How parents can help their child launch in the world. The Wonder Room

Welcome to the Teenagers Untangled Wonder Room where we're trying to fear less and wonder more. We talk about what experts have been saying on the podcast and basically anything that's been bothering you. So get in touch either by hitting the message button or emailing me on teenagersuntangled at gmail.com. Now welcome back to the excellent Catherine Radice who has decades of teaching under her belt, advising schools, parents, writing a book I highly recommend about exam stress, and raising her own boys. All her links are in the notes. Welcome, Catherine, again. Good morning. I think we've got some good stuff today. This week I talked with Thomas Miller about young adults who fail to launch. It's a topic I've come at from a few angles now, so if you're struggling with it, there are links in the notes to other episodes I've done. It's a growing problem in many countries. What were your thoughts, Catherine?

I thought it was such a useful topic because there's lots of stuff out there, right? For parenting in the early years, you know, young teens kind of move into the, you know, heading off to university or whatever. But that early adulthood phase is a whole different landscape because it's a bit trickier, you know, because your kids are adult, but if something doesn't seem to be going quite right, if you're worried they're not really getting on with things, what does it look like when you as a parent are trying to support your adult children? So I think it was really good to kind of shine a bit of light on the issue and think what we can practically do at home to support?

This is what the era of parenting where you don't have the sympathy that people give you when they're 12 or 14. I think we possibly feel more shame than necessarily we should. So, were there any bits that really stood out to you?

The bit that I kept coming back to in my mind afterwards was the question of value, right? So both the family values that you center around, but also a young person's sense of the value of their effort or the value of getting started. Because the failure to launch as an adult is kind of like a variation of the disengagement issue at secondary school, which I see a lot of teenagers who just think it's not worth it. I'm not going to keep putting my effort in, I'm just going to pull right back. And when disengagement happens at a secondary school level, it's all about a teenager thinking, my effort does not generate the return that I'm hoping for. And then you get a kind of adult picture of a teenager, well, not a teenager, a young adult thinking, it's not worth going out there, it's not worth getting up, you know, having a wash, trying to get a job, you know, I've lost my resilience, I'm just going to sit at home and, you know, whatever. And so when he kept coming back to the idea of value, it made me think, as parents, how do we help our teenagers and then our young adults value their effort and believe that that effort is worth putting in, even if you're in a tough patch where you're applying for loads of jobs and you're not getting an instant return? How do we help them feel it's still worth trying and trying and persevering? Because we all know that the kid or the young adult who perseveres, you do get somewhere in the end. But it's that skill of perseverance, believing that it's worth continuing to try.

Such an important point. And I think very often we will say things without thinking about it. When the kids are quite young, we'll make comments about certain jobs, or um, you know, somebody else's kid has gone and got this particular position. And without realizing it, we are creating a value system at home that our kids are picking up on. And I it's also on social media. So I really have spoken to a number of parents who said that their kids are not prepared to go and do the sort of really menial work because it feels shameful because they think they see everybody around them making mega bucks or showing off their brands, and and it feels uncomfortable to them and they feel like they're failing. And so we almost need to counterbalance that with a much better, more grounded idea of what starting work looks like, and that you can't possibly expect to be brilliant right from the start. In fact, and and it's great to tell stories about all the mistakes that we made when we were setting out, either when we were very young or you know, further down the line, because I think it's the shame, it's the fear and the shame that really can eat away at kids and make them feel that it's not actually, like you said, their own value isn't in this. And that's really tough to get past. I think it is really tough.

And I think there's a tension between we're so full culturally of the idea of, you know, have a dream, have an ambition. And there's a lot more chat in schools about career aspirations, and also as adults, there's still this kind of like go-to sense of if you're meeting a child, you know, you say, Oh, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, and no 12-year-old, no eight-year-old has any notion actually what they want to be when they grow up because they've never met their adult self. But a kid who has got a kind of entrenched belief that they need to be a doctor, or they're supposed to be a lawyer, or you know, they have to kind of have a job that looks a certain way. If that dream is really rigid, then there's a risk that when they leave university training, you know, whatever it is, school, if they've got a really rigid dream, there's a risk that they won't have the flexibility to think, right, if I want a job, I have to make the best of the opportunities that are there, rather than wring my hands about the fact that the opportunity I hoped was going to be there didn't exist. You know, and I think back to my kind of days as a teenager and I did so many terrible jobs, you know, minimum wage. So you were left, right, centre. You know, and I look back, I did fruit picking, I did cleaning, I did bar work, I did shop work, I did data entry. And it suddenly struck me that when I came home from any of these jobs, my parents never said anything like, oh, well, you know, that's a terrible job, that'll show you why you need to work hard and get a better job. All they ever said was, it's great, you're earning your own money. And I do think as adults, it's worth thinking, how do we position ourselves around that job hierarchy? Because if we're saying to our teens from, you know, 10, 11 upwards, don't get a you know, quote unquote dead end job, what does it look like when they are in their early 20s and they need to get a job and it might not be the shiny job straight off the bat? I think that's a big issue for us, you know, culturally, a big issue.

