Exams, AI Friends and More Joy: Parenting Unpacked in the Wonder Room

Welcome to the Teenagers Untangled Community Catchup. I'm Rachel Richards and I want to try something a little bit different. I know you listened to all of the episodes, so you will have come across Catherine Rodice, who wrote the book Exam Stress. She has two teenage sons and she also spends her life teaching teenagers, doing workshops for parents. And after the conversation that we had before, she messaged me with a whole load of other excellent ideas. And I thought, you know what, why don't we have some real conversations about what's been happening in the news, your questions, what experts say on the podcast, and just what it's like in the trenches for us parents, but from the perspective of someone who's also a teacher. So I want you to join in. If you have any stories that have bothered you or issues you're facing, message me on teenagersuntangled at gmail.com and we'll talk about them. Don't forget to like, share, and review the podcast because it makes all the difference to other parents. So, Catherine, welcome back. Thank you. Looking forward to the conversation. Let's just chat. Let's just be talking about problems. So um this week we had the GCSE exam results come out. Now, for people who are listening around the world, we had two big exams and it's a huge summer thing for us in England. Do you have any thoughts at all about how this is all going?

What we really need to do with our teenagers is say, look, whatever is happening on the national picture, these grades are yours. And actually, you know, I am really proud of you for what you've done because the risk of the big headlines of more people are doing well at maths is it can make, you know, the 16-year-old who's just got their maths grade kind of feel it's been a bit cheapened. And what you don't want is your child to feel their efforts, the value of their efforts, have been shifted because of what the national picture looks like. So definitely, you know, definitely as a parent, you know, take an interest in those headlines because they are interesting. As a parent of a teenager, the aim, I would say, has always got to be how am I going to help my child move forward in a way that makes them want to keep putting effort in. And if they feel their efforts have been cheapened, then actually that tends not to fuel motivation.

Each of these people has worked really, really hard to get some results, whatever those results are, or maybe they didn't work as hard as they could have, or whatever's happened, whatever the story is, it's a personal story.

Or it's the working hard bit, you know, lots of teenagers have worked really hard. And some parents might think, oh, you know, well, I didn't see my kid doing any revision. But don't forget that every teenager has like slobbed through school. So, you know, whether or not it looks like your child was working hard, and if they weren't working hard, it's probably because they didn't find it, you know, fun, engaging, and so on. And if they were turning up to school, they've sort of endured sitting in the space of that thing they didn't like. So there's definitely room for congratulations and praise just for making it to the other side of the line, even if you think they weren't showing all the you know manifestations of a super stellar student, you know. So remember that a bit as well, I reckon.

I love that, Catherine. And one of my daughters actually called us on the day of the exam and said, I'm not going to do it. I, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna succeed. No, no, no, no, no. And I spoke to her tutor and said, Please could you just have a conversation with her? Because we don't care what the grade is, but we really want her to go into that exam and just sit it. And she actually passed. And it was one of those moments where she looks back and says, Oh my goodness, I can't believe I passed. But but that's the thing. We just need to give our kids the the bravery to go in and sit it. And if they didn't pass, again, it doesn't wouldn't have mattered. It's just the fact that she sat down and actually did the exam and got through it, and we need to cling on to that. And I also think I see an awful lot on social media, particularly on threads and Facebook and wherever, which is really, really negative about our schooling system now. And and and I have had people on the the show who have explained what the issues are with the the exam system and with the grading system, and these are all very important issues, but I really, really concerns me that as parents, if we're looking at it and going, oh, well, you know, it's rubbish anyway, it's not a good school system, that's going to feed into how our children feel about school.

