Latest / Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families / #1155 - 2025 Predictions: Everything Changes This Year
Transcript
- 0:06Speaker 1: Welcome to the Happy Families podcast Real Parenting Solutions every
- 0:10Speaker 1: day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. I'm just I'm
- 0:13Speaker 1: here with Kylie today something different. Not so much about
- 0:16Speaker 1: solutions on the pod today as it is about predictions.
- 0:20Speaker 1: Jogi Bearer said, it's tough to make predictions, especially about
- 0:25Speaker 1: the future, but that's not going to stop me from
- 0:27Speaker 1: being confident. You're almost smiling at that one. Did you
- 0:29Speaker 1: like that quote? No?
- 0:30Speaker 2: I was just thinking whether you've started reading the stars
- 0:33Speaker 2: you're into your narch.
- 0:35Speaker 1: No, No, but I am. I'm pretty Some of my
- 0:38Speaker 1: favorite podcasts do predictions for the year, and I decided
- 0:42Speaker 1: last year we did a word for the year and
- 0:44Speaker 1: it just didn't excite me. We talked about it all year,
- 0:46Speaker 1: but we kind of already know what we was supposed
- 0:48Speaker 1: to be doing as parents. Didn't excite me or didn't
- 0:50Speaker 1: want to do a word for the year. This year
- 0:52Speaker 1: kind of just went meh about it felt pretty mid
- 0:55Speaker 1: if I was the quote our ten year old or
- 0:56Speaker 1: our fourteen year old, But I thought, I really love
- 0:59Speaker 1: the idea of predictions. And I happen to little bit
- 1:01Speaker 1: about parenting and parenting trends and I reckon we should
- 1:04Speaker 1: do some parenting predictions. So today my eight predictions for
- 1:09Speaker 1: twenty twenty five for parents and their families. These are
- 1:12Speaker 1: family and parenting predictions.
- 1:15Speaker 2: Number one, parenting style of twenty twenty five.
- 1:18Speaker 1: I'm making a prediction that we're going to shift away
- 1:22Speaker 1: from this idea of helicopter parenting and free range parenting.
- 1:26Speaker 1: Are you supposed to hover at that extreme or you're
- 1:28Speaker 1: supposed to go to other extreme and just let the
- 1:31Speaker 1: kids go for it. Carte blanche, go and fill your boots, kids,
- 1:34Speaker 1: do whatever you want. Into something more nuanced. Parents who
- 1:37Speaker 1: stand firm like lighthouses, offering steady guidance while letting their
- 1:42Speaker 1: children navigate their own waters. Not lighthouse parenting, I think
- 1:45Speaker 1: is going to be the parenting trend, the parenting style
- 1:48Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five. Lighthouse keepers don't jump into the
- 1:51Speaker 1: water to drag ships where they're supposed to go. And
- 1:55Speaker 1: I think that with everything that's been going on in
- 1:57Speaker 1: the world over the last few years, parents are starting
- 1:59Speaker 1: to step back a little bit, resist that urge to
- 2:02Speaker 1: solve every problem. But they're also identifying that too much
- 2:07Speaker 1: freedom is not healthy. There has to be a really
- 2:09Speaker 1: healthy balance, So Like I said, helicopter parents, they have
- 2:13Speaker 1: free range parents kind of disappear. Lighthouse parents illuminate. That's
- 2:17Speaker 1: my parenting style prediction for this year.
- 2:20Speaker 2: In Parental Guidance Season two, we actually saw a brilliant
- 2:24Speaker 2: example of lighthouse We were ahead of the Babby and Jason.
- 2:28Speaker 2: We are much like a lighthouse. We observe from a distance,
- 2:31Speaker 2: but ultimately that they ever do get into trouble, they
- 2:34Speaker 2: can come to us and then we can help.
- 2:35Speaker 1: Them with a lighthouse parenting approach.
- 2:40Speaker 2: We can raise these children to be confident, strong, worlled,
- 2:44Speaker 2: happy adults.
- 2:46Speaker 1: Yeah, we were ahead of the curve in Parental Guidance
- 2:47Speaker 1: Season two. Lighthouse parents. They were awesome. They had their
- 2:50Speaker 1: I think Pepper was ten at the time, and they
- 2:53Speaker 1: just I loved having them on the show. They brought
- 2:55Speaker 1: such wisdom and they ended up really making a great contribution.
