Dr. Leonard Sachs is a parenting expert who has been a physician and a psychologist for over 30 years. He has written several books on the differences between parenting girls and boys, and the rise of permissive parenting that has led to what he calls the "collapse of parenting." He s got a second edition of this New York Times bestselling book out now, The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grownups. So we are getting lots of wisdom from him today on the rise in screen time, the toxicity of parenting culture in the United States, and how to properly build a strict but loving relationship with your kids to help them flourish.
00:00:00.740Dr. Leonard Sachs is a parenting expert. He has been a physician and a psychologist for over 30 years, has written several books on the differences between parenting girls versus boys.
00:00:13.820Also, the rise of permissive or gentle parenting that has really led to what he calls the collapse of parenting.
00:00:23.280He's got a second edition of this New York Times bestselling book out now, The Collapse of Parenting, How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown Ups.
00:00:32.800So we are getting lots of wisdom from him today on the rise of screen time, the toxicity of parenting culture in the United States,
00:00:43.400how to properly build a strict but loving relationship with your kids to help them flourish and the distinctions between boys and girls and how we raise them.
00:00:56.200Lots of good stuff here on today's episode of Relatable.
00:00:59.100It's brought to you by our friends at Life or Death Con.
00:01:01.920I will be speaking at Life or Death Con in Washington, D.C. on January 23rd.
00:01:06.620Get your tickets at LifeOrDeathCon.com.
00:01:37.280I am a family doctor, and I have written four books for parents, Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift, Girls on the Edge, and The Collapse of Parenting.
00:02:31.260So, we have a lot of research on social media.
00:02:37.500Researchers who study social media divide social media basically into three generations.
00:02:42.140First generation social media is Facebook and apps like Facebook.
00:02:47.280First generation social media is about connecting you to people you know.
00:02:51.760So, Facebook, you can connect with your first grade classmate, find out what they're doing.
00:02:57.700Second generation social media is Instagram.
00:03:02.320So, Instagram, not only can you connect with your classmates from school, you can connect with celebrities and people that you'd like to follow and influencers.
00:04:35.300We know that girls, especially, who spend time on TikTok are much more likely to become anxious and depressed.
00:04:44.320And I have corresponded with Jean Twenge, our nation's leading researcher, studying the effects of TikTok.
00:04:51.920And she has said that the evidence supports a ban on social media for all children and teens under 18 years of age.
00:05:00.720Now, what is happening in the courts and at the Supreme Court is not a ban on TikTok.
00:05:07.400It is a ban on Chinese ownership of TikTok.
00:05:12.660So kids are still going to be on social media.
00:05:17.860And what is most likely to happen is that they'll simply move from TikTok, assuming that TikTok is not simply sold to another owner, in which case kids' experience might not change much at all.
00:05:31.120But if it is indeed banned, first of all, kids will still be able to use it.
00:05:36.100They just wouldn't be able to download a new kid who isn't on it, wouldn't be able to download it.
00:05:52.540And if indeed kids want to download a new app and they're not able to download TikTok, they'll most likely just download Instagram Reels, which is a very similar app, just less popular.
00:06:07.800Quick pause for the first sponsor for the day, and that is WeHeart Nutrition.
00:06:16.180I rely on my supplements from WeHeart Nutrition every day.
00:07:14.400Is your belief that people under the age of 18 should not be on social media, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook?
00:07:29.240It's my belief that kids in the English-speaking world should not be on Instagram or TikTok.
00:07:36.480So John Haidt published a book last month called The Anxious Generation, and it makes a great deal of the rise in anxiety and depression among kids since roughly 2012,
00:07:49.340and asserts that cell phones and social media are driving this rise in anxiety and depression.
00:07:57.140But one point he doesn't mention in his book is that this rise in anxiety and depression is confined to kids in the English-speaking world,
00:08:05.400in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia.
00:08:09.340It's actually not seen outside the English-speaking world.
00:08:13.100Kids in Greece, kids in Russia are just as likely to have smartphones and just as likely to be on social media.
00:08:20.360But the rise in anxiety and depression has not been seen there.
00:08:24.340So I think it's important for parents to understand that the smartphones and social media are the vectors.
00:08:35.440They are spreading this toxic culture, but they are not themselves the cause.
00:08:45.400And parents need to understand what is toxic about American culture, about English-speaking culture that is driving this rise in anxiety and depression just in the last 15 years or so.
