Dr. Arne Rubinstein on Rites of Passage

Lukas: Our next guest is an expert on rite of passage and adolescent development with 30 years experience as a medical doctor, counselor, mentor, speaker, and workshop facilitator. His programs and seminars are designed to support boys and girls in successfully making a safe, healthy transition to adulthood. Today we are talking about overcoming adversity in childhood, rites of passage for all children, and reframing masculinity. We might cover those things, we might not. But welcome to the worthy virtual studio, Dr Arne Rubinstein.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Thank you, nice to be here.

Lukas: Excellent. As we're talking about off air, the reason I wanted to get you on is to cast that wider lens on how we're supporting our children in those years all the way through. And I love what you highlighted in that conversation around rite of passage — it isn't just for the teens, there's rites of passage all the way through for everyone.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: That's right. You have a seven-year-old daughter and she'll be going through all sorts of changes, and the way I look at it, to simplify, is that basically we're all on a staircase of life and each of the stairs represents another stage. So the first step is probably when we're still in utero, and then a baby, and then a toddler, and a young child, and then a grown big child, and then a young adult, a potential community leader, a parent, a grandparent, an elder in the community. So we're all on this staircase, and we're one community on the staircase, and the idea is that progressively we move up the staircase and hopefully we do it well. But the thing is, for example, when a child is born, that's a rite of passage for the child because now they're born. It's also a rite of passage for their parents, who go from not having children to having children, or from having one or two children to two or three children. And then as our children become young adults, that's a huge rite of passage for the children as they're moving into that privilege and responsibility of being a young adult. But equally as important, their parents also need to go through a rite of passage and be letting them go and giving them space, and looking at — well, now my child is growing up, how does that change me? And when the whole community is involved in the rites of passage together, we're all moving up that staircase together, and then we're all on the right step. Whereas what I see happening a lot now is everyone's all over the place — everybody wants to be as far down the staircase as they can and pretend they're still young and vital and adolescent. We don't have enough elders. Children are completely lost because they're being brought up by technology rather than healthy adults. So, got a lot of work to do, haven't we.

Lukas: If you were to reflect on where your journey up this staircase, how did you find yourself involved with the rite of passage?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, I started my career as a doctor — I was a medical doctor — and when I was working in general practice, one of the things I found is that a lot of the older people who I really enjoyed talking to and listening to their stories would tell me that they wish they'd done things differently. And I know it sounds cliche, but they wish they'd worked less, spent more time with their families. And they also recognized how a lot of their issues started when they were teenagers. So there was something that was missing for them, and they sort of spent a lot of time compensating for that. And then I worked as an emergency medicine doctor for many years and I saw all these teenagers trying to create their own rites of passage through drugs, or early inappropriate sexual behaviors, or fights, or cars, or whatever. And I'm like, wow, this is mad. And then I somehow realized that all of our children are going to go through a rite of passage when they're teenagers, and the question is: are we going to create something healthy and positive for them, or are we going to let them create their own, which can often be a disaster?

Lukas: Yeah, and then my observation is they're looking for their peers to make these informed decisions about their rites of passage and their identity within the world, and it's not about having that stewardship and wisdom of that older generation pushing down.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Correct. We act like — well, actually, the adults expect them to act like adults but treat them like children, by the way. And we know that when peers create rites of passage for each other, it doesn't work well. That's when we get into abuse, and we get things like hazing that happens in universities or boarding schools, where they treat each other incredibly badly, or they get into gangs, and they actually do the worst thing they can to each other, which often involves humiliation and shame. And then a year or two later, the ones who've been through the rite of passage themselves are doing it to the next round coming through. It's got all the elements of a rite of passage except for the healthy facilitation, because a rite of passage is supposed to be a positive, uplifting experience, not a damaging, wounding one. And when I was in emergency medicine, I was at Schoolies for many years, and Schoolies is, in my opinion, the worst rite of passage in the world. We send our kids out from school and they get as drunk as they can, they take drugs, they have sex with people they've never met before, sometimes for the first time — and that is not the rite of passage I want my children to be going through.

Lukas: Yeah, I personally know people that are my age, coming into their 40s, and they're still working through trauma from Schoolies in that era of their life.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, because that trauma affects them their whole lives. It affects the relationships they get into, it affects their decision-making. And we actually need to be working with our teenagers so that they don't leave school and leave those teenage years traumatized, but they actually leave those years passionate and motivated about the future, and have a good sense of self, and have a support network. That'll make a difference to their whole lives.

