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Professor Ann Sanson is sitting in a chair in a studio
to talk to you about Growing Up In Australia,
The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children.
- Hello, I'm Professor Ann Sanson
and I'm the principal scientific advisor to Growing Up In Australia,
and I've been involved in the study since it was just a gleam in our eye
back in the year 2000
and I've been involved all the way through.
It's a very exciting study to be part of.
So we're now at the stage of the middle of adolescence,
and this is a really important time in development.
Adolescents' brains are growing really fast
and they become capable of much more complex thinking.
They're becoming more independent and able to live more of their lives
outside the confines of their home and family,
so friends and school become much more important in their lives.
Erm, adolescents at this age
are also becoming more involved in the society that they live in.
They learn more about it and they become more involved
through things like clubs and sports and all the media that is around them.
They have a much better sense of who they are
and what sort of person they want to be when they grow up,
and they're much more articulate about their own thoughts and feelings,
even though they might not choose to share all of that
with their parents all the time.
So it's really important that besides hearing from parents,
who are really important to give us a sense
of how their children are developing,
that we also hear from adolescents themselves,
that we can hear their voices, that they can tell us directly
what they're thinking and how they're feeling.
Most teenagers have a relatively untroubled path through adolescence,
but this stage can also be a time of risk and of risk-taking.
Because of their greater independence,
teenagers get exposed to a whole lot of ideas and opportunities
and models of how to behave and what to do.
And so experimenting with alcohol
and with smoking and with minor forms of misbehaviour
is not uncommon at this age.
And we really need to learn
how it is... how we can stop these sorts of problems becoming entrenched
or even getting worse.
At this age, teenagers are also doing a lot of comparing themselves
to their peers, other kids of their same age.
And most teenagers feel reasonably good about themselves.
But others are confronting problems of self-doubt, low self-esteem,
dealing with problems of feelings of depression and anxiety.
Again, we really need to understand how it is
that most teenagers deal with these problems successfully,
but for a few, the problems might get entrenched or even become worse.
So we need to ask teenagers
not only about the things that are going well in their lives
and things that are right on track,
but we also need to ask about the things
that might be causing problems for them at this point in time.
We need to know how they negotiate all this
and how earlier things in their life,
as well as other things that are going on in their lives
around them right then,
help them to deal with these problems
or perhaps cause them to become more serious over time.
So a study like Growing Up In Australia
is really fantastic for helping us to understand all of these things.
14 to 15-year-olds are really getting stuck into their education.
We know that how they feel about school,
whether they feel it's a place where they're valued and respected,
where they have good, strong relationships with their teachers,
erm, all these things are really important
for how well they succeed at school
and whether they want to stay at school and continue on with their education.
Another really important aspect of their school lives
is how they feel about learning.
So some teenagers are driven by curiosity and a real love of learning,
others are driven by a wish to be at the top,
some are driven by a fear of failure,
and others are aware that what they're learning now
is going to be really important for their future career.
So we really want to understand
how these different attitudes towards school develop,
how we can support the more positive sorts of attitudes
and how this does impact on their later education.
All parents know how important friends are to their teenage children,
friends and other age mates.
Through their interactions with their friends,
they're learning so much about the world,
they're learning about how to form relationships and support relationships.
Teenagers are often wanting to be with their friends every minute of the day,
either in person or through their various electronic gadgets.
And they tend... Through their friendships,
they're learning about how you behave, the sort of social norms,
they're learning about how you deal with the more uncomfortable things
like bullying, either happening to them themselves
or observing it happening with others.
They're learning how to develop close and confiding relationships
and also to have a broader social network.
They need to also be leaning how to fit in with a group,
but also to stand up for what they believe in when the need arises.
So lots of important things that happen
through friendships and interaction with their peers.
So this is something else that we really need to be asking about.
Some kids just have a few close friends,
others have a much bigger but looser social network.
How do these things matter for kids' later development?
What we do know is that things like trust
and open communication with their friends
is something that is really important
to adolescents' feelings of self-worth and of happiness.
All these things we want to explore in Growing Up In Australia.
Even though adolescents are spending less of their time with their parents,
we know that relationships with parents
are still the very most important thing to their wellbeing.
Parents have to manage the tricky task
of giving their child more space, more autonomy,
but at the same time maintaining a close relationship
and also imposing reasonable limits
and knowing enough about what their teenager is doing
when they're not at home.
How parents negotiate that varies with different children, different families.
And it's all important for us to understand about.
Again, we know that warmth and trust and open communication
between parents and their adolescent children
is key ingredients in positive development.
And even though many people talk about the terrors of adolescence,
of all the turmoil that goes on within families at that time,
in fact, in most families,
these close relationships are maintained pretty well
with maybe a few hiccups over time.
So we need to hear from both parents and from adolescents
about how these sorts of family relationships are going,
and we are looking forward to tracking
how this impacts on kids' lives in the future.