Yes. I've had a dry start with this because my daughter, which I've talked about on this podcast, uh, left school at 16 because it just wasn't working for her. And we had to take a big gulp and go, let's follow the this path and see where we go. And I said the first thing is you have to have a job. You can't just leave school, you have to have a job. And the reason I said that was because I if you don't have structure in your life and you leave education, that's a really, really tough call because it's like you fell off a cliff and you've lost your friendship groups around you because they've carried on, and what you've got now is you on your own with nothing. So it's very, very important that we remember this. So even if our kids have graduated or wherever they are in this cycle, they coming to a sudden standstill can be very, very difficult. And I know from talking to lots of boys, this is particularly hard because not all of them, but a lot of boys love struct love structure and not having it can be very challenging. So our attitude with her was we don't care what job you get, just go and get work because it doesn't matter what you're doing, you are going to learn. And she did learn, she learned so much. She learned about making sure she presented herself properly, turning up on time, you know, having conversations with just about anybody, you know, and she made mistakes. But she also said, you know, that I don't want that to be my path. And that was the thing that made her turn around and say, actually, I'd like to go back into education because I think I have more to offer there. And every job will teach us something. Every single job. And that's so, like you said, let's not put um a value on any particular job. Let's look at what skills can be gained from any job that they do.

Yeah, and that makes a huge difference, doesn't it? Because if you think, take that same scenario, if she had gone off to do whatever job it was, coated in shame, of this is your life not panning out, as opposed to this is the opportunity that is now before you, go and get from it what you will. Those two framings make a huge difference because I don't know of a single teenager or adult actually who thrives within shame. And yet we do, as adults, quite often use the prospect of shame as an attempt to motivate. So when I was interviewing people for the exam stress book, I did a lot of conversations with psychotherapists, and quite a lot of them said that they heard really often in their work a kind of catastrophization of if a kid doesn't get great grades, they're gonna end up flipping burgers. And that catastrophization just isn't true. You know, a teenager who doesn't get great grades, or a young adult who doesn't get their dream job straight off, it is not a kind of, you know, success or total failure. There's all sorts of steps in between. But also, if a young adult did leave school and spent some time in the hospitality industry, that is not necessarily a disaster if they've still got the kind of get up and go and the self-belief to think, right, I will get from this what I can, and I will keep my eye on the next opportunity that might be there. Because a job, you know, any bit of your life as a starting point for the next thing, it's not the final destination. And I think where we can really help our teenagers and our young adults, particularly if they are finding that their life is not quite as they hoped it to be, is we need to be optimistic about the potential that is still there, as opposed to, you know, full of disappointment of, you know, well, I didn't think it was going to end like this and you should have worked harder. If we don't believe in the potential for progress, we're asking quite a lot of our young people to believe in their own potential for progress.