Lukas: Yeah. Do you think — and I'm really intrigued around that relationship of cultural identity as Australians, being a young country, and then what we perceive as a norm, like this emphasis on academics as opposed to maturing in that emotional intelligence factor — so what's your observations around that cultural identity influence on the rite of passage?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, it's such a great question, because the cultural identity is supposed to create a rite of passage, but the rite of passage also supports the whole building and regeneration of the community. And the rite of passage itself grows the cultural identity. In fact, rites of passage were a big part of cultural identity in the Indigenous communities. Now, because we don't have formal rites of passage and because we're creating our own, they're often based around alcohol and sex and toxic masculinity — that then gets embedded in the community as what we do. So we live in a community that worships alcohol and being able to drink a lot, that is sexually very dysfunctional, and where toxic masculinity kind of still is a major influence on everything that's going on. So at some point we have to step up and say, hey, how can we do this differently? And then, what you mentioned with academics — the school system has to change. It's no longer in the best interest of our children to be spending eight hours a day at school, with a massive emphasis on academic outcomes, where we're seeing huge mental health issues happening in our teenagers, and growing mental health issues. And we have research out from places like the National University of Singapore who have clearly discovered that your child's academic result at the end of Year 12 is not the major determinant of their future success. So the mark they get at Year 12 is no longer — if it ever was — but it's certainly not now, the major determinant of their future success and actual...

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Ultimately the major determinant is their critical 21st century life skills — if they're resilient, if they've got emotional intelligence, if they're adaptable, if they've got relationship skills, those are the things that they actually need. The vast majority of the academic stuff is on their iPhones, it's in their computers, we can all access that stuff. And it's interesting because for the first time McCrindle, a big research agency, have also published research which shows that parents are now as interested in their child's well-being and in the well-being of the school as they are in the academic outcomes — which is basically parents saying, "I just want my kid to be okay." Sending a kid to school and having them leave school with a mental health issue — who cares about their Year 12 mark? We just need our kids to be okay. And if they are okay, there are multiple ways to be successful if you have appropriate 21st century life skills. So it has to change.

Lukas: It's remarkable, when you start having a conversation around teen mental health, how many families and friends and associates in our community will be like, "Oh yeah, my daughter's going through this, my son's going through this, my dad's doing this, my eight-year-old's doing this." It's absolutely rife. And the school my children go to, they're actually building a well-being hub — like a whole area of the school just allocated for well-being — because the principal said, "I don't have a choice, I can't deal with it otherwise." Their priority is to sort out the emotional, and the academics will sort themselves out.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: That's exactly right. If a child is happy, emotionally stable, has a good support network — family, friends — they'll do well, because they'll have interests and passions. The other thing I have to say is a lot of children don't actually switch on until they finish school, so for a lot of children it's just about getting them through those school years where there's a few options, and then when they leave school all of a sudden they get out in the world and discover there's about a million ways to live your life.

Lukas: Yeah, not just one box that we grew up thinking we had to fit, where if you didn't you were a failure. I mean, it's rubbish.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah.

Lukas: Working with teens and knowing teens, I just want to hug them and be like, this isn't all there is — just get through this, get out of school, and you'll see the lens open up a bit broader for you. We'll just coach them through it. We're referring a whole bunch to rite of passage, but just so our listeners are all on the same page, what are you referring to when you're talking about rite of passage, for those people that don't know?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: So a rite of passage is an event that transforms you — it's a life-changing event, and you're not the same afterwards. When I talk about the staircase, we are all basically going to move up the staircase. The question is whether we move up it well and gracefully and beautifully, or whether we basically get kicked up the staircase by life's traumas and events. A great one, and the one that I'm very passionate about, is a boy becoming a young man or a girl becoming a young woman. The thing to realize — and I'll talk about boys to start with, because that's who I've done a lot of my work with, even though I now work an awful lot with girls too — if you look at the difference between a boy and a man: boy behavior is "I'm the center of the universe, it's all about me, I'm the most important person, I can't handle my emotions. If something doesn't work out the way I want, I have a temper tantrum, I hit things and swear at things." A boy thinks he's going to live forever, and a boy wants a mother to do everything for him, to be a servant basically, and just be there and tell him how wonderful he is. Now if that's in a six-year-old, it's okay. But if that boy never goes through a rite of passage and ends up a 30 or 40 year old man thinking he's still the center of the universe, thinking he's the most important thing in the world, thinking that if he doesn't get what he wants he can have a temper tantrum and swear at or even hit his partner — which is domestic violence — and wants a mother to do everything for him, it's a disaster. And if the women listening to this podcast think about it, I guarantee you they will all know men who still function like boys.

