We have years of experience through counselling and teaching, and all these professionals in place who actually have social relationships with these kids. We have parents who are seeking help for kids who are having mental health issues as well. It seems to me that's where your solution is going to be. Again, a technological fix is often very awkward and interferes with those relationships.
I was talking to Rena before we started about Safer Schools Together, a new Canadian company. About 126 school boards across the country have bought services from this company. They give the name of every kid in the school, and then a robot program goes out and grabs anything that this child has posted on the Internet and uses algorithms to find out whether or not they're at risk of mental health.
One of the things they're using in England to determine this is whether they've posted emo rock lyrics on social media, which every 13-year-old does at least 12 times a day. It generates a report for the principal and the police. That can't replace those rich experiences and relationships that you describe. Those are where the solutions are.
Typically, when you look at kids at risk for any form of violence, there have been multiple reports to CAS, and there have been multiple attempts to intervene. We're not failing these children because we don't know who they are; we're failing them because we don't have enough money in mental support for kids. We're failing them because we don't take any of their concerns seriously. We throw them out there on the Internet and expect them to navigate this commercialized space all on their own. It seems to me that the technology to that is irrelevant. It's the relationships that matter.
Often when people say, “What can parents do? What is the most protective thing I can do? You don't want me to spy on my kid, but what should I do? I'm terrified.” Many parents are. Have dinner with your kids. That is the single most important protective factor, having dinner with your family at night, not in the car on the way to soccer, but actually sitting down.
We need to get off the technological wagon and remember that we have all sorts of experience in dealing with these kinds of problems. What we really need to talk about is where we're putting our resources, into building those technologies, so we can innovate and create wealth, or into providing mental health services for kids, so they can grow and thrive.