REPLAY ｜ The Dangers of Gentle Parenting, SEL & Empathy ｜ Guest： Abigail Shrier
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Summary
Author Abigail Schreier is here today to break it all down for us as we are talking about her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren t Growing Up, Why They Don t Want to Be Parents.
Transcript
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Gentle parenting, empathy, therapy, all the things we're told are good for kids are actually
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Author Abigail Schreier is here today to break it all down for us as we are talking about
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her book, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.
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Guys, this is an amazing conversation that you need to share with every single parent
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This episode, this conversation with Abigail Schreier is brought to you by our friends
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Go to goodranchers.com, use code ALI at checkout.
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Abigail, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
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All right, you've got another amazing book that's out after Irreversible Damage.
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Tell us why you went down this road and decided to write it.
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So first of all, thank you so much for having me on, Ali.
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I really love your show and I really appreciate the invitation.
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So I'm raising three kids in the rising generation and what I wanted to know was, why did the rising
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They seem to be in genuine distress, genuinely fearful, genuinely full of worry and anxiety,
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And they hadn't obviously lived through anything that hard until the pandemic.
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They really hadn't lived through, you know, anything hard at all as a group, as a generation.
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And the other strange thing was they received the most mental health treatment, the most coping
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techniques, the most mindfulness, the most therapeutic intervention, the most diagnosis,
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So they really should have been the picture of mental health, wellness.
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And the other thing I wanted to know is why they have no interest in growing up.
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Why did they, you know, 18 to 25 year olds and numbers we've never seen want to live with their parents?
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Why did they not want to get driver's license, you know, even more than millennials?
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Why did they not want to be parents or to get married?
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And did your last book, Irreversible Damage, where you talked about this kind of phenomenon
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of particularly young girls, quote unquote, transitioning into boys, did that book and
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the backlash it received from you had, you know, libraries, institutions saying, oh, this
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book, your book will cause suicide and so-called trans youth.
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Did that kind of have an effect on your desire to start looking into the therapy world?
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Well, remember that in almost every case where a girl goes down this path, that the parents
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who called me, they already had a therapist for the girl.
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In fact, the therapist played a big role in the child's, you know, or teenager's revelation that
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she was trans, either a therapist the family had hired or the school counselor invariably played a
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So I knew therapists were making terrible mischief with the kids.
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And what I want parents to know is it wasn't a gender therapist.
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It wasn't even necessarily an activist therapist.
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It was just a therapist that parents very often hired to deal with the girl's anxiety or
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depression, who when they were done, you know, talking about her, you know, emotional trauma
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or whatever, you know, of she felt like she had gone through in adolescence, they would
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And that was really enough to get them off to the races.
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And so that is an example of something that you talk about in the first chapter, this idea
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that healers can harm, and you use a Greek phrase, atrogenesis, is that how you, is that
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Yeah, this is a word that, you know, I wasn't aware of, but everyone should know because every
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single intervention, no matter how good, can cause harm.
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So iatrogenesis refers to when a healer introduces the harm.
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And of course, that doesn't mean any intervention is all bad.
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Tylenol causes harm if given too much, too often.
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And there's actually a large body of research showing the harms of therapy.
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They include things like making depression worse, making anxiety worse, alienating you
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from your parents, making you feel inefficacious in your life, like you can't do anything on
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your own, making you feel demoralizing you with a diagnosis.
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All these are known side effects of therapy that all the academic researchers knew.
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Oddly, though, most of the practitioners I talked to either weren't aware of them or
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And what is it about therapy that is causing that, particularly what you talked about, about
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I've noticed that, too, the just complete lack of interest in getting your driver's license,
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What is it about therapy that is causing that kind of failure to launch?
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Well, the idea of and it's, you know, these kids are getting therapy not just from a therapist
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in school and from their parents who are reading the best, you know, the most popular parenting
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And what it is, is any time you are told to check in and double check and think about everything
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you're going to do before you do it, that you can't handle any problems on your own.
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Every time you have a squabble with another kid, you have to go rushing to mom or rushing
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It creates what they call treatment dependency.
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And the idea is I can't take a risk on my own because I could ruin things.
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And so I have to bring everything to an adult and adults are always standing by.
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These kids feel unwell over half of the rising generation says their mental health is not
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You know, they, they report that, you know, that they don't feel well.
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And so they don't feel up to the responsibilities of adulthood, right?
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It means I'm ready to be someone other people can rely on.
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I'm ready to be a good neighbor and someone you can depend on.
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And, and really it's no surprise because if you feel weak, you don't think you're ready
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And the irony is, is that going to therapy is marketed as the most responsible thing,
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the most mature thing, the most adult thing that you can do.
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And in fact, it is the thing we are told that will help you finally be able to love other
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While we've heard this kind of therapeutic mantra of you can't love other people until
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And loving yourself has to look like constantly thinking about yourself, constantly focusing
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on yourself, constantly thinking about and examining your feelings and overcoming your
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You can't go out and love other people and be this dependable adult until you take care
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As long as you're going to therapy, you could think that, well, I still don't love myself
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Maybe I still can't be a responsible adult in a faithful relationship because I haven't
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perfectly figured out how to like every nook and cranny of myself.
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I mean, here's the thing to know that therapy with a child or teenager is totally different
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from therapy with an adult because with an adult, an adult can push back on a therapist.
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So a lot of the harms that are, that there are risks of are going to be less.
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I wouldn't call it, you know, I wouldn't call our relationship toxic.
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Or an adult can say, you know, honestly, I don't like the way I feel on these medications.
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It's very hard for a teenager to say those things.
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But also it's very hard for a teen who might be angry with mom to say, you know, I'm not
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sure I'd agree that my mother's emotionally abusive.
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And yet, so there isn't that pushback, but also there isn't the buy-in.
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An adult who chooses to go to therapy decides, listen, I feel like I need someone to work
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But a teen or child who's, who's signs up for therapy is strong armed by an adult.
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So there's the incentive of the therapist to pander to the child, whatever will make the
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I can see why that made you feel terrible that your mom said that.
