Transcript for
Ways to support young people experiencing loneliness and bullying

Speaker 1 (00:02): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Families podcast. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (00:07): 

Hi, I’m Nadia Rossi, and you’re listening to an Emerging Minds Families podcast. Before we start today’s episode, we would like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors, and elders past, present, and emerging from the different First Nations across Australia. Today’s episode is part two of a two-part series. So if you haven’t listened to part one, I encourage you to go back and give it a listen. If you have, welcome back. In this episode, I continue my conversation with Dr. Ben Lohmeyer and Amber Brock-Fabel. Amber is the founder of the South Australian Youth Forum, and Ben is a senior lecturer in social policy within the College of Education, Psychology, and Social Work at Flinders University. In this conversation, Amber and Ben continue to share the findings of their co-design study on loneliness and its relationship to bullying. 

(01:06): 

They discuss the implications of their findings for the wellbeing of young people and some of the steps both families and practitioners can take to support them. I wanted to ask about the main themes that came out of the study around what young people said they needed, and what kind of support did they feel would help when experiencing bullying or loneliness? 

Ben (Guest) (01:26): 

There, again, are lots of different little things, and I think there’s more to be done to explore them, but some of them we’ve already talked about. So having a space for a retreat is really important, whether it be a Zen Den or otherwise, it’s that idea that loneliness isn’t just wanting more connections. It can be feeling overwhelmed or unwanted connections. And so a retreat from that can be really useful. The other thing we’ve talked about is the importance of those positive connections. I think that’s really important in the school-based study, but in the early findings of the kind of initial things that seem to be coming out of the youth centres one, a lot of the young people talk very positively about the people who work there, the workers and their relationships that they have with them, they’re often mentioned as the person that makes a difference. 

(02:08): 

And I think that seems to be very clear things to do to support young people to address loneliness. Amber, we also talked about how your experience of talking about this idea of loneliness was in itself helpful. And so I often think a big part of what’s great about this project is the centrality of youth participation and young people’s ownership of it is part of why it works. It’s addressing loneliness by talking about it, but also by there being opportunities to express agency and to do something about it. And so it’s the connection, it’s the conversation that in itself is addressing loneliness, which is really nice. 

Amber Brock-Fabel (02:46): 

And building on your point, Ben, is listening to young people when they come to you with a problem or a report they’ve made, but also spending the time to understand loneliness from young people’s perspectives within schools, within youth centres and youth spaces is really important. And that working with and not working for is really critical. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (03:08): 

I think that’s so important. I think it’s really easy to brush over things or not really take the time and the busyness of a day to maybe realise when your young person might be trying to explain something to you or starting a conversation. We always talk about maybe go for a car ride together because facing each other can be really intimidating for a young person. So go for a car ride or go for a walk and take some time to kind of allow and leave space for a conversation with your young person that they might be trying to have with you. Amber, following on from that, did the young people you spoke with mention anything that doesn’t help them that schools or adults in their lives have tried, but doesn’t resonate with them? 

Amber Brock-Fabel (03:50): 

That’s a really good question. I think in those early stages when we were working with the SA Youth Forum and having really open, vulnerable conversations around loneliness and our young people really being honest about where they feel lonely was a testament to the fact that the forum was a safe spot, but also the young people weren’t in school together. So I think we had some conversations around how this research would go with a group of your peers at school and a lot of young people saying that they would lie or not be honest at all and really make stuff up so that there will be no chance of the bullies making more fun of me or me looking even more different than I am. And so I think bringing together young people from all these different schools and experiences and ways of life for those first few stages was critical to our understanding of how we create safe spaces to talk about such a sensitive, vulnerable topic. 

(04:44): 

And also then I guess that created when we were applying this to a school and understanding what school to apply that to with the knowledge that not all schools facilitate safe spaces for young people to be honest is really putting in the time to get to know the young people. So it wasn’t just straight up focus group and like, tell me where you’re lonely and this and that and tell me your stories and I’m just a random researcher coming to ask you all this stuff. We had quite a few sessions with the same group of young people and by the end of it had real deep connections and stories around their experiences. But another key element was the fact that our young people, myself and another co-researcher, Abby Wilkinson, we were 18 and 19 at the time of being co-researchers with Ben. 

(05:33): 

So we were brought along to facilitate these focus groups and we had about two or three young people each. And what was really special is that we had our own experiences of loneliness. And when they shared their stories, it wasn’t too different to what we felt as well. So we could kind of really bounce off each other. It wasn’t just a person that doesn’t get it, then gets it too. It wasn’t this- 

Ben (Guest) (05:54): 

Even though I’m old, yeah. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (05:57): 

No, that’s good because you can take that. Everyone’s experienced loneliness and bullying to certain degrees, extreme cases and not so extreme cases. But like you’re saying, I think it’s just about taking that time and building that trust and that relationship with young people and sharing stories, where age appropriate, so that they can connect with you. It’s about fostering that connection. 

