Connection in Practice: Rethinking Risk and Youth Wellbeing with Dr. Nevin Harper

[music] Welcome to the Outdoor Education Podcast. Honest conversations about nature, learning, and leadership. We explore stories from the field that remind us why outdoor and experiential education matters no more than ever. [music] Hi everyone, my name is Rob Kermichel and welcome to the Outdoor Education Podcast. Today I'm joined by Dr. Nevin Harper, a pioneer in outdoor and adventure therapy and one of the world's leading thinkers on the relationship between nature, well-being, and youth development. Nevin is a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, a registered clinical counselor and a long-time wilderness guide and educator. For over three decades he's helped shape the conversation about what it really means to grow up in a healthy and increasingly disconnected world. He's the author and editor of several texts in the field, including nature-based therapy and outdoor therapies, and know with Dr. World Dubot, he's co-authored a new book titled Kids These Days, Understanding and Supporting the Mental Health of Children and Young People. In this conversation we'll explore Nevin's journey into the field, the big ideas behind the new book, and what it means to help young people not just survive, but truly connect with others themselves and with the natural world. Nevin, it's a pleasure to have you on the Outdoor Education Podcast. Thanks for having me Rob. Nevin has shared a little bit about your journey and your work published recently, but maybe you could start by giving our listeners a little bit of an insight into your path and what drew you first into the world about your education and counseling. Well, I'm in my 50s now, so when we're talking about time frames, sometimes we're talking about decades and multiple decades. I grew up in Northern Canada, so for those who know Canada, there's a 60th parallel that divides our territories from the provinces, and it's quite far north. For Europeans, it's on about the same parallel, I think, as Oslo in Norway, and so it's fairly far north, and for Canada being inland, it's dark and cold and isolated, and it was a small community of 350 people. So I spent a lot of time outdoors. I spent a lot of time around wild things, and dark, quiet evenings in the winter, staring at the northern lights, and by the time I was 17, I left the north, and I honestly believed that that's what every child's experience was like. So I was in college my first year as a 17-year-old, and I was living in a dormitory at a college, and a group of roommates had said, "Oh, yeah, we're going to the mountains this weekend. Let's go," and I'm like, "What are you going to do?" And they're like, "Yeah, we're going to the mountains. We're going backpacking." I'm like, "Yeah, but what are you going for to go backpacking?" And it was this circular conversation I got nowhere, and I finally realized that sometimes people just go to the woods for the sake of going to the woods. For me, there had to be some resource extraction. There had to be hunting or fishing, or there was something being harvested. There was a reason that you had to get something. You had to go for something. There was no rationale. It made no sense. I fully understand that. When we go to even go to the beach, when I first became a father, and I'm taking my young children to the beach, I was like, "Okay, so what's the activity? What are we doing here? Are we going surfing? Are we going kayaking? What is the thing?" And just actually sitting and being in that space. Just being. And you know, the funny thing is, Rob, the first weekend that I went on a break in the fall of "Ogosh" 1988, I guess. We go to the Rocky Mountains in Canada. It's a few hours drive. We backpack into a campsite. And then I find myself looking after these turkeys for the weekend. Because they had no skills. They didn't bring the right gear. They didn't know how to light a fire. It was just a bit of a gong show. And so, starting at 17, 18 years of age, I realized that I had some skills that others didn't. And then by the time I got into university, I was working for an adventure challenge company. And we were running Tripstress, Australia, New Zealand. And so that was '90, '91, when I started working in the field. And since then, it's just been different organizations working primarily outdoors, primarily with groups of people that would be classified as having some marginalization or at risk or developmental therapeutic corrections, rehabilitation. But almost always the same. It was like outdoor activities for the purpose of an educational outcome, a therapeutic outcome, a developmental outcome. And it just carried on and on and on until I had my own kids. And then at that point, it was really hard to be running programs where either a month in the bush, which I was then supervising, but then I was getting the panic, you know, cell phone pager for people to remember pages. I had a call in the middle of the night and I'd left it out of the room because I didn't want to wake the kids up and so I'd run out to the living room and I'd get my pager call and I'd be on the phone with someone who's out in the woods saying, "We've got a runner." So you've got a young, young offender who we've taken from the correctional center out to the woods for 30 days and then they've decided to run away. And just the crisis side of it was just too much. And so I headed towards organizational learning and leadership and development to work with nonprofits at a leadership level and got scooped up right away by someone who wanted me to come and be their first PhD student. And I had no clue what that meant. But since then, I've kind of been one foot in the ivory tower and one foot in the earth and trenches. And that's just because I'm not a classic academic, I don't fully buy into the grant pursuit and publish your parish. And so I work with programs. So maybe I've been in the field for a long time, but I haven't guided a trip since when was that 2016. Well, so 10 years. Yeah. So I've taught some canoeing and I've taught some outdoor skills. So I've still been doing outdoor education as a leader and trainer. I'm still a trainer for the outdoor council of Canada. So I'm an instructor trainer. So I still have some of the qualifications as a on the instructional side of it, but I haven't besides my own personal trips and family trips and going out with friends. I'm not really a wilderness guide anymore. That's a bit of a stretching of the truth, but thanks for such a rich telling of that story of your personal journey. I want to just touch on them. So you mentioned how you were doing the wilderness gating and obviously the teaching and you were working with at-risk youth. Where did the Canada pursuit of becoming a therapist or a counselor come into that? Was that just a natural transition? Because you mentioned the academia and the gating, but I just want to get an idea of where that counseling piece fits into that puzzle. It was mostly because of where I was working and the population I was working with. So I did dip into straight on guiding and sort of doing the program leadership for people that were willing to just pay out a pocket and do it recreationally. I did not find the types of rewards that I wanted from that kind of work. I would rather work with groups that would be involved with the cooking and the cleaning of gear rather than me doing all the cooking and cleaning for my quote-unquote guests. No, and I think there's- You get this. There's a lot more value in that for everyone when everybody's part of the process and not just those specific individuals. Whenever you look back on your kind of journey, were there any particular mentors or moments that they kind of shape your philosophy of learning and how the odours can be a positive space for young people? Yeah, yeah, there's a few. I would easily name Dr. David Wright, whose I believe he's still in Oregon, but when I was at university and I went to university in the United States, at least to finish my degree. Some guys were heading down to play hockey and I just jumped in a car once with him and went down and I thought, "Well, I can do this too." So we lived in Oregon for a year and a half, but I met this guy who was a PhD student at the time and he ran an organization still does, I think, called Pacific Challenge Adventure Company. And he was basically funding his way through his PhD. He would run trips for university students. He found out how to leverage credit from a couple different institutions and students could go back and tell their parents, "Hey, mom, dad, I could go do this adventure trip for eight weeks and get just as many credits as if I did a whole semester and it'll be a bit cheaper and you don't have to pay for rent for this semester." So we were filling these trips up with like, "Yeah, young university students that wanted to do like, rafting, kayaking, absailing, caving, backpacking, cultural tours, pub tours, like you name it." We did like a six week Australian New Zealand adventure trip. One of those things where you get off a plane in New Zealand and this guy throws you a set of keys and you go get into the passenger seat because I had never driven on the other side, never driven right side before. You know, just those types of daily experiences and I just, to be honest, I would put him at the top of my list as a mentor because the guy was having a blast. Like, he loved what he did. He loved that we didn't know where we're going to camp the next night. I'm like, "There's nothing on the intonary day." He goes, "Yeah, but I think they got a pretty nice park and town there." I'm like, "We can't camp in the park." And he's like, "Well, we can't after it gets dark." Right. And so as much as it was a little bit maverick back in 1991-92, I had so much fun. He taught me how to absail off the back of Autsen, no, not Autsen State. And that was the football stadium. Hayward Field, the famous Nike track at the University of Oregon, where we went up in the middle of the night with hemp ropes, like big old caving ropes, cavers breaks. He taught me to tie my own harness on. He got out these massive steel carabiners, like heavy carabiners. We clipped in. He showed me how to run the cavers break to descend on. He jumped over the back, and he disappeared, and he said, "See at the bottom, mate." Because he's Australian. I was just like, "Hold the ship." And I grew up with sports. I grew up with hockey and football and competitive water skiing. And I kind of knew about my body and myself, but this idea of crawling over the edge and clipping myself into a rope and descending, like 150 feet in the dark, in a place we weren't supposed to be. And he taught me to whitewater kayak on the rivers in Oregon. Sounds like I know a bit of a legend. He is. He's still running these. I talked to him like a couple months ago. I was doing my PhD in Minnesota, and somehow we crossed paths. And I had him into a class I was teaching at the University in like outdoor education or something. It was part of my, you know, the responsibilities when someone pays for your PhD, you give back so you teach and be a research assistant. But one of the courses I was teaching, I had him in as a guest speaker, and when I introduced him, I said, "This is the guy that got me into all this stuff." And he's like, "What? Really? Oh, wow." And he had a moment there where he thought, "Oh, maybe I have made some positive impacts in my life." That's awesome. And it's great to be able to give those stories back, you know, a few years back, I ran into an old mentor of mine as well. And the opportunity to say, "You know, you had such a massive impact in my life was really cool." And you could see that it meant a lot as well. Thanks so much for sharing those key moments from your past, Nevin. But I'd like to move on and talk a little bit about your latest book, Kids These Days. What was the inspiration for both you and Will to write this book? We've been pretty consistently telling this story about the fact that we were both sitting together at an outdoor therapy conference in Norway, probably three, yeah, at least three years ago now. And just the facts, like there's more therapies than ever. Like the American Psych Association sites like 500+ therapies. And we know that there's twice that many when you think of wellness approaches and interventions and everything else. And so there's more therapists than ever. There's more talk of therapy than ever. And yet, at least on the youth front, there's this almost panic about the youth mental health crisis. So things are getting worse. Things are getting worse. We're seeing rising numbers of anxiety, depression, self-harm, even suicide in the Western world. That's like one of the leading causes of death for people 13 to 30. And it's shocking. It's like what's going on. And so Will and I had said we should we should write something. We should do something. We didn't know what that meant. Paper, you know, an article for for newspaper or magazine. And I started by interviewing some people that I had access to through my work in academia. So sort of legends in their own respective realms. Like, you know, the number one parenting guru in Canada, Gordon Newfelties, late 70s, legendary trainer, loved by all, had a conversation with him. It's just like I hadn't thought about things that way. I think near the end of one's career, when you're you've accumulated a lot of knowledge, you've got a lot of wisdom. And you also feel like maybe you don't have that much time. You get a little bit blunt. And so he started dropping just comment after comment, truth bomb after truth bomb. And I'm like, oh, there's something here. And so I just kept going to the next interview, going to the next interview. And in the meantime, Will and I are listening to these interviews going like, this is a book. This is a book. And so I created a folder on Dropbox. And I just used the phrase kids these days to label the folder. We dropped 12 interviews in there. We transcribed. We interpreted. We started talking about story. It came together as a book that was going to cover all of it. We weren't going to drop into one particular issue. We weren't going to be, and we were getting a little annoyed with some of the books we were seeing too, because there's a number of books that came out in previous years that would say, it's bad parenting. It's too much talk about therapy. It's the social media and cell phones. It's this, it's that. But each of those books was about one issue. And we're like, yeah, and, yeah, and there's not that we disagreed with them wholeheartedly. It's that we disagreed that that was the singular problem. So that's the genesis of it is that we just became this large writing project that then had to be like whittled down into something that could actually be packaged as a book that people would actually read or listen to in some cases. I really liked the 40,000 feet approach. And I liked the thing that really grabbed me the most was the quote from Aristotle at the beginning of the book. And that that's really. - I agree. - Socrates. - Socrates. - Yeah, I was Socrates. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And that grabs one's attention. The kids of the days have always been kids these days. - Yeah. Like 2400 years ago, someone stood up and, you know, wagged their fists and said, "Ah, kids these days." - Well, in our realm, you must have recognized the Kurt Hahn piece, right? Like, you're talking about the 1920s and 30s, right? Pre-Nazi, Germany, where all of these, the declines, the moral declines of youth were listed, right? Like, kids aren't active and enterprising enough because of the modern locomotion. Like, cars can do 40 kilometers an hour now and kids are lazy and, and they're using, you know, tranquilizers and sedatives. Well, that's, that in our counseling terms, that's best practices today. - All right. The Kurt Hahn piece. And I really loved that you included a bit about the, the experiential learning, the hands on learning. And, and I actually referenced in that Hanion approach as well. The quote that you give, that we're not the passengers, we are the crew. That's actually, you know, the organization that I work for United World College is a former, it's a, it's, it was started by Kurt Hahn in Atlantic College in Wales in the sixties. And in our boardroom, we have that quote in the board, we're not the passengers, we're the crew, and you'll find little snippets of Kurt Hahn all around our campus here in, in Thailand as well. And, and for me is, you know, so many works within the field of outdoor and experiential education, saying that brought in and you showing like the potential benefits for young people to be engaging in education. That is more experiential in nature, that has them actually doing rather than being passive observers of it, was, was something that, that resonated a lot with me. But if we look at the, the conversation about youth mental health these days, what do you feel at the moment are some of the, the prevailing topics for listeners and some of the topics that you cover in the book that, that, would encourage our, you know, some of the people listening to this to go out and read a little bit more of the book. Yeah. Well, I think one of the, the key sort of drivers that will and I have both in our practice and in what we wrote in the book is that we're not big fans of telling kids how to grow up or telling people what to do or as sometimes we say not shooting on people. Right. And in doing so, that means that you're going to, you're going to try to build a relationship with a young person that includes their voice to find out who they are in this world and what their aspirations are and what gets them out of bed in the morning and what their big concerns are like that's just relationship building. That's just good basic human nature. And yet when you think about how adolescence are inundated with messages about who they should be, how they should be, what they should be doing, how they should be thinking, how they should be identifying. And you live in a world that has far too many conversations about mental health, like planet mental health, WebMD influencers on social media apps. Basically anyone who starts down that lane gets fed more and more in the algorithm and you'll start to see characteristics of yourself in these diagnoses. So you become familiar with them familiar with the language of them and then you do have a struggle and you seek help and you've got all the language which sets you up to be sitting with an MD or psychiatrist or psychologist. And then they're asking you some questions and then suddenly you've got a diagnosis, you've got a medication. It's like the bar has been lowered to not just have a diagnosis, you can almost self diagnose now and identify as being in this category which needs to be treated in a particular way. We see it in the schools at least in the universities with our learning and support centers where it used to be that students who had physical disabilities use those supports. We need a wheelchair ramp. We need a scribe. We need a assistive reading device. That's only 20% of the students at the university now that are seeking those types of supports. 