"That would take all day," she told the National Press Club in Canberra.

Her parents, like many from the 1980s, were not hovering over her shoulder throughout her childhood but allowing her and her siblings the freedom to run free, get bored, make mistakes, be creative, enjoy the outdoors - live a full life and become resilient along the way. "There were no fences. We were left to explore," she said.

And she says if children today are to have any chance of sidestepping so-called "diseases of despair", those around mental health, they need to be given similar opportunities. And adults, she says, need to step up, saying parents who are fixated on their phone, offering their children only continual "partial attention" were more harmful than the child's own use of technology.

Ms Wilson told the press club that following the international release of her New York Times bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: a new conversation about anxiety, she was flooded with questions about the "childhood anxiety epidemic".

But in her latest, soon-to-be-published work, Ms Wilson has instead suggested young people are suffering from a "resilience epidemic" in which they were failing to deal with everyday life and the uncertainties of life. That was even as parents were coddling their children more than ever, shielding them from boredom and discomfort and engaging them in a frenetic schedule of organised activities that left little room for idleness and the potential for creativity and innovation. At the same time, they were trying to survive in a society that strived for perfection.

"Without a doubt, kids are despairing," Ms Wilson said, citing Australian studies that showed the prevalence of suicide, self-harm and anxiety among young people.

She also shared the "particularly startling American statistic" that life expectancy in the US had fallen for the third year in a row, particularly due to those diseases of despair, opioid use and suicide.

Ms Wilson, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 21, just before she started in the Canberra press gallery, working for the Financial Review, said she was not a scientist, academic or parent but someone who had asked "nuanced questions" around the topic of mental health throughout her life.

She said there was growing evidence of young people retreating from everyday life, to avoid risk and discomfort, whether that was in teenagers delaying getting their driver's licence (the number had fallen "dramatically" in Australia in the last decade) or putting off starting a relationship (in Japan almost 50 per cent of people in their 30s were virgins). She said the average age of women becoming nuns in the US had fallen from 40 to 22 as young people saw the sisterhood as a retreat from the "flux and uncertainty" of modern life.

Ms Wilson said it was easy to blame anxiety on young people's use of technology and social media, but said a recent, eight-year study had found no causal link and that the issue was "more nuanced" than that. She suggested US research had found more harm was being done through parents' addiction to their phone, giving their children a clear message that there was always something more important to attend to than them. The American study had found the "continuous partial attention" of a parent always on their phone that was interrupting vital emotional and developmental processes in children. Other research had also found Generation X parents were more addicted to their devices than their children.

"So if we're going to focus on technology use, we probably should focus on our own first," she said.

Ms Wilson said some solutions to raising less anxious, more resilient children were adults "being adults", making firm decisions for their children, rather than overwhelming them with choices.

She said parents needed to stop protecting their children from the challenges of life. She looked to the Dutch who "did child rearing like it was stuck in the 1980s". She said there was a summer scouting tradition among the Dutch called "dropping".

"Kids are dropped into the woods in the middle of the night and left to find their own way home," she said, to laughter.

"It's perfectly commonplace." Ms Wilson then went looking for anxiety figures among Dutch teens.

"And, sure enough, in report after report the Netherlands tops OECD countries for the highest life satisfaction rates amongst young people in the world."

Children also needed to engage more with nature; exercise, and realise that satisfaction did not come from buying things. The former editor of Cosmopolitan now regarded the fashion magazine as "a veritable bible of stuff nobody needs".

The National Press Club address by Ms Wilson was a Women in Media event.