Amber Brock-Fabel (06:17): 

Yes. And researchers like Ben, trusting 18 and 19-year-olds to be part of it, even if I don’t turn on the recording for half of it, but still getting- 

Ben (Guest) (06:25): 

I wasn’t going to bring that up. 

Amber Brock-Fabel (06:26): 

I brought it up. But still trusting us to have those conversations is really important. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (06:32): 

But then brings it across a true co-design. 

Ben (Guest) (06:35): 

Yeah, that’s been an important feature of this is that as much as is possible, tried to bring young people into each stage of it. So the design component, absolutely the co-researchers, so that data collection element of it, we brought the data and initial analysis of it back to the group and said, well, what do you think of this? Been really fun to find out bits that I really don’t understand and that this group of people- 

Amber Brock-Fabel (06:55): 

We would read our quotes and be like, what does this mean for you guys? And have this discussion. It was really great. 

Ben (Guest) (07:01): 

Yeah. And then trying to think about things like co-authoring and publishing together. So Amber’s co-authored a couple of different papers with us now as well, which is amazing, but also all was really tricky at different stages as well. Amber’s had an incredible staying power with this project whilst very reasonably other young people have been like, oh, I’m done for this bit. I think I’ve done my bit and I’m going to move on. And so there’s lots of parts to that I think that worked well and other bits that are always just going to be a little bit challenging. There’s a few things that I think I just wanted to pick up on that we’ve been talking about, which I think are important. One was what’s really important for parents. I really want to acknowledge the bit that you were talking about, which is how busy parent life is. 

(07:40): 

Given the idea of just listen to your young person and be like, but when? When will I have time for that in my week? And maybe it’s the drive, that’s a really good example, but you can’t be understated how important that is. That time is critical for hearing and listening, understanding, and taking seriously as well. I mean, one of the biggest things in bullying research is if your child comes and tells you that they’re being bullied, you just take that seriously and you listen to that and you take action on it and you work with them to take action as well. We’ve talked a lot about co-design, but working together collaboratively at all of these stages is important. If you’re a young person who talks about being bullied, asks them what they want you to do about it. And it might be nothing. I just want you to hear me. 

(08:17): 

Or it might be, yeah, I actually want to do something, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe can we talk to the school about it? Great. And then be their advocate at the school level because there’s lots of different parts of the institution to navigate. So work with them to say, okay, who should we talk to? What do we want to have come out of it? Who do you want to include? Who do you not want included? What sort of solution works for you? All those things I think are really important as compared to the officer, which is some of the conversations we’ve had where things have been done for young people or to them or that’s not clear. 

(08:45): 

So one of the things I remember being talked about as unhelpful was going to see someone like a counsellor and then not knowing if that counsellor was going to tell your parents or not. And that sort of boundary around confidentiality or who should be involved and the young person’s control over it can be really off-putting for seeking help. And so I think those sort of things are also really clear, really simple, and a lot of it is kind of just good practise, but they too seem to have an important impact. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (09:10): 

I was thinking exactly just the ways that young people want their parents to or need their parents to respond and then also how they want their parents to communicate with the school I think is a really big question. And just sitting down and asking them is just so important. Amber, was there anything the young people in the study mentioned about the ways they would want their families to communicate with their school? 

Amber Brock-Fabel (09:35): 

I don’t think explicitly, but I think our study can highlight advocating with your school as a partner rather than a system that’s failing my child perhaps. And yeah, I guess Ben’s talked about it a bit around addressing bullying through the resources available and the good research and tools can really help around reducing isolation and loneliness as well. But I guess this research is just an eye-opener of the lack of research around loneliness and loneliness with the unique lens of young people in schools. And I guess it’s just the start. So we’re keen to see what happens next. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (10:17): 

I think that was so important what you mentioned about being in partnership with the school as a family and as a parent that there is… We talk about this often as communicating with your child’s teacher and having conversations with your child about what they feel comfortable about, but that it is a partnership you’re going through potentially from reception or foundational, the beginning to even high school, potentially at the one school. So there is that you are in a partnership with that school as a family and how do you have that communication where your young people feel supported by the teachers and by yourself? So I think that’s so important to remind our listeners that we can be in partnership with the school and how beneficial that can be to the relationship of the child as well and their time there. I was wondering if you had any advice for practitioners, whether in schools or in the community on what they could do to better support children and young people around these issues of bullying and loneliness. 

