Abigail Schreier is 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. Her latest book, Bad Therapy, 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. 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 overvaluing every emotion children express. This is a conversation filled with critical analysis, insightful commentary and the fearless pursuit of truth. This is The Sunday Special, and we're privileged to have Abigail on the show again. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We'll be looking out for your most-wanted promo codes throughout the week. Thank you so much for all the support we've gotten from you, our listeners. We really appreciate it. Sincerely, Sarah and Ben. Sarah: Ben: . . . Sarah's Note: We're looking forward to hearing back from you all on what you think of this episode! Thanks, Sarah: . . , , , and & . , Rachel: , & , Thank you, - (Alicia: ) and . ( ) (P. ( ) (A.M. ) ( ) & (B. (C) ( ) & ( ) . ) (C). (V) (A) [A. M. (AQA) ( ) ) & (B) ) ... (S. , etc.) (F) & [A] (A] (D) . ) ) [AQE (ATS (AJE (C] ) ? ), ? (QAQR (AV ) , ) ) (BQE ) . & AQE? etc. & BQE & ) : AQA ) Is This Is a Good Thing (A Good Thing? )
00:00:15.000And 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.
00:00:26.000See, 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.
00:00:36.000Today, 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.
00:00:48.000Abigail Schreier's career trajectory is as impressive as it has been impactful.
00:00:52.000After obtaining her undergrad degree from Columbia University, she further honed her critical thinking skills at Oxford University, where she delved into philosophy.
00:00:59.000Following 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.
00:01:09.000After law school, Abigail embarked on a career in journalism, quickly establishing herself as a forthright, incisive commentator whose work often challenges mainstream perspectives.
00:01:18.000Abigail 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.
00:01:29.000Since 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.
00:01:37.000Released 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.
00:01:49.000Today, 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.
00:02:03.000We'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.
00:02:12.000Abigail's background in law and journalism equips her with a unique lens through which to analyze the intersections of policy, culture, and personal experience.
00:02:19.000Insights that are crucial for anyone concerned with the future of our society and the well-being of the next generation.
00:02:24.000So, buckle up as we prepare for a conversation filled with critical analysis, insightful commentary, and the fearless pursuit of truth.
00:02:46.000So let's talk about what's ailing the kids.
00:02:49.000Why 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.
00:02:59.000He 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.
00:03:10.000You 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.
00:03:49.000It'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.
00:04:06.000In 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.
00:04:19.000Those kids, these are little kids, they weren't on social media.
00:04:22.000They're not on social media now, but they definitely weren't back in 2016.
00:04:26.000But also, if you look across countries, look at countries like Israel, okay?
00:04:31.000The youth are all on their phones in these countries.
00:04:33.000In fact, in Israel, they give the smartphones to kids younger than they do in America.
00:04:38.000But their mental health in terms of anxiety and depression is better.
00:04:42.000And the reason is, is because it isn't just a question of the phones.
00:04:46.000It'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.
00:05:01.000So let's talk about that with regard to specifically young kids, then we'll sort of move up the age chain here.
00:05:05.000So 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.
00:05:19.000For boys, There's always been a sort of over-medicalization of boyhood.
00:05:22.000This 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.
00:05:28.000They're just motoring around all the time.
00:05:29.000That that somehow represents a break from normality and must be medicalized.
00:05:34.000And that for young girls, insecurity, which again is kind of normal among young girls, that is also a medical issue.
00:05:40.000What do you see in terms of the over-medicalization?
00:05:42.000Which are the things that have been treated as medical problems when in reality, they're just failures, for example, of parenting or structure?
00:06:35.000And normal behaviors, unfortunately, are not only diagnosed, but what we do is we make all these things worse by accommodating them.
00:06:42.000The 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?
00:08:25.000Treating kids who don't have a significant problem.
00:08:28.000We're doing this through public schools, through things like social-emotional learning.
00:08:32.000Parents are applying kids with these techniques.
00:08:34.000They're reading the best-selling parenting books, all written by therapists, and they're applying kids with this constant focus on their emotions.
00:08:54.000So let's talk for a second about the parents in all of this.
00:08:57.000So 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.
00:09:04.000And 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.
00:09:10.000We 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.
00:09:16.000Because it used to be that if your kid failed in a particular way, your first thought was reflexive.