00:08:58.180American culture has only recently become a culture that is toxic and harmful to children and teens.
00:09:11.200We have very good data on this point, which, again, is the point of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, where I show how American culture has changed and how it's become a harmful and toxic culture for children.
00:10:25.100But the researchers found that each of those shows, 1967 through 1997, was communicating the same message, that the most important thing is to do the right thing, to tell the truth, even if it hurts, to be a good friend, even when that's not easy.
00:10:42.820Being famous was number 15 out of 16, or number 14, or number 16, over those 30 years.
00:10:52.060There was great consistency in the values that the shows were communicating, even though the themes and the production values were very different.
00:11:00.960But then the researchers found that between 1997 and 2007, American culture flipped upside down.
00:11:10.240And in 2007, the most popular shows, shows like Survivor and American Idol, the most important thing, the number one thing, was winning and being famous.
00:11:26.300Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island, doing the right thing, dropped from number one to number 13, between 1997 and 2007.
00:11:36.380And winning and being famous, jumped from number 15 to number one.
00:26:36.160Like, all of these stories are about parents not really knowing best and kind of being like an inhibitor of their kids' happiness or freedom.
00:26:48.780And kids going down this path of liberation at a very young age to find themselves, to chart their own path.
00:26:57.920When you think about, like, Elsa, and now this is, you know, this is old.
00:27:12.900And she talks about, you know, breaking free from people's expectations and being who she wants to be and going off on her own and all of this.
00:27:22.820And so it does seem to be extremely ingrained, maybe even over the past 30 years, to some extent, in American culture,
00:27:31.380this kind of not only independent spirit, but this rebellious spirit.
00:27:35.980And the more rebellious you are, the more you reject your parents' religion, their belief systems, their authority,
00:27:44.280the more of a hero you are and the happier you'll be.
00:27:49.120Do you think all of that, that narrative that I'm describing, kind of plays a part in this toxic change of culture that you're talking about?
00:27:57.180Well, we could have a lengthy discussion of the first Frozen movie.
00:28:01.480I'm actually a huge fan of the first Frozen movie.
00:28:05.900Which I think is a great movie, because, in fact, Elsa comes to realize that she is mistaken, that there is no escape from the curse inside.
00:28:19.240And I think there's some very profound messages in that first movie.
00:28:23.860The second movie I thought was a great disappointment, but the first movie I thought was well-constructed.
00:28:28.500And she comes to realize that a lot of things she said in that first song, that she was mistaken, that the moral truths go deeper than she realized.
00:28:41.900So I'm a big fan of the first movie, but you're right, it begins with the children being orphans.
00:28:48.940But it also shows that being orphans comes at a tremendous cost, and that you need your parents.
00:28:58.100And when you don't have them, that's a really bad thing, as opposed to the Disney TV show, Jesse, where the parents are absent and the kids are completely liberated.
00:29:11.500And Jesse, I think, is a very toxic show.
00:29:14.660So the TV shows, I think, tend to be much worse than the movies from the 80s and 90s.
00:29:22.860But, no, there's been a real shift since the 90s.
00:29:27.560And I think, again, I don't want to make this just about the Disney studios, but I think the Disney studios have shifted since the 90s in a direction that has been harmful.
00:29:38.220But, again, it's not just about the Disney studios.
00:29:40.560It's about American popular culture, and I do look at what's happened, not only in television, but in the songs that kids are listening to, the videos that kids are seeing on YouTube, the social media that kids are watching.
00:29:59.220The culture has become a toxic culture across the board in social media, in the songs that kids hear.
00:30:06.360And parents need to understand this, and parents need to create strong bonds across generations.
00:30:13.480You can't just say no to the bad culture.
00:30:16.200You have to say yes to a healthier culture.
00:30:18.820You have to offer your kids a healthier culture, your culture, the parents' culture.
00:32:50.780We have scholars like Dr. Melvin Conner at Emory who's devoted his career to studying this question.
00:32:55.080And he wrote an 800-page tome, Oxford University Press, The Evolution of Childhood, comparing development in our species with development in other species, especially other primates.
00:33:04.840Asking the question, why does it take so long in humans?
00:33:10.000Why is development so prolonged in our species compared to other species?
00:33:13.360And the answer that he and the other scholars give is that it takes many years for parents and other adults to teach the kids what the kids need to know, to teach with authority what the kids need to know.
