The Ben Shapiro Show - Resisting Indoctrination | Abigail Shrier

00:00:00.000 Parents, who are so desperate not to say no to their kids, are now outsourcing this problem to the therapy profession.

00:00:07.000 The school counselors, the school psychologists, were so undermining parents' confidence.

00:00:13.000 They weren't trusting themselves.

00:00:15.000 And in fact, since I've written the book, I am inundated with letters from parents thanking me that they don't have to feel guilty anymore when they punish a child for bad behavior.

00:00:26.000 See, the therapeutic experts had so convinced them that they would traumatize the kid if they took away their smartphone or engaged in any other discipline, that parents were afraid to do it.

00:00:36.000 Today, we're privileged to host Abigail Schreier once again, a Yale-educated journalist and author whose incisive critique of modern sociocultural trends has positioned her at the forefront of some of today's most heated debates.

00:00:48.000 Abigail Schreier's career trajectory is as impressive as it has been impactful.

00:00:52.000 After obtaining her undergrad degree from Columbia University, she further honed her critical thinking skills at Oxford University, where she delved into philosophy.

00:00:59.000 Following her time at Oxford, Abigail attended Yale Law School, where she not only mastered the intricacies of law, but also developed a keen sense for the underlying societal implications of legal standards and practices.

00:01:09.000 After law school, Abigail embarked on a career in journalism, quickly establishing herself as a forthright, incisive commentator whose work often challenges mainstream perspectives.

00:01:18.000 Abigail first captured widespread attention with her provocative book, Irreversible Damage, a transgender craze seducing our daughters, where she explored the complexities and rapid increase in transgender identification among teenage girls.

00:01:29.000 Since her last appearance, Abigail has not shied away from controversy, but rather plunged deeper into the tumultuous waters of public discourse with her latest book, Bad Therapy.

00:01:37.000 Released in February, this new work examines the burgeoning crisis in mental health therapy, focusing on the potential harms of emerging therapeutic practices and ideologies that prioritize affirmation over critical assessment and care.

00:01:49.000 Today, she brings her rigorous analysis back to our show to explore the increasing obsession with mental health in the public school system, the implications of new parenting techniques that undermine parental confidence, and the potential dangers of overvalidating every emotion children express.

00:02:03.000 We'll tackle how these educational and parenting approaches not only fail to equip children for real-world challenges, but may also perpetuate a cycle of dependency and fragility.

00:02:12.000 Abigail's background in law and journalism equips her with a unique lens through which to analyze the intersections of policy, culture, and personal experience.

00:02:19.000 Insights that are crucial for anyone concerned with the future of our society and the well-being of the next generation.

00:02:24.000 So, buckle up as we prepare for a conversation filled with critical analysis, insightful commentary, and the fearless pursuit of truth.

00:02:30.000 This is the Sunday Special.

00:02:32.000 Abigail, thanks so much for taking the time to be here.

00:02:43.000 Really appreciate it.

00:02:44.000 Oh, it's great to be here.

00:02:45.000 Great to talk to you, Ben.

00:02:46.000 So let's talk about what's ailing the kids.

00:02:49.000 Why don't we start from the sort of Jonathan Haidt proposition that there started to be this massive uptick around 2010, 2011, 2012 with regard to suicidal ideation rates.

00:02:59.000 He traces that to the ubiquity of social media, to cell phones, to the ability of teenagers particularly to have all of this instant feedback in perverse echo chambers.

00:03:10.000 You really say in your book that it's much more about the sort of therapies that we've been using for kids who are troubled.

00:03:16.000 The kids have always been troubled.

00:03:17.000 There's been a systemic change in therapy.

00:03:19.000 What do you make of Haidt's theory?

00:03:21.000 And how does it contrast with your own?

00:03:23.000 Right, so, you know, there's a lot of agreement between me and Haidt.

00:03:26.000 Honestly, there's way more agreement than disagreement.

00:03:28.000 I think, and my last book was about a social contagion spread largely by influencers on social media, right?

00:03:35.000 I'm very aware of how bad social media has been for young people, including their mental health, and I agree. 1.00

00:03:44.000 Full-heartedly support his effort to get them out of schools.

00:03:47.000 I think that's a no-brainer.

00:03:49.000 It's something we've known is bad for kids, and having them on their phones in school just really doesn't make any sense, and there are a lot of harms that come from it.

00:03:56.000 Okay.

00:03:56.000 But does it totally explain the mental health decline of young people?

00:04:00.000 No, it clearly doesn't.

00:04:02.000 Let me just give you one statistic, although I can give you a few.

00:04:05.000 But let me give you one.

00:04:06.000 In 2016, according to the CDC, 2016, One in six American kids between the ages of two and eight had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.

00:04:19.000 Those kids, these are little kids, they weren't on social media.

00:04:22.000 They're not on social media now, but they definitely weren't back in 2016.

00:04:26.000 But also, if you look across countries, look at countries like Israel, okay?

00:04:30.000 Japan.

00:04:31.000 The youth are all on their phones in these countries.

00:04:33.000 In fact, in Israel, they give the smartphones to kids younger than they do in America.

00:04:38.000 But their mental health in terms of anxiety and depression is better.

00:04:42.000 And the reason is, is because it isn't just a question of the phones.

00:04:46.000 It's also a question of the unhealthy life we've given kids, which includes this constant therapy, this constant sense from schools, from parents, and yes, from therapists, that there's something wrong with them, that they have trauma, and that they need a diagnosis and medication.

00:05:01.000 So let's talk about that with regard to specifically young kids, then we'll sort of move up the age chain here.

00:05:05.000 So when we talk about kids that you're talking about, the kids who are two to eight, and the sort of mass therapy that has now been, you know, voiced upon these kids, the overdiagnosis of these kids, it seems like two separate phenomenon for boys and for girls.

00:05:19.000 For boys, There's always been a sort of over-medicalization of boyhood.

00:05:22.000 This goes back to the 1990s, this idea that if a boy can't sit still, which if you've ever met a young boy, they literally cannot sit still.

00:05:28.000 They're just motoring around all the time.

00:05:29.000 That that somehow represents a break from normality and must be medicalized.

00:05:34.000 And that for young girls, insecurity, which again is kind of normal among young girls, that is also a medical issue.

00:05:40.000 What do you see in terms of the over-medicalization?

00:05:42.000 Which are the things that have been treated as medical problems when in reality, they're just failures, for example, of parenting or structure?

00:05:51.000 So, shyness.

00:05:52.000 We never hear a kid described as shy.

00:05:54.000 They have social phobia or social anxiety, right?

00:05:57.000 Every child who's inattentive is told they have ADHD.

00:06:00.000 And by the way, they're often told by the teachers.

00:06:03.000 No one's checking to see if the teacher is particularly good.

00:06:06.000 Or if the lesson is particularly interesting to a five-year-old boy, no, the child has ADHD and they refer him for treatment.

00:06:14.000 And this goes on from phobias, all these things, testing anxiety.

00:06:20.000 If a child is defiant, he has oppositional defiant disorder.

00:06:24.000 It couldn't possibly be a problem of character or, you know, discipline.

00:06:30.000 So everything has become sort of therapized.

00:06:32.000 We've all been bathed in therapy.

00:06:35.000 And normal behaviors, unfortunately, are not only diagnosed, but what we do is we make all these things worse by accommodating them.

00:06:42.000 The second we are told a child, a teacher says, or a child says she might have, you know, nervousness about tests, she's taken to a therapist, she's diagnosed with testing anxiety, and what does the school counselor do?

00:06:55.000 They accommodate it.

00:06:56.000 They give her more time on the test.

00:06:58.000 Well, now it's become a problem for life.

00:07:00.000 You just turned, you know, what might have been a short-term problem into a chronic one.

00:07:05.000 So, let's talk about the therapy that's applied.

00:07:06.000 So, there's really two problems.

00:07:07.000 One is the over-diagnosis, then one is the therapy that's applied.

00:07:10.000 So, as you say, there's a label that has to be put on everything in order to justify the therapy.

00:07:14.000 So, if a kid is being a brat, yelling at adults or whatever, this now becomes an oppositional defiant disorder.

00:07:20.000 For example, what therapy is then applied?

00:07:23.000 Because there are a bunch of different types of therapy and they are not the same by any stretch of the imagination.

00:07:28.000 When it comes to things like, for example, OCD, there's exposure therapies that aren't quite effective.

00:07:34.000 In terms of getting kids to change their behavior with regards to a thing that's very difficult for them.

