A Podcast by Lynne Jackson

Growing Up Here

"We've spent decades studying what breaks children.
This podcast asks the opposite question:
what makes them unbreakable?"

Season 1 — In Production
8 Episodes · 2026
Global
Lynne Jackson — host of Growing Up Here
Lynne Jackson Host & Creator
The Investigation

What does it look like when a child grows up whole?

Most conversations about children's wellbeing start with what's going wrong — anxiety, disconnection, the slow erosion of something we struggle to name. This podcast starts somewhere else.

Across the world, in places that don't always make the headlines, children are growing up surrounded, known and held. Not because of any program or policy — but because of something older than both. Growing Up Here goes looking for it.

Eight conversations with researchers, clinicians, anthropologists, economists and policy makers who have spent careers circling this from different directions. They don't all use the same language. But something keeps showing up in the data — across cultures, across centuries, across disciplines.

This season names it.

S1
Now in Production

The Belonging Question

Eight context-builders. Eight ways of looking at the same thing.

Season 1 assembles eight world-leading experts — each from a different discipline — to examine the one ingredient modern childhood keeps leaving out. A clinician, an anthropologist, an economist, a policy maker. Different lenses. One recurring absence.
01
Paediatrics
The Paediatrician
What's changed over a career. What children who are okay have in common.
02
Child Psychiatry
The Child Psychiatrist
What's arriving in the clinic. What's shifted in twenty years.
03
Epidemiology
The Epidemiologist
The global data. The paradox of wealthy countries and poor outcomes.
04
Anthropology
The Anthropologist
How recent the nuclear family is. What children were built for. The long view.
05
Policy
The Policy Maker
Why evidence doesn't move funding. What policy can — and can't — reach.
06
Education
The Educator
Twenty-five years in the same regional setting. What they've watched disappear.
07
Indigenous Knowledge
The Knowledge Holder
What was always known. What colonisation cost children. What remains.
08
Economics
The Economist
The Heckman equation. The cost of getting it wrong. The value of community.
Clinical Partner
⚕

Dr Philip Tam FRANZCP

Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist · Cert. Child Psychiatry · RANZCP Fellow

Dr Tam is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists with a Certificate in Child Psychiatry. He is the clinical co-developer of the R.O.O. Wellbeing Program and a central voice in the Growing Up Here conversation — bringing the clinical reality of what is changing in children's mental health, and what the evidence points toward.

Your Host
Lynne Jackson

Lynne Jackson

Founder, Tradie Roo & Co™ · Host & Creator

Lynne Jackson is the founder of Tradie Roo & Co™ — an Australian children's IP company whose R.O.O. Wellbeing Program is clinically co-developed with child psychiatrist Dr Philip Tam FRANZCP. The program is delivered in schools across Australia, and has been piloted in inclusive classrooms internationally.

She has spent years at the intersection of child development, education, and community — and Growing Up Here is her attempt to answer a question she keeps coming back to: why are some children genuinely okay, and what are the places that raise them doing differently?

She asks good questions. She lets people talk.

Expert Invitations

Want to be part of this conversation?

I'm inviting a small number of researchers, clinicians and practitioners to contribute to Season 1. If your work touches this question — from any angle, in any part of the world — I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

Get in touch