Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Clinical psychologist who came to public prominence through television work, books, and advice columns, specializing in child and family mental health.
On the island
Eight records
I love this song. I've always loved this song and I I always will love this song. There's a line in it, I absolutely love you. My husband sang it this song to me when we met very early on and he told me he absolutely loved me and lucky for me he still does.
It talks about the teenage wasteland and One thing I despair about is how much we really disrespect the young people, our next generation.
Well, this is Dad, my father, John Sickle. Um my childhood every morning was jazz playing, fresh coffee on the table, real Continental breakfast, and uh this is the song really that is my childhood.
Ugh, this is just me. And Becoming a young woman and jumping around and going out and having fun, it's Debbie Harry.
Doris Day, this is for my mum. My sister and I were brought up on a diet of nineteen fifties mu musicals. My sister and I can recite virtually every line in every lyr lyric from Calamity Jane.
Uncertain SmileFavourite
It's very much being at university. It's just a great track, but particularly there's a big piano section in it. Jules Holland is playing the piano and oh, I could listen to this forever, and often I do when I'm writing.
It reminds me of when my kids were little. I kind of felt I ought to put a classical piece in, to be honest.
It's all about hitting the bottom and picking yourself up and carrying on. And that's what my dad was, and that's what I try and do in my job and probably have done in my life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:25Were you able to take your own advice and implement the parenting strategies you tell other people to?
Can you imagine how messed up my ki kids would be if I had been a psychologist instead of a mother? You know, I think being a practitioner didn't necessarily make me into a better mother. I think being a mother helped me be a better practitioner, because certainly you empathise with the trials and tribulations of parenting when you're one yourself.
Presenter asks
2:38Do you think parents trying to be friends with their children is a good thing?
I struggle with the idea of the friend parent. … I think if you're desperate to be your child's friend, particularly when they're young, and for them to approve of you as their friend, you're going to really struggle as their parent because sometimes as a parent you have to do things that they don't like.
Presenter asks
4:53Do you wonder sometimes if we are looking in the wrong direction regarding online safety for children?
I just find it really almost perversely ironic that we are so preoccupied with children's safety online. Yet because of the way that we've constructed childhood for most children, children really often have no option but to do their childhood online because our culture is so risk averse. Kids have very, very little freedom offline.
The keepsakes
The book
Jane Austen
I like Emma because it's not the central theme isn't about finding a husband.
The luxury
the biggest, most beautiful grand piano
A because I think it will look like a companion. And B because I'd like to learn the Jules Holland piano section from the Uncertain Smile while I'm there.
Presenter asks
6:09What advice would you give to parents about how they bring up their children in a world with many threats?
the more we raise our kids in captivity, the less we give them the opportunity to develop risk aware and risk management skills and fundamentally probably the more vulnerable we make them.
Presenter asks
17:04How did you and the rest of the family deal with [your grandmother's murder]?
I kind of don't have hugely formed memories about how we dealt with it. … And the only way I could deal with that was to try and understand why it would happen. I think that sparked an interest in how, even in the most tragic, dark places of life, one can find understanding and a way to deal with it and a way to move on from it.
Presenter asks
20:18What do you make of the unfeasibly large amounts of pressure and anxiety about achievement that youngsters face today?
It makes me really mad. … I sit in clinics with these beautiful, intelligent, articulate, fabulous young people who have been pushed and pushed and pushed. … and who are doing just really well, but are just carving into their arms, or smoking a lot of weed, or drinking, or feeling suicidal, because they just haven't got all the A stars. … I don't think the way you evaluate intelligence, and definitely not the intelligence of a person who's going to use that wisely and successfully in their life, comes down to their grades.
“the more we raise our kids in captivity, the less we give them the opportunity to develop risk aware and risk management skills and fundamentally probably the more vulnerable we make them.”
“Looking into the eyes of a child or a young person who wants to be dead. is truly truly It's truly sad.”
“humour is really important to me. … Jokes are very important ways of coping with difficult times. You know, having a laugh is often as good as having a cup of tea in a crisis.”