00:07:39.000 But then there's therapies like talk therapy that are completely ineffective.

00:07:42.000 Which therapies are good?

00:07:44.000 Which therapies are bad?

00:07:44.000 Are all therapies to be treated the same here?

00:07:47.000 So, right, so there are two things.

00:07:49.000 So what I'm concerned about is not therapy in response to a problem.

00:07:54.000 When an intervention, if a child has anorexia, if they have severe OCD, if they have a severe phobia, there are really good therapies.

00:08:04.000 Like, as you said, exposure therapy, which is cognitive behavioral therapy.

00:08:08.000 And what a therapist will do is they address the problem and they actually measure that the child's getting better.

00:08:15.000 But that's not the majority of what we're talking about.

00:08:17.000 What I'm talking about is so-called preventive mental health care, which we've never been good at.

00:08:23.000 That is treating the well.

00:08:25.000 Treating kids who don't have a significant problem.

00:08:28.000 We're doing this through public schools, through things like social-emotional learning.

00:08:32.000 Parents are applying kids with these techniques.

00:08:34.000 They're reading the best-selling parenting books, all written by therapists, and they're applying kids with this constant focus on their emotions.

00:08:42.000 Think about your emotions.

00:08:44.000 And that is leading to more dysregulated kids.

00:08:48.000 But as you said, look, therapies for things like phobias and OCD, they're very good.

00:08:52.000 They might even be essential.

00:08:54.000 So let's talk for a second about the parents in all of this.

00:08:57.000 So in this equation, we've talked about the kids, we've talked about the therapist, but it is the parent who's supposed to be the guardian of their kids from this sort of stuff.

00:09:04.000 And there does seem to be, if we're going to talk about the narcissism of the modern generation, we may be focusing on the wrong generation.

00:09:10.000 We may be focusing on young people who can't take care of themselves, their kids, but it's their parents who are really the problem.

00:09:16.000 Because it used to be that if your kid failed in a particular way, your first thought was reflexive.

00:09:22.000 What did I do?

00:09:22.000 What could I change about my behavior that would maybe change the behavior of my kid?

00:09:26.000 If a teacher came to you and complained about your kid in class, the move wouldn't be to then respond by either medicalizing the kid or by saying that the teacher did something wrong.

00:09:34.000 It might be to say, OK, what am I doing wrong as a parent that I can change at home to actually drill some sense into my kid?

00:09:40.000 And now it seems as though parents are outsourcing the problems to everybody else.

00:09:44.000 If you medicalize a problem, then obviously it's not your fault that the problem is occurring.

00:09:48.000 It's a medical problem.

00:09:49.000 And if that problem can only be solved by a third party, like a therapist, then that prevents you as a parent from having to actually do the hard work necessary in order to curb your child's behavior, which is the most unpleasant part of parenting.

00:09:58.000 I mean, you're a parent, I'm a parent.

00:09:59.000 The worst part of parenting is saying no.

00:10:01.000 Kids, of course, think that the worst part of saying no is that your parents love saying no to you, they want to say no. 0.98

00:10:06.000 Saying no to your kids is like the worst thing in the entire world, especially because, I mean, to be frank, kids are really, really stupid when they're little, and so you'll tell them, if you do A, then B will happen, and then they will do A, and B will happen. 0.96

00:10:17.000 And they'll get very angry at you and upset with you and say, I didn't want B to happen either. 0.99

00:10:20.000 That was why I made the threat.

00:10:22.000 That is why I told you about this conditional statement of A then B. But parents who are so desperate not to say no to their kids are now outsourcing this problem to the therapy profession.

00:10:32.000 Right.

00:10:33.000 So I started the book with that hypothesis.

00:10:35.000 I thought it had to do with the way they were being raised.

00:10:37.000 I noticed that parents were very gentle with their kids.

00:10:40.000 They didn't want to say no.

00:10:41.000 They were always asking their kids for input on the job they were doing.

00:10:45.000 This is so-called gentle parenting or what I call therapeutic parenting because it's very feelings-focused.

00:10:50.000 It's very, you know, abjuring your own authority.

00:10:53.000 And focusing on your child's feelings.

00:10:55.000 Okay, but why do I ultimately not think this is because parents were driving it?

00:11:00.000 So what I realized, and I realized this after I did an investigation into the schools, what I realized is that they had all these mental health experts at your kid's school.

00:11:13.000 Very often, that's the place where most mental health experts are the most aggressive.

00:11:18.000 The school counselors, the school psychologists were so undermining parents' confidence.

00:11:24.000 They weren't trusting themselves.

00:11:27.000 And in fact, since I've written the book, I am inundated with letters from parents thanking me that they don't have to feel guilty anymore when they punish a child for bad behavior.

00:11:37.000 See, the therapeutic experts had so convinced them that they would traumatize the kid if they took away their smartphone or engaged in any other discipline, the parents were afraid to do it.

00:11:48.000 You know, this is one of the problems you've been discussing throughout your career, particularly in your last book and also in this book, this cult of expertise that so many people have given into.

00:11:57.000 And of course, we all use heuristic shortcuts throughout life because we can't all be experts on everything.

00:12:01.000 I mean, if you've got a medical problem, of course you're going to go to a doctor.

00:12:03.000 You didn't go to medical school.

00:12:05.000 But when we decide that there is a class of experts, and these experts actually have an ulterior motive in maximizing their own importance, in maximizing the scope of their own jurisdiction, It makes it very difficult for parents to shy away from that.

00:12:18.000 If you get a call from a school therapist saying your kid has oppositional defiant disorder, for example, you don't know what the hell they're talking about.

00:12:23.000 You think that's an actual disorder that is commonly applied and that the therapist has some sort of objective metric that can be used in order to obtain that diagnosis.

00:12:32.000 And only when you dig into things do you realize that, well, maybe the metric that's being used for the diagnosis is inherently vague.

00:12:38.000 Maybe it turns out that there's really no great way to diagnose this problem and it's just a label being put on a certain set of behaviors that really doesn't apply.

00:12:45.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:12:46.000 And you're not even getting a call from the school therapist.

00:12:49.000 You're getting it from the teacher.

00:12:50.000 And the teacher's giving a diagnosis.

00:12:52.000 And the pediatrician is recommending SSRIs.

00:12:55.000 In both cases, not things they're qualified to do.

00:12:58.000 You know, psychiatric medication is really not the purview of the pediatrician.

00:13:05.000 But nonetheless, people are feeling free to diagnose people's kids and encourage them on a path to medication for things that none of them are qualified, really, to assess.

00:13:16.000 And I'll just say one other thing.

00:13:18.000 You know, it isn't just that they hand out the diagnosis.

00:13:20.000 When a teacher calls a parent, they don't say, your child is acting up.

00:13:24.000 They will tell them, your child probably may have ADHD.

00:13:28.000 But there's something else, too.

00:13:29.000 Nobody stops and says, what am I doing in the environment?

00:13:32.000 What's going on in the environment?

00:13:34.000 That's maybe making things harder for my child.

00:13:38.000 Like, am I handing him an iPad in the morning before school?

00:13:41.000 Things like that.

00:13:42.000 Am I not disciplining the child?

00:13:44.000 Am I never saying no?

00:13:45.000 Is the first time he ever hears the word no from his teacher?

00:13:48.000 Well, no wonder he's not listening to the teacher.

00:13:51.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:14:55.000 So, we've now had years of experience of the over-therapization of kids, and what are the results?

00:15:01.000 I mean, you talk obviously about the level of diagnostics, the level of therapy, and obviously we see the rising levels of suicidality.

00:15:09.000 I guess the counter-argument If I were going to try to steal man, the position would be that this always existed in the population.

00:15:14.000 We're just noticing it now.

00:15:15.000 It's the same argument that's very frequently used whenever you have a social contagion, is the idea that it was always there.

00:15:20.000 One fifth of people were always LGBTQ+.

00:15:23.000 It's just that only now are we noticing and giving freedom to people to be what they want to be.

00:15:27.000 It turns out that one sixth of kids were always Diagnosably mentally ill or had some sort of mental disorder.

00:15:33.000 It's just only now are we getting the therapeutic tools necessary in order to properly diagnose and create therapies for them.

00:15:40.000 How do you counter those sorts of arguments?

00:15:41.000 Yeah, okay, so that's a really good argument.

00:15:45.000 And let me just say, you know, to steel man it further, adolescent mental health has been in steady decline since the 1950s.

