She's 16. She should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, hanging out with her friends, wondering what to wear to a party, watching the Swedish equivalent of Gossip Girl. Her childhood has been stolen, but by who?

I watch my own children anxious over things like what to do once high school finishes, whether they'll make the starting line-up for the next game, I want to tell them everything will be okay, again I have no idea if it actually will be.

And then I get to thinking, are our middle-class concerns just first-world problems. People are suffering, people are dying, as Thunberg said in her speech. But that's been the case for a very long time.

I remember one of the most powerful issues of my own teenage years was entwined with Live Aid, the music-based initiative led by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for the ongoing Ethopian famine. We all rushed out to buy Do They Know it's Christmas and We Are the World, night after night our television screens were full of starving children. The famine left 1.2 million people dead, and 2.5 million people displaced. Yes, many attributed the famine to drought and climate change, even back then, but there were also many political issues at play.

A quick conversation in the tearoom revealed the teenage worries of several generations of colleagues: herpes, conscription during the Vietnam War, nuclear annihilation for those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, HIV/Aids - who can forget those television commercials during the 1980s, the Grim Reaper ads still scare me - terrorism.

My daughter and her school cohort were born in the shadow of 9/11. I was breastfeeding her late at night while I watched the Twin Towers fall. Terrorism has been a real concern for that generation. Are any of these concerns less relevant than the other? At different times and different places we all have a right to be worried about anything.

And that's the other thing that's worried me, as a parent, how people have turned on this child. Fox New have since apologised for calling her " a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left".

Trump probably thought his little tweet - "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future" - was clever but right back at you, you schmuck, Thunberg embraced the title by adding it to her Twitter profile. It now reads: "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."

In Wednesday's The Australian, environment editor Graham Llloyd was bold enough to tell us "What Greta Really Meant", responding to her speech, part by part.

No one, with teenage children, would dare tell them what they really meant. All children have a right to their own voice, to make their own decisions, and stand up for what they believe is right.

How dare Scott Morrison attack Thunberg, warning her against fuelling "needless anxiety" among Australian children. He pulled the old "as a parent" card: "We've got to make sure that our kids understand the facts, but they also have the context and the perspective, and that we do not create an anxiety among children in how we talk about and deal with these very real issues."

I wonder if Morrison's daughters Abbey, 11, and Lily, nine, know who Thunberg is. Do they admire her passion and intelligence? Morrison said he did not have deep conversations with his children about emission targets and the Paris agreement but did talk to them about fossil fuels.

"I encourage them to have a passionate, independent view about how they see the world, but I also give them a lot of context," he said.

"I don't allow them to be basically contorted into one particular view; I like them to make up their own mind."

Dare I suggest as long as it's your particular view.