Arts & Culture
6 September, 2026
Teens need healthy rites of passage: expert
Teens need positive and healthy rites of passage – otherwise they will find something for themselves with potentially disastrous and life-long consequences.
Teens need positive and healthy rites of passage – otherwise they will find something for themselves with potentially disastrous and life-long consequences.
Dr Arne Rubinstein OAM, founder and CEO of the Rites of Passage Institute, was speaking at Bowral Memorial Hall on Thursday night as part of this year’s At Our Table – Southern Highlands Wellbeing Forum.
The 2025 Father of the Year and former emergency department doctor used Schoolies Week as a prime example.
Working in the emergency department at Byron Bay Hospital, he described Schoolies Week as the “worst time of the year”.
He said kids who were just out of school would be taking drugs, consuming large amounts of alcohol, fighting and having sex.
Girls would hear a cautionary voice in their head and ignore it, while the boys heard no cautionary voice at all.
“They need glory. If we don’t provide it, they will go looking for it,” Dr Rubenstein said.
The Byron Bay-based father of two said the world needed to be run by “good men and empowered women” and the only way to achieve that was through transformational rites of passage.
He said school camps were ideal for this to happen on a broad scale, and it was unfortunate that many schools were cancelling camps because they were considered too expensive or too risky.
Dr Rubenstein said schools should move away from solely activities-based camps to include tech-free human experiences.
He said teenagers should be encouraged to share stories, to spend time on their own (without technology) to think about life and what’s important, and to consider what sort of adult they would like to be.
“When a person has a vision, they are more likely to achieve that vision”.
He said it was also important to recognise a young person’s gifts and talents.
Dr Rubenstein said rites of passage could also be incorporated into family holidays and other milestone events such as birthdays.
Thursday night’s presentation touched on everything from technology to the need to build life skills and provide an opportunity for young people to thrive.
Dr Rubenstein said he had no access to technology when he was at high school but still had problems.
“I just figured out a way to survive and to get through it.”
He said technology – particularly mobile phones – had not created the problems but had simply ‘super boosted’ them.
He said children were now getting access to technology earlier than ever before and there was a “whole generation of kids who want to be on their mobile phones and who don’t want to be hassled about it”.
On the flipside, he said young people were spending more time at home because they were on their mobile phones and computers.
Dr Rubenstein said parents could help their children thrive by providing them with a sense of belonging, by recognising their gifts and naming them and by making sure they are physically safe – but also making sure they feel safe to make mistakes and know they won’t be shamed for doing so.
“They are supposed to make mistakes.”
Dr Rubenstein said it was important to equip young people with life skills including resilience, emotional intelligence, adaptability and vision and purpose.
Teaching resilience was not about encouraging them to do bad things or to make mistakes, “but we need to be there when they do”.
Dr Rubenstein said universities and employers were now placing less importance on academic records and a Year 12 score was no longer the main indicator of future success.
“It’s the human skills that will become valuable.
“That’s what we need to be teaching our kids,” he said.
He told parents that young people need to keep evolving “and we need to make sure they do it in a healthy way”.
Dr Rubenstein said parenting teenagers was extremely different from parenting younger children.
“You can’t keep telling them what to do,” he said.
“You need to engage them in the conversation.”
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