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There's every incentive to do that because of course the child didn't even sign up to be
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there. So they have to do something to get the kids buy-in.
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Now, of course, if a child has a real problem, that's different.
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If a child is anorexic, if a child is severely, you know, obsessive compulsive disorder or, or,
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or has one of these other problems, then there's no question what the therapist is there to work
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on. But if you sign your, your anxious or moody teen up for psychodynamic psychotherapy,
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just general therapy, general talking about problems, there are real risks that the problems
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they have will be magnified or the therapist will introduce new ones.
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And in your research, how did you find that we got here?
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Not just in sending kids to therapy and going to therapy unnecessarily ourselves, but getting
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to the place of calling worry, anxiety, and sadness, depression, diagnosing a normal spectrum
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That's right. We didn't even realize, we almost didn't even want, you know, notice the water
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slipping in because you're right. It totally changed our vocabulary, you know, and, and I mean,
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across the board, liberals, conservatives, religious people, it didn't matter. All of a sudden we were
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seeing all of humanity as a series of pathologies, psychopathologies, and the whole human experience,
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every deviation suddenly was a diagnosis. And what that meant, and, and it was with the rise,
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there's been a dramatic increase in the growth of mental health staffs at every school, at every
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university. And, and of course, you know, they've, they've sort of sit atop our parenting.
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Um, they write all the popular parenting books and, um, you know, I have various theories for
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why, you know, part of it may have been, you know, the rise in, uh, divorce among that started
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with Gen X. We saw various problems in America and we thought the solution was to send everyone
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to therapy. We became convinced this really needed expertise. And, um, so adults started going to
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therapy in larger numbers, and then they sent their kids believing it could only help.
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And here's the thing, you know, if your child is struggling and they go to their aunt, okay.
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For help, for advice, their uncle, what, whoever there, the, the, the, the family member in general,
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not only has, is generally going to reinforce the parents values, not only generally wants the best
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thing for the child, but there's no incentive for them to keep the child coming back and making them
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their confidant. And here's the problem with in general, sending a bummed out kid to therapy,
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as opposed to grandma, you send a bummed out kid to therapy. The therapist's incentive is to treat
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the least sick for the longest period of time. They want that child coming back and there's no oversight.
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There's no one saying, you know, you're really undermining her, you know, um, respect for her
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mother. No one's even tracking it. Unlike with medicine where they're tracking harms,
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therapists don't even track these. And so no one's measuring it. No one's reporting. Meanwhile,
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you know, in many ways in a teen or adolescent could be getting worse.
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It also seems like social media has kind of glorified the idea of not just going to therapy
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as just something that you do if you're having any problem in your life, but also, I mean,
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taking anti-depression and anti-anxiety medications. I mean, there's a whole subset of
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TikTok that is about the different medications that teenagers can take to alleviate their symptoms
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of anxiety or whatever. And so probably, uh, maybe there's a lot of similarities between what you saw
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in the social contagion of what's referred to as gender dysphoria and somewhat of a social contagion
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here though. Okay. All my friends are going to therapy. All my friends are on Lexapro.
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That's right. And you know, that that's exactly right. There is an element of social contagion.
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People are valorizing diagnoses, but it's so, it's so dangerous to valid, you know,
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to valorize a diagnosis or being on medication for various reasons. First of all, those medications
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come with real risks, but, but also because it's so limiting. See, if you say I'm a shy person,
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well, that doesn't limit you. You can just say, well, I'm going to try to get over my shyness,
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but if you have social anxiety or social phobia, now you're saying there's a problem with my brain
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and I need an expert or medication to help me. So you, you naturally go down the road to feeling
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less powerful and less able to fix your life. You mentioned that they're not just getting therapy
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from a professional in an office, but I mean, they're getting it on social, social media. I mean,
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you follow these self-help accounts that claim to have the power to psychoanalyze you and tell you
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how amazing you are, but they're also getting it. You mentioned, uh, from school. Now, would you say
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that's primarily from this social emotional learning SEL curriculum that is now in a lot of schools?
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That's it. Yes. Social emotional learning is now this giant, massive juggernaut. It's an umbrella.
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It can mean anything. It can mean straightforward, you know, critical race theory, which the kids
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learn about, you know, white oppression. But so sometimes it's just a cloak for that, but very
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often it, it is a process of breaking down kids. That's effectively what it is. It claims to be, um,
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something that will help kids to make them more resilient. They throw around that word a lot. It
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will make them stronger by teaching them tricks for emotional regulation. Well, there are various
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reasons that focusing on yourself, focusing on your emotion, focusing on your pain, isn't the way
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to resilience. It's counterproductive, but these, the, the discussions of emotion in the classroom
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old, almost inevitably end up with discussions of sad emotion. First of all, because the prompts
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actually direct you there. But second of all, it's just much more interesting. How do you feel?
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Great. Fine. There's not much to talk about. Actually, I'm feeling really sad because my mom
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was too busy to help me with my homework last night. Now, now we're off and running. Now we've got
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something we can all talk about. And that's what the schools are doing. Um, they're all engaged in this
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constant psych, you know, this constant therapeutic kind of group therapy. And it, you know, there's,
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there's lots of evidence of this, but basically there's a lot of research showing group therapy
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often makes people feel worse about their problems. Um, this has been true of breast
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cancer survivors, burn victims, first responders to catastrophe. Um, you know, um, all kinds of
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situations, um, in which, you know, sitting around with a group talking about your pain, bereavement,
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uh, people who lost loved ones, they, they ended up feeling worse off than the control group who
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didn't go to therapy. And we're doing this with kids. It reminds me of something in college. When
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I first joined my sorority, my freshman year of college, and we had this retreat with the whole
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sorority and we all sat in a circle and I'm thinking back, I'm like, why did we do this?
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But whose idea was this? And we were all supposed to share something like really difficult and sad that
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we had gone through or something like that we had never shared before or something like that.
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And we were all supposed to be very emotional about it. And everyone, you know, ended up crying.