Ben (Guest) (11:10): 

Some of the things we’ve already discussed lead us to think about what are the implications for practitioners? So how can we set up retreat spaces is a good example. And we talked about it as a physical design feature in a space where you’ve got a room set aside for it, but lots of schools are thinking about how they can create little pockets for that in their classrooms as well. So can you set up a corner of the classroom that can be a few dozen pillows or a small tent or something like that? There can be a retreat space. So if you’re a teacher in a school, can you do that? If you are a youth worker or a wellbeing person in a school, we’ve talked about the importance of those relationships. And for many practitioners, that’s already central and core to what they do, right? They know that that’s how they do their work, that’s the way they have their expertise and currency. 

(11:52): 

So it’s nice to reinforce the importance of that. If you’re trying to think about how to address loneliness here, yeah, just do the things that you know are currently working. They’re the things that we want to continue to invest in, but acknowledge that those also get squeezed out. We have these schools where we increase pressure on them all the time. There’s more and more learning requirements, but also wellbeing supports expected of schools. I’m sure teachers would come in and tell us how much is already demanded of them every day. And then I think about youth services and the way they’re funded and offered and it’s very much about certain kinds of quantitative outcomes that we’re looking for, number of peoples put through a service, number of learned qualifications at the end or something like that. 

(12:31): 

And we have higher caseloads and less time for that relational work. So this kind of evidence page says we need to continue to prioritise connection and we need to make space for that in services. We can’t, like you were saying before, to roll in and go, right, tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets. And they’ll be like, yeah, sure. And oh, great. We fixed the problem and off we go to the next person. That’s not how people work. People want to connect, they want to feel safe, they want to have a sense of belonging. So this is the kind of thing that I just love to say, let’s keep prioritising that. 

Amber Brock-Fabel (13:01): 

Also, I guess if you are working to create the retreat spaces like we are recommending from this study, is working with the young people, not just creating one where the room’s free. Is it in a space where young people can access? Is it a window facing their classroom that they’re wanting to get out of? Or is the walk there okay? And when can the young people access the space? Is it at lunchtime or is it at all times of the day as well? Youth voice and listening to the experts who are the young people and the students that feel these emotions is critical. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (13:33): 

I think that’s really important to note that where we can’t change the infrastructure of a physical building, it is about schools thinking about the journey and how we make the students feel safe when they’re accessing those spaces that they’re putting work into trying to create. So it’s like we want the students to use those spaces, that’s how do we make it a warm and welcoming time for them and safe to get to? 

Ben (Guest) (13:53): 

There are always those compromises, right? We’re always restricted by the space or the money or whatever. But my thought and my challenge is always, how far can we push that? How far can we hand over control and permission to young people to create the space that works for them? I think it’s hard, but it’s worth keep having that sort of challenge. Often think about examples of youth participation or youth voice that have gone as far as saying, here’s a youth service or a youth centre and the young people are involved in hiring and firing staff. Are we willing to hand over that level of control for it? Or you imagine that at a school context, right? That’d be very interesting. 

(14:33): 

But often the youth voice is tokenistic. It’s like you can organise the casual day or what’s on the menu at the cafeteria or whatever. And it’s not a level of control that I think is really meaningful. It’s perhaps a starting point for building skills and expertise, but how far can we push that? How much of that control are we willing to hand over and what difference might that make? 

Amber Brock-Fabel (14:53): 

I guess in the instance of creating the youth retreat spaces, if you’re going to put the time, effort, and money into doing that, you don’t want it to be a space where it’s completely unsafe for young people to go because it’s just the space that’s there and available to be the retreat space. So it’s essential to have that youth input in that process as well. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (15:14): 

Absolutely. Yeah. There’s no point in creating it if you haven’t had a conversation about what they need, right? So bringing them into the conversation is so important and giving them that agency and that pride. I think you feel really proud when you’re able to contribute to something like that and that someone’s actually sitting down and listening to you and all the amazing things that the Youth Forum is doing is actually elevating the voices of young people. I wanted to ask you both from your findings, what do you feel like is needed to combat bullying and loneliness? 

Ben (Guest) (15:43): 

The reality is these are complex, large issues, but ours are focused on how do we think about space and the social experience in that space? And I think there’s an opportunity to keep thinking about how do we continue to improve the spaces young people are in? Particularly schools, because young people spend so much time. And youth centres are another example because they’re a dedicated space for young people. But I think we also have this instance where young people are not supposed to stay home on their video games all day, but also we don’t really want them in public spaces either. We have this challenge for young people where they’re supposed to be, and I think that we are yet to really discover and understand the impact that that’s having on their lives. There’s a social theorist of sorts who’s name I think is pronounced Oldenburg and he talks about the different spaces in people’s lives. 

(16:31): 

Talks about first spaces, second spaces, and third spaces. First spaces are your home environment where you are. Second space is often like work or we could think about young people at school. But a third space is the space where you go where you don’t have any of those other responsibilities and you have a sense of connection to the people who are there and nothing is really required of you. And we have some of those spaces in our culture, but almost like we’re getting rid of them. We have faith communities, people aren’t as religious as they were in the past. We have some public spaces like parks and libraries, but often they kind of get developed or shifted or not invested in as much, put as much money into them. Those third spaces are really important for creating connections. If they’re just an alleyway between two high-rise buildings that has got an uncomfortable chair and maybe a very sickly looking plant, then we’re not going to build connections there. 