So my eldest, it was so interesting because when she was going through her A levels, um, she got an internship with this company, which we had managed to swing for her, to be honest. And after she turned up late to the first day, we were like, Oh my goodness, this is awful. She was calling us saying, How do I get there? And we were going, No, why is this happening? And then at the end of it, the only reflection she had was, God, they spend a lot of time at their computers. Oh, I didn't like that at all. And we both looked at each other and thought, what did she think people do in office us all day? I mean, this this is what life is like now, unfortunately. I mean, I started catastrophizing. I was thinking, what are we going to do with this girl? She doesn't seem to understand. And and then when she graduated, she sort of came home and she sat around in her bikini. It was a lovely sunny summer. And um for a while we were kind of just letting it run. And then I started saying to her, So, so sweetie, we need to actually talk about how you're going to move forward because I didn't want that drop of a cliff moment. Because of course, you can have that sort of decompress, but that drop off a cliff is a big problem. She was like, Well, I just want to have some fun. It's been really hard and stressful. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know that you do need to get onto this track because you you don't have anything around you at the moment. I just said to her, you need to find anything, anything that interests you and start applying. I don't care what it is. And that helped her start looking through different options. She did all the work herself. She did, she found the most incredible job with training, but it was months and months before this happened. And it was through networks. So, not people I knew, it was people she would sort of chat to at parties and things like that. And I the reason I'm saying this is because I something stuck in my head with what Thomas said, which was the difference between pressure and urgency. And the pressure is what you were talking about, sitting there, waiting for them to do something, and then panicking every now and then when nothing's happening. And, you know, this sort of pressure cooker building up in the household where everybody's aware that things are going wrong, but nobody's doing anything about it. And then the urgency, which is this gentle kind of scaffolding around what's going on, and saying, one of the benefits to actually starting to look is this, and and where are you looking? What how are you doing this? Giving them, giving them sort of threads that they can start pulling on so that they can move forward because it is hard and it is different now to when we were graduating. You know, it's not as obvious a clear a career path for most of the kids coming out of school and university nowadays.

I think in what you said just there, the bit that is so crucial is the I don't care what it looks like, you just need to find something that's gonna help you move forward. And I think the bit that we as parents struggle with sometimes is being able to live up to that I don't care what it looks like, I'm going to accept that your first step or the way you navigate this situation might not be quite the way I was expecting. Because the advice on how do we upskill independence and how do we build self-belief, you know, that that advice is quite clear-cut in that we have to give our children ownership of as much as we can as they grow up. We have to believe in their capacity to fix their own problems, you know, all of that. But the difficulty is actually delivering on it. So take something like chores, you know, chores are a great training ground for teenagers both to learn to deliver on tasks they don't want to do and also kind of wake up to the hard truth of the fact that life just doesn't happen for you, and also kind of build the values of we all live in this house, you know. So there's no doubt that it's obviously good for teens to do chores, and yet routinely up and down the country, loads of teens don't do chores, or it turns into a battleground. Because in order for the teen to do a chore, you have to accept that it might not quite be done the way you want, or it might be a bit slower, and you know, all of that. And I think as parents, sometimes we have to be quite firm on ourselves and thinking if we do want to promote independence, we have to pay the price of accepting that that might mean it looks different from how we're expecting. And I think sometimes we get a bit caught up on the wrapping paper around the values as opposed to what those values actually are. And there's a massive difference between E.G. saying get a good job and value hard work. Yeah. Because get a good job is quite a brittle value, because it may or may not happen at any individual point in someone's life. But value hard work is quite a durable value because you can uphold it even when things are going bad. And so I think that idea of if we're going to center around values and goals, like are they brittle or are they durable, is quite a big difference.

Yes, and I love that I love that point. And um, I think one of the things I'd like to zone in on that's happening at the moment is I think a lot of kids are looking out at the job landscape, and I've seen lots of parents talking about this on social media, and thinking, AI's taking all the jobs or all the jobs at AI applications, la. And and almost feeling like they've just got to churn through as many applications as possible to find any job. And I was actually talking with my bonus daughter last night, one of them, who is currently trying to recruit somebody in a role. They they've tried to hire somebody and they thought this is gonna be easy. I mean, there's so many graduates out there who really, really want a good job. The people who applied, they said, right, here's a little task for you to try. And I see a lot of people on social media going, oh, they just want me to give all my best ideas. And then now that does happen in creative industries, I can see that happening. Um, but this setting of a task and seeing how someone accomplishes it is a very known tested way of seeing what you're dealing with, because it's all very well looking at a CV, you just can't see how someone will perform. And and that gives people opportunities even if they haven't got the best degree, for example. And she said to me that the applications they got were appalling because the the people filling in these tasks, basically every single one was AI, and they all looked exactly the same. And she said it was so depressing because none of them seemed to be interested in the challenge. There's an element of us as parents talking to our kids about if you're going to apply to a job, I really have to give it my best shot, and that is not resorting to AI, even though it can feel a bit depressing going through one job application after another. Because I know that there are an awful lot of companies who don't even respond. You send in your CV, you send in an application, they don't even respond. So I get it. The whole landscape has changed and it's a very difficult one to navigate. But I think quality, quality is the thing to focus in on and do the best application because it's more satisfying for everybody. It's more satisfying for the your child if they're trying to apply for a job, and it's more satisfying for the people who are receiving those applications. And actually, it's really not hard to stand out nowadays because of this particular problem.