00:33:28.480That's what human development is about.
00:33:30.400It's about authoritative teaching of the grown-ups to the kids.
00:34:09.44012-year-old boy not paying attention in school.
00:34:11.400And the teachers have filled out these Connors scales, which is a measure of inattention.
00:34:15.640The boy's off the chart in every class, not paying attention in every class.
00:34:18.740Parents take him to the child psychiatrist who looks at the Connors scales, he's off the chart, and the doctor says, well, let's try Vyvanse and see if it helps.
00:34:37.040But now the boy develops palpitations and loss of appetite and jittery.
00:34:43.340And the parent Googles things and finds articles I've written for the New York Times and Time magazine about the dangers of the medication.
00:34:53.260So they bring their child to me for a second opinion.
00:34:56.080And I do a more careful sleep history.
00:34:58.820And I say, does your son get good night's sleep?
00:36:27.120We're talking about a 12-year-old boy.
00:36:29.200This is a mom who's uncomfortable exercising her authority, even though her son is clearly being harmed by playing video games.
00:36:37.120But mom is uncomfortable exercising her authority, shutting down the video games.
00:36:41.620This is very common, and that's a good illustration of what I mean by the collapse of parenting.
00:36:49.340Parents who are reluctant to exercise their authority and their failure to exercise their authority is harming their child.
00:36:55.700This is a kid who is sleep deprived because mom cannot bring herself to turn off the video game so that her son can get a good night's sleep.
00:37:51.480Do you think most parents who are permissive in that way, uncomfortable with exercising their authority, what would you say is the most common reason is?
00:38:06.500It takes time and effort to argue with your child or to endure their temper tantrum or whatever.
00:38:11.840Is it because they want their child to like them and to be their buddy?
00:38:17.180Is it because they truly are ideologically, philosophically driven to believe that their child should have full autonomy, creativity, the decision-making power to do whatever they want to do?
00:39:00.560And they read the New York Times or they listen to National Public Radio, which says that you should validate your child's feelings.
00:39:07.980Or they have succumbed to this notion of gentle parenting, which absolutely tells them that good parenting means letting kids decide and letting kids live with the consequences of their decisions.
00:39:22.280Well, then this boy says, I want to play video games.
00:39:26.740Well, good parenting means letting kids decide, so you let him play video games.
00:39:30.420Gentle parenting is psychotic in the sense that it is utterly detached from reality.
00:39:40.560Again, the researchers find that human civilization works when you have authoritative parents, when you have parents who set firm boundaries, which they enforce.
00:39:52.840And that means that children have parents so that parents can set those guidelines because parents know better than their children.
00:40:03.120Parents know that kids need a good night's sleep more than they need to be playing video games.
00:40:07.480So the authoritative parent needs to limit video games, limit, govern, and guide what video games the kid is playing and how much time they spend playing those video games.
00:40:19.500And I offer detailed guidance in answer to those questions based on the research.
00:40:27.880And again, the motivation for writing The Collapse of Parenting is to empower parents.
00:40:47.900You know, as a mom of three, I've noticed so far that it's around two and a half, three years old that all of my kids have kind of started to assert their independence and their defiance to a certain extent.
00:41:04.080And I'm curious what you would tell parents of little kids.
00:41:09.100What is the best way that you've seen to enforce boundaries early?
00:41:14.740Well, I always encourage parents to read or reread my chapter titled Joy in the Collapse of Parenting.
00:41:27.060Good parenting has to be built around a loving parent-child relationship.
00:41:34.380And parenting is easy if the love is there.
00:41:38.340Because if the love is there, your child wants to please you.
00:42:02.000Because, again, in my own practice, I've seen the parents of 2- and 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, they're spending that precious Saturday driving their kids from one play date to another because they seem to think that it's really important for their 3-year-old to spend time with other 3-year-olds.
00:42:18.200It's much more important for their 3-year-old to have good time with you.
00:42:22.400So cancel the play date and instead take your kid to the part and do fun things with your kid.
00:42:54.880So when they do disobey you or when they don't want to eat their vegetables or do something that you want them to do, like get dressed and, you know, a quick manner so that you can go out the door and they're disobeying or they're arguing.
00:43:11.700Like what do you think is the best strategy for parents to not be permissive parents but to enact discipline?
