As youth mental health issues escalate here and globally, a clinical psychologist says it's imperative to listen young people about what services would best help them. Kerry Gibson is an Associate Professor from the University of Auckland and has done extensive research on the matter, including asking young people where they'd like to go for support. The result is her book What Young People Want from Mental Health Services. She says mental health services for youth are outdated, inhospitable and inaccessible to many, and need a radical overhaul.

As youth mental health issues escalate here and globally, a clinical psychologist says it's imperative to listen young people about what services would best help them. Kerry Gibson is an Associate Professor from the University of Auckland and has done extensive research on the matter, including asking young people where they'd like to go for support.

The result is her book What Young People Want from Mental Health Services. She says mental health services for youth are outdated, inhospitable and inaccessible to many, and need a radical overhaul.

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It's easy for parents to become angry when children fight repeatedly but a strategic approach is needed to help restore the peace, says parenting coach Joseph Dreissen.

It's easy for parents to become angry when children fight repeatedly but a strategic approach is needed to help restore the peace, says parenting coach Joseph Dreissen.

Some disruptive episodes are to be expected between siblings but when a toxic relationship between children is really affecting them and their family it's time to intervene, he tells Kathryn Ryan.

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First, play detective

The fighting is usually driven by one child. Often parents suspect who but need to confirm it by becoming more observant and reflective, Dreissen says.

Keep in mind some children are super-manipulative and know how to bait their sibling so they'll lash out and get the blame. (This could even be the child who seems happier.)

Start by asking each child separately exactly what happened in the most recent combative incident and who started it.

"Sit both children together very calmly and give your positive expectations for the family. Say 'We're a family, we enjoy each other's company, we want to be safe in the house and your quarrels are just affecting us. Then you say I want this to stop. It's very important that you say 'I' or 'we'. It's important that they feel the authority of the family stands from parental expectations. Don't do it with screaming and yelling 'cause you're just actually modelling to them how not to do it.

Then ask each child for their thoughts and listen so they both feel heard.

"Then say 'I want this to stop from now on. It's very important that you say from now on."

Tell the children next time they fight you're going to find out who started it that person will get a consequence.

If the fighting continues, separate the children

Tell the children the new family rule is that if people can't play together nicely then they have to play apart.

"You can say 'This is your shared space with your family and your quarrels are ruining it. Yesterday you had a row so today you're going to play in separate rooms'.

"You have to be persistent and consistent and it might take a number of weeks before it embeds. And if you weaken and don't do that then they will know that you're not very persistent and consistent and then you're back to the very beginning…

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Australian author and educator John Marsden joins Nine to Noon again to talk about why he thinks kids need to take more risks. It's a philosophy he's had throughout his career as an educator and author, and has been a motto at Candlebark, one of the two schools he's founded in his home state of Victoria in Australia.

We need to let kids take more risks, says Australian author and educator John Marsden.

It's a philosophy he has had throughout his career and a motto at Candlebark, one of the two schools he's founded in his home state of Victoria.

Marsden last spoke to Nine to Noon two years ago about his book The Art of Growing Up, and he joins Kathryn Ryan again for his latest work, Take Risks: Raising Kids Who Love the Adventure of Life.

Listen to the full interview with John Marsden here.

Throughout his career and in observing thousands of schools from around the world, Marsden says he has seen it all.

"I started noticing about 20 years ago that young people had no conversation anymore except that they would talk about what they'd seen on TV the night before or if they had any stories about real life experiences, it wouldn't be experiences that they had had, it'd be experiences that their parents or grandparents had had.

"But they didn't have any stories of their own. And I thought this is just not right. We shouldn't be living our lives via Bear Grylls or the Top Gear team on BBC Television we should be getting out there and doing things ourselves."

Children need their own first-hand experiences to build their foundations for adulthood, he says.