00:15:51.000 It's been a precipitous decline in this country, which, by the way, is another reason I don't think social media entirely explains it.

00:15:58.000 We have seen this steep downward trend, okay?

00:16:02.000 Although, you know, I do think social media made things worse, absolutely.

00:16:06.000 But why do I think that it isn't just more awareness of poor mental health?

00:16:11.000 Because it isn't just people getting diagnosed.

00:16:16.000 It's people we're seeing more rumination.

00:16:18.000 This is the number one symptom of depression.

00:16:21.000 More rehashing of bad feelings.

00:16:24.000 Focusing on your pain.

00:16:25.000 Talking about your trauma.

00:16:26.000 That itself is a symptom of depression.

00:16:30.000 Just their willingness to constantly talk about it.

00:16:33.000 But also, they're not showing up for work.

00:16:35.000 They're not showing up for work because of minor problems.

00:16:38.000 They're not showing up for work because they feel traumatized because they don't like the president who was elected.

00:16:43.000 And they're not faking it.

00:16:45.000 These are kids who have been conditioned to be so focused on their feelings that their feelings are predictably, and I show this through the interviews with experts, the genuine psychological research, it shows if you focus on your feelings too much, you will become dysregulated.

00:17:03.000 And that's what we're seeing.

00:17:05.000 These kids are walking around focused on their feelings, and their feelings are constantly out of whack.

00:17:10.000 So, the sort of place that you've chosen to put your lens, obviously, is on the medical industry, on the therapy industry, and all the rest.

00:17:19.000 But if you move beneath that, you mentioned, for example, the trend of teenage angst and problems in teenagers going all the way back to the 1950s.

00:17:27.000 Emile Durkheim suggested that anime was a problem going back to the late 19th century.

00:17:31.000 This basic idea that as societies became unembedded, that as people became unglued from their social structures, from family, from church, from community, that you would end up with greater anime, greater depression, is what he was predicting.

00:17:44.000 I mean, he wrote an entire book called On Suicide that was effectively about this.

00:17:49.000 Is that what we're actually seeing society-wide, and now it's just being turned into sort of medical language?

00:17:53.000 Yes, I totally agree with that.

00:17:56.000 So I believe we are giving kids increasingly unhealthy lives and then we pour in the mental health resources and we're baffled that they're not helping.

00:18:04.000 They're not helping because exactly as you said, kids are detached from community, they're detached from family.

00:18:10.000 And by the way, the psychological literature, if people bothered to read it, and I mean the mental health professionals, if they bothered to read it, they would say that it supports all this.

00:18:20.000 Kids need to be engaged in something bigger than themselves.

00:18:25.000 They do very well with outward focus.

00:18:28.000 Feeling connected to family, having a certain amount of independence, which yes, includes some amount of risk and danger.

00:18:34.000 So, you know, a trip to the store or being able to cook for themselves, things that involve some danger.

00:18:40.000 These things are so good for kids and it's what we're not giving them.

00:18:45.000 By the way, I thought you were going to say fatherlessness.

00:18:47.000 This is like the big thing that conservatives always bring up.

00:18:50.000 Well, she completely ignores fatherlessness. 1.00

00:18:53.000 I don't ignore fatherlessness.

00:18:56.000 Of course, you know, any kind of family instability, including lack of fathers, has had a profound impact on kids.

00:19:03.000 But the thing to know is that a lot of the, you know, poor mental health has coincided with fathers being present.

00:19:11.000 It really has.

00:19:13.000 Some of the kids who are the most diagnosed have fathers present, and I know that from my last book, in which I talked to probably a thousand families, and the vast majority of them had intact family structures.

00:19:26.000 What they didn't have is parents who were willing to exercise authority and say, no, you're not a boy, you're a girl.

00:19:34.000 I mean, and what you're talking about there is something that goes deeper than fatherlessness in sort of the technical sense that there's not a father in the home.

00:19:40.000 It's that there is a role called father.

00:19:42.000 And if no one is playing the role of father, you effectively do have a fatherless family.

00:19:48.000 If the father is playing mom, I mean, it used to be.

00:19:51.000 You know this, of course, because you're Jewish, but the typical Judaic framework is that the

00:19:54.000 masculine attribute is justice and the feminine attribute is mercy.

00:19:58.000 And you do see that in the house a lot.

00:20:00.000 In our house, the reality is that if you want real empathy, you're probably going to go

00:20:04.000 to mommy.

00:20:05.000 And when the bleep hits the fan, it's daddy who's coming down with the hammer.

00:20:10.000 And if Daddy never comes down with the hammer, then you do have a real problem on your hands, particularly when it comes to teenage boys.

00:20:16.000 Once you get to teenage boys, teenage boys are simply not going to listen to Mom when she sets down the rules.

00:20:20.000 It really is going to have to be Dad who does that.

00:20:22.000 And if Dad doesn't do that, well then, what's the impact of having a man in the house who refuses to actually set the rules in any way, shape, or form?

00:20:30.000 One of the things that you talked about there also, is the idea that kids need an orientation outside of themselves.

00:20:36.000 And what's amazing to me is that everything you're talking about is so commonsensical to people who actually have kids.

00:20:42.000 And so one of the things that I'm wondering is whether as we as a society have fewer and fewer children, and as the people who are in positions of power in these various industries, many of them don't have kids at all.

00:20:52.000 Many of them don't have traditional family structures at all.

00:20:55.000 And they're in charge of the education of our children.

00:20:57.000 I mean, the heads of the teachers' unions are not married couples with four kids.

00:21:02.000 They're very often lesbian couples with no kids or lesbian couples with an adopted kid.

00:21:06.000 I mean, that's the story with, I believe, Randy Weingarten, for example, over at the American Federation of Teachers.

00:21:10.000 That's a very different way of viewing how family structure is supposed to work.

00:21:14.000 And so if you're structuring all of teaching around sort of your own anecdotal experience, You're gonna end up with a lack of experience in areas that's really necessary.

00:21:23.000 I know for me, on a Sunday morning, if my kids are not out of the house by 9.30, oriented toward a task, they will start clawing at each other, like, immediately.

00:21:31.000 Because they need a thing to do, and kids need a thing to do, but we're not giving kids a thing to do.

00:21:35.000 We're telling kids that they ought to be coddled, because we've told adults that they ought to be coddled, and now we're treating adults like kids, and kids like small adults, effectively.

00:21:44.000 Yeah, you said so many interesting things.

00:21:45.000 So, first of all, authority.

00:21:48.000 Yes, somebody has to be the authority in the home.

00:21:50.000 I don't necessarily think it has to be the father, but somebody has to be the authority, which, yes, means willingness to punish.

00:21:57.000 But what you said about the subversions of fathers is right. 0.94

00:22:01.000 I think men have changed the most, fathers have changed the most in the last generation.

00:22:06.000 And here's what I mean.

00:22:06.000 It isn't just that they won't punish.

00:22:09.000 It's the way they will even talk to their kids.

00:22:11.000 They're aping the same therapist moms are. 1.00

00:22:14.000 So for instance, no one says to a child, no one, shake it off, you're fine.

00:22:19.000 You almost never hear shake it off.

00:22:20.000 You almost never hear sticks and stones anymore, or you'll live, right?

00:22:25.000 So no one is telling kids, even at a small level, that they can overcome minor injuries.

00:22:32.000 So they don't think they can.

00:22:34.000 You know, one of the phrases that's been banned in our house from very early on, my oldest is now 10, but the phrase that's been banned in our house very early was, that's not fair.

00:22:42.000 That's not fair is completely inapplicable.

00:22:44.000 Because guess what?

00:22:44.000 This is a dictatorship, not a democracy.

00:22:46.000 And fair doesn't come into it.

00:22:48.000 Fair is your perception of how the outcome should work.

00:22:50.000 It is not a reality.

00:22:52.000 And again, that goes to a set of societal values.

00:22:55.000 And I really do think that because we don't have as many kids in the society anymore, People do not have a set of values that is geared toward the raising of children.

00:23:04.000 Another friend, Tim Carney, recently wrote a book about the childlessness of Western culture, and he used as his counter-example Israel. 0.89

00:23:11.000 He and I had talked about that before, and I said, you know, the only Western society that's currently reproducing at above-replacement rates is Israel, and the reason for that is because that is a society where the entire structure of the society is built around setting rules For kids, such that when you go to a playground in Israel and a kid is acting badly, another person who is not a parent of the kid will literally tell the kid to stop it, which is something that is unheard of in the United States. 0.55

00:23:34.000 If you are at a playground in the United States and one kid is bullying another kid, you first try to find the parents of the kid, and then if you can't find the parents of the kid, you try to move your kid from the situation, probably because you're afraid of legal liability or because it's considered rude.

