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Raising Mentally Healthy Children with Melinda Tankard Reist

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Melinda Tankard Reist speaking at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig, Western Australia on 4 August 2017. Photo: Deirdre Fleming

If these facts about our children don’t give you pause, then you’re not paying attention.

  • More than a quarter of 16-24 year olds have a mental disorder.
  • One in sixteen of 16-24 year olds have depression.
  • One in six have an anxiety disorder.
  • There has been a 90% increase in older adolescent self –harm (mostly girls, but some boys) in the last 10 years – cutting themselves, pulling out hair, pulling out eyelashes, pulling out eyebrows.
  • There has been a 60% increase in 12 to 14-year-olds hospitalised as a result of self-harm between 1996 and 2006. (Patrick Parkinson, Repairing the Social Environment for Australian Children and Young People, 2011, Vos Foundation)
  • One in 100 adolescent girls are anorexic.
  • One in ten girls are bulimic.
  • One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, mostly breast implants,  with a 50% increase in girls between 15-23 wanting labiaplasty or genital surgery (when there is nothing wrong with them).
  • Among boys, body image dissatisfaction for Western men has tripled in the past 25 years.
  • Up to a quarter of people suffering from anorexia nervosa or bulimia are male, and almost equal numbers of males and females suffer from binge eating disorders.
  • A ‘reverse anorexia’ condition is occurring among men who are dissatisfied with their body image: body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), also called bigorexia, or muscle dysmorphia. In their quest for cheap, muscle-building steroids, these men often travel overseas, but don’t come back alive.

These were just some of the introductory points made by Melinda Tankard Reist, author and media commentator, at a presentation she gave last Friday at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig.  A passionate defender of our children’s right to be children, Tankard Reist links our culture’s obsession with sex with the dysfunctional behaviours now becoming common among our youth.  Drawing our attention to the sexualisation of our culture, she took us through a visual tour of the porn-invaded advertising and industry landscape.  Who hasn’t heard of high-heeled shoes for babies, children’s shirts that say “SL_T, all I need is U”, Trashwhore shorts, Playboy baby clothes (with front-and-centre statements like “Future Player: Lock up your daughters” and “Future Playmate” on their baby onesies), and the not-to-be-missed Cotton On/Typo “Porn is my Saviour” mugs?

Boys, in particular, are at risk from the pornification of the internet, and are exposed to a myriad of sexualised images from advertisers seeking to groom them for a life addicted to their products.  Some advertisers have even cleverly linked the pop-ups featuring their sex-products to common spelling mistakes made by children when searching the internet for completely unrelated material.  Tankard Reist points out that the male brain is not fully developed until age 25 to 30, and that this oversaturation with sexualised images distorts the perception among teenage boys who think that porn presents what is normal.

It has been demonstrated elsewhere, that porn addiction has serious implications for the happiness of both men and women in later life, with porn-addicted men no longer being able to have normal sexual relations with their wives – resulting in an associated increase in treatments for impotence.

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Melinda Tankard Reist in conversation at St Stephen’s School, Duncraig, Western Australia. Photo: Deirdre Fleming

At schools across the country, Tankard Reist is busy engaging children and teenagers in conversation about issues such as teenage self-perception.  Crucial to the discussion is whether the young person understands that they are so much more than just their physical appearance.  Tankard Reist encourages parents to develop in their children a wider sense of their own value, and praise their children for things other than their appearance in order to help them develop a well-rounded view of themselves as people with intelligence, people of faith, with the ability to love unselfishly, and possessing virtues like kindness and self-control.   She helps young women to navigate ways of answering the question, “How do I say no without hurting his feelings?”

Her organisation, Collective Shout, has been instrumental in achieving a number of wins for children. Zoo magazine, the ‘rape manual for boys’, was removed from sale at Coles, and subsequently went out of production, while Grand Theft Auto V, a video game in which you can earn health points by sexually abusing and murdering women, has been withdrawn from sale at Kmart and Target.  Another  campaign resulted in the removal of billboards advertising local brothels, previously positioned overlooking the playground of a Brisbane boys’ school with the obvious intention of grooming future customers.

Melinda was also one of the first to expose the porn sites connected to the Safe Schools Program.  Ostensibly anti-bullying, Safe Schools was developed by Roz Ward, a Marxist LGBTI activist, and former lecturer at La Trobe University (she has now been booted out for alleged misconduct).  More and more people are coming to see the Safe Schools program for what it is, an attempt to sexualise and confuse our children about their bodies and challenge ‘heteronormativity’, at an age when this is the last thing they should be thinking about.  I recommend everyone read Miranda Devine’s article in the Daily Telegraph, critiquing the Marxist agenda of deconstructing the family.  The alternate universe of LGBTI activists sees the traditional family not as the core of a socially cohesive nation, but as something from which we should be liberated.

To smooth the operation of capitalism the ruling class has benefited … from oppressing our bodies, our relationships, sexuality and gender identities alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia (which) serve to break the spirits of ordinary people (and make us) feel like we should live in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for people in those units. (Roz Ward)

Ms Ward is quoted in The Australian as saying:

It’s more like 40-50 per cent of young people who are not ­exclusively attracted to the opposit­e sex.  That’s how fluid sexuality is headed.

I will have more to say about the (so-called) Safe Schools program in a future post, so stay tuned.

There is much that we as Catholic parents can do to help our children.  We can teach them their value in God’s eyes – their dignity as humans created in God’s plan, with a particular vocation and purpose in this life, one which it is our sacred duty to discover and cooperate with, if we want to live a life of joy and abundance.  Instead of teaching them that most malleable of words, ‘values’ (HT Iain Benson), let’s teach them actual virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope and love.  At the same time, let’s draw their attention to the seven deadly sins, so they can know what not to aim at: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.  Let’s teach them to pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord), and to be able to demonstrate the fruit of the Holy Spirit in their lives: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  When my children were still living under my roof, we prayed for these things every night and they memorised the lists, and although they’re not perfect (but who is?), I can see the fruit in their lives today.  For our culture and for your children’s present and future happiness, keep the faith.

Further reading and listening:


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8th Sunday, Year A | The depressed person’s guide to escaping from dark times

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Our Lady of Walsingham and English Saints, mural, hall outside Slipper Chapel Shrine, Walsingham. Photo by Norman Servais.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Whenever today’s Gospel reading comes up it takes me back to 1991.  This was the year my beloved father died and my daughter was born.  We had taken the decision that I would be a full time Mum some years earlier with the birth of my first child, so making ends meet was difficult, since my husband was in the process of building up his own business, with every spare cent being reinvested back into the business and Australia still suffering a loss of confidence following the 1987 share market crash.  But after Elinor’s birth, life was further complicated by my developing post-natal depression.

The winter of 1991 was probably a perfectly ordinary winter, as winter’s go, but inside my head, the landscape was bleak and, at times, terrifying.  It seemed to rain constantly so that I spent much of the time cooped up indoors with a two year old and an infant, and no support family within two thousand kilometres.  Odd things happened, like the Water Corporation invading the park behind our house to fix a sewerage problem, and the whole neighbourhood being filled with noxious odours for days on end, adding to my general feeling of malaise.  Then I had a great fear that I was going to develop a mental condition that was present in my extended family.  And of course I was grieving for my Father who had wasted away over five years until every breath was a struggle.

But God uses these moments of interior misery to bring us back to him. The children and I had joined the local playgroup which was run by some of the young mums from the Neo-Catechumenate group.  On one particular day, when our bank account was down to about $3 and I was wondering how we were going to manage until payday, the ‘Neocats’ invited me round for some Italian macchinetta-brewed coffee as well as prayer round their kitchen table.  By chance, their Bible reading for the day was this:

‘That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these.

  Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will he not much more look after you, you men of little faith?

  So do not worry, do not say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?” It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things. Your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow, will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble if its own.’  (Matthew 6: 25-34)

Sometimes you just know God is trying to tell you something.  I went home and thought about it.  Depression is different from other medical conditions, in that there is a certain amount of control one can have over it merely through the choices one makes.  No, really.  (I can hear people disagreeing with me.)   I have met people who seem almost to identify with their depression to the point where they describe it as being part of their genetic makeup, and love-love-love telling you about how they and all the members of their family are living on anti-depressants due to congenital deficiencies in their parietal lobe.  Fiddlesticks to that, I say.

The reason I have my doubts is that we are humans who are free agents, and free agents can choose at each moment how they are going to behave.  We might not always be able to control how we think, but we can control how we behave.  I can remember thinking while I was depressed, that I was ever so bored with my brain which seemed to want to go round and round in an endless monologue over the same subject matter.  The trick seemed to be actually to do something which would change the subject.  What helped me escape from my depression was meditating on the above reading, telling God that I needed a hand and then going outside myself to think about other people who were in situations far worse than my relatively mundane and self-centred situation.  At one point, I remember seeing a picture in a newspaper about a young boy from Vietnam whose face had been terribly disfigured through burns, but who was coming to Australia for plastic surgery.  These things made me realise I needed to get out of my own head and start doing something positive, even if emotionally I didn’t feel in the mood.  I decided the cure for feeling miserable and broke was to start helping other people who were even more down-and-out than I was.  I looked up the nearest St Vincent de Paul Conference and went to their next meeting.  Soon I was in training with a senior member, learning how to discern whether someone required a food voucher or other assistance.  I had always been a Mass-goer, but now prayer and scripture reading became more of a daily feature of my life.  And the more I concentrated on helping others, the smaller my own problems seemed.  In addition to this, over time, God helped us to prosper our business and manage on our budget.  I look back on this period as my first great re-conversion to the Faith.

This didn’t just happen once in my life – over the course of decades, there have been several occasions where things have gone pear-shaped and I have been tempted to slip into depression and self-centredness.  And every time, God has reached in and shown me the way forward – because Jesus Christ our Saviour is the Light of the World, He cares about our individual situations, He wants us to come into a right relationship with Him, and He wants us to be filled with an unshakeable joy in the midst of life’s trials.

