Candice Odgers

We need to build communities and spaces for children and teenagers to play and to learn.

And we need to deliver effective digital mental health services and digital literacy programs to young people where and when they need them.

And we're going to pay for all of this with a big old tax on tech.

Right?

APPLAUSE

Did I mention that I'm Canadian and I do not mind taxing the rich?

But if our goal is to support young people, and I assume that we all share that, then we will fail if all we do is focus on tech and taking things away.

If all we see when we look at our kids is their phone, we're going to fail seeing what they really need from us.

Thank you.

So I actually started my career working with sexually exploited youth in Vancouver, kids who had been displaced from families and homes, and showing up in the courthouse and making sure that they knew why they were charged with the

crimes that they had been charged or the infractions, and then trying to understand who was going to show up to speak up for them.

And one of the things I quickly realized was that the biggest predictor of whether a child was put into custody versus taken home or taken out of that courtroom was whether a caring adult showed up in the courtroom.

So I made it my purpose to track down the adults in these young people's lives.

That's a great question.

So I've worked and studied around the world and worked on a number of longitudinal studies.

And these are studies that follow children from sometimes birth into adulthood and measure multiple dimensions of their mental health.

What you typically do is you measure performance.

cognition, education, mental health, sleep, family dynamics.

But you're only able to see the children and the families usually once a year, once every couple of years to understand, you know, what are the early predictors of mental health problems?

And so you discover right away that that kind of assessment, it just misses a lot.