- 3:00Speaker 1: For twenty twenty five, we're seeing this emerges the correction
- 3:02Speaker 1: to our overparenting crisis. Lighthouse parenting.
- 3:05Speaker 2: Next two AI predictions, one for the lound room and
- 3:09Speaker 2: one for the classroom.
- 3:10Speaker 1: Yeah, We're going to go from the house to the
- 3:11Speaker 1: school with two things that I think are going to
- 3:14Speaker 1: be really big. This year. The first is an AI
- 3:17Speaker 1: parenting boom Kilie. The greatest parenting library or resource that's
- 3:23Speaker 1: ever been assembled now exists, and it's in AI llm's
- 3:27Speaker 1: AI training sets. We're talking about grond called Chat GBT
- 3:30Speaker 1: or Anthropic or Gemini or I don't know whatever AI
- 3:34Speaker 1: platform you're using. Most people on Chat GPT, but the
- 3:36Speaker 1: some other brilliant ones that are out there, and it
- 3:39Speaker 1: has got all the information that you'll ever need about parenting,
- 3:42Speaker 1: everything from discipline strategies to bedtime stories, to breathing exercises
- 3:46Speaker 1: to do to calm the kids, down to lunch packing hacks.
- 3:51Speaker 1: Like it's all there. It's this incredible comprehensive parenting partner.
- 3:54Speaker 1: And while over the last couple of years AI has
- 3:56Speaker 1: been building and more and more people are getting on it,
- 3:59Speaker 1: I believe that twenty twenty five is the year that
- 4:01Speaker 1: AI is going to explode in our living rooms and
- 4:04Speaker 1: parents are going to be It's not like you're just
- 4:07Speaker 1: searching up something and saying I need an answer and
- 4:10Speaker 1: Google gives you two bajillion hits in zero point seven
- 4:14Speaker 1: to six seconds. It gives you an answer. Let's say
- 4:17Speaker 1: you've got a child who's gluten free or lactose intolerant.
- 4:20Speaker 1: You can say I need a recipe for blah, and
- 4:22Speaker 1: when it gives it to you can look at the
- 4:23Speaker 1: rest and say, I really like that, but can we
- 4:25Speaker 1: substitute this ingredient for something else? Or that one doesn't
- 4:28Speaker 1: quite work. I'm looking for something more along the lines
- 4:31Speaker 1: of and you give it these prompts and start a
- 4:32Speaker 1: conversation with the AI and parents are starting to get
- 4:35Speaker 1: their head around how this works. I was with some
- 4:38Speaker 1: people just the other day, and every time a question
- 4:40Speaker 1: came up in our conversation, one of the guys would
- 4:43Speaker 1: pull out his telephone and he would use chat GPT
- 4:47Speaker 1: to enhance and augment our conversation to provide some clarification.
- 4:51Speaker 1: But it was different to saying, oh, Google says this.
- 4:54Speaker 1: Instead it was a hey, it looks like there's a
- 4:56Speaker 1: couple of different alternatives here, and it changed the conversation
- 5:00Speaker 1: so much.
- 5:01Speaker 2: A few friends and I are preparing for a triathlon
- 5:05Speaker 2: in March.
- 5:06Speaker 1: Look at you, my friends. Well I didn't predict. I
- 5:10Speaker 1: think triathlon is going to boom this year as well.
- 5:14Speaker 1: That's right.
- 5:15Speaker 2: And my friend sent me a message and she said, so,
- 5:17Speaker 2: I've just organized a training schedule with chat GPT, and
- 5:22Speaker 2: I told it that we were a bit weak on
- 5:24Speaker 2: the swim, we needed to work on our run and
- 5:26Speaker 2: we had the bike fine, and it just spat out
- 5:29Speaker 2: this amazing routine that we can all follow.
- 5:32Speaker 1: Yeah, here's your training schedule for the next four weeks.