00:23:45.000 In Israel, you'll have some random grandma who will just tell the kids to cut it out, and it's perfectly accepted because, again, when you have that many kids in the society, There need to be rules of the road that everybody sort of agrees on, and that just doesn't exist in the United States anymore. 0.76

00:23:58.000 Right, absolutely right, and I actually talk a lot about Israel in the book, because they do give kids a lot of things that are really good for mental health, like independence, genuine independence from age 8 and on, the kids all walk to school themselves, or get on a bus themselves.

00:24:11.000 But I'll tell you something else, so why don't I focus on things like, have more kids, stay married, Because, yeah, those things are good, but are essential and important.

00:24:23.000 But here's the thing.

00:24:25.000 If you tell people, have more kids, I don't know if they'll have them.

00:24:30.000 But if you tell them, actually, here are the benefits, the mental health benefits of toughening your kids up.

00:24:38.000 So I tried to look at the source code and go a little bit, in some sense, deeper and look at, yes, more kids around is really good for everyone's mental health.

00:24:51.000 Why?

00:24:52.000 Because they realize they end up less fragile, less worried that they're going to fall apart if someone says something mean to them in school, and parents don't have the time To attend to every mean comment like it's a crisis and call it bullying and rushing to school and change the child's seating just because one kid said something mean, right?

00:25:10.000 So it's undeniable that people with You know, bigger families, religious families, intact families, they provide so many mental health benefits to the kid.

00:25:21.000 Just that structure, the outward focus, you know, the more kids around, all that connection to grandparents, all that's very good for kids.

00:25:31.000 But here's the thing that a secular society, and America's increasingly secular, might not know.

00:25:37.000 It's actually way better for your mental health to toughen you up a little bit than to sit around attending to every one of your problems.

00:25:45.000 I know we think it's the gentler, nicer thing to do, but it is turning these kids into emotional basket cases.

00:25:52.000 You know, you mentioned there bullying briefly, and this has been one of my bugaboos for a long time, because one of the big things that people talk about when they talk about suicidal ideation among kids, they usually use this in context of gender dysphoria, for example, where the suggestion is that rates of suicidal ideation among gender dysphoric kids are high specifically because everybody is mean to them, and society is cruel and mean, and it can't be that maybe the kid was experiencing depression and confusion before, and now has been social mediated into gender dysphoria, or into faux gender dysphoria, or rapid onset gender dysphoria, No, it's gotta be that everybody is being really, really mean.

00:26:23.000 And this has been a logic that you see used all the way up to and including the White House is the idea that kids are effectively suicidally ideating because they are being bullied in school.

00:26:33.000 Not only do I see no evidence that that's the case, I see a fair bit of counter evidence

00:26:37.000 that's the case.

00:26:38.000 Bullying in school has probably never been rarer in the United States than it currently

00:26:41.000 is, specifically because the schools have been taught to crack down on it for both liability

00:26:45.000 reasons and for mental health reasons.

00:26:47.000 And second of all, when it comes to actual bullying, as somebody who's viciously bullied

00:26:51.000 throughout my youth, I got to tell you, I don't believe it.

00:26:54.000 I don't think that the evidence is there, that if people are mean to you, that this

00:26:57.000 is what typically makes people suicidal.

00:26:59.000 I think that what makes people suicidal is something that goes far deeper than that.

00:27:05.000 And this kind of notion that bullying, again, I'm not pro-bullying. 0.99

00:27:09.000 Bullies should be punched in the teeth. 1.00

00:27:10.000 In fact, one of the aspects of growing up is you learn to punch bullies in the teeth, which I think is a really, really important lesson to learn. 0.99

00:27:15.000 It's one that I hope to teach my own kids, and I'm teaching my own kids.

00:27:18.000 But this sort of idea that in order to avoid bullying, in order to avoid the hardships of life, and thus to lead you to health and happiness, we have to, We have to wipe out all the bad things that you're experiencing in life and then dumb down bullying to include not just being punched in the face by a bully, but somebody saying a mean word to you or crossing you.

00:27:35.000 That, as you say, is creating fragile kids.

00:27:38.000 Yeah, I mean, a few things.

00:27:39.000 So I think you're generally right.

00:27:41.000 The idea that there is bullying around LGBTQ identities is, I mean, in most of America is at this point laughable.

00:27:50.000 It's the opposite.

00:27:51.000 Kids feel so much pressure to identify as one of the LGBTQ labels.

00:27:57.000 But, you know, is there a different kind of bullying?

00:27:59.000 I think there is.

00:28:00.000 I think that kids are tyrannizing each other with their feelings.

00:28:04.000 We see on university campus the treatment of Jewish kids.

00:28:07.000 I mean, that's a certain amount of bullying.

00:28:09.000 But with the results you just said, which are you're seeing young Jewish, you know, coeds come out and show more grit. 0.98

00:28:17.000 And more strength than I think we've ever seen.

00:28:19.000 It's the opposite.

00:28:21.000 A certain amount of heckling and harassment very often produces the stronger people.

00:28:28.000 And not, of course, to condone any of that.

00:28:30.000 It's abhorrent.

00:28:31.000 But the point is that the hysteria that we all feel, I mean, I do think that's part of why we have fewer kids in this country.

00:28:39.000 More kids are great.

00:28:40.000 I love Carney's book, but we need to have more kids by taking the pressure off parents.

00:28:46.000 We're right now frantic that anytime a child's teased, they could have trauma and this trauma will last a lifetime.

00:28:53.000 It's not true.

00:28:54.000 It's a lie.

00:28:55.000 And the research does not support that, that, that trauma myth.

00:28:59.000 But what we parents need to know that.

00:29:01.000 Yeah, one of the things you're talking about there, which is the ease of parenting, you're totally right about this.

00:29:05.000 It is very, very stressful to be a modern parent where your job is to alleviate every single problem that your kid has.

00:29:12.000 Whereas in the past, having kids basically meant, okay, they go to school, they are expected to do their homework when they come home.

00:29:17.000 And then they're expected to go out in the sunshine until it gets dark, and then they're expected to eat what you put on the table and go to bed, which was, you know, the way that most people were raised for most of human history, actually.

00:29:25.000 You know, the kind of nouveau parenting, where you're expected to hover around your kids and be on them at all times, is incredibly stressful.

00:29:32.000 It's really, really difficult.

00:29:34.000 My wife at one point joked about writing a book called I'm a Bad Mother and So Are You, meaning that the basic kind of concept is that no one can abide by these standards.

00:29:44.000 Right.

00:29:45.000 And parents talk about this to each other all the time.

00:29:48.000 Being a parent is difficult. 1.00

00:29:50.000 Kids are a giant pain in the ass. 1.00

00:29:52.000 They really are. 1.00

00:29:52.000 They're very difficult. 1.00

00:29:53.000 They're wonderful and they're terrific. 1.00

00:29:54.000 And also they're a giant pain in the ass. 1.00

00:29:56.000 They're a huge time suck. 1.00

00:29:57.000 And all of that is true.

00:29:59.000 But it makes it even worse when what you feel is that every single ding on the brand new Mercedes-Benz that is your child is going to wreck the entire value of the car and can't be ironed out. 0.99

00:30:09.000 I think that's why kids became a pain in the ass, by the way. 0.98

00:30:13.000 It's because we made it so labor-intensive to hover. 0.99

00:30:17.000 I mean, you listen to these gentle parenting, you know, these therapeutic parenting experts.

00:30:21.000 I listened to one just the other day, and they say if your child is demanding that the family watch a different movie, this is an example I heard just yesterday, not the movie you want, but a different movie, and they're throwing a tantrum, you pick them up Carry them to their room and sit there with them for a half an hour to an hour until they calm down.

00:30:41.000 Now, you can't do that if you have more than one child.

00:30:45.000 You're not disciplining, you're being their slave.

00:30:49.000 But this is the kind of advice parents get all the time, and it makes having more kids feel impossible.

00:30:55.000 Yeah, and one of the things that I've seen in some of the parenting books is this thing where your kid's fussing, your kid's having a meltdown, a tantrum.

00:31:02.000 And you're supposed to say to them, I see you're feeling sad, aren't you?

00:31:05.000 I see you're feeling really angry, aren't you?

00:31:07.000 So we tried that one time with my oldest daughter.

00:31:09.000 And the problem is that she's smart.

00:31:11.000 So she immediately, she basically, not in these words, she said, why are you patronizing me?

00:31:15.000 Like, yes, I know I'm angry.

00:31:17.000 Yes, I know I'm sad.

00:31:18.000 Like, I don't need you repeating it back to me to feel that.

00:31:21.000 What she really wanted was for us to say, okay, well, until you can calm down, you're going to be in this room and we're going to be in that room.

00:31:26.000 When you calm down, come on back out and then hang out with us.

00:31:29.000 It's this sort of mirroring effect also.

00:31:33.000 It feels like, it's not just kind of this gentle parenting, it's this empathetic parenting.

00:31:37.000 It's all about empathy with the child.

00:31:39.000 Well, I mean, again, I don't think that I ought to empathize with what are essentially small, crazy people.

00:31:44.000 I mean, I've said to my wife before that being a parent is like running an insane asylum.

00:31:48.000 Half the time the kids are wonderful and you're enjoying it, and then half the time they're melting down for legitimately no reason.

00:31:53.000 And that's okay.

00:31:55.000 That's okay.

00:31:56.000 And you're supposed to deal with that. 0.90

00:31:58.000 And there's something else, too, that this is kind of a radical statement, but I think it's very obvious, too, and I can talk about why, but the idea that you're supposed to validate all of your child's feelings is ridiculous.

00:32:14.000 Now, you have to educate a child's feelings a little bit.

00:32:19.000 That's different.

00:32:19.000 That's why therapy is so different for adults.

00:32:21.000 It's one of the many reasons.

00:32:23.000 An adult may want a safe space or whatever it is to just vent in a non-judgmental space in which to vent their worries or feelings without being judged.

00:32:32.000 And you know what?

00:32:33.000 That's your prerogative.

00:32:34.000 But a five-year-old who feels rage that he was served mac and cheese when he wanted a different meal for lunch and throws the bowl at mom needs to be told that that is not, first of all, that the behavior is unacceptable.

00:32:49.000 He has to have a consequence.

00:32:51.000 And he also has to be told that's not a reason for anger.

00:32:55.000 That's not a reason for anger.

00:32:56.000 We can be angry at a lot of things.

00:32:57.000 That's an inappropriate reaction.

00:33:00.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:33:55.000 That's good ranchers calm with promo code Shapiro today in many ways and one of the things that's happening also is

00:34:02.000 the as you say it's creating a countervailing response in kids

00:34:06.000 that significantly worse because You know as we say you have kids I have kids what kids want

00:34:10.000 more than anything else is parental attention It's the thing they desperately want parental attention,

00:34:14.000 and they will get a negative or they will get a positive They don't really care they they would prefer to have

00:34:18.000 negative parental attention than no attention The worst thing that the worst punishment we use with some

00:34:24.000 of our kids is we say I'm going to ignore you until you actually

00:34:26.000 Start acting like a rational human being and deprive you of that attention

00:34:30.000 Because very often kids want the fight because they'd rather have the fight with you than to be ignored completely.

00:34:36.000 But what we do when we engage in these sorts of, okay, we're gonna validate your feelings,

00:34:41.000 you're actually encouraging them to feel bad in order to get your attention for feeling bad.

00:34:46.000 Which, I mean, you see this with your adult friends too.

00:34:48.000 There are people who just love being depressed because they can't wait to tell their friends

00:34:51.000 about how depressed they are and how terrible their life is

00:34:54.000 because, you know, that's what's fun is you get to go out to brunch

00:34:56.000 and then talk about how terrible your life is.

00:34:58.000 Nobody likes these friends.

00:34:59.000 And you're creating these adults out of your children when you do this sort of stuff.

00:35:04.000 You're making kids more dysregulated.

00:35:07.000 And by the way, there's really good research going back to the 1960s by Diana Bomerund and showing that authoritative parents, rule-based parenting, loving but rule-based, always produce the happiest, most successful, and kids with the best relationship with mom and dad.

00:35:24.000 Not authoritarian, which is cold.

00:35:26.000 Obedience is everything.

00:35:27.000 By the way, it doesn't exist in America.

00:35:29.000 It's now just a complete straw man.

00:35:31.000 Whenever they bring it up, that's authoritarian parenting and not permissive.

00:35:35.000 And we don't have that anymore either.

00:35:36.000 We have this surveillance parenting, this hysterical therapeutic surveillance parenting, which has all the detriments of permissive family parenting minus the independence.

00:35:47.000 We never give kids independence and they need it.

00:35:50.000 They need to be trusted with knives at some point.

00:35:52.000 Otherwise they're gonna be like animals in a cage and that's what they are.

00:35:56.000 You brought up Jonathan Haidt and I love, I certainly love his hypothesis and we agree about so much,

00:36:03.000 but one of the things that I'm worried about with this generation is not just their levels of distress,

00:36:08.000 which is very alarming, but also their lack of sense of efficacy

00:36:12.000 that they can do in the world.

00:36:15.000 And we've never seen kids at such high rates, young adults now saying they don't feel they can improve their lives, that things they do matter.

00:36:24.000 And that's why I think there are no tech founders in this generation so far.

00:36:29.000 So we need to reorient the way these kids are being raised.

00:36:33.000 And part of that means we need to get the experts out of the room so that they stop undermining parents' sense that they know what's best for their own kids.

00:36:40.000 So one of the most surprising things that you talk about in the book, you talked about it on Joe's show as well, was some of your findings with regard to the statistics on suicidality among people who claim gender dysphoria.

00:36:51.000 You had suggested that actually it is not radically higher than other segments of the teenage population when you remove other factors.

00:36:58.000 I wanted you to kind of explicate that and explain what you mean by that.

00:37:01.000 Sure, this was the more recent study out of, I think, Finland, which said that when you control for other comorbidities, other psychological problems, the rates of suicidality among transgender-identified youth are not higher.

00:37:17.000 than they are for the adolescents more generally.

00:37:20.000 So, look, you know, these kids, part of the reason a lot of them are attracted to the idea that they might be transgender is they have a lot of mental health struggles at the same time.

00:37:32.000 And the question is, is the transgender or the gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in the biological sense, in the biological sex, is that driving the misery? 0.98

00:37:42.000 Actually, it turns out not to be.

00:37:44.000 And so, you know, predictably, transition, gender transition is no cure for it. 1.00

00:37:50.000 So let's talk about some of the cures that you recommend here.

00:37:53.000 So obviously we kind of know who the villains are.

00:37:56.000 We know who the, on a general level, but let's get more specific about that.

00:38:00.000 So when you look at the educational system or you look at the medical system, if you were going to target institutions to change, which would be kind of top of the list for you?

00:38:09.000 Schools.

00:38:10.000 Schools have to shrink mental health staff right now.

00:38:13.000 What they are doing is they are obsessing with children.

00:38:16.000 I just got an email just yesterday from a friend whose daughter's in public school, and I talk about in the book the really horrifying CDC-authored suicide studies, mental health surveys, sorry, mental health surveys that kids across the country are routinely taking.

00:38:32.000 Her daughter said she was getting them weekly.

00:38:36.000 How is your mental health?

00:38:37.000 How is your mental health now?

00:38:38.000 Have you considered cutting? 0.95

00:38:39.000 Have you considered burning?

00:38:41.000 Choking?

00:38:42.000 Have you ever played this game?

00:38:43.000 Over and over and over.

00:38:45.000 These kids are so oppressively being asked about whether they're thinking about suicide, whether it's presented as a coping mechanism.

00:38:55.000 You know, having mental health struggles is valorized in schools with the counselors who are constantly checking in, and these surveys are a disaster, but so are the mental health staffs who are always directing these.

00:39:07.000 They're directing social-emotional learning.

00:39:09.000 They're constantly obsessing over kids' bad feelings, and it's way too much for kids.

00:39:15.000 When it comes to these schools and the staffs, school therapists, how often are they actually, say, medical psychiatrists, as opposed to, you know, just somebody who got a degree in therapy?

00:39:25.000 Yeah, so almost never.

00:39:26.000 What they are is they usually get a one-year accreditation as a school counselor, and they're leading kids in exercises like social-emotional learning.

00:39:34.000 Now, what is social-emotional learning?

00:39:36.000 It sounds great.

00:39:37.000 The idea is to teach kids emotional regulation techniques.

00:39:40.000 That's the idea, and who wouldn't want that, right?