00:43:19.060So you'll notice I never address that ever in the class of parenting.
00:43:27.060Those strategies differ from one family to the next and certainly it's important for kids to know that actions have consequences.
00:43:41.380If a child is defiant and disrespectful, then they're going to lose privileges and parents need to enforce those punishments.
00:43:57.040In the first edition of my book, Why Gender Matters, I did have a chapter on punishments and I addressed corporal punishment because we actually have a great deal of research.
00:44:09.440Again, my brand is evidence-based so I cited all the research and we actually have a lot of research showing that appropriate corporal punishment to spanks on the behind is actually very helpful for four-year-old boys but not for four-year-old girls.
00:44:30.240Spanking on the behind is appropriate for four-year-old boys but not for four-year-old girls because when you spank a girl, she thinks you don't like her.
00:44:43.860She thinks you don't like her and that gets in the way because, as I said, good parenting has to be based on love.
00:44:50.400And if she thinks you don't love her, that can really be a problem for the parent-child relationship.
00:44:56.240So, in the first edition of Why Gender Matters, I said, you know, limited corporal punishment, two spanks on the behind for a four-year-old boy has a place but not for girls.
00:45:10.720Based on the research, this is not a guess.
00:45:13.440I had lots and lots of scholarly papers that I cited in support of this.
00:45:18.100In consultation with my editors at Doubleday, we struck that chapter from the second edition.
00:45:24.800There's no mention of it for a number of reasons.
00:45:29.280The American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a policy paper saying corporal punishment is absolutely unacceptable for any child in any context ever.
00:45:40.920Now, we can talk a lot about the American Academy of Pediatrics.
00:45:43.740Some of its guidelines are evidence-based.
00:46:09.900Um, so, um, but, uh, Doubleday, uh, is my publisher and non-celebrity authors, you can't argue with your, uh, they're part of Random House.
00:46:30.880Well, I'm interested to hear more about the differences between parenting boys and girls because it goes well beyond corporal punishment.
00:46:39.240Um, into how you raise not just little kids, although that's what I'm most interested in since I have little kids myself, but also preteens and teens.
00:46:48.500So can you start from the earliest years?
00:46:51.140Like, when do we see the differences between boys and girls when it comes to how they respond to certain parenting tactics?
00:46:58.340Well, again, beginning with that talk that I do for parents of two through seven-year-olds, uh, which is titled, uh, cancel the play date, make a family date instead.
00:47:11.700And the, and the key point of that talk is again, the overwhelming evidence we have from brain imaging, beginning with brain imaging of babies in their mother's womb.
00:47:21.780And the third trimester of pregnancy is that boys mature much more slowly than girls.
00:47:29.580And this is true all the way through girls reach full maturity and brain development by 22 years of age boys, not until 30 years of age.
00:47:38.160And that explains a lot if you think about it.
00:47:40.420Um, so again, a story from my own practice, uh, a mom of two children, an older daughter and a younger son said to me, you know, when my daughter was 18 months old, I could bounce her on my knee and I'd say Google Gaga.
00:47:56.300And she'd say Google Gaga and I'd say, oh, and she'd say, oh, and we could do that for like 20 minutes.
00:48:11.660And I tried it with him and somebody rode their bike past the front door and he turned and looked at that and the house made a noise and he turned at that.
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00:52:11.460This seems to be an issue in school too.
00:52:16.160And, you know, I hear a lot of people talk about how the normal school setup is harder for boys, especially young boys who are typically a lot more active, kind of what you just described.
00:52:27.220I didn't think about it like that, that I'm not saying every school, but education in general is looking at, okay, what is the average for a child and not as what is best for boys versus what is best for girls because those two things aren't the same.
00:52:43.000And you've talked about the change in kindergarten assessments and first grade assessments, like what is expected for a kindergartner and first grader versus what was expected 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
00:53:14.920And he described his kindergarten experience and the experience that his kids had in kindergarten, which is every day you learn some and play some and sing some and dance.
00:53:26.120And that was a pretty accurate description of kindergarten back in the 80s when his kids were in kindergarten, which was about duck, duck, goose and singing in rounds and arts and crafts and field trips to go to the park and splash in a pond and chase after tadpoles.
00:53:41.480And that's actually what kids were doing in kindergarten 40 years ago.
00:53:46.680But beginning in the 90s, there began to be an academic push to get kids to learn to read and write in kindergarten.