- 5:35Speaker 1: It's crazy, come back and report. What's fascinating is how
- 5:38Speaker 1: AI is learning to adapt to different parenting styles and
- 5:42Speaker 1: contexts culturally. So I don't think that AI is going
- 5:46Speaker 1: to replace parental intuition, but I do think it's going
- 5:49Speaker 1: to enhance it. As a side note before we move
- 5:51Speaker 1: on to the other AI prediction that I have for
- 5:53Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, an AI search, if you use chat,
- 5:57Speaker 1: GPT or anthropic or whatever, it uses at least ten
- 6:01Speaker 1: times the power, the electricity the energy generation of a
- 6:05Speaker 1: Google search. So you type something into Google and all
- 6:08Speaker 1: of Google servers fire up and they give you the information,
- 6:10Speaker 1: and Google uses an x amount of energy. But if
- 6:12Speaker 1: you use an AI search, it's using ten times minimum
- 6:16Speaker 1: ten times the power required to get you that information.
- 6:20Speaker 1: So my sort of non parenting prediction around this is
- 6:23Speaker 1: watch the tech giants start to invest in nuclear because
- 6:26Speaker 1: I think that's the energy product of the future.
- 6:29Speaker 2: Or should I predict that electricity bill is going to
- 6:32Speaker 2: go through the roof?
- 6:33Speaker 1: Well, Google's will, anthropics, will chat GPTs will. I think
- 6:38Speaker 1: the other thing to highlight here, just while we're talking
- 6:39Speaker 1: about this is I'm not necessarily on the side of
- 6:42Speaker 1: all the things that I'm predicting. I'm just highlighting that
- 6:44Speaker 1: they might happen. So you mentioned the living room AI boom.
- 6:48Speaker 1: That's prediction number two. Prediction number three is the classroom
- 6:51Speaker 1: AI boom. I think we're going to see massive challenges
- 6:55Speaker 1: as traditional schools become increasingly like landline telephones and a
- 6:59Speaker 1: smartphone world. They're functional and they're familiar, but fundamentally they're outdated.
- 7:05Speaker 1: And my prediction is that we're witnessing the death of
- 7:07Speaker 1: the classroom assembly line, that standardized process where kids show
- 7:12Speaker 1: up at four or five and they go through their school.
- 7:16Speaker 1: AI isn't just replacing teachers. I think that it's rewriting
- 7:20Speaker 1: the very definition of education itself. And as a result
- 7:24Speaker 1: of what's happening with AI, certainly at the tertiary level
- 7:27Speaker 1: and it's starting to trickle down into high school, we're
- 7:29Speaker 1: starting to see major cracks in our school system, which
- 7:33Speaker 1: highlights to me that what we've got is a standardized
- 7:36Speaker 1: school system rather than an individualized education system. So to me,
- 7:42Speaker 1: the real battle in twenty twenty five kicks off. It's
- 7:45Speaker 1: not actually AI versus teachers. Teachers are navigating this incredibly well,
- 7:50Speaker 1: but my goodness, it's hard for them. It's really the
- 7:52Speaker 1: industrial education complex versus the personalized, individualized learning revolution that
- 8:00Speaker 1: AI is going to enable. There's one more thing that
- 8:03Speaker 1: I'd highlight around this as well, and that is that
- 8:06Speaker 1: the schools and the teachers and the students who will
- 8:09Speaker 1: flourish are those who become massively AI literate and they
- 8:14Speaker 1: use it to enhance and improve thinking and an idea development.
- 8:19Speaker 1: Too many people are going to continue to use AI
- 8:22Speaker 1: as the one true answer, like a glorified Google that
- 8:26Speaker 1: is not going to provide an enhanced education. But people
- 8:29Speaker 1: who learn how to engage with the AI and argue
- 8:32Speaker 1: with it and find the mistakes in it and improve
- 8:35Speaker 1: what the AI puts out, they're the ones who are
- 8:37Speaker 1: going to do the best learning, and they're the ones
- 8:39Speaker 1: who are going to find the most educational advances occurring.
- 8:43Speaker 2: Recently, I had a conversation with one of our kids
- 8:46Speaker 2: who was putting together a cover letter for her resume.