I mean, I'm a huge advocate for schools today. Not because I think they're perfect, they're not, you know, and all of the parents who have had a very frustrating experience because school hasn't suited their child, I 100% empathise that it is really, really grim if the thing that is school and the thing that is your child, those two things don't align. So I don't think schools are perfect for everyone, but they kind of never could be, because they are big environments teaching kids in classes of, you know, 25-30, you know, whatever. And that's never going to suit everybody equally. But schools are massively better than they used to be, and also the intentions are really good. And the bit that worries me as a teacher and as a parent is that if we are too quick to bash the schools and say, you know, this uniform policy is outrageous, it's appalling, they have to sit in classrooms of whatever temperature, you know, if we are too quick to bash the schools and we don't remember that actually what schools are are a lot of very busy professionals working really hard to try and get good outcomes for as many students as possible, often in difficult circumstances, if we don't remember that those intentions are honourable, then we kind of encourage our kids to have a relationship with school where they're very quick to say the problem is the school. And they're a bit less quick to believe that the school might help them. And if you want your kid to have a positive experience through school, they need to believe that the adults in their life are going to want to help them. And I can't promise that you know if your kid goes to an adult school, they're going to get exactly the response they want in that moment. But if you as a parent can remember, can remind your teenager, people in schools want to support you. They want to get it right. The intentions are so honourable, you make it much more likely that your kid will actually work with the school in a way that allows the school to help them. Because a kid who expects that a teacher is going to treat them well is going to have a massively better experience than a kid who's just constantly looking for an opportunity to find fault with what a teacher has done. So yeah, if I could wave a magic wand, if I could just have one wish about education, I would say I do wish there was more respect in our kind of day-to-day dialogue, the schools, and a bit more appreciation that, you know, teachers really, really have the best interests of those pupils at heart. They do. You know, it's great being a teacher because I work with so many people where I look at them and I think, you are such a nice person. You are trying to do such a good thing with your day-to-day. Hats off to them.

Yeah. This week I have seen that ChatGPT has launched its teen version. Did you know about this? It's a really interesting concept, isn't it? Yeah, and I I hadn't known anything about it before it was launched, and it's not not been launched in every single country yet. And I looked into it. So there are five positives that I've been thinking about. There's automatic age gating. So there's an age prediction system that indicates an account holder is under 18 without requiring formal ID verification. No idea how that works. No idea. Um, real content restrictions on the heaviest topics. We don't need to explain what those are. They have a study mode which steers users towards working through schoolwork rather than just handing over answers. Um parents set boundaries. So parents can actually set boundaries, but you can't see what they're asking. You can just set the boundaries. And they have a stated philosophy, which is that they are trying to steer kids more towards real-world connection, which I think is a really, really big issue. And I read um a comment by the Rhythm Project on this, and they were saying that their biggest concern is this relationship between teenagers and the parents, and that we are really the most important support. And what they were concerned about is so imagine your team complains to Chat GPT or one of the these chatbots about their parents, and then the the chatbot says, Oh, yeah, well, they of course they don't understand you. They're so that's so messed up, and but I'll always be here for you. That's artificial care. It's not they don't really care about you. And over time, that could end up driving a wedge between young people and the adults around them. It's really important for us to be having conversations about why we're using the chatbots. And when I interviewed Sheridan Boise, he said that chatbots are really, really good tools, but we should never be thinking about them in emotional relationships. And he said that one of the problems is if we treat them like friends, um, there are some outcomes that we may not like. And he said the reason people like chatbots is because they're available 24-7, which their regular friends aren't. It will always affirm you, never judges you. I mean, how many times does a chatbot come and say, that's the most amazing idea? I have never heard somebody so small. You know, then and actually it's a joke. It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And then it's friendship on their terms. And the problem with all of those things is that we are now looking at tendencies that start to become narcissistic. So a narcissistic tendency is where we expect people to be permanently available to us, we expect to be constantly affirmed, and we expect our needs and our timing and our comfort to be the most important thing, and then there's no sacrifice on our end to listen deeply or be inconvenienced. And this is this is really dangerous, don't you think?

Oh, 100%. We have to remember these are designed by commercial entities. You know, in order for that commercial enterprise to work, people have got to like using them. So, you know, you have to design a chatbot which is going to give the answer that you like on a top level kind of quickly and seamlessly. So that affirmation is 100% going to be built into the model. But actually, in human relationships, what we need is not affirmation, we need the friction of disagreement. And I've been reading some really interesting things recently on disagreement. So one was a book called Beliefism, one was a book called Why We Think, What We Think. And you know, the central idea within each of them is if we don't have conversations where we disagree, what happens is our views become increasingly unreflective and extreme because you just get a load of confirmation bias kicking in. But if I say one thing, like, you know, I love doing whatever, and I'm talking to someone and they say, Oh, I'm not so sure about that, then it means I think more deeply about why I like what I like. I take more of an interest in why there might be an alternative. And that disagreement is so fertile for helping both teenagers build their sense of self, but also helping conversations be, you know, compassionate, respectful, aware of difference and so on. So, you know, as an educator and a parent, the bit that worries me most about the online dynamic is the affirmation. And what are we going to do to actually keep that really healthy friction of disagreement and dissent in the mix? And actually, as families, you know, we all know that parenting teenagers is difficult. And one of the hardest bits in the teenage years is how you handle that disagreement and dissent because it can easily become very problematic and divisive, or exactly the same disagreement and dissent, handled a different way, can actually be really instructive and full of growth. But it's worth thinking about how we're going to position ourselves around it so that we use those moments of difference to build understanding and relationships as opposed to fracture them. And my worry is if someone taps into a chatbot, you know, my mum said this, and I disagree, you know, was she right? There's a huge risk of no, your mum's being totally unreasonable. You know, and that doesn't help any sort of family dynamic at all.

No, and I think also nuance is so, so, so important, isn't it? And being able to talk to our children about growth and how the way someone is thinking and behaving now is not necessarily how they'll be five years from now, particularly at this age. You know, this is the those sort of teen years as where there's this massive developmental growth. And there's there's quite a lot of risk in them thinking, oh, well, if they disagree with me, they're a bad person, or if they disagree with me, they don't like me. Coming on to friendships, what I loved was that Sheridan actually broke down the stages of friendship so that we could actually talk to our kids about what those stages are, because he said pretty much every relationship that ends up being a 2 a.m. relationship where you can call them at 2 a.m. because you're having a crisis has to go through these different stages. And I think there's a tendency when our kids are young to want to have a best friend straight away. And I remember that because when I was young, you know, I turned up in England and a girl walked up to me and said, Do you want to be my best friend? And I said, Yeah. And that was it. And and we go from that to them being teenagers, and you can't really do that because that's not what that's not how this is built. So I think it's trying to help them understand. So he puts it, he said, number one is acquaintances, and these people you know by their names. So you might sit next to them in the classroom, but you don't know anything about them. And then casual friends where you've got a shared enjoyment, so a sport, a hobby, sense of humor, favorite films. So, like when we you think about clubs and stuff where you're doing something together, that becomes a casual friend, doesn't it? Someone you can do things with. But a friendship proper is where there's mutual reliability and trust. So you can trust them, you're gonna tell them something, and they're not gonna go and just tell everybody. But this is a hard thing to find because I find that in school friendships, a lot of kids use that information to then gain status by telling other people that they know something, right? And that's a really difficult one to get that mutual trust, and that's one thing that they've got to understand that this is gonna be leaky, you know, because a close friend is even further down the line where you've got a much stronger mutual commitment and emotional support, and and only then at the end of that is this deep friendship. And I think being able to talk to our kids about these stages and that they can't expect to have a deep friendship with someone until they've gone through some tricky times with them, because that's what builds these, where you realise that you can trust them, they will stand by you, they will stand up for you. It's it's so true.

And actually, I thought one of the things that he said in the podcast when he was talking through those stages that was so interesting was when he talked about the need to value the early stages. Because I think there's so much kind of heat on, you know, have you got friends? Who's your best friend? Particularly if you've got daughters, you know, boys can rumble along for ages without really having any sense of, you know, who their friends are, they just hang out with whoever, you know. But girls always know, you know, girls know she's my friend, she's not, we're best friends, we're not, you know. And so there's a lot of heat on have I got a best friend? Are we best friends? Are we not best friends? And I think as parents, if we are too focused on do you have the optimal version of friendship, there's a risk we devalue the early stages. And actually, you know, the sort of friends you just chat to in maths, they're a different friend from your sort of you know, BFF. But there's a value in that. And so I think as parents, helping our kids realize friendship has totally different sorts of shapes and sizes. There'll be some people who you just talk to in maths, and that's really nice. And actually, let's just remember where that's valuable, and it's nice because it makes the maths lesson a little bit nicer. Um, but it's also worth as parents being really realistic that learning the skills that build enduring friendships takes time. So that leakiness of, you know, I'll tell you my secret if you tell me yours, and we're gonna be best friends forever because we tell each other our secrets, it's really important for kids to know that friendships do change. And that in every adolescent friendship, there will be moments where friends hurt each other. And one of the most useful things for teenagers to know is that when they feel hurt by a friend, because maybe a friend has told their secret, doesn't mean that friend's a bad person. Doesn't mean they've done anything wrong. It just is part of friendships being hard. And what's really difficult is, you know, if a kid has told a secret to someone else and they tell it, you know, if the narrative becomes they were in the wrong, that was so bad, they should never have done it, they're not worth being your friend, then what you do is you make friendship feel risky, right? Because you imply that if you tell your secret to the wrong person, then you know, if that person is a bad person and you might not know they're a bad person, because it might not look like that, you know, if you kind of make the idea that friendships go wrong because someone is bad a big part of the conversation, then it feels really risky about who you make your friends. And if instead you say, look, it's absolutely fantastic when you feel like you've got a friend, but these things evolve, they change, they move in and out. And maybe your friend has really hurt you, and that's really understandable that you're hurt, but let's use this as an opportunity to understand why friendships can be difficult as opposed to turning it into a, you know, she's bad and avoid her type in the future, because that's not going to help anybody develop their mature sense of friendship.