00:09:22.000What could I change about my behavior that would maybe change the behavior of my kid?
00:09:26.000If 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.
00:09:34.000It 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?
00:09:40.000And now it seems as though parents are outsourcing the problems to everybody else.
00:09:44.000If you medicalize a problem, then obviously it's not your fault that the problem is occurring.
00:09:49.000And 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.
00:09:58.000I mean, you're a parent, I'm a parent.
00:09:59.000The worst part of parenting is saying no.
00:10:01.000Kids, of course, think that the worst part of saying no is that your parents love saying no to you, they want to say no.
00:10:06.000Saying 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.
00:10:17.000And they'll get very angry at you and upset with you and say, I didn't want B to happen either.
00:10:22.000That 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.
00:10:41.000They were always asking their kids for input on the job they were doing.
00:10:45.000This is so-called gentle parenting or what I call therapeutic parenting because it's very feelings-focused.
00:10:50.000It's very, you know, abjuring your own authority.
00:10:53.000And focusing on your child's feelings.
00:10:55.000Okay, but why do I ultimately not think this is because parents were driving it?
00:11:00.000So 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.
00:11:13.000Very often, that's the place where most mental health experts are the most aggressive.
00:11:18.000The school counselors, the school psychologists were so undermining parents' confidence.
00:11:27.000And 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.
00:11:37.000See, 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.
00:11:48.000You 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.
00:11:57.000And of course, we all use heuristic shortcuts throughout life because we can't all be experts on everything.
00:12:01.000I mean, if you've got a medical problem, of course you're going to go to a doctor.
00:12:05.000But 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.
00:12:18.000If 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.
00:12:23.000You 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.
00:12:32.000And only when you dig into things do you realize that, well, maybe the metric that's being used for the diagnosis is inherently vague.
00:12:38.000Maybe 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.
00:12:52.000And the pediatrician is recommending SSRIs.
00:12:55.000In both cases, not things they're qualified to do.
00:12:58.000You know, psychiatric medication is really not the purview of the pediatrician.
00:13:05.000But 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.
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00:16:45.000These 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.
00:17:05.000These kids are walking around focused on their feelings, and their feelings are constantly out of whack.
00:17:10.000So, 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.
00:17:19.000But 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.
00:17:27.000Emile Durkheim suggested that anime was a problem going back to the late 19th century.
00:17:31.000This 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.
00:17:44.000I mean, he wrote an entire book called On Suicide that was effectively about this.
00:17:49.000Is that what we're actually seeing society-wide, and now it's just being turned into sort of medical language?
00:17:56.000So 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.
00:18:04.000They're not helping because exactly as you said, kids are detached from community, they're detached from family.
00:18:10.000And 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.
00:18:20.000Kids need to be engaged in something bigger than themselves.
00:19:13.000Some 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.
00:19:26.000What they didn't have is parents who were willing to exercise authority and say, no, you're not a boy, you're a girl.
00:19:34.000I 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.
00:19:40.000It's that there is a role called father.
00:19:42.000And if no one is playing the role of father, you effectively do have a fatherless family.
00:19:48.000If the father is playing mom, I mean, it used to be.
00:19:51.000You know this, of course, because you're Jewish, but the typical Judaic framework is that the
00:19:54.000masculine attribute is justice and the feminine attribute is mercy.
00:19:58.000And you do see that in the house a lot.
00:20:00.000In our house, the reality is that if you want real empathy, you're probably going to go
00:20:05.000And when the bleep hits the fan, it's daddy who's coming down with the hammer.
00:20:10.000And 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.
00:20:16.000Once you get to teenage boys, teenage boys are simply not going to listen to Mom when she sets down the rules.
00:20:20.000It really is going to have to be Dad who does that.
00:20:22.000And 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?
00:20:30.000One of the things that you talked about there also, is the idea that kids need an orientation outside of themselves.
00:20:36.000And what's amazing to me is that everything you're talking about is so commonsensical to people who actually have kids.
00:20:42.000And 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.
00:20:52.000Many of them don't have traditional family structures at all.
00:20:55.000And they're in charge of the education of our children.
00:20:57.000I mean, the heads of the teachers' unions are not married couples with four kids.
00:21:02.000They're very often lesbian couples with no kids or lesbian couples with an adopted kid.
00:21:06.000I mean, that's the story with, I believe, