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Bron Grieve on how to connect with young people

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The Nugget
June 06, 2025

★ Bron Grieve on how to connect with young people ★

Legendary Community Health Nurse, Bron Grieve

I think every parent needs a coach to get them through what is the world's toughest job and one that comes with no instructions.

Bron Grieve is that unicorn. She's got empathy on empathy plus deep knowledge.

She's a community health nurse with specialist knowledge on how to parent young people in our messed-up world. Kids don't just endure her talks on puberty - they straight up love when she visits their schools and they actually open up to her.

Bron gives six parenting talks a year and the next one is on Thursday, 12 June.

She is focusing on an age group that doesn't get a lot of attention: tweens who are 7-11 years old.

"These years before the teenage years are the absolute window of opportunity for putting some amazing parenting techniques into place and being aware of the changes that are coming but also the changes that are already happening in this age group," Bron says.

"There's a huge amount happening with hormones, with development of the brain. It's really putting that into perspective and then hopefully sharing tips and tricks on parenting for the next years that are coming before those hormones really do hit the fan."

Before moving to Castlemaine, Bron worked as a nurse at a boarding school in Alice Springs.

"I think what I realized then was the repercussions on our young people of not getting this stuff right. I saw a lot of young people really, really struggling."

Bron says the key is to build strong connections with kids before they become teenagers so they have an anchor to hold on to when things get hard. A safe place to go for help.

So how do we do that? And how do we help kids thrive in an online world that is so different to the one we grew up in.

"It's the 50-hundred-million-dollar question," Bron says. I think, essentially, our young people are similar to what we were. They just have so, so, so, so many other things being thrown at them to deal with, and brains that aren't developed. They've literally been pruned of all their logic and are working purely on emotions. Our brains did the same, but we didn't have so much swirling around us.

"It's respecting that, No. 1, and not parenting, possibly, the way we were parented, but also trying to get into the shoes of our young people and how they're actually working with all those things swirling around them because we can't control them. I think that's what we often think: We can control the screens, we can control the algorithms, but we can't. We've got to sort of go off that focus."

Bron has three great touchstones that I have found helpful to ponder and try.

1. Be a lighthouse

2. Listen to understand.

3. Make every real-world connection count

"All of us, but young people especially, need that person, the lighthouse, who they can trust, say anything to, be anyone they need to be around, say it as it is," Bron says.

That person, or ideally group of people, can help bring the logic that young people don't yet have.

Imagine if we all made a legit effort to connect with the kids in our world. Stephen Graham, the actor and creator of the truly disturbing TV series Adolescence, put it so well on Jimmy Fallon.

"It takes a village to raise a child? Well, I just thought, what if we’re all accountable? The education system, parenting, the community, the government," Graham says.

"I'm not blaming anyone, I just thought maybe we're all accountable and we should have a conversation about it."

What does that look like? Bron says it starts with putting your phone down and saying, I'm here. Making yourself available on a young person's time, on their terms with full permission to stop and start.

"And also, being really curious and checking in when they're asking something. It's not like coming and saying, 'Right, this is what you've got to know.

"Start with: What do you know, what would you like to know? Do things at their level and again, checking in: 'Is that what you'd like to hear, is there anything I could do differently next time. It's a really respectful relationship and it's also showing our young people that role modelling for life."

And you can put that into practice out in the wild with all the kids in our community. When you see a young person working at the grocery store or a café, ask them how things are in their world, how their day is, tell them they are doing a good job. Try to connect.

Bron says she has seen these simple acts of outreach, that cost us nothing, do make an impact.

"Young people don't give you a lot of feedback. That's probably a really good one to put out there first. So, you won't hear it, but you'll see it. I do it all the time I go out of my way - it drives my children mad - but I go out of my way to make sure I've connected with somebody. It's great for us as well. You just see eyes light up. You just see that smile that wasn't there before," Bron says.

"You don't know what people are going through."

Bron says that when she does school visits, young people will say to her, 'I saw you downtown the other day and you smiled at me.'

And you know that's enough. They know that we're out there and us adults can mean something really significant to young people."

❀ The MAINest of games ❀

Eeek, the best football game of the year is upon us.

The Main Game gates open at 12:00 PM on Sunday. While it’s the highlight of the year for so many Castlemaine folks, I meet lots of people who have never heard of it.

MainFM shared this post that answers every question you might dream up about the Main Game. Get along to it and support the best little station in the nation.

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