We do live in an optimization culture, and educationally, teenagers have been through a school system, whatever type of school they're in, which is all about optimizing performance. But the downside to the optimization culture is you also have to build the fact that a lot of your life is not going to be optimal. So if you're applying for a job and you know the wind is not blowing in your favour and you haven't suddenly landed the magic job you were hoping for, you have to be really open-eyed to the fact that there's going to be a lot of wastage, you're going to apply for a lot of jobs you're not going to get. The first job you do get might not be the job that you particularly want, but it's probably going to be worth cracking on and doing it anyway. And even if you're in your dream job, some bits of the job are going to be good and some bits are going to be annoying, frustrating, difficult. My elder son has just started uni. He definitely comes home and says, you know, Mom, it was easy for your generation. Like you all had jobs guaranteed, you know, our generation, never going to get a job, never going to buy a house. And I have to say to him, look, there will still be jobs of some sort. They might not be the job you thought it was going to be. And either you just stay open and flexible and think, I will see what's available and I will work out how to bring some good out of that, or I will keep on trying to make sure that I try and get my life designed to its script. You know, of the two, the flexible, open, I'll make the best of what's there, as opposed to I've got to try and deliver on this predefined script, that first one, make the best of what's there, that is definitely a more durable mindset. Yeah, for sure. Than thinking I have to try and land a job that looks a certain way. And that means we as parents need to be really open and flexible about actually what we're looking for. And I thought Thomas's starting point, you know, when you asked that brilliant question of what's the difference between actually failing to launch and a young adult just being a little bit, you know, demotivated. And he said, you know, live, laugh, work, play, look at the whole thing. You know, if someone is getting up and going to work and enjoying their life, that is basically fine, even if the work is not what you might have thought. And I think as parents, we have to keep coming back to that. We have to keep remembering that our children's lives might not be the way they thought they were going to be. And that's not necessarily a disaster. It might take some adjustment, might take a bit of surprise, but it's worth being quite soul searching about where our inbuilt sense of success and failure might be, and asking ourselves whether that sense is actually creating a bit of a cage around our children and making them devalue some of the opportunities available to them. I mean, you know, we all kind of fear, you know, unemployment or whatever, but I don't fear it in the way that some people do because I've always thought I would do pretty much anything. And I think that partly because of all those jobs I had when I was 16. Like as I say, you know, if I need to go back to fruit picking cleaning, whatever, you know, I've done them all and I've also seen they are always to earn money and they are all starting points. And the people who I think are less willing to be as flexible, I think that that makes the pathway a bit more frightening, perhaps.

Yes, still in my head is the piece from Anna Nin's diary. Now, Annae Nin was a writer who left France in the war and they moved to America, leaving her dad behind. So she's written these copious diaries about what it was like, and she was a young girl. I think she was about 11 or 12 when she wrote this. And the piece that stood out to me was she had become sick, had to take time off school, and then her mother became sick. So now she's at home convalescing, but basically she's ended up having to run the household, which included everything because there were no labour-saving devices. So she was washing, ironing, you know, cooking, darning socks. And in her diary, she said, My life is no longer my own. I'm basically running this household. I'm doing, I'm working morning till night. And she said, I've never been happier. She was talking about how she felt, she had purpose in her life, all the difficult thoughts had stopped. And this was a young girl who was perfectly capable of doing this. Not that I want my kids doing that. But the point is, it's the industry that actually keeps us sane, makes us happy. We all need to feel like we're We have purpose in life, we matter. And mattering comes from being in a structure where we expected to get up, where when we turn up, people see us, they need us, those sorts of things. So the point being that even if they don't yet have a job, the structure's our friend. And one of my previous interviews looked into this where, you know, if everything's gone to pot and your child is fesshering in their bedroom and nothing seems to be going right, the sleep-wake cycle is the critical element. It's like, what time are they going to bed? What time are they getting up? Start there. Because you need structure in your day and the thing that work does for us, apart from all the other amazing things like contact with other people, learning new skills, just being outside of the house. Um, having structure is vital to us human beings. So we start there as a parent and say, you know what, I'm just going to focus rather than panicking and having this pressure valve explode. I'm going to just start putting in structure that helps them move forward and talking to them honestly about how that will actually help them and that I believe in them. And that structure, if they don't have work yet, can also involve making sure that they are doing hobbies, making sure that they have friends, people that they can meet up with, which is one of the difficult things because if they've left school, left university, and all their friends have moved on to the next stage and they haven't, they are now either going to be seeing friends and finding it very embarrassing or difficult because their friends are moving on and they're not, or they've lost their friends, which is even harder. So it's getting through to our kids that personal growth is what should really matter to them, not the job title. It's actually about how do I how do I build growth into my life? How do I build mattering into my life?

