"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.

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

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

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".

Ms Wilson said it was easy to blame anxiety on young people's use of technology but said a study had found no causal link. She suggested 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.