00:39:43.000 So kids are more self-aware and more courteous to each other.

00:39:48.000 I mean, that's how they sell it.

00:39:51.000 For reasons I explain in the book, what it does is, if you're going to teach emotional regulation, invariably the conversation turns to negative feelings.

00:40:02.000 Why?

00:40:02.000 Because if you're asking kids, what was the time when you were happy, there's nothing to teach.

00:40:06.000 So it's always asking kids, what's a time when you felt left out, bullied, traumatized, when you felt alone or misunderstood?

00:40:14.000 And it's getting kids to ruminate on their bad feelings.

00:40:17.000 This is, again, the number one symptom of depression.

00:40:20.000 And, of course, it also tees up a criticism of the parents.

00:40:23.000 Why?

00:40:23.000 Because whose job was it to keep the child safe?

00:40:26.000 So, invariably, the question is, well, where was your mom?

00:40:30.000 Where was your dad?

00:40:31.000 So this kind of social emotional learning for those reasons that feelings focus leads to kids who are more dysregulated.

00:40:38.000 Now as I was writing the book, I predicted all of this.

00:40:40.000 I explained why I thought this was really bad for kids based on the research.

00:40:44.000 But what I didn't know was while I was thinking this, two teams of researchers in Europe were thinking the same and they were testing it.

00:40:51.000 So a team of researchers in Australia evaluated something called the WISE Teens Program.

00:40:56.000 This was social-emotional techniques offered to kids in school in Australia.

00:41:00.000 And another team of researchers was doing a meta-analysis of these techniques in England.

00:41:06.000 Everything from anti-bullying techniques, to wellness tips, to social-emotional techniques.

00:41:11.000 And in both sets of studies, they concluded the same.

00:41:15.000 Kids, as opposed to a control group that did not go through the program, The teenagers who went through the program emerged more anxious, more depressed, and more alienated from mom and dad.

00:41:27.000 It really is amazing that there's this bizarre bifurcation in how we think about kids in America and in Europe as well.

00:41:34.000 On the one hand, we treat kids as absolutely fragile, gotta be super careful not to scratch or dent them.

00:41:41.000 On the other hand, we pour all this stuff into their heads with the assumption that they can't be damaged.

00:41:47.000 As you mentioned, if you keep asking a kid over and over and over about, say, their gender identity, or whether they feel depressed, or whether they've ever thought about cutting, You are implanting ideas in kids' heads.

00:41:58.000 I mean, this is, in fact, how you actually get kids to think in a particular way.

00:42:01.000 They're unbelievably malleable at this age.

00:42:03.000 And so when you point this out, people say, well, are you saying that if you just keep saying this stuff to kids, then they might start actually doing this sort of stuff?

00:42:10.000 The answer is yes.

00:42:11.000 If you keep saying things to kids, they will end up doing this sort of stuff.

00:42:14.000 And by the way, we actually do know that from the best social research with regard to suicidal ideation.

00:42:18.000 It turns out that suicide is actually fairly contagious.

00:42:21.000 And that when you continue to tell kids, in a particular social circle, that one kid has committed suicide, have you thought about committing suicide?

00:42:27.000 Have you thought about committing?

00:42:28.000 If you do that, this is why there's been a crackdown on social media, for example, on talking about suicide, specifically because of the social contagions that can occur.

00:42:36.000 When it comes to politically correct diseases, Then all of a sudden, there's no social contagion at all.

00:42:40.000 Then if you say, for example, that gender dysphoria is socially contagious, which it clearly is, then no, no, no, no, no.

00:42:46.000 It's always been that way.

00:42:48.000 When you say, well, you know, it's weird because if you go a couple generations ago, and you can look at it on the age spectrum, people above the age of 60 in this country, less than 1% are going to openly identify as LGBTQ+.

00:42:58.000 And when you look at people who are below the age of 20, you're looking at probably a quarter of the population.

00:43:03.000 Now, that doesn't seem like an evolutionary bottleneck.

00:43:05.000 That seems like a social, no, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

00:43:07.000 It can't be that if you keep speaking into people's brains over and over, it has any impact on their brains.

00:43:12.000 So on the one hand, highly, highly bubble-wrapped, don't let anything touch them.

00:43:16.000 On the other hand, we will pour as much toxic nonsense in your ears as we possibly can under the assumption that it will have no impact.

00:43:23.000 And it will fly under the flag of mental health. 0.90

00:43:25.000 That's the thing.

00:43:26.000 That's why I don't think it's just a smartphone.

00:43:28.000 Again, because teens are identifying with their diagnoses.

00:43:33.000 It's not just they feel limited by that.

00:43:35.000 By the way, there's a classic effect of, you know, diagnosis is that a side effect is that you feel limited by that diagnosis.

00:43:42.000 Now you feel like you can't change.

00:43:43.000 You need a pill or you need a therapist to help you.

00:43:46.000 And we're seeing that.

00:43:48.000 These kids are absolutely convinced they're depressed.

00:43:51.000 Over half of the rising generation thinks their mental health is not good.

00:43:55.000 We've never seen these numbers.

00:43:57.000 And why?

00:43:57.000 Exactly what you're saying.

00:43:58.000 We're constantly suggesting to kids that they might be depressed.

00:44:02.000 Now, here's the funny thing.

00:44:03.000 You said you're right.

00:44:05.000 We know, and the CDC came out with, and others have issued reports on what makes suicide contagious.

00:44:11.000 Things like presenting it as a coping mechanism.

00:44:14.000 Things like normalizing it and valorizing the subject.

00:44:18.000 This is all stuff that we know we're not supposed to do in the media, but mental health, you know, so-called experts in schools, the school counselors are doing this all the time.

00:44:27.000 And again, these surveys are now given out by pediatricians, they're authored by the CDC, and they're given out in school, and they're constantly presenting a world to children that is dark, Where kids are constantly engaging in self-harm, where their mental health is so shaky.

00:44:44.000 We're telling kids that the kids around them are barely getting by.

00:44:48.000 And by the way, how are you doing?

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00:45:53.000 So, again, we talked about the schools.

00:45:55.000 When it comes to sort of the professionals outside of school, what changes need to happen there?

00:46:00.000 Because there's a pipeline that exists, obviously, where the school therapist, with a one-year degree that is virtually meaningless, decides that they now know how to diagnose mental health problems.

00:46:10.000 Then they funnel that person to an actual psychologist.

00:46:13.000 And then people say, okay, well, a psychologist is a doctor.

00:46:15.000 That person went to actual medical school, or at least to PsyD.

00:46:18.000 You know, they at least have some sort of background in this.

00:46:21.000 But it seems like the psychology profession has also become unbelievably captured by a lot of this ideology.

00:46:28.000 So what I want to do is reset the default settings.

00:46:33.000 Parents at the first sign of children's distress should not drop off their children with a therapist, especially if they're able to stabilize a child through other environmental changes, right?

00:46:45.000 If your child has a severe problem, OCD, for example, as you mentioned, Or anorexia and you can't stabilize them other way than by all means the question now becomes what kind of treatment?

00:46:56.000 Should it be something like cognitive behavioral therapy?

00:46:59.000 But dropping a kid off at the first sign of trouble or first sign of distress with a psychodynamic psychotherapist who's going to sit around and talking about their trauma.

00:47:09.000 They might end up with exactly what we're seeing, a population that is nursing every injury, nursing every emotional hurt.

00:47:18.000 I mean, in the book, I argue that they're basically emotional hypochondriacs, which doesn't mean they're faking it.

00:47:23.000 That's not what hypochondriasis is.

00:47:25.000 It's not what they now call illness anxiety disorder.

00:47:28.000 It's not what it is.

00:47:29.000 It's people who apply a hyper focus to their problems, in this case, their emotional problems, and thereby magnify those problems To the point where they're experiencing so much distress they don't want to show up for work.

00:47:41.000 So how did all of this get started?

00:47:43.000 The over-diagnosis, the over-therapying.

00:47:46.000 Was this a money game or was this an ideological game?

00:47:50.000 So Frank Ferretti, he's a wonderful British sociologist, he argues that this has been a steady march across the West of professionalizing all relationships.

00:47:59.000 And I think it's very compelling what he says, that we have this natural mistrust of informal relationships.

00:48:07.000 And we try to professionalize it.

00:48:09.000 And that's why parents think they need to ape therapists in talking to their own kids.

00:48:13.000 God forbid you were ever natural with your child, right?