80% of the learning in a student assistance center are actually students coming in and telling the assistant center that they can't public speak or they can't be called upon in class or they need an extra hour for an exam or why? Well, they get to disclose with the learning center but the instructor in the classroom doesn't get the disclosure because that's a protection of private health information. I've got director of our school this year and I've got one faculty member who's got 100 students in a lecture hall. She's got 20 students on individualized learning plans from the learning center. Many of them say she'll not be called on in class, she'll not do public presentations and that's an expectation of her class. And how is she supposed to remember which of those 100 students are the 20 that have very particular needs and there's no remediation plan? Even the protectionism and how do we get better at something? You fall down. You do it experientially and you fail gloriously and you get up and you try it again but you have to have an environment that's conducive to that. So that that's safety trap chapter and if you've been through it, it's like there's so many facets to it. Like we eliminated almost eliminated childhood visits to emergency rooms in Canada a few years back and our child safety experts were so happy and proud of that. And then there was this court case we write about it in the book where a child was playing a game called Grounders which is a tag game on a playground that involves using the equipment very differently from the way that it was decided. Like there's a lot of running on top of things with your, you know, where the person trying to tag, he's got their eyes closed and anyways, a child fell, a child got her parents sued the camp, the staff, the recreation association, like the numbers of organizations. The judge eventually came back and said, this is childhood play. It is it is with inherent risk. That is what children playing. They were adults around, they were semi supervised, they were on a break from the camp. They weren't doing camp based activities. They weren't told, you know, Rob didn't tell them to climb up on the play structure and fall off. So they let it go, but that that was a great win for experiential outdoor risky play and for all the educators that believe in it, but it turned into a public argument in our provincial newspaper between child development experts and child safety experts. Like, this is as bad as, you know, going back to the dark ages. The point is that they were arguing over whether or not it's okay that some kids get hurt. And have we gone to a place where we've overprotected so far that there's not enough grit for a young person to be able to stand up in front of their peers in as classroom where it's made as safe as possible, safe enough. But the anxiety is too great. And I think when you consider that risk plays a huge part in any outdoor educators life, but the biggest risk of all is not having young people engage with risk. And it's something that I talk to a lot with our parent community here and try to get them to understand and be part of that conversation that if we as teachers, as educators, facilitators have our students or even parents have our students go the entire way through their life and send them out to university. Obviously, having never had any sense of developing risk management strategies by themselves from experiencing and feeling fall and down and getting back up, how can we expect them to be able to do that on their own? Because what happens with someone who has never been taught risk management strategies, they'll either shy away from all risk altogether, which doesn't lead to successful human beings. Or they'll do what most teenagers do and maybe go all in. So the approach that I try to apply in our setting here is that we teach risk management to students from the start and give them the opportunity to have personal responsibility for how that develops within them. And it's the same, like you would never send a kid out under the world to manage their finances, how do you not taught the math? How can you expect them to self manage themselves in terms of engaging with the world to run them if you don't give them the strategies in which to do so? Special thanks to our sponsors and offices who support outdoor learning and professional collaboration across Asia and beyond. Don't forget to sign up for the Office's 2026 conference hosted at Garden International School in Kuala Lumpur, where educators, adventures and changemakers come together to share ideas, connect and shape the future of outdoor and experiential education in the region. What has been the response so far from educators, parents, practitioners and even young people to the book? Well, young people would be nice to understand if any of them have read it, how they take it. I've got two young adult children myself who now have copies of it, but haven't cracked it because it's something that's something that dad did. It's probably about therapy and I don't want to read it, but now we're getting quite good reviews, like we had our first round of readers were the people that we sought endorsements from. And so we tried to, you know, as with any project, you try to get as high up the food chain as possible and, you know, we were looking for people with names, you know, and we did actually have a couple people in the therapeutic community. Review it early and come back and say, I thought I would endorse this, but maybe not. Because in some cases, we're talking about and being critical of maybe people that make a living talking about everything's trauma. Oh, you're not feeling well today. Oh, childhood trauma. You know, and it's a kind of making light of that, but the reality is some people didn't like the critiques. We, I mean, we could kind of take a swing at our own profession of psychotherapy. And why not? We're working on a, on a false document, like the ESM, the, this idea that the diagnoses are something that's actually real and between your ears and it lives in you and it can be treated with a medical model, which is either surgical or pharmaceutical. You know, we have worked with young people who just simply changed environments or changed their diet and then suddenly the diagnosis is gone. Where did the depression go? Where did the anxiety go? It's not that these things don't exist. It's just that we need to think more with more nuance about what might be going on and that has to come through the development of a relationship with a caring, you know, adult. The, the seven minutes in the doctor's office answering, you know, seven or nine questions of a questionnaire that was designed by a pharmaceutical company leads to you leaving with medication. Yeah, like that's, and we really unpack a couple of those in the book where this is problematic when who, who chooses to measure what? What is the mental health crisis? If it's based on the numbers of those that are diagnosed, then we got to go back and say, who's diagnosing? What are they diagnosing? How are they measuring it? Why are they measuring it? And then what is the markers for, for saying you are aren't X, Y, or Z? It almost always comes back to some kind of corporate entity with a profit margin and an associated government regulatory agency that's allowing it to happen. Like the collusion