"If you don't have that kind of childhood and adolescence, I'm afraid there's a fair chance you'll be a very boring person, so it makes them more interesting, lively people. But it also gives them an understanding of the world."

Even the playground environment has become stringent on safety to a dramatic extent, he says.

"We have this fear of physical injury which has now become so much a pandemic in our society.

"If you cut out any risk of physical injury, there's a pretty good chance you'll be damaging people in other more abstract and less visible ways - they'll be suffering emotional damage and social damage and even cognitive damage and intellectual damage because they are so protected.

"The average child now has like three points in their life and it's the home, the school and the shopping mall, and not many of them go outside those three points."…

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Parents who turn off audible notifications on their devices have the best chance of expanding their child's vocabulary, according to a new study by the University of Auckland's School of Psychology.

Parents who turn off audible notifications on their devices have the best chance of expanding their child's vocabulary, according to a new study by the University of Auckland's School of Psychology.

People might assume the number of times parents check the phone or the time spent talking on it that would be more problematic, yet audible notifications seem to be the most disruptive to child development, says doctoral candidate Maria Corkin, who led the study.

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Corkin's research team were interested in whether a parent's mobile phone use could affect their infant even when they weren't actively using it - and whether this might be associated with the size of their vocabulary.

For their experiment, parents and 20-month old infants were recorded playing with things like jigsaws and stacking cups at the university's Early Learning Lab. Later, the parents were sent questionnaires about their own mobile phone use and general screen use in the family.

Every parent-child play interaction was assessed and coded on four dimensions - Responsiveness, Coordinated joint attention, Directiveness and Scaffolding:

Responsiveness

" showing awareness of the child's activities and cues and following the child's leads in the activities and responding appropriately and in a timely manner - within a few seconds of the child giving a cue for the parent's attention."

Coordinated joint attention

"That's where the parent and child are looking at each other and focused on each other and the same activity at the same time."

Directiveness

" parents are leading the interactions... leading the child's attention away from what they're doing to what the parents want them to do. It's not responsive to the child's cues. The parent is directing the child's focus to something else."

Scaffolding

" parents are using strategies that can support children's learning, such as asking questions or giving feedback, creating opportunities for a child to practice a skill."

Parents who typically received a higher number of audible notifications per hour were found to be less responsive and more directive towards their children and "scaffolded" them less often, Corkin says…

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Neuroplasticity educator and parenting expert, Nathan Wallis talks to Kathryn about Covid lockdowns and getting children back to a normal routine and dealing with the anxiety of going back to school after the holidays.

Neuroplasticity educator and parenting expert, Nathan Wallis talks to Kathryn about Covid lockdowns and getting children back to a normal routine and dealing with the anxiety of going back to school after the holidays.

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Clinical Psychologist Sarb Johal talks about why rates of anxiety in children have gone up so much recently. He answers listeners' questions about children and anxiety during lockdown.

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How much screen time should you let your children have? How and when do you talk about sex? What can you do when your kid throws a tantrum? Why should you let your children just play? Maggie Dent is the mother of four boys, a former teacher and counsellor who is one of Australia's foremost parenting experts, known as the "Queen of Commonsense". Her latest book is called Parental As Anything: Toddlers to Tweens, and she is also the host of the ABC podcast Parental as Anything.

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New research from Massey University and New Zealand Council for Educational Research on learning from home shows children are experiencing some rich learning, while the Educational Review Office’s latest report suggests on-going issues for students include anxiety around returning to school, missing out on learning and attendance. For how parents and teachers can support children at this time Kathryn is joined by Mohamed Alansari, Senior Researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

New research from Massey University and New Zealand Council for Educational Research on learning from home shows children are experiencing some rich learning, while the Educational Review Office's latest report suggests on-going issues for students include anxiety around returning to school, missing out on learning and attendance. For how parents and teachers can support children at this time Kathryn is joined by Mohamed Alansari, Senior Researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research

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Wellington speech and language therapist Christian Wright explains childhood apraxia of speech, where some children have difficulty putting sounds and syllables together.