- 8:48Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 8:50Speaker 2: She was adamant that she would not use chat GBT
- 8:52Speaker 2: because she felt like it was a cheat. And I
- 8:55Speaker 2: said that's okay, and so she left the room and
- 8:58Speaker 2: she left me with the cover letter and I tried
- 9:00Speaker 2: to do it normally, but I could just tell that
- 9:03Speaker 2: I was being verbose and everything that she had said
- 9:07Speaker 2: and that I was trying to kind of fix was appropriate,
- 9:11Speaker 2: but there was just it was too much. And so
- 9:13Speaker 2: I pulled up chat GBT and I said, this is
- 9:16Speaker 2: what we've got and I said, but it's just a
- 9:18Speaker 2: bit too verbose. What would you, you know, take out
- 9:21Speaker 2: to make this really succinct and you know, kind of
- 9:24Speaker 2: attention grabbing as a cover letter. And anyway, I pulled
- 9:28Speaker 2: it up and I was just like, oh my gosh,
- 9:30Speaker 2: this is this is good?
- 9:31Speaker 1: How good?
- 9:32Speaker 2: So I caught our daughter back in and I said,
- 9:34Speaker 2: I know how you feel about chat GEBT, but I
- 9:37Speaker 2: just wanted to give you an idea of what it's
- 9:40Speaker 2: capable of. I said, so this is what we wrote together,
- 9:44Speaker 2: and I read it to her and I said, it
- 9:46Speaker 2: just feels a bit messy, doesn't it. And she said yeah,
- 9:48Speaker 2: I said, listen to what we've now got with the
- 9:51Speaker 2: help of AI. So I read her what we had
- 9:54Speaker 2: and even like literally the first line it took like
- 9:58Speaker 2: a paragraph of our work and just was so succinct
- 10:03Speaker 2: up and she looked at me and I said, so
- 10:05Speaker 2: it's saying exactly what we were trying to say. It's
- 10:08Speaker 2: just made it better. And she said, uh huh. And
- 10:12Speaker 2: I kept reading and by the time I was finished,
- 10:15Speaker 2: I said to her, you don't need to use it.
- 10:16Speaker 2: I'm just showing I'm just showing you the advantages of
- 10:21Speaker 2: what it's capable of doing. And she said, no, that's okay,
- 10:24Speaker 2: you can print.
- 10:25Speaker 1: That up right, So let me build on that. When
- 10:28Speaker 1: it comes to schooling and education, we're not just talking
- 10:32Speaker 1: about a cover letter for a resume. We're talking about
- 10:34Speaker 1: being able to analyze and describe and contrast and empirically
- 10:38Speaker 1: examine different things. The AI will give great answers, but
- 10:42Speaker 1: the people who are able to then read it and
- 10:46Speaker 1: identify what's right and what's wrong and enhance it further
- 10:49Speaker 1: in conversation with the AI, they're the ones that are
- 10:52Speaker 1: going to do the best, which means that they're going
- 10:55Speaker 1: to have to do the work first. There is not.
- 10:57Speaker 1: Everything can be instant and brilliant, and when it comes
- 11:00Speaker 1: to building great people, there's no such thing as an
- 11:03Speaker 1: instantly great person.
- 11:04Speaker 2: No, but it's not like I said to AI, I
- 11:07Speaker 2: need a cover letter.
- 11:08Speaker 1: Correct, you'd already done the work. We've done all the
- 11:10Speaker 1: that's my point.
- 11:11Speaker 2: We've done all the work, and that it enhances Prediction
- 11:14Speaker 2: Number four is an education one as well.
- 11:17Speaker 1: I'm predicting that homeschooling is going to rise in twenty
- 11:19Speaker 1: twenty five here the.
- 11:21Speaker 2: Is this just about our loundroom?
- 11:23Speaker 1: No, no, it's not. But the experience that we've had
- 11:27Speaker 1: enhances my belief that it will rise. So the reasons
- 11:30Speaker 1: that parents went out of the school system. There's bullying
- 11:32Speaker 1: in school, violence says school refusal, and anxiety. There's enormous
- 11:36Speaker 1: discomfortable education department policies, specifically around what a lot of
- 11:39Speaker 1: parents are claiming is woke brainwashing of kids. There's a
- 11:42Speaker 1: degradation of standards, there's sexualized aggression, there's name calling, and
- 11:45Speaker 1: whether you agree with what I'm saying here or not,
- 11:48Speaker 1: there are parents who absolutely absolutely sit very very squarely
- 11:52Speaker 1: in what I'm saying. Homeschooling used to be the domain
- 11:56Speaker 1: of the deeply religious or the alternative hippie, maybe even
- 11:59Speaker 1: slightly wacky people. But now homeschooling is moving closer and
- 12:02Speaker 1: closer and closer to the mainstream, and parents are looking
- 12:04Speaker 1: for alternative ways that they can protect their kids well
- 12:09Speaker 1: being and maintain their educational standards.