that happens at that level, we could have written an entire book on that alone. Yeah, we tried to stay. I mean, that's why the book was three times its size and had to be whittled down is that every single issue that we raise in that book somewhere, you know, in every one of those stories in the background or in the dark is another adult doing something that's harming a child. And whether it's intentional or indirect or knowingly and direct, youth are being hurt by this. Yeah, there's a couple of things that really stand out to me from the book is one was we've decided to shift away from 30 years ago or longer or less depending on what part of the world you're in. And where in order to get students to behave and what is considered the correct manner, they get slapped with a stick or a belt and that has just been replaced by in order to get students to do they expect the behavior they're medicated. So this is a part so I recently reconnected with someone from my high school days who is now a vice principal of a school back in that same home community. And for him, he said I love the story of Mr Watson because that's who I got the strap from the third strike was from Mr Watson who made it count so to speak and this guy this friend Paul remembers Mr Watson is a big dude is a big old. There's an English chap that had a pretty hefty hand with that leather strap right and and will and I as writers I mean we joked about it and he's like what sounds like you and I were both the same guy in high school like a bit of a like a bit of a punk a bit of a rebel a bit of a pain in the ass but also the class clown and I tried my damnedest to just keep it together but I laughed a lot through high school and got kicked out of class for just having too much fun and it was always under the threat of the strap. My friend Paulie said he said I grew up and went through high school with this fear that when someone came back to class and they had those welts on their hand we behaved because we feared physical punishment now that's I'm not saying that's okay or we should go back to that. But the next generation was just medicated and I have this conversation with a Danish colleague just a couple weeks ago in Ottawa at a conference and she had said the Danish government is negotiating with teachers right now about the use of physical control. Of physical control in the classroom and revisiting that for the early years well so interesting pendulums right and swinging and then so so I think you know if anybody has a takeaway from our book it should be like adults it's really the adults these days this is the problem so thinking about that and thinking about how that pendulums shifts from you know obviously the physical abuse of kids which is not good and the over medication of which is not good where and I know you talk a little bit about this in the book but where do you see the the perfect and being within that where do you where do you see the opportunity for for teachers yeah well I think our field and maybe that's because it's also willing my background is in terms of education outdoor therapies experiential learning outdoor activity connection to nature relational approaches not universalist mandated prohibitionist behavior like we're seeing with cell phone bands in across countries in different parts of the world. Like that's one that really flared up for us last year and it was quite frustrating to finish writing our book without wanting to respond directly to that you know there's there's very few interventions that have been designed that are universal that work for all it's a blunt instrument yeah so when you say let's just ban cell phones belt belt in a school as a parent doesn't sound that had an idea why the kids need school or their cell phones at school well you just have to see the young teachers in the classrooms now and you know that there's integration there's digital integration in learning there's gamification there's doing kids doing research on their phones looking things up understanding you live in a technological world AI geez if we're going to compete in any way the last thing we should be doing is telling kids to put their phones down but you want to talk about a pendulum let's just go back what is it 2025 go back four to five years when the whole world went online all kids went to school online everybody had to teach online and we told all the young people you guys are the digital natives you guys have got this your whole world is going online and it's going to be okay everything's going to be great and a couple years later you're not allowed a cell phone or to be on social media till you're 60 and will he constantly saying that the funny thing is that Australia is gone for this full ban 16 year I think you have to be 16 some age verification 16 to get on to certain apps age of criminal responsibility is 10 in Australia so you're supposed to know right and wrong and be held fully accountable for your behaviors at 10 years of age criminally but don't be using one of these devices with an app until you're 60 yeah I mean the messaging is so inconsistent and it's it's what's missing is being in relationship those who need help find out and provide them with help like the mental health crisis is 25% of youth robbers 25% of youth have mental health problems you know what the percentage is for adults is 25% Rob it's 25% so it's not a youth issue it's a human issue and if you're going to be prohibitionist for a hundred percent of kids in school what about the 75% that are doing fine they're suffering the same intervention fantastic fantastic points and one of the things that I took away from the book the most was the idea of connection connection connection connection is key to supporting youth throughout its supporting people as adults as well we need to have connection we need to be in places that we can talk openly share and and and feel a genuine connection to our teacher to our parents and that was something that came through to me I come from the perspective of I fully understand that idea the social media ban and the the cell phone ban as being maybe pushing one way or the other I I find a I find it hard as as part of me to maybe go as far as you're maybe suggesting and that it it's okay it's open and obviously what you're doing as you're driving it from research you know you're providing examples of of where it goes what I don't see is where the positive lies within a allowing you know the access to social media I get I think the biggest problem for me is the complete redirection by saying social media and phones this is the cause of it and then the assertion being that that if we can take care of