Wellington speech and language therapist Christian Wright explains childhood apraxia of speech, where some children have difficulty putting sounds and syllables together.

The condition is very rare he told Kathryn Ryan. And has three distinguishing features.

The first, he says, is inconsistency.

"These are the kids when they are trying to speak and put sounds and syllables together find it very hard to be consistent, because they're having enormous difficulty coordinating the plans to move the speech musculature of the mouth - your tongue, your lips and your jaw."

The messages that the brain is sending are getting disrupted and confused, Wright says.

The second is difficulty transitioning between different sounds and syllables, and syllables and words.

"These transitions often they take longer than normal, they become disrupted. Their speech doesn't feel very continuous. There's no good flow to it, it's stilted and feels like they're producing it syllable by syllable."

The third feature is prosody which is where we put stresses, the pitch and rhythm of speech.

"These children have very unusual prosody. Maybe their stress is very even across the speech, and the rhythm is quite broken.

"So, it creates a monotone robotic sort of feel to the speech. "

Other presentations may be making mistakes with longer, more complex words and syllables, poor vowel accuracy and tongue coordination problems, he says.

"They sometimes have these tongue-lip groping kind of behaviors where you can see as they're trying to imitate this speech that their tongue is worming around in the mouth and, their lips are not sure whether to close or open or to make a flat shape or a round shape.

"So, it looks very inconsistent this sort of reaching for these sounds and these words."

It is a difficult condition to diagnose, he says, but signs can appear at age two to three years.

"If we think about those early signs, it's things like in that two to three-year age group, they've got a very limited range of consonants.

"Parents would often feel as though they don't seem to make a lot of sounds. And the sounds they do they're usually Ps or Bs or Ds or Ms, some of those lip together sounds that you see right at the beginning."

It is very frustrating for the child, Wright says…

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Being a grandparent is a wonderful role. All care and no responsibility, as the saying goes. But these days many grandparents are involved in helping raise their grandchildren, to support working parents. Dr Tessa Grigg is the co-author of a new book for grandparents - a guide to helping bring up well rounded, emotionally balanced grandchildren - even if you only look after them a few hours a week. It's called Grandparenting Grandchildren: new knowledge and know-how for grandparenting the under 5s.

Many grandparents are involved in helping raise their grandchildren to support working parents.

Dr Tessa Grigg is the co-author of a new book for grandparents - a guide to helping bring up well rounded, emotionally balanced grandchildren - even if you only look after them a few hours a week.

It's called Grandparenting Grandchildren: new knowledge and know-how for grandparenting the under 5s.

Listen to the full interview

Grigg says she and co-author Joan Williams acknowledge a lot of grandparents naturally have the know-how for dealing with children, but times have also changed.

For instance, it's important to talk with your own children (the parents) about acceptable ways of modifying behaviour, she says.

"We know more about how to manage children, and I think that grandparents can certainly learn those ways.

"I think it's about people understanding why hitting is not a successful technique and we've got a whole section about alternatives to smacking."

Another change of the times means sugary treats shouldn't be all that defines a visit to the grandparents, she says.

"I think that there are alternatives that people have worked out, that are still treats but maybe not quite so full of sugar.

"I think it's about finding a balance and not saying no, you can't have any sweets but just make that that's not all they eat when they're at grandma's ."

Griggs also understands the inclination to leave all the disciplining for parents and just have fun, but says often the line between grandparenting and parenting blur.

"I think what happens these days is that quite often grandparents are more involved and so therefore the children, it's kind of more of a normal life as opposed to just a treat with grandma.

"Even if you're not a full-time parent of your grandchildren, take time to spend time with them so that you build these relationships and provide them the richness of what you can provide.

"I think what children really want more than anything is time, and if you have the luxury of having more time with your grandchildren that's just precious, particularly under five ." …

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