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But I remember feeling that it almost turned into a competition of who can give the worst sob story,
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who can shock everyone the most, who has been through the hardest thing. And like you said,
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valorizing trauma or difficulty or whatever it is, it, even in that just kind of like micro example,
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I can see that I could see that competing to see, you know, who's had the hardest time
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can make things a lot worse. That's exactly right. And what I want people to know is that's
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inevitable because they can say, Oh, we're just working on our emotions. We're just discussing our
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emotions. We're working on self-regulation. They can say that all they want. But as soon as you get
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kids in a circle talking about their feelings, it becomes, there becomes a natural one-upmanship
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occurs to, you don't want to just say something boring. Um, right. I, it becomes what, you know,
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what, what, what a great researcher said to me, it becomes like a memory poker. You start up,
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you start trying to, you know, dredge up the worst memory of a painful episode in your life
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because you want to sort of keep the group engaged. And we're doing this with kids right
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before they have to take a math test. And, um, sometimes it's the school counselor. Sometimes
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it's the teacher. And the worst part is parents are told this is really good for them. In fact,
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we're going to interrupt their lessons for it. Um, it, it really is, uh, it's a, it's an incredibly
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good way to break kids down. And that, that isn't even, you know, the mental health surveys they're
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flooded with. Many of them written by our CDC, which talked to them about suicide, self-harm.
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What are the ways you might use? You know, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Have you tried
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cutting, burning, choking? What about a choking game? I mean, it goes through all these with middle
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schoolers or high schoolers in great depth and as if, Oh, we're just, we're just asking no harm.
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Yeah. And they do it of course, in the name of saving lives. And they also do it in the name of
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representation. I had a woman on my show. She had gone viral a couple of years ago for speaking
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at her school board because her eighth grader had come home. This was a conservative district in
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Texas. Public school had come home with this horrifying book that was not only very sexually
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explicit, but also detailed like how this person was planning to commit suicide. And when she went to
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the school and she said, what in the world, why is the English teacher recommending this book to my
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13 year old? They said, well, we give these kinds of books to represent. So these students can see
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themselves. What if a student had gone through something like this? What if there was a student
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who had thought about suicide? What if there was a student who was gender confused? Even they justify
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books with pedophilia. And then by saying, well, what if the child has gone through this? And they say
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it's important to see themselves reflected in this literature, in this content that they're consuming.
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I mean, to me, not only would it make it worse if a child had gone through that, but also for most kids,
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you are introducing very, very dark themes into their little form, you know, uh, formative minds or
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their, uh, malleable minds that they can't really safely and fully process in a healthy way.
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And Allie, when a, when a mom goes in and objects, the first thing they do is make her feel stupid
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or crazy. That's what their response is. Oh, you don't know the literature. Well, I looked into
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the literature because I wanted to arm moms like that one. And actually the literature backs up the
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fact that if you valorize suicide, if you present it as a coping mechanism, if you, um, are, um,
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repetitive in your talk of suicide, we know that that increases suicide. Okay. There have been great
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studies on this. There's a great Viennese subway study in which that, that showed this when they, um,
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stopped doing, when they got the press to stop doing those things in reporting Viennese sub,
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subways suicides in Vienna. Um, they were able to depress the rate of suicide just by stopping all
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the talk of it. Stop by, you know, talking about methods and, and valorizing the subject. And, and
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you're right. It absolutely presents the world as dark and dangerous. But here's the other thing I want
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you to know. Look, my kids are in religious school. Okay. They're in a very religious school. Um,
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a lot of people think, and they felt this way with my last book, you know, on the left,
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they kind of, the react, the attitude was always like, why are you picking on this marginalized group?
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Right. And on the right, the attitude is, why would you even bother? Like, that doesn't,
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that doesn't apply to us. Who would do that? Like, you know, that, that is sort of like irrelevant.
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SEL is completely in my kid's school. They expanded the psych staffs, right? Even in religious school,
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they bring this stuff in, they smuggle it in, they tell you it's life-saving. And they,
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they start to very much like DEI officers in a university, they get to work undermining the
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school. And they, they, that doesn't mean they mean to, but they sort of take over because they
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can oversee everything in terms of mental health. And now we're no longer talking about morality.
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We're not, no longer talking about treating each other correctly or, you know, doing what's right.
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All of a sudden we're talking about feelings and oneness with feelings and that's, and, and, and
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always looking at yourself. It's, it's, it's, you know, it tends to really undermine, uh, you know,
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even the most, even in the most conservative districts or in the most religious schools.
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Yeah. I mean, I think that we all have a natural tendency to be self-centered, to think about
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ourselves and to look at the world through the lens of like, what do I want? How do I feel?
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And this kind of feeds into that. And also, as you've said, it glorifies it. And so it glorifies
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self-centeredness. And you're actually told that self-centeredness, being self-centered,
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being self-focused is the best and most moral and the kindest and the most loving thing that you can
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do. That is how you are a good neighbor. That is how you are a good citizen. You just learn to love
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yourself more and more. You just understand your feelings more and more. And what you're saying is
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that it's actually doing the opposite. It's not only making kids, stunting their growth,
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but it's also making them more cruel, right? Like they're actually less able to see the pain of
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other people and understand other people's point of view, right? That's right. They're living under
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this tyranny of feelings in which they tyrannize each other with their feelings and they are tyrannized
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by their own. They're constantly focusing on their feelings. And guess what? When you think
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about your feelings all the time, you're going to conclude that you're not that happy. You're going
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to think about every tiny worry and magnify it. I mean, I call them in the book sort of emotional
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hypochondriacs, by which I don't mean that they're making up their own pain, right? It's not that they're
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inventing it. They're just making it worse, just like hypochondriacs do. What they do is, you know,
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what they now call illness, anxiety disorder, somatic symptom disorder is these are people.
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And I talked to world experts in hypochondriasis. What they do is they magnify the pains we all have
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by hyper-focus on them, by relentlessly focus on them. And that's what kids are doing with their
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feelings. And, um, you know, you mentioned empathy. What I learned is that empathy naturally,
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unlike things like fairness, it causes us, we can't empathize with more than two people at once.
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It's not possible. So naturally we privilege the person in front of us who's suffering very often
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at the expense of the out group. So it actually, empathy can lead to a lot of cruelty.