Whereas if we create a healthy rite of passage and they move to being a man, a man doesn't think he's the center of the universe. A man knows he's actually part of a community, and that his actions affect others in the community, and that he has a responsibility to look after the community. A man knows he's not going to live forever. A man is able to handle his emotions — I'm allowed to be upset or angry, but I'm not allowed to put that on someone else, I have to be able to stand with that. And a man is not looking for a mother, a man is looking for a relationship — a healthy relationship.

I have a great concern that we currently live in a world that is run by boys — boys who can make major decisions that affect whole countries, boys who can drop bombs on other countries because they think that's okay, boys in positions of power and business who take all the proceeds of the business for themselves, don't worry about the impact it's having on the earth and all those sorts of things. We're destroying our earth and our humanity. So, you know, indigenous communities recognized that we had a moral obligation to create a rite of passage as boys became young men, and also as girls became young women.

A big part of girl behavior is external validation — how pretty I am, or how good I look, or what I do — whereas in healthy woman behavioral psychology, I don't need my validation from outside, I can actually get my validation from inside because I know who I am. I'm not dressing up for others, I'm actually dressing up for myself, and those sorts of things. So that's a big rite of passage.

When someone becomes a parent, it's a big rite of passage — am I then going to be a parent who understands I have a responsibility to look after my child, or do I become a parent who still wants to act like a teenager? So at all stages of our lives there should be healthy rites of passage to help us keep moving, and at each stage how we see the world and our values are going to change because we're at a different life stage. So yeah, those are the sorts of rites of passage we're trying to create in a healthy way.

Lukas: I love it how you put it — I didn't view the rite of passage before as a contributor to community culture, the lack of rite of passage — but it makes absolute sense, and it kind of answers one of my questions and observations around that masculinity of "the boys" culture. They're always like, "Yeah, yeah, the boys," and I hear that phrase and it's a bit cringy, and I'm like, you're not boys anymore. What stands out in that conversation is that responsibility, and that rite of passage moving into that servant mindset — you're like, "Hey, you serve and look after," that's the position of the man. Does that mean don't be masculine?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: No, not at all. There's a beautiful model which says that every man has in him a king, a warrior, a magician, and a lover, and that can come out in a healthy way or an unhealthy way. A healthy king looks after his kingdom — which he doesn't own, he looks after and supports his family and community. A healthy warrior will stand up and defend his family appropriately. A healthy magician does magic and creates wonderful things in his family and community. A healthy lover appreciates beauty and has that loving energy. That's the healthy side.

But an unhealthy king — a shadow king — will just take it all for himself and be abusive. An unhealthy warrior is violent and a bully. An unhealthy magician is a trickster and steals things. An unhealthy lover is an addict and dependent. So we need to be bringing out the healthy sides of ourselves and our psyches rather than the unhealthy — and unfortunately a lot of modern culture and society celebrates a ver—

Dr Arne Rubinstein: It's a very unhealthy form of masculinity. I mean, we talk about how inappropriate it is for men to sexualize women as objects, and yet we still see billboards all over the city with women lying there in their underwear, or men having to look a certain way. So we sort of know what's right and wrong, but we're still promoting an incredibly unhealthy form. You just have to see the reality TV that's on, you know, on islands where they put young people — well, they're not that young, they're in their 20s — and they're physically beautiful, but that's it. And they're putting these people up as those who we're supposed to spend our time watching on TV and aspiring to. It's just crazy. It's wild.

Lukas: What springs to mind — and the listeners have been listening to the podcast for a while, I use that ecology model quite a lot — and that positioning fits in nicely, in that toxicity is a consumer of that ecosystem. They're just consuming all for themselves. They're not actually producing anything.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, yeah, because it's destroying.

Lukas: Yeah, and it just offsets that whole balance, and then that trickles into community, culture, everything.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, you look at power — so if I'm a man in a "boy place" and I get power, that means I can have more for me. I can have a bigger house, a bigger fence around my house, more expensive holidays, more stuff, consumerism. Whereas if I'm in a healthy man place and I have more power, it actually means I can do more good in my community. I can help more people. I can contribute to the world rather than taking from the world. And I guarantee you, the majority of men who are in positions of power — it becomes about what they can possess rather than their gifts. The gift is only a gift if you give it away. So if I give away my power, I give a gift to the community. If I hold on to it, I just have more possessions, and we just don't need more possessions.

Lukas: No, and at the end of the day, like you're mentioning, working with the elderly — no one's saying, "Oh, I should have upgraded my car," or "I should have got the bigger house."

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, and by the way, one of the biggest rites of passage that we are missing is that of adult into elder. Elders are such an important part of any healthy ecosystem. So what we're trying to do is set up a healthy ecosystem where babies can be babies, children can be children, teens can be teens, young adults are young adults, the grown-ups know what it means to be grown up, and the elders are healthy elders — because they have such an important role. The elders are supposed to circle back and work with the young, and that's why in a lot of Asian communities the grandparents are the ones who bring up the grandchildren. There's a saying that grandparents and grandchildren have a special bond because they have a common enemy. It's a beautiful thing when you see grandparents and grandchildren together, because the grandparents get to pass on their wisdom, which the children are hungry for, and the children end up gaining wisdom and knowledge and getting the unconditional love of the grandparents, which is what they need. The grandparents get energy, which is what they need, and the parents in the middle are freed up to go out and do their big things in the world. So it's actually a really healthy relationship when you have the elderly looking after the young. But we don't do that — we tend to break our ecosystem into units, and everybody functions sort of independently. Then the elders don't have as much of a role anymore, so they go off on holidays in their RVs or play golf, or unfortunately a lot of elderly are depressed and alone. The children are on their devices, which is now the new babysitter, and the parents are overwhelmed trying to work and look after their children. So that social structure is not in as healthy a way as it could be.

Lukas: Is the underlying motivation that whole "we move toward pain or away from pain" — the big Freudian thing, move away from pain and toward joy? We're not willing to go through that adversity, so therefore we've got the band-aid of the screen, we've got the band-aid of shiny stuff. Is the whole cause of this that we're just too scared to face adversity when we live in such a blessed and fortunate place here in Australia?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: It's a great question. Again, we are scared to face adversity, and the ultimate adversity is the acceptance that we're getting older and going to die. Death — we don't face that. We do everything to avoid death. We put death in a hospital and pull a curtain around it. We try to hold it off as long as we can, and we can now have plastic surgery to make ourselves look a few steps down from where we actually are. We think that if we buy enough things that'll keep us happy, but at the end of the day the ticket always gets collected, and we are growing older. There's this staircase that we move up, but there's almost another staircase which goes down, in that as we get older we're going to lose people around us. Eventually our parents are going to pass — my mother died two years ago, it was a major thing. My father's now a very elderly 92-year-old man. As we get older we're going to experience loss and disappointment and even betrayal, and it's not about trying to avoid those things — it's about how we can actually manage and grow from them. I know that when my mother passed away was the saddest day of my life, but there was also a lot of beauty in that time — being able to support my father, and my brother and sister and I really becoming close. It made me realize that I now have to go up a step, and I have great responsibility in my family and my community. These losses and pains and adversity are actually part of life — we're all going to go through it. It's actually about how we deal with it, manage it, and grow from it. When we just try to deny it, then it all comes in at the end, and we go, "What was my life about? Where's my family? Where's my community?" Unfortunately, way too many people are dying alone, scared, and unsupported. For me, it's just another example — and I saw it as a doctor — of how many things we do which are probably the opposite of how we should be doing them.

Lukas: And examples of those?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, just the denial of death, and the fact that when our elderly are dying, it's a great opportunity to be with them, to sit with them, to hear their stories, and for the young to come and see them — instead of separating them and putting them in an old people's home or in hospital and keeping them alive way too long. That's definitely one example. I also see people thinking they can replace family and relationships with stuff — "if I consume enough, I'll be happy." But the problem with consumerism is it's addictive, and it never quite satisfies, so we need to keep consuming more and bigger. We have one Earth, and in our need to consume we're basically consuming the Earth we live on. We just can't keep doing that — we're already seeing catastrophic impacts of climate change and everything else.