And those are such good examples of durable rather than brittle values. Because we care about structure is a durable value because you can put it in place regardless of the externalities of what's happening around. And we care about growth and moving forwards is durable because, again, even if someone is stuck in a job that they're not loving, they can still look for ways to grow around that. You know, maybe I sign up to this online course, or I take up this hobby or whatever, or I do this volunteering. You know, structure and growth are durable values. Whereas EG saying you've got to get a job, you know, in the next month, or I kick you out, or whatever, that is not a durable value because the success of that value depends upon things that aren't necessarily in your kids' control. And it also makes me think about the whole thing of effort or outcome. If you say, I as a parent, I'm gonna support the effort you put in, I'm gonna say that, you know, you have told me this number of job applications per day, I'm going to, you know, commend you for that, I'm gonna support you in doing that. Whether or not a job lands today, next week, or whatever, there's a huge difference because we have to help our kids feel that their effort is worth it even when they're not getting the outcomes they want. And that is kind of like the killer bit, you know, if kids only think that effort is worth it when the outcome lands, that's where disengagement happens. But a kid who believes the effort is worth it for its own sake, I just keep on trying for its own sake, those are the kids who both have the resilience and also in the long term will end up with better outcomes because they kept trying. If you're listening to this, thinking, right, how can I help my teen, my young adult, feel better motivated, have more positivity about what the future holds for them, then let's keep coming back to this idea of what values are we putting in place and are they durable or are they brittle or risky? Because the more durable our values are, the stronger the compass they provide for our kids. Um, and it's so interesting, you know, it's so interesting just to pause and hear the words, you know, what do we say? What do we say? And actually, is that value fulfillable?

Such a big thing. Yes, I've just been thinking about this book I read some time ago called Thank You for Being Late. I forget who wrote it. One of the things he talked about was some of the bigger companies in America where they have, for every member of staff, an opportunity to learn. And so the staff have X amount of money that they're given each year so that they can learn something new. And when they learn something new and they have a certificate from whatever thing they learned, they can register it on the system. And then the company trawls through the system and sees as if anybody in their workplace has been doing something that they want as a skill, which I thought, gosh, that's amazing. Of course, we can't all access that, but we can do that with our kids. So when my daughter left school, we said you have to have a job. The other thing we said was you have to keep studying. I don't care what you study, don't care. And that's why I mentioned hobbies, because we often think of hobbies as a waste of time. They're not, they are actually a very, very important part of being a human being, um, being someone who grows and gets value out of life. And so if we say to our kids, okay, I know you're looking for work at the moment, what what things are you finding hard? How can I scaffold that? Should we set how many jobs you look at per week? We can support all of that. But it's also like, could you make sure that you're actually growing while you're doing that? So what are you learning? It doesn't matter what it is, because when you take the lid off and allow your child to explore, magic happens. It really happens. And they found this in the disengaged teen. And they said that as parents, this is one of the key roles that we can play, is in ensuring our kids are looking for things outside of the kind of structured box that they've been handed that will help them grow into the person that they really should be. So I think that that's one of the core messages we can be getting across to our kids. Because even when they do start work, if the work isn't particularly enjoyable, if they've got that other thing that they're doing which really helps them grow, they're going to be better off and happier no matter what, aren't they?

Yeah. And that feeds into what sort of questions do we ask as parents to help our teens learn to notice things that are valuable. So, you know, I'm quite a big fan of intentionally structured conversations, you know, particularly with teenagers, because if a conversation is intentionally structured, you probably get a bit further. And what I mean by intentional structure is, you know, that whole thing, eG if you sit down around the dinner table and you say, right, everyone shares something that went well or something that you know didn't go so well or whatever, like having certain set piece manoeuvres just to move through certain different types of content. But that go-to thing of what went well, you know, what didn't go so well or whatever, which is like quite a common technique, I think, in family conversations now. If we took that idea of what went well and reframed it as what did you good today? You know, what helped you move forward, then you've got an intentional conversation structure that's much more durable. What helped you move forwards is actually encouraging a teenager to notice that it actually did me good to go and get some exercise. Or did me good just to, you know, have a kind of chat with my friend. And what did you good is such a powerful question for helping teens work out what is healthy and what isn't healthy.