Yeah, and I think I really worry that that's actually fueling cancel culture, this sense that they're good or bad. We've got so much binary already in the world, we don't need more of this. And I found that with my girls, as they went through their various struggles with friendship, the easiest, the best thing I could do was to step in as their best friend. I they can't be my best friend ever. I have my own friends, but I can be their best friend while those things are happening. So they can tell me their secrets, they can, we can laugh and talk about things and I can go and do fun things with them if they're feeling very friendless. Because knowing that there's someone who really values you can really help t them through those very difficult stages. Also, I think actually modeling apologies. You know, when we when we actually get things wrong, we say dumb things because we've all done this, we've you know, even as an adult, I've said really dumb things. And I being able to say to our kids, Oh, I wish I hadn't said that, that didn't actually come out right. Then our kids think, Oh, that's what people do. Because they only know what's normal from what we're doing at home.

Yeah, totally. And they also only know what's normal from the way we label it. So, you know, I'm a linguist by training, and one of the reasons why, you know, I love languages is I love the whole concept of how words cut things into different shapes, and the way we label something does create its own, you know, not quite its own reality, but its own way of looking at the world. And one of the languages that I've worked on is ancient Greek, and in ancient Greek, the word for forgiveness is quite different from our word because the kind of equivalent word that's not quite the same in ancient Greek is the concept of shared understanding. And I think one of the challenges for us in the kind of modern day about apologies is we sort of implicitly think forgiveness is saying it's okay you did it. And there are some things where it's never okay you did it. You know, if your best friend has told your secret, it's not okay. Full stop. It wasn't okay, it's never okay. But you can move to a place where you understand why it happened. And maybe it happened because actually the friend just didn't think, or maybe it happened because the friend was feeling like they, you know, were really worried about not being liked by this person, or they felt pressurized to, you know, share a secret back or whatever. And I think when we're kind of role modelling how we move through a bit of friendship turbulence, which is what the apology is all about, isn't it? You know, the apology is where you sort of like get to the other side. Are we aiming to get to a place where it's all okay, or are we aiming to get to a place where it's understood? And of those two, getting to a place where it's understood is much more constructive because that's where you grow. Just saying it's got to all be okay is actually a bit unrealistic, and therefore there's gonna be a bit a bit less growth there. So, you know, when things go wrong, having those chats of why do you think they did it? Let's understand why it's so hurtful, how is this gonna help you remember to be a good friend to others in future? And actually, if you are the one who has done the thing that's upset someone else, how can we apologize in a way that isn't just trying to defend what we did, but actually recognises how it felt the other person? There's so much growth that happens from things going wrong, and friendship turbulence is hard, but it's also necessary. If you don't have any of it, then you don't learn what that whole dance of friendship is like.

100%, and I absolutely love that element of getting to understand each other better. Forgiveness is an important part of relationships as well, and you have to understand someone to be able to forgive them. And I also think that one of the things I realised is that it's really, really important how we talk about friends in our homes, because what we're doing on a day-to-day basis is without thinking about it, we're modelling how adults think about the world and how the world works. And if you have someone over to tea, Mrs. Miggins, and she walks out the door and you say, God, she's just such a bore, I can't stand that woman, and you say all sorts of things about her once she's gone, or you call up someone else and go, Can you believe it? Then then what you're doing is you're telling your child that there's a very high chance that people will be nice to you to your face and then they'll be really horrible to you behind your back. And then they'll also think that about you, that actually, well, if you're saying that about Mrs. Miggins, what are you saying about you your own child when they're not in the room? And I think it just Creates an entire sense of being unsafe. And so I think it's really important that we check our own conversations and language. And this also stretches to things like which colleges other children end up going to, what exam grades they got. Because you might be thinking, oh, my child got, you know, a seven and I'm so proud of them. And oh my goodness, can you see such and such only got a five? And someday they may get the five. I'm just trying to talk about being sort of respectful about the way we talk about other people within our home environment. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, totally.