that the problem is solved which is something something that you address in the book but I think it's it's just a great example it's a current example and I think we didn't write about this but since the book has come out there's been events happening there's other topics that have come to the surface like there's a massive lead poisoning incident in Australia right now in some small communities where you know it's not getting the press it needs it's not getting the coverage we're talking about children who have been sick and by you know water systems that were knowingly contaminated with lead so if you can hear there's issues like that that are real world issues and causing health problems and killing people why can't we get the energy that we get from the this moral panic around cell phones yeah it's not that we disagree we think these devices are horrible like they're distracting they're addictive they're you know they're just they they just suck the life out of us and yet there's some young people that are running very successful entrepreneurial businesses off their cell phones because they're digitally integrated and they're still going to the gym and they've got relationships and they're living their best life and the the data on the youth with mental health issues is correlational those with mental health issues tend to have stronger affiliations with social media apps and connecting with people through that rather than doing it face-to-face but the the idea that someone has taken that data and said that it is causal that it's a social media that causes the youth mental health issues is like the biggest sin in statistics it's just not okay because there's other researchers who said I do qualitative follow-up reports and I find that most youth with mental health issues spend more time on devices as opposed to the devices are causing the mental health issue so there's always a little nuance and I think that's one that we can easily be provocative because there's lots of action right now but if you just look at that or listen to the the toxins chapter that is not a part of the mental health story that nobody's having that conversation that plastics and lead and atrazine and endocrine disruptors and that these things are in our systems they're in our food production systems they're in our homes they're in products that we buy and use and consume and the end result the health effect mimics things that we call mental health disorders right we maybe we just need to detoxify yeah yeah I agree and that kind of brings me to another point is that we have as adults this idea about fixing youth and maybe shifting that to understanding you know how are we as adults maybe misinterpreting you know our roles and the things that the kids are trying to tell us yeah well 100% like we've got this you know heightened level of reports of self-reporting of anxiety and depression well think about an 18-year-old right now would have been 13-14 at the beginning of the pandemic and we lived under you know mandates that scared the crap out of everybody and and and the the media's perceptions of of the risk was heightened and you know people can debate about whether that was appropriate or not but that that particular population like our our say our young adults right now and for the next few years this is the population that we're talking about and this is a group that had a very different experience there were 30-year-olds that were scared when the when the pandemic happened there were 50-year-olds that were scared when well what about a 14-year-old we still don't know what impact that's going to have on them in the long term you know developmentally we know that the like the American Pediatric Association shifted the markers for language development by six months after the pandemic because small children learn how to speak by doing what by looking at people's faces I've got another one for your friend of mine his wife is a midwife in Hong Kong and she had someone who came to give birth to their kid at the very beginning of the pandemic and over two years later she was back to give birth to her second child her first child had never been outside to play so the impact that that's something like that will have on huge those those kids and we won't see that for 10 15 20 years well very similar and for our field rub a European colleague talking about working with young kids from an inner city apartment block hardly ever have grass just to walk on you know let alone be out in the woods took them by van out into the countryside late in the day it got dark while they were driving they got out of the van and a couple of the kids when they looked up ducked because they had never seen stars they understood stars they had seen stars in books but when you go from city lights, city living so much like you know pollution that you'd never actually seen a starry night and then you get out in the countryside and all you've got are stars above you that that sensation of like putting your arms up to protect yourself and seeing I've got a grad student from Brazil right now and he says some kids they like they he tried to get them to get their shoes off in the parks and that and they're walking on grass and they're like they had something similar as well so again working within an educational institute that has a huge focus on other education that's that's happening whatever grade that we're in we've had students who've came from settings who are afraid of the grass to begin with and then you know that's that's a journey that they have you know there's bugs in the grass it's dirty and the other one was again immediately falling the the pandemic as we were starting to get outside again I took a bunch of grade 3s at the time for a walk in the jungle along the trails and I would say every 10 meters someone trapped and fell over because they've been used to walking on completely flat surfaces for two years and then when we went outside and ended the jungle where you've got rids and vines and and there was trip trip trip and that took take a little while to reset as well Nevin you talk a little bit about is the need for less diagnosis and more dialogue within and again that comes back to that theme of connection and also about framing context why do we think like the context of like family, school and community cultures what why is that so essential for us to help understand youth well-being hmm that's a good question I think it's a basis for most of our learning like our functional learning for life comes from those pieces so being in relationship with others where herd animal we want to belong family is the probably the most influential people