Ah, there's a really good book by Angela Duckworth out at the moment called Situated. And one of the things I absolutely love is a chapter on mentoring. And her point is we have this trope that we all, you know, we're an island. We, you know, we succeed or fail based on our grit and determination. But what she has said is she's kept studying the people who are doing really well in life, and actually she's found it's how you are situated, and that can be geographically situated, but also the people you're surrounded by. You know, she's lent into that idea. But the the chapter she's got on mentoring is very, very interesting for our kids in this situation because she suggests that you regularly talk to somebody who you're inspired by or who's doing something interesting. What is your job? How does that work? And how did you get it? And how would I learn more about it? Mentors get as much from mentoring as the mentee. But when we reach out and ask other people who we admire how they've done something, and and I've actually had another guest on my program who's talked about using this to change his life completely because he was going down a terrible, terrible route, uh, almost divorced, everything. He started asking people who he thought were doing really well, like, how are you doing it? What how does this work? Would you mentor me? Would you, would you just explain one or two things? This is a really, really good way of building a network of contacts that can help you get work. And she talks about that. And I think a lot of kids find it really hard to talk to adults and open up those doors. But helping our kids understand how that works, how they can do it, can be really, really beneficial.

Yeah. Yeah. And it also gives rise to another one of those really helpful questions that we can ask our kids to help them, which is who do you learn from? Who are your role models? Because there's so much fear out there about negative influences in our teenagers' lives, right? You know, all of the Andrew Tate stuff, you know, what influences online and so on. Like there's so much hysteria about potentially negative role models. And if we want to counterbalance that as parents, we can either get all panicky about the fact those negative role models exist, or we can nurture our children leaning into positive role models. And given that you can't get rid of everything negative on the internet, then leaning into positive role models is a much safer, more durable game plan. So if you're listening to this, you know, go home and say to your teens or your young adults, who are your role models? Who do you know in your life that you think you can learn from? Because until you ask that question, it's possible that your teen will never have fully verbalized to themselves actually, this teacher at school or this neighbor or you know, this relative is a role model. But once they've verbalized which people are their role models, then they will learn from them much better because they'll actually start to lean in and look and be interested in what those people are doing. And some people are role models because of you know how they explain things, and some people are role models because of who they are, and it all helps come back to do our children understand which fits themselves they want to grow, which values and goals, like Thomas Miller was saying, are going to help us move forward. And are they giving the space and the airtime to those values and goals which will help them? Or are they getting sidetracked by values and goals that someone else has said, like you've absolutely got to get, you know, A stars and you've got to get an internship before you're 23, otherwise you're doomed or whatever. You know, if they're leaning into goals that are restrictive as opposed to leaning into those more durable, kind of broader goals that are enabling, then their progress is going to be limited. So, you know, I'd say to any parent out there, you know, if you are worried about your teen or your young adult, start being more optimistic about what their progress could look like and lean into the durable stuff. Don't just chase the quick fix for a shiny externality.

Yeah. I love that. What a great, uh, what a great point. Um, Catherine, thank you so much for joining me once more. Um, it's been such an interesting conversation. I'm very wedded to this topic because I think um I've seen my kids all the way through and I've seen myself panic when the my bonus kids were younger, and that they are just the most amazing people now. So I I I I'm telling you now, hang on in there, parents. If you're worrying and panicking, don't catastrophise, just focus on the energy of moving forward rather than thinking, oh, it's all going to pot because I think it's so easy to do that, isn't it? Um, Catherine, thanks again. I really, really appreciate it. If you have any comments on this, let us know. An email it's teenagersuntangled at gmail.com. Go and find Katherine on Substack. She writes some brilliant articles on there. I'm on Substack too. Um, she also has her own website. Links are in the notes. Ping this to somebody else who might be having a bit of a wobble about this at the moment because we could all let's help ourselves as a community, hey. Um, that's it for now. Bye bye.