Lukas: Yeah, the visual I see when we're discussing this is around rites of passage — taking that ownership over your mastery, over an internal fulfillment model. Like, "I'm the master, it's my responsibility to bring myself joy, it's my responsibility to have purpose." And the challenge is we've created a culture of so much external fulfillment, with instant gratification through screens and consuming shiny stuff and drinking and all of these things. We really have to support our children and generations to take that ownership internally.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Correct, and that's why, when we create rites of passage — especially for teenagers, which is probably the first major facilitated rite of passage that they go through — it is really...

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Part of it is about setting them up for the future, and part of it is getting them to think about what sort of adults they want to be, and what they need to let go of and stop doing if they're going to become that person. Then the other really important part of a rite of passage comes from indigenous philosophy — that every person has their own natural gifts and talents, every child is born with a spirit, and a huge part of a rite of passage is helping our young ones recognize and know that they are valued for their innate gifts and talents and their spirit. So basically saying, we love you for who you are, we admire you, and we're proud of you for who you are — not sitting on this benchmark that they have to look a certain way or be a certain way, and if they're like that we'll love them, and otherwise, they're not okay. Social media is telling us girls need to look a certain way, boys need to look and be a certain way, so we give them one model, which is often a very unhealthy model, and then they all aspire to that. At some point we need to break that pattern and go, actually, we want you to be you, and we want you to find out what you love doing, where your passion is, where your gifts are, and bring that into our community.

Lukas: Developing identity.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Correct.

Lukas: And healthy identity.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah.

Lukas: Well, so let's start at the other end — how do we best support our children?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: We work with rites of passage, obviously, but we've sort of developed a model now that extends past rite of passage, and we call it transformational parenting. There are three pillars of transformational parenting. The first is around creating healthy communities — strong, healthy communities — and children who are in strong, healthy communities will do better than children who are not. There's a ton of research on that. The second is teaching them critical 21st century life skills — things like resilience, adaptability, emotional intelligence, relationship skills. If our children get those basic skills, that's really good for them. And then the third one is creating healthy rites of passage, rather than having them go out and create their own. So in a healthy community, with good life skills, we need to be creating and celebrating the different stages that our children go through and creating rites of passage. My work has really been based on studying rites of passage around the world and recognizing that they all have the same stages and elements, and then going, okay, these are the stages and elements, how can we do this in the most appropriate way — in this school, in this family, in this Aboriginal community, wherever we're doing it — how do we create that, and then support people to set up and create their own rites of passage in their own way, in their own community.

Lukas: My understanding is that one of the steps in that process is coming up against challenge — something to be avoided, something to be met head-on and overcome.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Absolutely. Children need challenges, teenagers need challenges, and if we don't create them for them, they'll go and create their own. When they create their own, there's no boundary — their challenge might be to drive their car at 180 kilometres an hour with the lights off down the highway on the wrong side, or jump off something into a lake — all the millions of things that they get up to. So we need to create challenges that challenge them but don't actually destroy them, and we can do those things. It's from adversity that they actually grow and develop resilience, and the ones who don't have resilience, who've had the perfect upbringing and everything's been looked after — if there's any problem we go and solve it for them — when those kids get out into the world, they can't cope because they just don't have those basic functional coping skills.

Lukas: Yeah, and once again, the rite of passage is the parent saying, "act like an adult now, make good decisions," and the child's going, "you've never let me make a decision in my life — what does that even look like?"

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, yeah. And look, that even starts early, where we encourage parents to teach their children skills of reflection and to help them solve their problems rather than just doing it for them. So we say to parents — if something happens, it can be anything, you might be going down the street and see some young kids smoking, or there might be something you watch on TV — rather than telling your child "don't smoke" or "that was wrong," ask them what they think about it, ask them what their thoughts are. And if they have a problem, instead of automatically solving it for them, see if you can get them to come up with some ideas and then support them. Just teaching those — we've put together a series of basic parenting strategies because we've found that that's what parents want. They want the support, they want the help, they want the tools, and if we can help them with that, then it actually makes a big difference.