in your life right is your immediate family your community that culture the traditions and practices and rituals of that culture they reduce uncertainty we play with the word conserve or conservative a couple times not that it's a bad word it's a good word in terms of its interpretation like what is it about traditions and practice in our culture that we want to conserve what are the pieces that are really good to protect well if community gatherings or families that have dinner every Sunday night if those types of ritual practices are just made as expectations then there's less certainty about things do you know what I mean? and I think this is why spirituality and religion is actually really important to people is that they find that they can reduce the uncertainty in their life by whether it's a set of rules or a set of beliefs or the community that they get to hang out with that share those values and beliefs and so when we have kids in large classrooms with other kids that they're not necessarily connected to in community because their families aren't connected you just continually water down the sense of belonging and I think educators have a huge job ahead of them to try to create belonging people need to feel safe enough to take risks they need to feel that you know that they're crew and not passengers that they're that they're wanted that they're needed right and then if we refer to the circle of courage model that we explore in the book Dr. Martin Broken Legs work it's a brilliant way of thinking about the growth of any young person regardless of the circumstances kids have to belong they have to get good at something even to a you know a mediocre level kids have to have a sense of mastery they have to actually get good at something it's just really important for your development to feel some pride in yourself independence that moving away from always being looked after, always being led to some level of independence and then generosity is the closing of the circle and bringing it back where you start contributing as to the community or you're then the mentor that's starting to lead another generation right and it's it's something that I mean we're talking about this recently on another on another podcast that a lot of the things that we critique are interventions that are more modern, newer, medication, certain you know teaching styles, certain curriculum, social emotional learning we're adding these things as if there's something new when in fact sometimes we've got to stop and look back it's like good good trail leadership break you've got to look back and see what it looks like in the other direction sometimes especially if you want to find your way out looking back is actually really really important like what worked what worked in your community growing up who did you know who you connected to those are the assets of a community that allow for healthy development of children like North America maybe the same in Europe but in North America one of the major losses in community was the front porch you think about houses up until probably I think it was probably into the 70s when they started building the garage, the big door with the car opener was the front part of the house so when you came home from work you could press a button, you could drive right into your garage and press a button it used to be that the front porch was usually covered in its stack out in the front all the kids would play in the street in the front yards together and all the parents, all the adults in the community would be sitting on the porch and they could see and they could talk to they could yell, "Hey Rob, tell my kids to come home and yell down the street farther." That's cohesion. It doesn't mean everybody got along and had the same, went to the same church and had the same politics but there was cohesion there and kids knew that they could count on their neighbors. I don't think kids have that today. I don't think anybody knows their neighbors very well. No, I think that's something that like societally can be a big issue and it actually leads into another guest who will have coming up in the podcast a guy called Kenny Peevy and he has a fantastic book called The Box People and it's about how the people go from the box in their larger box into their box on wheels to their box of the office or school and then they come home back to their box to watch a box before going back into their box and that idea of being box people and how, you know, for some people they need to step out of that and it's a, it's kids book but along with that idea of the box people all those places are environmentally controlled in terms of they're always comfortable. This seats are comfortable, the air conditioning or the heating is comfortable and we've got a generation of people who are less likely to lean into just discomfort and discomfort of being I'm hot, I'm sweaty, I'm dirty, you know and what that actually means and that's adults, you know, young adults and children and we're seeing that and trying to make sure that we can find this space and ease with just being uncomfortable and allowing that to happen and again, playing outside in the front porch, you know, that's not climate controlled. So, Nevin, you've built a lot of your career around the outdoor and adventure therapy and you discuss the experiential approach in the book as well. Why do you see that engagement with the natural world being so vital to help young people connect with one another, connect with themselves and grow and learn as people? I have to recognize I'm obviously significantly biased, right? That's put that out there right in the forefront. I'm on this podcast, I'm talking to you. So, we're preaching to the choir, so to speak. I talked to some of my clients about why I prefer to work outdoors as a therapist. I don't mind sitting in an office and having a conversation. I just think if I could be walking through the woods while having that same conversation that why wouldn't I? Because I know that that's kind of self-care and relaxing for myself and so if the client is benefiting from it in that same way, it is an opportunity for people to both be doing something for their health at the same time as doing something for their mental health. And again, not to separate them as if there's a real significant difference. But there's also plenty of good research around our ability to regulate better in nature that exercise outcomes tend to be better if you're viewing nature. There's biochemical responses to organic compounds and aerosols and the soil in the forest floor. There's immune system function improvements. I mean, there's just a lot of great science