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Right. I think that's such an interesting concept. You're the title of chapter eight is full of empathy
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and mean as hell. And, um, I'm actually writing a book that'll be out this fall about how specifically
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empathy tricks Christian women into taking the progressive position on everything. If you have
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empathy for the migrant, then you'll be for open borders. If you have empathy for these gender
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confused young people, you will affirm them, use their pronouns, um, et cetera. And I never thought
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about what you said though, that you can't really have full empathy for two people at once. And so
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whoever is hoisted up in front of you as the worst victim is the biggest victim based on their skin
00:25:37.220
color, based on their sexual orientation or gender identity or whatever it is, that's the person that
00:25:43.180
you're going to say is right, needs your full defense, needs your full celebration, needs your
00:25:48.020
full affirmation, even at the expense of everyone else, even at the expense of truth, even at the expense
00:25:53.580
of fairness, even at the expense of safety. Obviously we see that in the gender issue, um, a lot, but
00:26:00.280
there are many other examples of that, how empathy can actually not just be unhealthy, but harmful.
00:26:06.960
I love that. That's fascinating. I'm excited for your new book. I mean, that's, that's exactly right.
00:26:12.680
Empathy becomes a tool of manipulation, right? So you say to a kid, whatever the issue, oh, well,
00:26:19.500
we all need to feel bad for so-and-so. And I profile in the book, a young woman who was treated
00:26:24.040
so cruelly over supposedly a racist and antisemitic comment. Now it turned out the girl was Jewish and
00:26:32.320
it wasn't, she hadn't made an antisemitic comment or a racist comment, but the administrators and the
00:26:38.240
children who accused her of the antisemitism were not even Jewish, but they accused her of antisemitism
00:26:44.920
based on a funny joke she had made that had really nothing to do with anything. You can see it in the
00:26:51.000
book, but it really didn't have very much to do with anything at all. She was joking about Halloween
00:26:54.620
costumes and they then persecuted her for the rest of the school year and that they felt, but they were
00:27:02.460
only sticking up for the kids who were so pained and injured by this. And no one bothered to say,
00:27:08.680
wait a second, what do you mean you're injured by her antisemitic comment? You're not even Jewish.
00:27:12.720
She is. What are you talking about? No one said that because they completely forgot every sort of
00:27:20.100
basic principle of what was actually said. Does this make any sense? And they just ran with this
00:27:25.140
girl's feelings. Yeah. You know, it reminds me of a phrase that I heard echoed a lot in the era of
00:27:30.700
George Floyd, like the summer of 2020. What matters is the impact, not the intent. That's what they would
00:27:39.560
say. The activists would say is that it doesn't matter what you meant by what you said. What matters
00:27:44.260
is how it made people feel. And really it's both. And like, obviously, if you run into someone, you
00:27:49.660
didn't mean to run into them. You still apologize to say, I'm sorry that I hurt you, even if you didn't
00:27:54.400
mean to. So it's both. But I think that motto that is always just the impact and the intent doesn't
00:28:02.140
matter at all. It exemplifies what you're talking about there, that we always have to prioritize how
00:28:08.160
someone feels about what you did or what you said over the truth of what someone might have said.
00:28:17.100
And that is a very unfair world to live in. Right. I mean, remember, empathy is not a moral
00:28:25.720
concept. Right. In other words, you can do good in this world without having empathy for the person
00:28:32.920
you're helping. You might say, I can't really understand what she's feeling, but I'm going to
00:28:36.920
take care of her anyway or him anyway or whatever the act is that's good. Likewise, you can be, you
00:28:43.460
know, very cruel and full of empathy. So we know that con men and all kinds of, you know, bad people
00:28:50.060
exploit the fact that they can get inside other people's heads to take advantage of them.
00:28:54.880
So sometimes, you know, empathy is not a moral concept. The problem is we're so pushing this
00:29:00.600
with kids and it takes over. It completely sort of, you know, submerges fairness, considerations like
00:29:08.700
fairness, what's right, justice. And we think we're being so emotionally in tuned, but really we're
00:29:15.500
being, you know, the schools are often very tyrannical as they run supposedly with, you know,
00:29:21.960
to take care of someone's feelings. You know, I've thought about empathy and you can tell me if you
00:29:29.020
agree or disagree with this, but I've thought about empathy as something that can be in particular
00:29:35.780
contexts helpful. For example, before I had kids, when I went on an airplane and there was a bunch of
00:29:43.440
crying babies, I'd be like, seriously, seriously, can you, can the parents not just figure this out?
00:29:49.040
I can't believe that you have this crying toddler, this toddler running around. You have all of these
00:29:52.600
silly thoughts in your head of, oh, when I'm a parent, I'll never do that. It'll never be that
00:29:57.120
way. And then you have kids and wow, you understand. And you have so much compassion for those parents.
00:30:02.860
You completely know what they're going through. It's not easy. They're much more stressed out about
00:30:07.520
their crying baby than you are. And that can motivate you to say, okay, how can I help? Now, of course,
00:30:15.180
you can have compassion for someone without having been in their shoes before, but it helps having
00:30:20.580
been in their shoes. It helps having experienced something yourself. It helps to be able to say,
00:30:25.380
not only can I have compassion for you, but I have felt what you feel. And that is what inspires me
00:30:32.440
to help you out or to see things differently or to be more gentle with you. But, oh, go, you know what?
00:30:40.740
Go ahead. You, you answer that because I think I've spoken enough about it. I think I've explained it.
00:30:44.820
Not at all. I, you know, I would say just to push back on you that it's actually coming from your
00:30:49.960
values. So in other words, you could also have empathy just as easily for the stewardess who is
00:30:57.280
trying to get the parent to shut up or right. In other words, your values lead you to, to empathize
00:31:05.300
with that mother. But it, the goodness is coming from your values, feeling like a young mother is doing
00:31:10.940
something noble. She's raising the next generation and she's trying to tend to her kids and I should
00:31:16.180
try to feel for her. Right. I mean, you see people empathizing with terrorists, empathizing with
00:31:22.080
vandals all over the place because empathy is not bad. It's morally neutral. And that's the point.