00:48:17.000 And as you said about your daughter, she knows when she's being patronized.

00:48:20.000 When your mom's pretending to be a shrink, the kid knows it, right?

00:48:24.000 When they're saying, I'm setting a boundary or, you know, this sort of language where they're so obviously aping the shrink or aping the therapist, it creates this incredibly unnatural relationship.

00:48:37.000 Look, we want natural relationships in the home, which doesn't, you know, of course, parents aren't supposed to be their kids' friends, they're supposed to be authorities, but they also want to be natural, which means their own sense of humor, their own values should prevail.

00:48:51.000 So, you know, I think that march has been going on for the last 50 years, the sense that, you know, you can't trust people to their own informal relationships.

00:49:01.000 We need to hire experts to get in there and fix them.

00:49:04.000 One of the things that is kind of amazing is just that parents are now expected, because as you talk about, there's this professional relationship that's supposed to attend on being a parent.

00:49:14.000 You're actually not socializing your kids properly at all, because a professional is paid to have a relationship with you.

00:49:19.000 A professional is somebody who is going to put their own personal reaction to what you are doing aside in order to deal with you.

00:49:25.000 You are the center of their world.

00:49:27.000 If I hire somebody to do a job, I'm the client, they're the professional, that's the way it works.

00:49:31.000 But what families used to be was a place where socialization actually happened.

00:49:34.000 You see this largely among siblings, right? 0.99

00:49:37.000 Siblings treat each other like crap half the time. 0.99

00:49:38.000 I mean, they really do. 0.98

00:49:40.000 I mean, in every single family, they love each other and they protect each other and they protect from outside threat.

00:49:45.000 And also they bully each other and they say mean things to each other and they fight with each other.

00:49:48.000 That's just like, that's normal.

00:49:49.000 And that's, it's a really good socializing thing because that is how the world works.

00:49:53.000 And as a parent, if your kid is being really terrible and you display a little bit of anger with regard to your kid, Everybody treats that as though that's the worst thing in the world.

00:50:01.000 I'm not so sure that that's the worst thing in the world, given the fact that in the real world, if you act badly, you will be met with anger.

00:50:07.000 And this idea that it's everybody else's job to sort of respond to your feelings in the way you wish to be responded to, that you're upset, you're throwing a tantrum, and everybody is then supposed to cave to you, as opposed to reacting how actually the rest of the world normally will, that is not socializing your kid at all.

00:50:24.000 It's doing the reverse.

00:50:26.000 That's exactly right.

00:50:27.000 And what happens is these kids that show up after being so accommodated by their parents, so gently treated on expert advice, they can't sit still and they end up medicated.

00:50:36.000 That's what we do because we can't get them to govern themselves because to do that, you have to set down rules and consequences.

00:50:43.000 And we call that gentler.

00:50:45.000 It's not gentler to go in there and rework your child's personality medically and make them feel that they have a brain problem when they don't, when they just haven't learned to govern themselves.

00:50:55.000 You know, you mentioned extended family.

00:50:56.000 That's one of the things we don't give kids. 0.99

00:50:58.000 And here's the secret.

00:50:59.000 If a child, exactly like you said, you send a kid off to a therapist, a psychodynamic therapist, a kid who doesn't have a serious problem, and they're going to explore everything that might be the cause.

00:51:11.000 And you're going to find out, and I've heard this again and again, that the child was nursing You know, some purported hurt that happened years ago that was extremely minor, but the therapist is paid to rehash it with them ad infinitum.

00:51:25.000 But, you know, if a child brings their problem to an aunt or a cousin or an uncle, you know, there's a limit for how long the child will be allowed to go on.

00:51:36.000 At some point, they'll say, not only will the person be incentivized to reinforce your values, but at some point they'll say, go play.

00:51:43.000 Go play.

00:51:43.000 Yes, your sister hit you.

00:51:45.000 It's not the end of the world.

00:51:45.000 Go play.

00:51:46.000 I'm sorry.

00:51:47.000 The therapist will never say, go play.

00:51:50.000 So the endless rumination never stops.

00:51:54.000 The endless treating of people as though they are two years old has obviously had radical ramifications for the society at large, not just for kids, but for adults.

00:52:05.000 And I'm picking two as sort of the reason, because when kids are two, you can't reason with them.

00:52:09.000 When kids are two, you can't actually tell them their feelings aren't valid because they literally don't understand anything when they're two, they're two.

00:52:15.000 And so we treat six years old like they're two, we treat 15 year olds like they're two, and now we're treating 25 and 30 year olds like they're two.

00:52:22.000 And so what you have are, just this week, employees at Google, which is an incredibly successful and powerful corporation, probably the most powerful corporation on the planet.

00:52:30.000 Employees at Google staking out their boss's office, occupying their boss's office to try to get Google to somehow remove its investments from Cloud services for the Israeli military in the belief that it's the job of the Google CEO to validate their feelings and make them feel better about their own political priors.

00:52:49.000 And what's even more amazing is how many of these corporations are deciding to go along with this.

00:52:54.000 This is the part that I don't understand. 1.00

00:52:55.000 There was always a feeling, at least until the last few years, there's always a feeling that, OK, so we're doing all this crap and it's really stupid. 0.99

00:53:02.000 And then there will come a point where somebody becomes an adult. 0.99

00:53:05.000 And the real world will clock them in the face.

00:53:07.000 And it turns out that when you actually, when you educate an entire generation this way, almost universally, they don't even know how to break the cycle.

00:53:16.000 The cycle just continues.

00:53:17.000 So instead of the CEO of Google just saying, OK, well, you're here, you're all fired, which is what a normal CEO would do.

00:53:23.000 OK, how can we bargain with you?

00:53:25.000 I want to validate your feelings, make you feel better about yourself.

00:53:27.000 And the world gets worse.

00:53:29.000 Well, you know, I'm going to say something kind of funny here, and that is that, you know, I hate to be on the side of defending the CEO of Google, but a 25-year-old who's throwing a temper tantrum is scary.

00:53:42.000 It's really different than a two-year-old, and that's what we've got.

00:53:45.000 We've got 25-year-olds together throwing temper tantrums.

00:53:49.000 And, you know, as I say in the book, it's the reason they don't want to grow up.

00:53:53.000 They don't feel up to it.

00:53:55.000 We've got 25-year-old basket cases who don't know how to govern themselves, don't know that there's a world outside of their feelings that's more important, and they are acting truly like overgrown toddlers.

00:54:09.000 And that has ramifications for the next generation.

00:54:12.000 We're talking about the current young generation, but there's another generation that just is not going to exist because of this.

00:54:17.000 Because it turns out that one of the predicates to becoming a parent is actually getting outside yourself.

00:54:22.000 In fact, that's most of what being a parent is, is getting outside yourself.

00:54:25.000 It's most of what being married is, is forming a relationship with another human being

00:54:28.000 where the marriage is about both of you and the institution is more important than either of you

00:54:32.000 and the relationship is more important than whatever you're feeling in the moment.

00:54:35.000 No one has ever wanted to do the dishes or take out the garbage, but you do it anyway

00:54:38.000 because that's what you are supposed to do.

00:54:41.000 And if you are not prepared to make that sort of commitment, and then if you're not prepared to make the far fuller

00:54:45.000 and more demanding commitment of actually raising another human being

00:54:49.000 to be a responsible human being, then what's gonna happen is what is happening,

00:54:52.000 which is people are not forming relationships.

00:54:55.000 They're averting to pornography or to bots or to 900 number, whatever it is.

00:54:59.000 So they won't form a relationship.

00:55:01.000 And then even if they do, it'll be sort of a bizarre angsty teenage relationship.

00:55:05.000 Like this has been one of my critiques of pop culture for a long time is Taylor Swift is almost as old as I am.

00:55:11.000 And she's still writing songs like she's a 16 year old girl about her latest breakup.

00:55:16.000 And it's like, Taylor Swift is the same age as my wife.

00:55:18.000 My wife is a doctor with four children.

00:55:21.000 I don't know in what world you get to be a youngsty teenager when you're 34, 35 years old.

00:55:26.000 At a certain point, in human history, that was a point where some women were grandmothers.

00:55:30.000 I don't even know what we're talking about here, but that is the entire generation we've created, and what that means is that there's another generation that simply is not going to exist.

00:55:37.000 I think this does contribute in a sort of backward way to the Tim Carney point, which is that people who are not capable of having kids just will not have kids.

