The Quiet That Changes Everything – Jennifer Oaten
I recently spent a few days at my brother’s farm in Bremer Bay. I boogie boarded. I went kayaking, I gathered firewood, ate long meals around the kitchen table, and I sat outside in the evening and did not check my phone.
It sounds simple. For a Principal, it is anything but.
The role absorbs a great deal. Not in a way that is anybody’s fault, but in the way that leadership simply does. The decisions, the people, the weight of responsibility for a community of students, staff, and families. Switching off is something I know I should do more of. Bremer Bay reminded me why.
By the second day, I noticed something shift. Not a dramatic revelation. Simply a quieting. Thoughts I had not had time to finish were finishing themselves. Problems I had been circling looked different. I felt more like myself.
It got me thinking about our daughters, and how rarely they are given that same chance. Time to be outside, time to rest, time to think.
We Have Made Silence Uncomfortable
Dr Mark Williams, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spoken at Santa Maria on a number of occasions, often cites research showing that just having a smartphone nearby uses up part of your brain’s attentional capacity. You do not even need to be looking at it.
I think about that often. If a phone in a pocket can do that to an adult, what is it doing to a teenage girl who has grown up with one constantly in her hand?
We have become so conditioned to fill every quiet moment. A queue forms, and a phone appears. A car journey starts, and the earbuds go in. Waiting for a bus or an appointment and the scrolling begins because we feel uncomfortable to sit in silence.
There is nothing wrong with music or connection. But when stimulation becomes the automatic response to stillness, something important is lost. The capacity to sit with your own thoughts.
The Thinking That Only Happens in the Quiet
There is a reason a long walk without headphones, or a drive through the country, so often produces a good idea. When the brain is not directed at a task, it is not idle. It is processing. It is connecting things that had not been connected. It is settling.
Our girls are at a stage when working out who they are matters more than at almost any other point in their lives. They are forming views, values, and a sense of self. That work does not happen on a screen. It happens in the unscheduled moments, when there is no input to absorb and no task to complete, and the mind is finally free to do what it needs to do. To think.
Australian research bears this out. The Black Dog Institute’s Teens and Screens Study, drawn from Australia’s largest longitudinal study of adolescent mental health, found that teenagers who scroll and view other people’s content on social media reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and disordered eating. The problem is not connection. It is the unthinking scroll hat displaces the quiet a young person needs to process and to think about things without the influence of others.
What We Build In at Santa Maria
At Santa Maria, this is something we build in rather than hope for.
Mass and Rosary give our students a rhythm during the week that is not about output or performance. The phone is away. Attention is genuinely freed. Homeroom prayer opens each day with a moment of stillness before the demands begin. Reflection Days create extended space for students to step back from the momentum of school and ask larger questions of themselves.
Our camp program takes girls out of their familiar environment and largely away from devices. That is not incidental to the value of camp. It is central to it. Staff regularly tell me that some of the most significant conversations they have with students happen on camp, not because of anything structured, but because there is space and time and nowhere else to be.
Music, when listened to rather than used to fill a silence, has also been shown to reduce anxiety and lower stress hormones. There is a difference between putting music on because you cannot stand the quiet and actually listening to it.
Each of these practices protects something our daughters are at risk of losing. The ability to be present with themselves.
What You Can Do at Home
The good news is that none of this requires a significant change to family life. It begins simply, with normalising the experience of having nothing to do.
Not filling every car journey with a podcast. Not solving the problem of boredom the moment it arrives. Not interpreting a teenager lying on her bed staring at the ceiling as wasted time. That ceiling-staring is often where the most important thinking happens.
Some families find it useful to protect a regular time with no screen and no structured activity. A walk after dinner, a trip to the beach where phones stay in the car, a Sunday morning before the week gathers pace. It does not need to be long. It needs to be consistent.
If your daughter has a faith practice, encourage her to treat it as a genuine pause rather than a box to tick. Repetitive, gentle ritual is one of the most reliable ways to quiet an overloaded mind.
And sometimes, simply sitting beside your daughter in comfortable silence is enough. You model what she learns.
Those few days in Bremer Bay reminded me that the quiet is not empty. For our daughters, protecting that space may be one of the most important things we do. Quiet time is precious time we all need more of.
- adolescent development support, Catholic school wellbeing, digital wellbeing families, Featured, Girls' Education Perth, parenting teenage girls, Santa Maria College community, screen time impact adolescents, student reflection and mindfulness, teen mental health wellbeing
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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