Lent is about to begin on Ash Wednesday.  This is a perfect time to pre-empt Satan’s plans for our misery by deepening our prayer life, coming close to God and asking Him to place in our path those people whom he wants us to help and encourage.

Today’s readings:
Word format: year-a-8th-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-8th-sunday-2017


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3rd Sunday of Advent, Year C | Unwavering Joy!

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Statue of the Smiling Virgin Mary, Cathedral of Santa Maria de Toledo, Castile-La Mancha, Spain.

The third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, reminds us to rejoice!

(The thoughts below are distilled from a 2003 homily by Bishop Robert Barron.)

I wonder how many of us associate God with joy?  God, by his nature, is joy.  The Father empties himself in love for the Son.  The Son empties himself in love for the Father.  The Holy Spirit is the empowering love shared by the Father and the Son.

How do we obtain real joy?  It comes from the act of letting go of oneself.  God created us, not because he needed us or needed created things, but out of the sheer intensity of his joy.

The 5th century Syrian philosopher, Pseudo-Dionysius said: “Goodness is diffusive of itself.” There is a natural inclination in all good things to spread their goodness to others.  That is what God is like.  Jesus makes this clear when he says, “I came that you might have life, and have it to the full.”  He didn’t come primarily to give us the law, not primarily to judge us, but to give us joy.  The minute you put anything other than joy at the centre of the Christian life, you have misconstrued it.

When we think of God primarily as judge, as someone who is brooding over us, it’s a sign that we’re caught in sin.  When you run away from the Divine Love, you run to the far country of sin, that’s when God seems distant.  It’s not that God has moved, but that you’ve moved.  When God seems difficult and overbearing, that’s not because he is, but it’s because by closing yourself in, you have made yourself the enemy of God.

The moral life begins with joy.  Law, virtue, obligation only exist to serve joy.

Christ’s purpose is to baptise us in the Holy Spirit.  Baptism in the Holy Spirit means to let God live in you in such a way that you experience the very joy which is the inner life of God.  In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist says, “he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”  Fire is that passion, enthusiasm and sense of purpose, that the Holy Spirit gives you.  Purposeful people are joyful.  When the Holy Spirit is in you, you know what to do!  You know where to go, your life is on fire!  That’s what Jesus has come to do to you!

John also says, “His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his barn; but the chaff he will burn in a fire that will never go out.”  Uh-oh – this sounds like bad news.  On the contrary, this is very good news!  The winnowing fan is like a rake that tosses the wheat up into the air, so that the wind can blow the chaff away, allowing the good grain to fall to the ground.  When Christ is in your life, when you have been baptised in the Holy Spirit, it means that Christ is now going to work in you, separating out all that is evil and dark and dysfunctional, from all that is in the Image of God.  When you let Christ work in you, then your hatred and your violence and your selfishness and your self-absorption and your division – he will throw these up into the air so that they might be blown away!  This is very good news.  When Jesus lives in you, this is the process of transformation that happens, and it is conducive to joy!

Joy is something we can be commanded to experience: in the Second Reading, Paul says, “I want you to be happy, always happy in the Lord.” or “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice!”  It is an action.  If you just sit around waiting for something to come and make you joyful, then you’re not going to be joyful.  Paul continues: “Everyone should see how unselfish you are!”  God is joy because God is a communion of love. Paul is commanding us to be like God in being unselfish.  You are joyful in the measure that you forget about yourself and look to the other, in love.  It’s not that complicated.  Hard to do?  Yes it is, for us sinners, but not that complicated to describe.

Let me give you a hint.  When you find yourself depressed, listless, hopeless, desperate … perform a simple act of love.  What’s love?  It’s willing the good of the other – nothing grandiose, it doesn’t have to be.  Just a simple act of caring for someone around you.  And believe me, Christians are surrounded by people whom we can love.  When you find yourself depressed, act, act, be selfless.  And that’s where joy comes from.  Paul goes on, “Dismiss all anxiety from your minds.  Present your needs to God in every form of prayer, and in petitions full of gratitude.”  What did Jesus say?  “Perfect love casts out all fear!”  The opposite of love is not hate.  The opposite of love is fear.  Where does anxiety come from?  Anxiety comes from the conviction that we are in charge of our lives.  I worry and fret because I’ve got to make things right.  I’ve got to determine how things go.  No, dismiss fear from your mind when you hand your life over to God, and you say, “Lord, you are the Lord of my life.”  What does God want us to do?  He wants us to ask him, “Lord guide me, Lord give me direction, Lord show me the path.”  He wants us to turn our lives away from our own obsessions and anxieties and to turn to him.  This is true of all the saints.  At some stage they said, “My life is not about me.  It’s about Him, and I’m going to let God run my life.”  In that moment and in that measure we find joy!

Listen to Bishop Barron’s homily here.

Today’s Readings (Australia):

Word format: Year C 3rd Sunday of Advent 2015

Pdf format:  Year C 3rd Sunday of Advent 2015