Nevin Harper, PhD, author, researcher, is a Professor in the Faculty of Health at the University of Victoria and a Registered Clinical Counsellor with more than 30 years of experience guiding individuals and groups through outdoor experiences. An expert professor at the FTHub Summer School and online trainings, Nevin brings an exquisite and often discomforting lens to the complexities of growing up and the sometimes uncooperative systems meant to support the well-being of ‘kids these days.’
Nevin and his colleague, Dr Will Dobud (PhD, Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia and a leading voice in outdoor and adventure therapies and youth psychotherapy) began a deep conversation about the paradox facing today’s youth: despite the growing number of professionals working in mental health, education, and nature-based practices, adolescent well-being appears to be declining. Rates of self-harm and suicide among teens are rising globally.
This concern led them to conduct a series of interviews with experts in psychology, child development, parenting, outdoor risky play, and Indigenous knowledge systems. These conversations gradually took shape as a book: Kids These Days. The title plays on the familiar phrase every generation uses to criticise the next, a pattern that dates back to ancient times. Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, who in the 1920s warned about the decline of youth character due to modern conveniences, Nevin and Will explore how meaningful, embodied, and nature-connected experiences can restore agency, resilience, and purpose in today’s young people.
The Kids These Days Effect
“Their frontal lobes are basically being hijacked by the short-term dopamine bursts that they can get not from achieving levels, say in a video game, but from anticipation of achieving the levels. It’s that little rise in dopamine that creates the addiction. Game and software developers are trying to create an addictive relationship with technology. Like “like” buttons. So essentially, we’re understanding that parents just have to put up a few more guardrails. They themselves have to change their behaviour. They themselves have to be in a better relationship with their kids. There needs to be a connection. The old saying is ‘connection before correction’, right?”
“It’s really hard to teach people indoors in a sterile environment how to be aware of their senses. Nothing’s moving. There are too many straight lines. There are fluorescent light bulbs overhead. So it’s difficult. So from an early age, kids need that outdoor play, levels of risk in outdoor play, mastery of skills and competencies like decision making, risk management, and even communication with an older, wiser one that’s maybe supervising that play. It is absolutely important”.
“As adults, we just are getting in the way. We’re interfering with the connection. So our book title is about interventions, interference and ideology, because there’s also some bad ideas out there too. The one that we really focus on is the culture of safety: we’re just trying to make everything so safe for everyone. So now we have children that have grown up so safe that they’re in university and can’t even have difficult conversations where people have opposing ideas.”
“We used to have a small percentage of students in university with some kind of barrier to learning. Now the numbers for those disabilities are way up, and most of them are for anxiety. Now we have requests that say to teachers, ‘this student shall not be called upon in class,’ or ‘shall not make public presentations’, or ‘needs to do their exam in a separate room so they’re not distracted.’ We’ve had this society of being safe, safe, safe, rather than safe enough to develop some resiliency by having people who care for you around you in a relationship, but let you fall down, let you experience rough and tumble play, let you get into that tyre in a playground and roll down that hill.”
“During an outdoor intervention, someone had climbed up and was standing on top of playground equipment and fell off and got hurt. There ended up being a lawsuit by the parents. And eventually the judge came back and said, “No, this was kids playing.” Even though it was a camp, even though there were adults there supervising. This was simply childhood play, and that includes its inherent risks.”
Diagnoses and Positive Deviants
“Doctors have all these people coming to them saying they’re anxious, but they have no way of telling them what it really is, or what to do about it. A questionnaire was developed with seven questions and called the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale (and there are many others, so they give you the amount of medication based on a score).
“Answers in a score, an amount of medication, all, within a 15-minute visit to a doctor’s office with no relationship, and the person doesn’t actually know who you are in context or why you might be anxious. But because you answered the questions that way, you’re now on medication”.
“Those are the types of things that we question in the book. And you know, that notion of being in a river and you’re in the main stream and that’s where everybody’s supposed to be. And sometimes there are eddies in a river where the water goes the opposite direction. Sometimes there are people in those, and you think, oh, they’re just out in some back eddy. Like it’s some wrong thing to be doing. When in fact, if they’re successful, they’re what we call the positive deviants. They’re the ones that are going against the stream, but they’re being successful. And we’re suggesting to parents, look around in your communities, your extended family, your town, your network, find the people that are doing something successful, be in a relationship with them and start practising in that way.”
“For example, one mother I worked with had a child who struggled to stay regulated in class at school and was having challenging behavioural problems. She knew how to look after her child emotionally, but she was just missing the boat when it came to food. They changed his diet, and within two weeks, his behaviour in the classroom was normal. I never saw them again as clients. I got an email that said ‘Took him off wheat and dairy for two weeks. Everything’s fine. Thank you.’ So was that a mental health issue? How many young people now have ‘mental health issues’ that may just be social or health issues?”
Adults these days
“My first session as a nature-based therapist with clients is for relationship building and exploring the pillars of health. We talk about exercise, diet, and social relationships. And they say, I’m up late, I’m scrolling, I’m trying to go to bed, I can’t get to sleep. I might only have a few sessions with some of these young adult clients to address the pillars of health. At the end of the second or third session, I might see that they have adjusted their behaviours and improved how they feel. They have reached out to friends and are making good choices. I might say, ‘Do you need to walk with me again, or can you have those conversations with your friends?’
“Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t. But a lot of times to get them back on track it’s not therapy and it’s definitely not medication. It’s having solid relationships in their life and doing things that make them healthy”…
“… like hiking in the woods and going for swims in the ocean and seeing their friends and getting a good night’s sleep, shutting all the electronics off two hours before you go to bed and reading a book, having lots of liquids so your body’s hydrated and your cells are energised, eating good food”.
“Get back to having a solid relationship with nature and nature will provide”.
“For some people, the medication is a lifesaver because it stabilises them well enough to deal with the day. That’s fine. No judgment overall. The call to action at the end of the book is that it’s really about adults these days. As we have created as adults, every environment that young people are experiencing.”
“We are in need of taking some responsibility to fix the environments so that children and teens can grow up and have adventures without too much adult interference, without too many bad ideas, and without too much pathologizing and intervening in their lives.”
“My Substack is actually called the Adults in the Room. Someone needs to make things right for kids and stop blaming them and stop calling them anxious and stop banning cell phones in the schools because you think that’s a universal intervention that’s going to resolve the mental health crisis without looking at the whole picture.”
“We also have a lot of young parents raising kids without the support of a traditional extended family. We used to live more in relationships. Encourage people to go live in those and build up small hub communities where young people can raise families together and afford to live and not have to work so much, so they can be there for their kids.”
Ph: Courtesy Nevin Harper and FTHub.
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