00:31:28.080
It can, it can be, it can manipulate us. Yeah. You know, it can manipulate us and, and be misapplied
00:31:34.120
all over the place. Yes, I, I agree. It has to be submissive. Empathy has to be submissive to your
00:31:41.720
values and submissive to the truth. And it is not the same as love. I mean, I've argued before that
00:31:48.780
there really can't be true love without truth. You're not loving someone well by lying to them.
00:31:55.480
You can empathize with someone and lie to them. I don't think you can love someone and lie to them.
00:32:01.200
So empathy can be good when it is submissive to those superior values of love, truth, principles.
00:32:09.960
And so I, yeah, I agree with you there, but it is definitely seen as like the reigning,
00:32:16.640
you know, stamp of virtue today that if you are empathetic, you will do X, Y, Z. It's a total,
00:32:25.000
total tool of manipulation and coercion. Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. You know,
00:32:30.600
if you empathize with a child too much, when you're going to give them a shot, you won't give
00:32:34.860
it to them. Yeah. If you empathize with a child too much, who's upset that he's been sent to his
00:32:39.780
room, you'll never punish him. Right? Like empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing good
00:32:47.240
in this world. And often over empathizing with certain people will keep us from taking care of
00:32:54.180
each other for keeping us from doing the right thing. Right? If a police officer over empathizes
00:33:00.160
with someone who is, you know, a criminal, he might not arrest him. And then the criminal could go on to
00:33:06.860
harm others. Yeah. So, you know, in all kinds of situations, empathy is just not, it's, it's amoral
00:33:13.780
and it won't necessarily produce the best result. Right. Right. Tell me how this leads into
00:33:20.800
gentle parenting. Would you say that it is that the idea of gentle parenting, that it is led by
00:33:29.240
the idea that empathy must be first and must be foremost when it comes to how we treat our children?
00:33:39.060
I love that. That's not how I described it in the book, but I love your characterization. I think
00:33:44.680
that's great. I mean, yes, that's a way of looking at it. It is a therapeutic method, which constantly
00:33:51.020
solicits the child's feelings, focuses on the feelings, puts the parent at the same level as
00:33:57.260
a child. And it's constantly a conversation about how are we feeling about this? Do we, and giving a child
00:34:04.080
endless options. Now there are a number of problems with this. There are another reasons that it's not
00:34:09.040
good for kids. And, and the number one thing is that we've known now for really millennia that kids
00:34:15.280
need parental authority, which doesn't mean cruelty. It doesn't mean, you know, an unloving laying down
00:34:21.440
of rules, but ultimately the parent has to be in charge. A child will feel much more safe and secure if
00:34:27.540
the parent is in charge. But if you empathize too much with a child, you'll never do what's right for
00:34:33.420
the kid. Hmm. Yeah. This is such a debate right now among young moms. And I think that there is some,
00:34:42.080
um, there's somewhere in between, I mean, obviously only being a disciplinarian or a nag or a nitpick
00:34:50.380
or someone who never gives credit to what your child is feeling. That's one thing.
00:34:54.540
But who is that today? I mean, does that even exist today? We don't have authoritarian parents
00:35:00.620
anymore. We surround our kids with these therapeutic empathic adults. No one is laying
00:35:06.080
down any rules or high expectations, almost in any situation they're in. The problem isn't that
00:35:12.780
they have empathetic mothers or empathetic fathers. It's that they're getting therapy from every angle
00:35:19.100
and no one's saying you're fine. Go on, keep playing soccer. You'll be fine. No one's saying,
00:35:24.780
knock it off. No one's saying, shake it off. No one's saying, handle your problems yourself.
00:35:28.840
And that's the problem. It's so extreme. And I'll tell you something else. Empathy can be much
00:35:35.180
crueler. And I'll give you an example why. Let's say you don't set down rules for your child. Let's
00:35:40.500
say you always solicit their opinion. You always worry about their feelings. You just hug them when
00:35:46.000
they're in distress. You never punish them when they punch their little sibling, right? Now you're
00:35:51.140
going to send them off to school where they have to obey the teacher's rules and they won't be able to do
00:35:56.120
it. So tell me what ended up the most compassionate. Was that compassionate? The teacher's
00:36:01.560
going to now want to put your child on drugs. Right, right. And even beyond that, I mean, if that
00:36:07.200
problem extends until they're a teenager or until they're an adult and they never learn how to work
00:36:14.320
with other people, learn how to share, learn how to not have outbursts or violent reactions when they
00:36:20.160
don't get their way, I mean, you're talking about not you disciplining them, but the state disciplining
00:36:25.380
them. And so you're right. At the end of the day, which was the more compassionate option?
00:36:33.380
The last book, people were always talking about, you know, oh, what about, you know, what we teachers
00:36:39.000
have to get in there and liberate the kids and protect the kids from their horrible, you know,
00:36:43.920
homophobic parents who won't affirm, you know, who are so homophobic, they would throw a child out in
00:36:50.040
the street. And they invented this bugaboo that didn't exist. I mean, I don't know what, how many
00:36:55.980
decades we have to go back in order to make that a reality of American life, but it has been so many
00:37:02.420
decades until since that even existed. And they were saying this in the most liberal districts in our
00:37:07.880
country, in California, there was this idea, oh, that we couldn't trust those homophobic parents.
00:37:13.320
And I think the same gets true when you talk about basic authority and rules and expectations in the
00:37:18.640
home. Where are these cruel, unloving parents who demand obedience? You know, these authoritarian
00:37:24.800
parents. Now we know authoritarian, which is unloving and rule bound. Those kids don't fare very well,
00:37:32.040
but neither do the permissive parents. And study after study has shown this. The ones who, or as I call
00:37:38.220
them, the therapeutic parents are even worse than permissive because they surveil the kids. They give them
00:37:42.980
no independence and they constantly solicit the kids' feelings on everything. Neither of those
00:37:48.400
kids has done very well in terms of happiness, anxiety, depression, and success, and all kinds of
00:37:54.420
good relationship with parents long-term. None of those have had good results. But authoritative
00:38:02.280
parents who just basically set down rules, that's not cruel. That's just parenting.