Lukas: And what are some of those tools? Obviously we don't have the time to run through a whole workshop, but just high level, because I just want to give that taster for our listeners, and then the links to that will be in our show notes. Great — what should they expect?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Sure. Well, I mentioned the skills of reflection and helping them solve their own problems. One of the really big parenting skills or strategies is to find something one-on-one that you enjoy doing with your child and they'll enjoy doing with you — and do it. Turn the mobile phone off and do it. There's any one of a million things.

Lukas: So you mentioned you have a seven-year-old daughter — is there something that you and she enjoy doing together, your thing that you do?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: I recently got a boat, yeah, so going out on the boat — she's so keen just to be out there and exploring. The world of camping, and anything where it's quality time away from stuff.

Lukas: Yeah, is that... that's really her love language? If I'm on the phone coming in from work, she'll be like — I could literally be five feet inside the door and she'll go, "why are you on your phone?"

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, but it tells you what she wants.

Lukas: That's right.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: That's the thing — they want you without your phone, and to do something. Going on the boat and going camping — how fantastic. You can't do it every day, but you might do it once a month, or once every three months, or once a week — you go and turn off the phone, you don't ask them a million questions, and then they will start asking you questions. Some people go for a walk with the dog, or they go out on a Sunday morning and have breakfast somewhere, or they play music together, or they go surfing together, or whatever. But I so strongly encourage parents to find something that they can do with each of their children — not with all of them together, one at a time, phone off, and just do it. That's probably as important as anything, because if you want to support them, you have to have a relationship with them. If you don't do things one-on-one with them, you won't have that same sort of relationship. And then the other one I talk about a lot is that when your children make a mistake or muck up or do something they shouldn't do, you don't shame them — you separate the person from the behaviour. So they know that you love them, but you go, "hey, I love you, but what happened? We need to talk about it, we need to work out what we're going to do about it, how we resolve it, whether we think it's okay or not," and actually talk about it together, rather than just saying, "you did this, that's not okay, you're hopeless, you're useless, and here's your punishment." They are going to make mistakes — they're supposed to make mistakes, that's part of learning and growing. If you can turn that mistake into a growth opportunity, that makes a huge difference. If you shame them, they won't tell you when they've got a problem, and then when they become teenagers or young adults and they might have a big problem, if they don't feel safe to come to you, then it's a real issue.

Lukas: Yeah, and another thing I was recommended, through probably a podcast guest, was — when you are there to have those conversations and unpack that behavio—

Lukas: To you we have the power of reflection and a bit of timeline so we can circle back to it at a later date, and then it creates that better margin than trying to be in that big feeling zone at the time.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Correct. It's a complicated beast, this whole parenting in childhood.

Lukas: But I also love what you were saying there around letting them have the failure essentially, come up against that adversity and say hey, yeah it didn't work out and that's okay. But also parenting can't happen in the car ride and pick up from school.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well that's why I feel about finding something that you enjoy doing.

Lukas: Once, importantly. Yeah, and just on what you said about the failure, when we interviewed and did a survey of headmasters around Australia, the big thing that came up is the children not having resilience and anxiety.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: And anxiety is a worry about what's going to happen in the future and uncertainty about whether they'll be able to deal with it or not, which is a lack of resilience. So we need to let them try new things, we need to let them fail. I mean, I think we should be doing resilience classes in school where they actually do fail, and the class doesn't start until you fail. That's when you start your learning.

Lukas: Yeah, I was asked to do a talk at a school recently for the entrepreneur program, and I said, oh, you can start by failing. I was like, don't make your business fail, but go out and find something you're going to really suck at and do that for a bit. That will only help — if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to fail. I was actually watching a special on Elon Musk about his SpaceX rockets, and the first three launches all blew up and failed, and he said, you know, we don't actually want to fail, but when we do, we learn so much.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, and he also had to consciously make the choice to go down that track knowing that he was going to fail.

Lukas: Right. It was like, based on the math, there's no way you're going to launch your first attempt — it's going to blow up. But still, to have that resilience, direct forge ahead for this bigger mission that's beyond yourself, and he knew he could handle failure.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yes.