- 12:12Speaker 2: I know that in twenty twenty four they saw a
- 12:14Speaker 2: massive influx big families coming into.
- 12:17Speaker 1: Coming off a load base, but really building.
- 12:19Speaker 2: And what was mostly interesting to me is the majority
- 12:23Speaker 2: of parents who are pulling their children out of school
- 12:26Speaker 2: are not pulling them out because they're concerned about their
- 12:29Speaker 2: education as such. It's not about a learning issue. It
- 12:34Speaker 2: is entirely about an environment. It's an environmental thing, yeah,
- 12:38Speaker 2: and a social thing. It's a really, really big problem
- 12:43Speaker 2: that our children are experiencing.
- 12:45Speaker 1: Yeah, the pandemic was just the trailer. Twenty twenty five
- 12:47Speaker 1: is the feature film for homeschooling. That's my prediction, and
- 12:51Speaker 1: I'll tell you why. Going back to AI. The technology
- 12:53Speaker 1: that we now have means that every parent with a
- 12:56Speaker 1: laptop is sitting on a potential private school right there
- 12:59Speaker 1: in the dining room or in their study. And it's
- 13:02Speaker 1: not just about escaping problems. It's about embracing all of
- 13:05Speaker 1: these incredible new possibilities for personalized learning. I think parents
- 13:08Speaker 1: are seeing it and embracing it.
- 13:10Speaker 2: It's interesting you said that the pandemic was I guess
- 13:13Speaker 2: the initiator right for it. I think for so many parents,
- 13:17Speaker 2: they've actually seen that it's possible. I think before then,
- 13:21Speaker 2: we didn't have an idea of what it would look like.
- 13:24Speaker 2: We couldn't conceive of what it meant to have our
- 13:28Speaker 2: children at home and actually help them through their learning.
- 13:31Speaker 2: And now we've had that taste and we've recognized that
- 13:34Speaker 2: we can actually do it.
- 13:36Speaker 1: After the break, how the cost of living is going
- 13:38Speaker 1: to affect my predictions for what happens in your family,
- 13:41Speaker 1: especially around family holidays and intergenerational contact. We're also going
- 13:45Speaker 1: to talk about social media and phone bands and the
- 13:49Speaker 1: Year of the Boy.
- 13:56Speaker 2: Number five, a prediction around the cost of life and
- 14:00Speaker 2: adaptations to it.
- 14:01Speaker 1: Right, So you and I both know and everyone who
- 14:04Speaker 1: does this, everyone who goes to the grocery store, it's
- 14:07Speaker 1: just an exercise in pain. We went down to pick
- 14:09Speaker 1: up a couple of things the other day and it
- 14:11Speaker 1: was over one hundred bucks. And they weren't big things,
- 14:12Speaker 1: they weren't expensive things. It was just a handful of
- 14:14Speaker 1: bits and pieces to get through a day's worth of food.
- 14:18Speaker 1: Electricity bills are off off the charts, and Australian households
- 14:23Speaker 1: are carrying what we can only describe as historically high debt,
- 14:26Speaker 1: particularly mortgage debt, which is putting so much pressure on
- 14:30Speaker 1: family budgets and it's influencing living arrangements. So my prediction
- 14:33Speaker 1: for twenty twenty five, I'm going out on a limb here,
- 14:35Speaker 1: but I'm predicting that multi generational living is going to
- 14:38Speaker 1: make a comeback. Your parents are moving in with this, Kylie,
- 14:42Speaker 1: maybe my mine are okay for now. And while they're
- 14:45Speaker 1: not actually, but while they're going to be strange relationally
- 14:48Speaker 1: for a lot of people, I just think it's in
- 14:49Speaker 1: that positive in terms of the impacts on family support
- 14:53Speaker 1: and connection. My other prediction around cost of living is
- 14:57Speaker 1: that we're going to make the backyard the new Bali
- 15:02Speaker 1: or Byron Bay. I just people can't afford to go
- 15:04Speaker 1: on holidays anymore. Travel is out. Staycations are in number six.