00:38:07.640
Hmm. Do you think that it's changed because of how the different generations were parented? My
00:38:17.520
grandparents were part of the silent generation. I think, like, within my age, it's probably
00:38:23.040
grandparents in the silent or the great generation. And so, you know, early 20th century to the 30s and
00:38:29.100
40s, my parents, baby boomers. And obviously, they didn't have as much of an emotional or even
00:38:36.460
affectionate upbringing as I did. And I have a great relationship with my parents. And they
00:38:42.960
certainly were not permissive. They were authoritative. And they weren't as, even though I
00:38:48.580
never, ever, ever have doubted that my parents love me so much and love my brother so much, I
00:38:53.860
wouldn't call them affectionate necessarily. My husband and I are much more affectionate as parents
00:39:02.020
and maybe a little bit gentler as well than my parents were. And a lot of my friends say the
00:39:09.440
same, say the same thing, that we are just much more affectionate and kind of like gushy with our
00:39:15.020
children than our parents were, even though we have a great relationship with them. And I just kind of,
00:39:20.420
I wonder why that is. Because we, I think we bought into the idea that it was cruel to lay down rules
00:39:29.080
and just say, no, I'm sorry. Those are the consequences. You hit your sister. I'm taking
00:39:34.800
away your toy. You're going to your room. We started feeling like that was abusive. That could
00:39:40.220
cause them trauma. We were afraid to do it even when we needed to. And it became, we also poured way
00:39:47.200
more time into the kids than any generation. We are so devoted to these kids and we're so determined to
00:39:53.840
have a close relationship with them in part because we spend all our time devoting ourselves to them.
00:39:59.240
So now we really want to be their besties. And the problem is, look, you can be as affectionate to a
00:40:04.800
kid as you want. That's not harmful, right? But, but you can't miss out on being in charge. See,
00:40:12.180
if you stop being in charge, that's when the harms come in. And, and, and study after study has shown
00:40:17.540
this, the kids don't do as well in all kinds of metrics because kids know that someone has to be in
00:40:22.920
charge. And very often when a kid did, wasn't raised by anyone who was willing to be in charge,
00:40:28.560
they go looking for daddy elsewhere. And we see radicalism, political radicalism in this generation
00:40:34.440
in, in rates that are, that are new, that are much higher than before. They are, you know, and many,
00:40:39.940
you know, I interviewed several immigrant parents and people who work with parents who, whose, um,
00:40:45.080
families have become radicalized. The kids have become radicalized. And they tell me very often
00:40:49.120
these come from the most liberal, these kids come from the most liberal homes before they join
00:40:53.480
Antifa, BLM, whatever it is, but they're really looking for daddy. And I, you know, that is a
00:41:00.860
consequence of never having high expectations or rules for your own home. Totally. I can see that
00:41:06.700
the importance of discipline and setting, not just setting the boundaries, but consistently enforcing
00:41:11.020
those boundaries. Kids are always looking for that. Like even when it comes to non, not, not just
00:41:18.260
discipline, but when you see, uh, toddlers start developing, they're putting everything kind of
00:41:23.540
into categories, into definitions. They know the difference between mom and dad, male and female
00:41:28.660
from a very early age. We do this here. We do that there. This is right here. This is wrong. Whatever
00:41:33.400
it is. You can tell that they are looking for those definitions. They're looking for the lines.
00:41:38.480
They're looking for the boundaries. And I think part of their development is to test those
00:41:43.040
boundaries. And it sounds like what you're saying is that parents in the name of being empathetic and
00:41:48.280
gentle have said, yeah, keep testing them, just keep pushing them out. And we will keep moving the
00:41:53.280
boundaries further and further out until they basically don't exist. And these radicalized teens are
00:42:00.640
out in search of those boundaries. Finally, like, you know, how extreme can I get? How radical
00:42:06.340
can I get until someone finally tells me to stop? Right. I mean, think about it this way. Say you
00:42:14.240
don't punish a five-year-old who's hitting his sister. Okay. First of all, he could hurt his
00:42:18.700
sister. Right. Okay. Um, second of all, now he's in charge because he's dominating things. He's the
00:42:24.840
most powerful. He's in, you know, asserting a certain, uh, rule over his sister. There's something
00:42:30.560
else too. Now you're sending a kid who hits other kids off to school. Totally. So is that more
00:42:36.340
compassionate? Is he likely to be, you know, get, have friends at school, have people like him,
00:42:42.180
have teachers who want to teach him? No, because nobody likes a kid who's going around hitting other
00:42:48.880
kids. Right. What they do is they suggest a medication. They start telling you he has oppositional
00:42:54.320
defiant disorder, right? There's something wrong with him. And if you think that having your kid set
00:43:00.980
up to believe there's something wrong with him, just because he, he, he never heard the word no.
00:43:07.280
Well, to me, that's far less kind and, and, and compassionate to a kid.
00:43:12.080
I worry about my kids being up, put in school and being around other kids whose parents did not give
00:43:25.340
them boundaries and did not discipline them and did not lay a good foundation for them, did not tell
00:43:31.540
them that self-control was a virtue. Of course, I believe it's a fruit of the spirit. It's as a good
00:43:38.120
thing the Bible tells us that we're supposed to practice. Um, I, I worry about that. I worry about,
00:43:44.080
I mean, my kids aren't Gen Z, they're younger than that, but I worry what kind of generation
00:43:49.440
they're going to grow up with kids who put their feelings first only and are unable to really function
00:43:58.340
in a healthy way with everyone else. Right. I think we're seeing it. I think we're seeing it in the
00:44:04.660
demand. You must use my pronouns. You must change your course to accommodate me. You must, um, you
00:44:13.280
know, we're seeing it in the workplace. Do you know how many young people are having their parents
00:44:17.080
call the, their bosses to tell them that they've got, that they're too stressed out on the job. These
00:44:23.100
are adults and they're so infantilized and their feelings are always front and center. And honestly,
00:44:29.480
they're tyrannizing others and they're tyrannized themselves by their own obsession with their
00:44:34.200
feelings. No wonder they don't want to get married and don't want to, don't want to have kids because
00:44:39.660
those things, they do require commitment. They require you to give up some of what you want,
00:44:46.820
your complete autonomy and your complete flexibility for the good of someone else. And when sacrifice is
00:44:54.920
seen as not just inconvenience, but as trauma and as something that is actually immoral and dangerous,
00:45:01.000
of course, you are going to avoid any kind of commitment that causes you to put yourself second.