You know, so so kids kind of drink up all the time the world around them. And their primary unit of learning how the world works is the dynamics in the family. That's where so much psychotherapy goes back to those early templates of what were your kind of like home dynamic like. And no parent is perfect, right? You know, we all have our habits. I do terrible things all the time on autopilot and then think, oh God, I can't believe I just did that, you know. But it's really helpful as a parent just to pause every so often and think, what is it that I do? So, you know, the whole concept of this conversation, kind of, you know, fear less wonder more. Like if we can wonder as parents about what is it that we are doing, then we get to see. And if we realise that we have a habit of coming home from work and just complaining about our colleagues, totally understandable the need to offload. But equally, if your child is just witnessing that when people come home from work, they complain about all the people they meet, then as you say, that child's going to grow up believing that the natural template for the world is whatever happens, the people you're with will probably go away and complain about you. And you know, maybe that is. So I have watched 20 years worth of playground dynamics evolve on a yearly basis, and you think, what is it that helps some children glide into friendships, and what is it that makes it harder for some? And part of it is some kids just expect that other kids are going to be nice to them, and some kids fear that they won't. And for the kids who fear that other kids won't be nice to them, sometimes it comes from really difficult kind of past occurrences where kids haven't been nice, and that's one of the reasons why if your kid is ever in a kind of a genuine bullying scenario, please do reach out to the school and you know get it kind of fixed because you know, early, difficult friendship dynamics can have a knock-on effect in the future. But equally, if a child has grown up in a family where people are just routinely nice about people, that child is gonna find it much easier to believe that the people they meet are probably gonna be nice about them and to them. So I think it's so worth just pausing and thinking, what is my child hearing? What are they drinking in? And if you are one of the people who offloads, I've done it, we've all done it, you know, think, okay, well, actually, I will maybe offload a bit, but I'm also gonna very deliberately say, if I've just complained about someone, but you know what, I am only, you know, hacked off with them because actually I was running late and busy. And what I do know as well is that they are really nice and committed and they do this. And it's just worth checking in, just noticing what is the conversational diet that your kid is getting, and then thinking, do I want to keep going with this or do I want to modify it?

One thing I missed when my kids were younger, because I'd never had a community in my entire life, was the really important value of community and the friendships that we have as adults for our children to witness. So it's it's another one of those dimensions where, and that's why I wanted to interview Sheridan, was because I wanted to give parents an opportunity to think about their own friendships and whether we've got out of the habit of having friends and having friends round and showing kids what it's like to have people in the house who are not members of your own family. How do we treat them? How do we prepare for them? What how do we make our life full of joy? Because I think that a lot of those habits were stalled. And we don't want to go back to my I was talking to another mother recently, she said, Yeah, well, my childhood, my parents just basically had dinner party after dinner party, and we were not to be seen, and I hated it. And, you know, so there's also that backdrop that some people have grown up with where they're trying not to be like that. But I do think that I hadn't appreciated the benefit of drawing people from my local community into the home, just into my life in some way, so that the kids could have much more, many more touch points rather than just that structure of going to school and coming home and just their friends.