- 15:10Speaker 2: Predictions around the dominance of YouTube.
- 15:14Speaker 1: Yeah, in fact, predictions six and seven are both tech related.
- 15:16Speaker 1: We'll start with YouTube. It's really fascinating when you look
- 15:19Speaker 1: at the data. Today's kids they don't dream of being
- 15:22Speaker 1: a Hollywood star or staler. They don't believe that they're
- 15:24Speaker 1: going to become rock stars. You know what they want
- 15:26Speaker 1: to be. They want to be influencers. They dream of
- 15:28Speaker 1: having a million subscribers on YouTube. And it's not about entertainment.
- 15:32Speaker 1: These are massive career aspirations, says Studies that show a
- 15:36Speaker 1: third of kids aged eight to twelve saying that being
- 15:39Speaker 1: a YouTuber is their dream job. We have a daughter
- 15:41Speaker 1: who is ten who literally says that to us on
- 15:43Speaker 1: a pretty much on the daily. We've got research showing
- 15:46Speaker 1: that eighty one percent of Gen ALFA on YouTube compared
- 15:49Speaker 1: to sixty two percent who are watching traditional I say,
- 15:51Speaker 1: traditional streaming services like Netflix, Like that's so traditional, right,
- 15:55Speaker 1: YouTube has a bigger market share than Netflix, has twice
- 15:58Speaker 1: the number of monthly users as tick Talk. Watch YouTube
- 16:02Speaker 1: boom in twenty twenty five. This is Alphabet's, their parent
- 16:05Speaker 1: company of YouTube and Google and so on. Watch YouTube
- 16:08Speaker 1: boom in twenty twenty five, and Alphabet continues to go
- 16:11Speaker 1: from strength to strength.
- 16:13Speaker 2: Well, you said number seven was tech base. We're to
- 16:16Speaker 2: looking at mobile phones and social media bands.
- 16:19Speaker 1: Right, Okay, so when we look at I can't believe
- 16:22Speaker 1: back in the day cigarettes in hospital, cigarettes on aeroplanes,
- 16:27Speaker 1: cigarettes in elevators, and future generations will be as shocked
- 16:33Speaker 1: as I am that people smoked where they smoked. They'll
- 16:37Speaker 1: be that shocked that we allowed phones into our children's
- 16:39Speaker 1: hands at such young ages. Last year we got phones
- 16:42Speaker 1: out of state school classrooms. I don't think we've removed
- 16:45Speaker 1: enough tech from schools for my liking, but the evidence
- 16:48Speaker 1: is compelling. Schools who have implemented phone bands are seeing
- 16:51Speaker 1: at least a six percent improvement in test scores. Teachers, principal, students' parents,
- 16:57Speaker 1: everyone's recognizing the value of this decision. At the the
- 17:00Speaker 1: end of last year, the Australian government said that legislation
- 17:03Speaker 1: comes into play in twenty twenty five, saying that under
- 17:06Speaker 1: sixteens will lose access to social media In Australia. We
- 17:11Speaker 1: are leading the world in this revolution. It's thanks very
- 17:14Speaker 1: much to Jonathan Hate's book The Anxious Generation. The rest
- 17:17Speaker 1: of the world is watching and following, and I think
- 17:20Speaker 1: this is going to be one of the biggest movements
- 17:23Speaker 1: in tech related to parenting globally this year.
- 17:27Speaker 2: Where you promised us eight the Year of the boy.
- 17:30Speaker 2: What is your predictions?