00:45:08.080
Exactly. That's exactly the right. That was perfectly said. You know, um, I, I, you know,
00:45:13.720
I think of at any time when, I mean, when do moms do what they want to do? Yeah. What feels good to
00:45:19.340
them? I mean, you spend so much time just suppressing your own needs, right. And, and taking care of
00:45:26.000
someone else. That's the job. And, um, I'll tell you what the best email response I got was from,
00:45:32.300
uh, someone passed on to me. It was from a mom who said, you know, I listened to Abigail on a podcast.
00:45:37.880
And for the first time this morning, I punished my son without guilt. And the reason I liked that
00:45:43.860
was not because she had punished her son. That's up to her. That was her decision. Not because I told
00:45:50.100
her when to punish or how to punish or whether to punish. That's not my business. Yeah. But because
00:45:55.280
she was doing what she believed was right without guilt for the first time. She was parenting.
00:46:00.640
She was right. And that's all I seek to, I'm not, I'm no parenting expert. I'm not,
00:46:05.440
I'm not even sure I believe in parenting experts. Okay. Most of the ones I've seen are not terribly
00:46:10.140
impressive, but I do believe in parents exercising their, their better instincts without being told
00:46:17.460
they're going to traumatize the child because it isn't true and it isn't helpful. Yeah. I think also
00:46:23.480
just like the overemphasis on individuality that everyone is special and that you don't have any
00:46:31.200
similarities to anyone else and you shouldn't. And every single kind of misbehavior or any kind of,
00:46:38.600
um, you know, lack of character that you have is not negative. It's just another quirk. It's just
00:46:44.760
your personality type. It's just your Enneagram number. It's just something special and beautiful
00:46:49.540
about you that doesn't actually need to be worked on at all, but needs to be applauded.
00:46:54.940
I think that also gives parents a sense of guilt that like, I can't punish. I can't discipline because
00:47:00.480
I am suppressing this snowflake of a person. Um, and while there are, you know, beautiful,
00:47:08.340
unique characteristics of each person, the fact of the matter is, is that we do have to learn how to
00:47:14.020
function in society with other people. Gosh, there's so much to say about what you just said.
00:47:20.200
That's totally right. It's why, of course, it's a huge part of why religious families tend to do
00:47:24.740
well. People who pass on religion because they're always pushing the kids to look outward, to think
00:47:29.640
of themselves as connected to something higher, to a higher purpose. Community is so important for
00:47:36.100
our wellbeing. We never talk about it. Instead, we tell their kids exactly, as you said, they're so
00:47:40.400
unique in the world, right? They don't need to ever worry about anyone beyond themselves. Well,
00:47:44.660
that's actually very detrimental to their, to their wellbeing. Um, telling them they're part of
00:47:50.320
something greater is actually really good for their wellbeing. But you know, there's, there's another
00:47:55.100
thing too. And that is that it, part of the reason parents never took away the phones and never even
00:48:01.120
limited their use, even during the school day was because they became convinced that the child would
00:48:06.280
be cruelly treated and emotionally, you know, tormented if they weren't with their friends,
00:48:12.040
if they weren't always connected to their friends. I can't, that was the most common response I got
00:48:16.920
when I said, why don't you take it away from her? If you feel like it's harming her, if you feel like
00:48:20.940
her, you know, transgender identification is getting worse, if you feel like, you know, she's getting
00:48:25.560
more anxiety, more depression, more sleeplessness, less attention span, why can't you take it away?
00:48:30.680
And the parents would often say to me, because she's connected, that's how she talks to her friends.
00:48:34.660
I can't take her away from her friends. And of course, a generation ago, parents had no trouble
00:48:40.920
saying, I'm sorry, you're grounded. You can't go out with your friends. This is best for you.
00:48:45.660
But in this generation, we were so afraid of the trauma that would come in if we ever, you know,
00:48:52.020
cut them off from their friends. And the mental health experts told us that they said that explicitly
00:48:57.140
that, you know, very often kids need to be connected to their friends over their phone and that it was
00:49:02.940
good for them. And they warned parents that it might undermine your relationship with your child
00:49:07.240
if you take away their phone. And so parents couldn't even follow their best instincts.
00:49:13.320
Yeah. I think that also parents just want to avoid bad feelings as much as possible.
00:49:19.400
And if their child says that they feel bad without their phone or they feel bad because their child says
00:49:25.720
they feel bad, the easiest way to numb that pain is to just give your child what you want.
00:49:31.080
So it takes not only discipline for your kid, but discipline in yourself.
00:49:35.620
Like parents have to be able to manage our bad feelings and to say, it doesn't feel good to take
00:49:40.520
this away from my child. I don't want to do it. It's making it a lot harder. I have to deal with
00:49:44.080
the tears. I have to deal with the tantrums. I have to deal with the consequences of doing this hard
00:49:48.720
thing. Parents also have to be willing to go through hard things and to deal with hard feelings if we
00:49:55.440
are going to discipline and parent our kids. I think that's, you know, a whole other layer to
00:50:00.800
this. That's right. But here's the other thing. They get no support. Parents get no support from
00:50:06.660
the culture. None. I mean, the easiest thing to do would be, you know, what, what, you know,
00:50:11.620
the wonderful psychologist Jonathan Haidt has suggested, and we have known for years, they take
00:50:16.640
the kids out of, they take the phones out of schools. Yeah. At least during the school day,
00:50:21.280
they don't have them on their phones. This was so obvious and parents knew it. Parents had been
00:50:25.540
complaining about the harms to their children, but they got no support and they were undermined
00:50:30.780
all the time. So they couldn't trust their own instincts. And you're right. Everything we need
00:50:36.240
to do for our kids is hard. There's nothing harder than sending a kid away from the dinner table
00:50:42.400
because he's been rude or disrespectful or done something bad at the dinner table. I mean,
00:50:47.640
it's such a hassle to parents. If anything, you know, it's the hardest thing you ever have to do
00:50:53.520
is discipline your kid or not give them what they want, but it's also necessary.