(17:21): 

So how do we create spaces, third spaces for people to spend time, build connection, don’t have to spend money, they don’t have to have a lot of other expectations. And can we do that in schools? That would be really amazing. It’s going to be challenging because we’ve got such a long history of building schools in certain ways and all the things that are there, but given how much time young people spend in these spaces, I think we can keep thinking about ways to improve them. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (17:45): 

And Amber, from your interviews with young people, what have you heard about what might help address loneliness and bullying? 

Amber Brock-Fabel (17:53): 

Building on what Ben’s talked about around the third spaces, I mean, just the experience of starting the forum and meeting on picnic blankets because of the lack of accessible community spaces that open on weekends and accessible for young people to be there, hang out and just be. And I guess in my own experience as well is where do you go? And you spend $10 for a coffee or a beer at a pub just to sit and hang out. And particularly interested around the beach is a really big spot for our young people and myself to hang out and go and connect with our friends and is a free place. But now with the impact of the algae bloom on the beach and surrounds is going to be really interesting to look at around summer and where young people go. And we did a regional tour around South Australia earlier this year, working with young people across Kangaroo Island, Mount Gambier, Water Range, Port Lincoln, and the Riverland. 

(18:48): 

And what came out really prominent was space and places to connect and just be, and also just the lack of public transport to get to places and things to do on the weekends. And a really great example was on Kangaroo Island, we had a workshop on a Saturday and we had plenty of young people come and I asked them why they were here and they’re like, Amber, I don’t really care about getting my voice heard. I just came to do something today because I would just be sitting at home alone. And I think that is just testament to young people want to do stuff and they want to come to a youth voice workshop, which is so nerdy. So I think they would be open to a lot of other activities as well. And looking at the introduction of the social media ban and the hours young people spend on their phones and we replaced getting rid of that, but what are we replacing it with? 

(19:39): 

Are we replacing it with free transport and free community spaces and free events for young people to get together and spend their time? Or else are we going to have more young people just sitting alone at home and not doing anything on the weekends? It’s a very scary thought. Third spaces and I guess research as well and working with young people is really awesome. And I guess this is really cool. And we’re seeing a lot of emerging research and building on existing research around loneliness in young people, which is really great to see. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (20:06): 

That is so great to hear and just really important to think about these third spaces. And like you said, with the social media ban, what are we doing for our young people in that time space that they will now have? And yeah, it’s just the want is there and the need is there, but what are we providing as a community for our young people? Every time you guys have been talking about these spaces, I keep thinking, oh, but libraries. I take my daughter to the library. But that’s at 11:00 AM on a Wednesday for rhyme time because she is four. And that’s something that I can do as a mum because I was on maternity leave or I work part-time and that’s accessible to us. But once you hit that older age bracket, it’s like, where are they going and where can they go and be safe and not spend a lot of money? 

(20:53): 

It’s financial as well. And I know parents listening and thinking, well, maybe I should put my child in a something group or another group, but then that’s a cost associated with that as well. So I think, I don’t know, maybe searching on Facebook and finding youth groups around and in your community might be helpful or just reaching out to any youth forums that are around or something like that. But I think we need to have a bit more of a game plan moving forward about what we can do for our young people. I wanted to leave you both with one last question, and that is if you could leave our listeners with one thing from our conversation today, what would they be? 

Amber Brock-Fabel (21:25): 

I think listen to your young person and also understand that loneliness and bullying are not an issue of the person, but a more socially structured issue. And to really help your young person understand that because it’s really easy to feel like something’s wrong with you if you’re feeling lonely or if you’re feeling bullied and excluded from school and it’s not your fault. That’s really important. Ben? 

Ben (Guest) (21:50): 

I don’t think there’s a better takeaway than that. I’m really happy with that one. Listen to your young people, remind them that it’s not their fault and think about the social context. That’s fantastic. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (22:01): 

Thank you so much for joining me today, both of you. It’s been such a pleasure and taking a lot from this conversation as I’m sure our listeners will as well. So thank you so much. 

Ben (Guest) (22:09): 

Thanks for the shout. 

Amber Brock-Fabel (22:10): 

Thank you. 

Nadia Rossi (Host) (22:11): 

Thank you for joining us for today’s episode. If you would like to keep up to date with our latest conversations, we’d love it if you liked and subscribed to our Emerging Minds Families podcast channel. You can also find us on Instagram at EmergingMindsAU or on Facebook at Emerging Minds Families. 

Narrator (22:29): 

Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au/families for a wide range of free information and resources to help support child and family mental health. Emerging Minds leads the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.