about it. I mean, tomorrow morning, I'm leaving to go to a conference called the World Forum on Forest Therapy. And it's going to include people that are psychologists and it's going to include foresters and it's going to include biochemists. Well, everybody's looking at and researching this from their own area of expertise. And so as much as I'm really cautious to never say outdoor therapy is better than any other type of therapy because I know that not to be true. But it might be better for some and I think the health benefits are there and increase the likelihood that something good will come of, you know, spending an hour walking with nevin in the woods. Is there any tips or little pearls of wisdom that you might be able to offer to some of maybe there's counselors less than this about how they might start to integrate that kind of nature-based approach into their practice? Or even for parents in connecting with their kids if they wanted to try and pull that experience to the outdoors. Yeah. Obviously you're starting with a relationship and finding out where they're at. You know, we've talked earlier about maybe a child grows up in the city and has only ever been on flat surfaces with shoes on. So you have to figure out where to start and create the experiences that fit their sort of motivation and preferences and potential phobias. I think that's finding the fit is the most important part. But you can just as easily do work in an indoor setting to prime the pump for outdoors work. And that's getting people excited about seeing things, doing things, knowing that the sensory experience is so much richer outdoors. Having natural objects, I mean, my office is full of, I had bones and stones and sticks and not sorts of things that I've collected over the years that I thought were interesting. And then getting, you know, whether it's adults or children, getting them excited about finding something that interesting themselves. So it's all, I mean, I think environmental education is really, it needs to be stay focused on creating a sense of wonder and awe both in natural world, which we are just simply one species in. It's humbling. It has to, I don't, there's nothing magic about it. It's just the environment that sustains us and we need to be connected to it because we need it far more than it needs us. You know, like we need to protect it, but the truth is, if humans were here, the nature would, you know, force would be fine without us. And for all of you doing a lot better. Probably. Just as we come to the close of our conversation, I could sit here and talk with you for another few hours, Nevin. But I appreciate that you've probably got other things to do. You got to get ready for your flight to Korea. Just to wrap up. If you could give, and it may be hard to, one piece of advice to adults here working or raising kids these days, what would that be? You've got a whole book on it. So. This is, this was the challenge that we didn't want to write a parenting book. And so we didn't want to, I mean, again, we would have sold farmer books if the subtitle wasn't understanding and supporting East Mental Health. If it was 10 rules for parents raising teens, right? Books like that become hyperbolic and sensationalists and sell lots of copies. But I think our final chapter, when we talk about positive deviance, is something that's really important. It's, if there's a struggle, if there's a challenge, look around in your community, in your family, within your culture, to see who is doing it right, who is, you know, showing success, who is having the positive outcomes at a time when everybody else isn't and learn from them. And I think that's something to consider, especially in a time when, you know, society is so easily divided on issues and people, you know, hear the loud messages from the polls as opposed to the majority of the people sitting in the middle just trying to figure stuff out. Find out who's successful at something and just plagiarize those skills. Just practice what works for others and see if it'll work for you. I mean, just that to me is better than just going along with the latest fad in terms of intervention or interference in kids' lives. And then letting them have a voice, like just following their lead. Most kids know what they need, know what they want, but they have to be in a relationship where they actually trust that there's someone authentic sitting with them who actually cares about them. And they can't get that from just showing up and saying, you know, what do you need? There's investment. The relationship has to be built. Connection has to be enriched. That's timing. Connect them advice. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely the time. Never. If our listeners want to learn more about your work, follow your reading or find kids these days of work and they do that. You can either find me online, just Google Nevin Harper. I think it's nevinharvard.com, which sounds very corporate, but it's not. The book has its own webpage. It's called the kids these days book.com. And then wherever you buy books, it seems to be now that it's out in, as our publisher says now that it's out in the wild. It seems to be showing up in all sorts of places from, you know, bookstores to people talking about it on podcasts. But yeah, wherever you buy books, it's unfortunate that Amazon now controls book sales pretty much in the world. If a book is going to be successful, it has to be measured as such by the Amazon. So we're kind of directing people towards that and encouraging reviews, but at the same time, if you don't want to buy from Bezos, don't buy books where you buy books. And we will appreciate it either way. And it is available on audiobook as well, right? Yeah, Kindle audiobook and paperback. We didn't do a hard driver. There was no point in putting an extra $15 on the price for the sake of early sales. It doesn't make sense. Excellent. Nathan, thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom. Kids these days reminds us that the real work of helping young people really does begin with just understanding, providing time for connection, being there as a presence and not those simple quick fixes. Everyone can find links to Nevets Book and some of the research in the show notes. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and share the order education podcast. Special thanks to Gus Merkel for today's show production. You'll find all the details and links in the show notes. And if you've enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe, and share the Outdoor Education podcast to help us reach even more people who care about outdoor and experiential learning.