00:50:59.000
Yeah, man. You're so right. I know moms who are trying now to get other parents on board to take
00:51:07.620
the phones out of school. They want other parents support and saying, Hey, can't you get on board with
00:51:14.120
this initiative to say no phones in school? And the biggest impediment to that, like the biggest
00:51:20.540
obstacle those, you know, anti phone in school moms have is other moms, other parents. And the biggest
00:51:28.140
reason is I want to be able to text my kid immediately. I want them to text me back. I want
00:51:32.860
to know that they're okay. Well, guess what? For thousands and thousands of years, we never had that
00:51:37.860
luxury. And now it's parents who are conditioned to that instant gratification of knowing their kid
00:51:45.180
is okay. Um, and so it is an uphill struggle. That's exactly right. We've become so frantic,
00:51:52.280
so anxious. And look, I can tell you my own kid's school, you know, they tried to limit the phones,
00:51:57.760
but I can tell you that every time we have an expert who comes in, they say, well, the phones are good
00:52:02.700
and they're bad. And even the, um, you know, American psychological association, which was so
00:52:08.240
late in issuing any statement when they finally mentioned, you know, the harms of social media,
00:52:13.360
it was incredibly equivocal. It was, Oh, it can be bad, but also good. You know, they never,
00:52:19.060
the surgeon general never did this with cigarettes, right? When they, they warned parents of the harms,
00:52:24.780
which by the way, cigarettes also have positive things about them, right? They're neural stimulants,
00:52:30.900
they're social. There are things that are good about them, but bottom line is they'll give you
00:52:34.920
cancer. And at least they issued the warning. The, the, the, the psychological associations
00:52:40.520
won't even issue, haven't even issued a clear warning about these things. So it makes it so much
00:52:46.400
harder for parents to organize and, and try to take them out of schools, even though we've known
00:52:52.140
for eight years that they're bad for kids. Hmm. Um, what would you say? And I know that we have to
00:52:58.800
end. There are a million other things I could ask you. What would you say to the position that says,
00:53:04.480
okay, I hear you, Abigail, but there are some good things about therapy. There are some good things
00:53:11.300
about children learning how to express their emotions and talk about difficult things and talk
00:53:17.780
about their feelings. We don't want all of that pin up because maybe it can manifest itself in bad ways
00:53:22.940
down the line. What do you say to people who say, I've seen some benefits to SEL or to therapy and
00:53:30.840
how dare you take that away from us? So, um, I think that, you know, I, I try to look at the studies
00:53:39.060
because, um, I think that people tend to exaggerate. You, you often see this with young mothers.
00:53:44.500
They'll see one, you know, one thing that was positive. And then they go around telling every,
00:53:49.820
in their five-year-old and they go around telling everyone, no, no, no, no, SEL is good. It really
00:53:53.720
helped my daughter today. I mean, you have to wait and see how these things play out over time now.
00:53:58.980
Um, so, so I do think it's good to look at research. Um, there's new research out of Australia
00:54:05.720
and England in which they had a control group. One was a meta study of several different kinds of SEL
00:54:12.120
and the other, and then the other looked at, um, coping techniques and teaching specifically kinds
00:54:19.080
of regulation skills, coping techniques and social emotional skills. The other looked at anti-bullying
00:54:24.160
techniques that were taught. They had a control group. They had, um, and they followed these kids
00:54:28.920
over a year and the kids ended up sadder, more anxious or not helped at all and, um, more alienated
00:54:37.320
from their parents. So, um, does giving kids a vocabulary about their emotions help them? Of
00:54:43.940
course, but that's not actually what the schools do. You see what they do is they go in and they,
00:54:49.740
they give them gobbledygook. Sometimes one parent shared with me that her child was being taught
00:54:53.960
anger is red. Um, it was like, happiness is yellow. You know, it was all arbitrary nonsense.
00:55:01.260
They aren't always, I mean, I'll give you an example. Let me, let me just say something real fast.
00:55:05.840
I'll give you an example to, to strengthen that point that you were making. Okay. Here's a good
00:55:10.560
example. When my, my husband told me the story when he was a little boy, um, his father came to
00:55:14.860
pick him up from a friend's house early and he's gotten to the car and he said to his dad, I'm so
00:55:20.820
angry that you picked me up because I was having a good time. And his father said to him, no, you're
00:55:26.180
not, you're frustrated. And that was helpful because now he was saying, no, you're not, you're not angry.
00:55:32.540
Let me, let me give you a new word. That's actually going to help you because it's not
00:55:36.200
exactly anger. And there's no question that's helpful. But if you go into the schools and look
00:55:41.160
at what they're actually doing, all of this feelings focus inevitably funnels towards obsession over bad
00:55:48.160
feelings, obsession over bad pain. And who's in charge of you when you're a kid, who's in charge
00:55:54.880
of making sure that you're not hurt. Inevitably it ends up as a criticism of the parents, the people
00:56:00.000
who were supposed to keep you safe. So in practice, those things very, very often go
00:56:04.700
together. Hmm. That's a really good clarifying point. Thank you so much, Abigail. I'm so excited
00:56:10.400
for people to read this book, bad therapy, why the kids aren't growing up. And I just want to say
00:56:15.840
like your chapter titles are amazing. The chapter titles are sufficient and getting someone to want
00:56:21.480
to read this book. So good. Thank you so much, Abigail. Um, this book I'm guessing is available
00:56:27.360
everywhere. It's available everywhere. Thank you so much, Allie. I really, really appreciate it.
00:56:32.100
Awesome. Thanks so much, Abigail. Have a good day.