Yeah, so you know, I live in Cambridge, I've been here for what is it now, uh, nearly 10 years. Crikey, that's a long time, just over 10 years. Um, and I think the, you know, there's there's no doubt that the ideal is having that community around you. You know, it's really, really nice if you know your neighbours. I'm also really conscious that, you know, for lots of parents, lots of people listening to this, you know, we're also really busy. And I remember Sheridan saying that one of the biggest barriers for adult friendship is, you know, mobility. We move away from our friends, but also just busyness, you know. So I think if you if you're the sort of parent who's thinking, oh my gosh, you know, oh, this is another thing to put on my to-do list, don't necessarily think, you know, oh crap, so I've suddenly got to do this. But what I thought was really important in this idea of building community is that if you do want to build community, it's not about those set piece dinner parties, it's about the low stakes. You know, if you, you know, know your neighbours say, Hey, would you want to pop in for a cup of tea on a Saturday afternoon and have a chat? You know, because that low stakes, and I remember you saying about the thing you set up in your community or you know, kind of come around for a cup of tea and you don't tidy up. And actually, as parents, if we can role model low stakes friendship, where people come for a cup of tea and we don't tidy the kitchen because everybody has, you know, bits of mess in the corner, whatever Instagram shows. And also where we say, you know, would you like to come around? It's fine if you don't, where that low stakes is, you know, maybe you want it, maybe you don't, but it's okay if you make an invitation and someone says no, then again, we make friendship much much calmer. Because one of the most useful things we can role model is that offering something and having someone turn you down, well, it's great you offered. And although of course it hurts a little bit if they turn it down, you know, one of the biggest barriers for teenage friendship is that fear of rejection. So anything where as a parent you can role model low-stakes interactions, come over for a cup of tea. You know, I do a thing now actually with some previous colleagues where, you know, on a Friday night, you know, once a term, they come around, everyone brings their own frozen pizza. Perfect. And we just whack it in the oven. And I thought I need to set something up where there's no barrier to doing it. I don't feel I need to cook, they don't need to feel grateful about the fact I've cooked. Everyone brings, you know, a bottle of something, own pizza, I do a salad, you know, and actually thinking, how can I put low-stakes interactions in which are easy to handle? That's great for kids to witness, without a shadow of a doubt.

Yes, and Miranda Gosling, when she did all her research for her book, she said, our kids do better when we do better. So it's not just adding something to your plate, it's actually adding to your life and bringing more joy into your life and making this parenting thing much more fun rather than just thinking, oh, I've got to do this for my child. What I've done with recently with my um local, there's just a few mums that I quite like, and I didn't really know them that well before. And I just set up a WhatsApp group that I called Fancy a Pint. And my kids saw this and they're like, Mummy, because they I'm not really a dr I'm not really an alcohol drinker, and and fancy a pint is a very male thing, but I just thought that's funny. And whenever I'm around and I think, oh, I just fancy going out for a short, you know, one hour, two hours in the pub, because we have a pub nearby and it's nothing special. We just go, we've we've done this a couple of times, it's so lovely. Because I'll just I'll just say anyone around. And if they're around, then we just go, let's all meet up. You need other parents, other people who just can make you laugh, de-stress you. Men do this a lot more than women, I think. You know, we need to do more. And then and and actually have a group that's building so that when your kids start moving off, as our children are, to you know, college and university, then we have a life. We have something else. We're not just thinking about our kids because that's too much pressure, isn't it? Definitely, definitely.

Um, and it's also good for kids to realise that other people have needs and you know, human reactions. And I think particularly, you know, as mums, like there's a very kind of um maybe it's biologically hardwired into us that you know you try and put your kids' needs first, and you know, that's really honourable and brilliant, but it's actually also really good for teenagers to realise that you have needs too. So I was catching up with a friend of mine who has got a son who I think is about 11 now, and they were out in the park, and he might be a little bit younger, actually, nine or ten, and she was due to come over to my house and we were just gonna go for a walk. And her son didn't want to leave the park, and she arrived at my house and she said, Oh god, he was in a terrible mood, he was so grumpy that I said we have to go home. And then she paused and said, But do you know what? It's probably good for him to have heard me say, you know, we've done your thing. I took you to the park, we've done your thing, and now we're gonna stop your thing, and I'm gonna do my thing, because actually, just that recognition of, you know, you as a parent have things you want to do as well, that's gonna stop the solipsism that can easily build up in adolescence. So, yeah, absolutely. It's not a bad thing to say to your kids sometimes, actually, do you know what? Maybe you are gonna have to miss whatever it is, you know, football this one occasion, because I'm gonna have the neighbours round, because we have to balance who gets to do what. And I would like to have a nice time too.

I love that. Yeah. On that note, let's let's leave it there because I think that's a message we want to get to through to parents. Stop worrying so much because you're doing an amazing job. If you're listening to this, you are a fantastic parent, obviously, because you know, a lot of people don't even think about what they're doing. So if you're actually even trying to figure things out, that's a wonderful thing. So well done, you. And go and find some friends to go and have a nice time with and not worry so much about your kids. Um, thank you, Catherine, for this. It was really interesting. I I think you have some wonderful observations. I'm now going to be thinking all week about this Greek understanding rather than just accepting someone's apology. I think it's really important. That's it for now. Take care. Bye.