00:55:45.000 And here's the other thing, here's the secret in my view, and that is that growing up, taking on responsibilities is actually the solution to a lot of teenage angst.

00:55:55.000 Thinking of others, doing for others, having that outward focus actually makes you feel less angsty about your own situation.

00:56:04.000 And not only are they not being raised to feel ready for that, they don't feel up to it.

00:56:10.000 They are so focused on themselves.

00:56:13.000 And I totally agree with you.

00:56:14.000 Of all the things I worry about, the rising generation, I think, you know, and I have kids, I think about my own kids, of all the things that looks hard growing up today, the hardest looks dating.

00:56:25.000 Because when you have a population so focused on itself and its own feelings, as you said, forming a family with such people looks almost impossible.

00:56:35.000 Yeah, I think this is also one of the reasons why you see differential rates, as you mentioned, in other countries of happiness among young people in other countries.

00:56:42.000 As you say, the more responsibility you give to young people, the happier they are, actually.

00:56:47.000 I mean, kids are actually looking for responsibilities.

00:56:49.000 They want to be treated as people who are capable of carrying forward those responsibilities.

00:56:54.000 We've actually given our kids, in some ways, the worst message, which is, follow your dream, no responsibilities.

00:57:00.000 When the reality is, what most people are looking for is a place in life.

00:57:03.000 They're looking for a thing to do.

00:57:05.000 They're looking for an actual program that is going to bring them meaning in their lives.

00:57:09.000 And you see that in places around the world where there is a program for bringing meaning in their lives.

00:57:13.000 So I'm gonna take the example of Israel again, just because it's the one I'm most familiar with.

00:57:16.000 In Israel, when you're 18 years old, you go and do national service and you go to the army.

00:57:20.000 And that is a radical burden.

00:57:22.000 I mean, you literally stop your life and you go to a place where you might be killed.

00:57:25.000 I mean, right now they're at war.

00:57:27.000 And yet young people in Israel are significantly happier by the numbers than young people in the United States, where they have no such burdens.

00:57:33.000 There's no draft.

00:57:34.000 You're not expected to do anything.

00:57:36.000 The federal government might relieve your student loans.

00:57:38.000 You can go major in something completely useless.

00:57:40.000 But in Israel, you are expected to contribute immediately upon hitting the age of 18.

00:57:45.000 And then When you're done with that, you're expected to get a job, and you're expected to get married, and you're expected to have kids, and you're expected to contribute to the community and to the nation.

00:57:54.000 And we've lost that.

00:57:55.000 That used to be the way it was in the United States also.

00:57:58.000 I mean, if you go back to the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, that was the way that it was.

00:58:01.000 If you were a young person, it's not that you were expected to go to the military because there wasn't a draft until the late 30s, but you were expected to get a job.

00:58:07.000 The understanding was that as you graduated high school, you were either going to college to get better credential to get a job, or you were going to go out and start supporting your family and go get a job and move out of the house right now, and you're expected to get married.

00:58:19.000 And as we keep delaying this sort of stuff, it's not that people are getting happy.

00:58:22.000 It turns out that we now have, you know, what my friend Jordan Peterson would say is choice paralysis.

00:58:28.000 We're faced with, you can do anything you want.

00:58:30.000 Well, what if I don't want to do any of those things because I don't know which one of those things to choose?

00:58:34.000 Right, so what can American parents do?

00:58:37.000 Start with chores.

00:58:38.000 Chores is a great way to give kids independence and a sense that they are contributing to the greater good, which by the way is amazing for the mental health.

00:58:46.000 Look, exactly what you said in the book, you know, I compare other cultures who are doing better than American kids.

00:58:53.000 One of them is Israel in terms of things like anxiety and depression.

00:58:57.000 And they're on the same smartphones.

00:58:59.000 But what they are doing, as you said, is they have to grow up.

00:59:03.000 They have to take on responsibility for someone besides themselves.

00:59:07.000 And we have divested American kids of this in two ways. 0.68

00:59:10.000 One, we have to give them chores. 0.97

00:59:11.000 We don't give them any responsibility.

00:59:13.000 We don't give them any independence we need to.

00:59:15.000 They have to be sent to the store or to work on a project that will better the family.

00:59:20.000 Okay, so these types of things are really good, but here's the other thing we don't do.

00:59:24.000 In our trauma-obsessed culture, we're afraid to tell them what their grandparents and great-grandparents went through, because we're so afraid of traumatizing them.

00:59:32.000 What they need to be told is, your grandparents and great-grandparents, they've gotten through really hard things, and you can too.

00:59:40.000 Yeah, this is the one of the things that I think just as a society we've lost.

00:59:44.000 We call them first world problems, but they're really not even first world problems.

00:59:48.000 They're just modern problems.

00:59:49.000 And the modern problems are so much lower in scale and scope than anything that our predecessors had to face.

00:59:55.000 This is why when I see young people and they say, I don't have any hope for the future.

00:59:58.000 I mean, your present right now is better than anything that your grandparents ever experienced for their entire life, if they died, any time in the last 20 years.

01:00:08.000 The bizarre notion that you're experiencing at the richest time in human history, this suffering that is absolutely cataclysmic, It's amazing and I think that it's actually tearing apart the country.

01:00:21.000 It's the reason why people go to catastrophism because if they don't feel responsibility and they don't know a way to go, I think one of the kind of bizarre kind of side effects of that is you end up with a lot of literature and movies that are all about sort of the post-apocalyptic era.

01:00:34.000 In the sense that those are very simple decisions, right?

01:00:38.000 Now the question is, do you eat, do you not eat?

01:00:39.000 I think people are so thirsty and hungry for simpler choices, because there is no choice matrix, that they're consuming literature that is largely about making extremely simple choices in limited circumstances.

01:00:52.000 And when you're pining for that, it's not long until you get there, because you're going to make those circumstances for yourself.

01:00:59.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:00:59.000 I always ask people to tell me about their grandparents or great-grandparents because invariably the story is one of privation, it's one of poverty, it's one of all kinds of hardship.

01:01:09.000 And I tell the story in the book of my own grandmother who was born in 1927 to a poor family of immigrants and her mother died in childbirth.

01:01:18.000 She eventually was raised by an older sister because her father had four kids and couldn't take care of all of them.

01:01:24.000 And she was raised by her older sister.

01:01:27.000 She then got polio and spent a year in an iron lung.

01:01:30.000 And she ended up not only married to my grandfather, she went off to college, but she ended up one of the happiest, most grateful people I've ever known.

01:01:39.000 And the idea that she wouldn't be able to form a family never entered her head.

01:01:44.000 Okay.

01:01:44.000 And the idea that somehow that she had been permanently marked by a year of isolation, which she had, and it was real isolation.

01:01:51.000 It was an iron lung.

01:01:52.000 It wasn't like, you know, being, you know, lockdowns, which were, you know, obviously very hard on kids.

01:01:57.000 But the idea that she couldn't recover never entered her mind, probably because no team of counselors suggested to her that she had childhood trauma.

01:02:08.000 Hey, well, Abigail, if you're going to give a final note to parents as we leave here, what is your sort of final note to parents who are just thinking of where to put their kids in schools?

01:02:17.000 How should they make that decision?

01:02:19.000 So, gosh, I would say, number one, parental authority.

01:02:23.000 Kids need your authority.

01:02:24.000 So wherever you're going to send them, make sure they know your values, that you're in charge, that you know what's best for them, and make sure that we communicate our values to our kids.

01:02:35.000 We're doing a lousy job of that in the country, and we send them off to school where teachers can't wait to pass on their values to your kids.

01:02:43.000 So don't let that happen.

01:02:44.000 They need more independence.

01:02:46.000 They need more chores.

01:02:48.000 You have to give them a sense of meaning and extended family and siblings.

01:02:52.000 That's all really, really good for kids.

01:02:54.000 And the final thing I'll just say is everyone's obsessed with making kids happy.

01:02:58.000 We should be more focused on making them strong.

01:03:01.000 If you make them strong, they will be happy.

01:03:04.000 Abigail Shrey, I really appreciate the time.

01:03:05.000 The book is fantastic.

01:03:06.000 Go check it out right now.

01:03:07.000 Bad Therapy, available everywhere.

01:03:09.000 Thanks, Abigail.

01:03:10.000 Thank you.

01:03:11.000 Ben Shapiro's Sunday special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

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01:03:23.000 Editing is by Chris Ridge.

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01:03:37.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

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01:03:43.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 05, 2024

Resisting Indoctrination | Abigail Shrier

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