Lukas: How else do parents and caretakers — mature members on the stairs, if you will — how do we support our children to become more resilient?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, we encourage them to try new things, we talk about our own failures and how we've learned or grown — or not — from those things. And when something does go wrong, we just make sure they know they're safe, it's okay, and we're going to talk about it and see if there's anything we learned and whether we want to try again or do it differently. We need to look for those opportunities and grow from them. And then when they do succeed, we give them appropriate encouragement and praise for doing that, because kids are expected to do well, and no one actually acknowledges it — but when things don't go well, it runs all over them. So it's about positive reinforcement and then support when things don't go right.

Lukas: Is resilience the kryptonite to anxiety?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: They're related. You could call them bedfellows.

Lukas: Yeah, and that's a way to overcome — to foster more resilience. If I'm anxious about doing something because I'm worried something will go wrong, I don't know what's going to happen, that very much speaks to my not having resilience.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yes. Resilience — I'm not worried if my rocket blows up the first time because I expect it to. And if I've got no resilience, then I'm incredibly anxious, because if the rocket blows up, I think it's the end of the world.

Lukas: Yeah, it's one of my challenges as a playground designer — I've got standards and regulations, but I'm designing for failure and working with teachers and educators to support children, using the language around "you can't do it yet."

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Yeah, and that's okay.

Lukas: Yeah. I was fortunate enough to see a little boy — he couldn't do a climbing wall, took like three months to be able to do it. I just happened to be there when he did it, like three months after. There's nothing I could have done, no way I could have supported him or created something in that environment to give him the fulfillment of having that resilience, persevering, accepting his lack of physical competence and then overcoming it, and that sense of accomplishment and joy. There's no way I could replicate that in anything I do.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: That's right. And if he'd succeeded on the first day, it would have meant a lot less. But the fact that it took him three months — how fantastic. He kept trying for three months and eventually did it, and when he did it, someone was there to witness it and acknowledge it.

Lukas: That is — yeah, perfect, I love that. And something that pops into mind — what role does perfectionism play in a lack of passage and moving through up those stairs?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Perfectionism is really dangerous. They talk about toxic masculinity — there's also a thing called toxic perfectionism, which unfortunately impacts a lot of girls in the education system, where they think they have to be perfect or there's a problem. If you're a perfectionist, then you're just waiting to fail, because we can't be perfect all the time — the world's not perfect, it just doesn't happen. So perfectionism, I think, is a very negative attribute. Our children need to know that their parents are not perfect, the world is not perfect, they're not perfect. It's actually about doing as well as we can, rather than thinking that if we didn't get it perfectly we failed. Perfectionism and anxiety go right together, because if I'm a perfectionist, I'm always incredibly anxious something's going to go wrong.

Lukas: And how do you support — because I can imagine that would be a big part of the girls' rite of passage, overcoming perfectionism. So what does that support look like?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, a big element that we have in rites of passage is around story sharing. If we can get girls sitting there with older women — their mothers, grandmothers, whatever older women — one of the topics is around how the women grew up and how they were when they were teenagers, and the discussion comes around to perfectionism. Then they hear these women talking about how life hasn't been perfect and things they've learned, and then we can actually have an impact on the girls' attitudes towards perfectionism. It won't happen by us telling them "don't worry about being perfect" — they don't want to be lectured to, but they will listen to stories. So stories are a really important part of a rite of passage.

Lukas: So from here, what's your — what are your tips, what's your big vision for the future for supporting communities with rites of passage?

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Well, we're trying to make rites of passage mainstream again, like they would have been historically. We want every child to have an opportunity to go through a healthy rite of passage. So a lot of what we do is leadership training — a three-day leadership training here in Byron Bay. I also run them in Perth, and I'm running another one in Belgium this year, but our headquarters is in Byron Bay. We teach people about the framework of a rite of passage. We're working in a lot of schools implementing transformational education around rites of passage and building communities. We're just doing everything we can to spread the work. So anybody who's interested, it'd be great if they jump on our website — teachers we're interested in coming to schools, and for individuals, we're interested in helping them create their own rites of passage in their families or places of work.

Lukas: Yeah, just getting rites of passage out there and starting at the base — transformational parenting starting at the root of the tree.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: That's right.

Lukas: Grows strong. Well, Arne, thank you so much. It's been eye-opening and absolutely phenomenal. I look forward to having you back to unpack some more things on the podcast, and getting this out there into the community, into what we do in designing and teaching about play. Thank you so much for contributing to the community and my own family.

Dr Arne Rubinstein: Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.