00:53:56.220And as beginning 20 years ago, that academic push really took hold.
00:54:03.860And kindergarten, what kids do at five years of age in the United States today, what kids do in kindergarten today is pretty much what kids did in first grade 30 or 40 years ago.
00:54:17.020Kindergarten today is about literacy and numeracy.
00:54:19.440It's about learning to read and write and do arithmetic.
00:54:21.940It's not at all what Pastor Fulgham had in mind when he wrote his book 40 years ago.
00:54:27.240And that turns out to be a big problem because the language areas of the brain of the five-year-old boy, it turns out, look like the language areas of the three-year-old girl.
00:54:37.800It is not developmentally appropriate to expect a five-year-old boy to sit and learn about phonics and diphthongs for 45 minutes.
00:54:46.020And the result is that many five-year-old boys fail and decide that they're dumb and they decide that they hate school.
00:54:54.660And researchers, most notably Debra Stipeck, Dean of Education for many years, Dean of Education at Stanford, found that these boys develop attitudes by the end of the kindergarten year.
00:55:06.680They decide that they hate school and they decide that they're dumb.
00:55:10.960And she and her students came back and tracked down these boys four years later.
00:55:15.880And they find that they still hate school and they still believe they're dumb.
00:55:19.120And other researchers have found that once those attitudes are formed, they are global, stable, and non-contingent.
00:55:25.900Meaning this boy doesn't think global means he doesn't just think he's dumb in reading and writing.
00:55:30.580He believes he's dumb in every subject.
00:55:33.820Stable means you track him down in 10th grade.
00:55:37.680He still believes that he's dumb and that the teacher hates him.
00:56:53.980In affluent communities, parents have figured this out, that kids need that gift of an extra year of childhood.
00:57:00.420And in affluent communities, they can afford an extra year of daycare or paid nursery school or whatever it is they're doing.
00:57:07.180But in lower-income communities, it is not at all true.
00:57:11.480Parents who cannot afford an extra year of daycare are putting their kids into public school kindergarten at the earliest opportunity.
00:57:19.280And kids in low-income neighborhoods are starting kindergarten at five years of age.
00:57:23.680And kindergartens in those low-income neighborhoods are still too hard for most five-year-olds, you're saying?
00:57:30.600Yes, they're all about literacy and numeracy.
00:57:33.140And so these kids are being set up for failure, especially in those areas, which means that we could see an even bigger education gap between the socioeconomic classes because of that.
00:57:47.040Yes, and Richard Reeves wrote a book last year called Of Boys and Men, in which he said,
00:57:57.520I just came up with this incredibly brilliant idea to solve the problem of boys.
00:58:02.360Let's start boys in kindergarten at six years of age.
00:58:04.820He had not seen my article or read about it in the New York Times, which covered my article back in 2001.
00:58:15.240But I'm glad he thought of it, came up with the idea independently 21 years later.
00:58:20.520But he also has documented in his book that, indeed, boys of color in low-income neighborhoods are the ones who are suffering the most from this accelerated kindergarten curriculum.
00:58:35.220Well, Dr. Sachs, thank you so much for all the work that you have done over the many years.
00:58:41.000What would you say is the biggest shift that you've seen in parenting over the past 10 years?
00:58:47.000And if you were to be as optimistic as possible, what is the shift that you hope to see in parenting over the next 10?
00:58:59.560I would say the biggest shift is that parents, they are confused.
00:59:04.680They think they have to choose between being either strict or loving.
00:59:10.080I've been a family doctor for 30 years.
00:59:11.920And 30 years ago, I would say many parents understood that the best parent is both strict and loving.
00:59:21.240But today, I find many parents feel they have to choose between being strict or loving.
00:59:27.360They don't understand that the best parents are both strict and loving.
00:59:31.420And I hope that we can somehow change that, that we can.
00:59:34.900And again, that's what I'm trying to achieve in my book The Collapse of Parenting, is to persuade parents, to show parents examples from my own practice and parents who are both, who are both strict and loving.
00:59:47.120And I give examples from my own practice using real parents, who are both strict and loving, who've had wonderful outcomes of adult kids, who, again, who I name with their permission, who've turned out great.
01:00:03.240Who maybe one young woman, Marlowe, wasn't happy with her parents as a teenager, thought they were too strict, and now loves her parents.