- 17:32Speaker 1: So my final prediction relates to masculinity. The game console playing,
- 17:38Speaker 1: bedroom dwelling boy isn't just a parential headache. He's a
- 17:42Speaker 1: canary in our societal coal mine, whether we're talking about
- 17:45Speaker 1: Bendigo or Bunbury or anywhere starting with something other than
- 17:49Speaker 1: be our young men are retreating from education, they're moving
- 17:52Speaker 1: away from work relationships at really, I think concerning rates,
- 17:58Speaker 1: over the last several decades, we focused and quite rightly
- 18:00Speaker 1: on lifting or removing the glass ceiling, but we've forgotten
- 18:04Speaker 1: about the quicksand that's been pulling our boys under. So
- 18:07Speaker 1: I'm not suggesting that twenty twenty five is the year
- 18:09Speaker 1: that we will reverse or switch, but rather that we're
- 18:13Speaker 1: going to expand our focus on who we're helping and why,
- 18:16Speaker 1: because the stats are telling a really i think confronting
- 18:18Speaker 1: story in that is that workforce participation in young men
- 18:20Speaker 1: is not great. Mental health challenges are undeniably soaring, Educational
- 18:25Speaker 1: engagement is at historic lows, particularly for boys. It's a
- 18:29Speaker 1: global thing. It's definitely on Australian shores, and it's not
- 18:32Speaker 1: just a society thing. It's a family crisis, because when
- 18:35Speaker 1: you're the parent of a teenage boy who is in
- 18:37Speaker 1: his room gaming for eight hours straight, all of the
- 18:39Speaker 1: complex social debates like toxic masculinity and feminism, they just
- 18:43Speaker 1: fade into the background. Parents, especially mums, they're watching their
- 18:46Speaker 1: boys struggle and they're desperate for solutions. And what we're
- 18:49Speaker 1: seeing right now and through twenty twenty five is the
- 18:52Speaker 1: increased acceleration of names like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.
- 18:58Speaker 1: This is I think Jordan Peterson, even Andrew Tate. I
- 19:01Speaker 1: hate to bring him up on the podcast, but what
- 19:04Speaker 1: the rise of these guys tells is something really compelling,
- 19:06Speaker 1: and that is that people are searching for solutions to
- 19:08Speaker 1: what I'm going to compassionately call the boy problem, and
- 19:12Speaker 1: the path forward is going to be debated and discussed
- 19:17Speaker 1: ad nauseum throughout twenty twenty five as we try to
- 19:19Speaker 1: help our boys to find purpose and connection in a
- 19:21Speaker 1: world that seems, in some ways to have forgotten them.
- 19:23Speaker 1: I think twenty twenty five is going to be the
- 19:25Speaker 1: Year of the Boy, the Year of the man. Changes coming.
- 19:27Speaker 1: I'm writing a book right now, I'm in the process
- 19:29Speaker 1: of finishing it about raising boys I think this is
- 19:32Speaker 1: an issue whose time has come.
- 19:35Speaker 2: There's some big predictions you've got there. Are we planning
- 19:37Speaker 2: on checking in throughout the year on these ones?
- 19:40Speaker 1: Well, we won't checking on during the year, but at
- 19:42Speaker 1: the end of the year or early next year, we'll
- 19:44Speaker 1: talk about how right I was or how wrong I was.
- 19:46Speaker 1: They're my eight big predictions for twenty twenty five.
- 19:49Speaker 2: Well, have you got room for one from me?
- 19:51Speaker 1: I didn't know you had predictions. I thought that you
- 19:53Speaker 1: weren't into predictions. Let's hear it.
- 19:55Speaker 2: Well, my prediction. It might sound a bit cheesy, but
- 19:58Speaker 2: if you can find a way every day to connect
- 20:01Speaker 2: with your kids, to see to really see them and
- 20:04Speaker 2: hear them and value them, your relationships will be better,
- 20:09Speaker 2: your love for them will build, and family life will
- 20:12Speaker 2: be so much happier.
- 20:13Speaker 1: I think that that's probably the most likely prediction of
- 20:15Speaker 1: all of the works that we've talked about to come true.
- 20:18Speaker 1: The Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Rulan from
- 20:21Speaker 1: Bridge Media. We would love it if you would leave
- 20:24Speaker 1: us a five star rating or review. Wherever you're listening
- 20:27Speaker 1: to the podcast, you get a warm, fuzzy We get
- 20:29Speaker 1: to reach more people because the algorithms like it. When
- 20:31Speaker 1: you do this stuff, can you please take thirty seconds
- 20:33Speaker 1: and let everyone know that you love the pod. Five
- 20:35Speaker 1: star ratings and reviews wherever you're listening make a big
- 20:37Speaker 1: difference for us reaching more people. If you'd like more
- 20:40Speaker 1: information and resources to make your family happier, visit us
- 20:43Speaker 1: at happyfamilies dot com dot au.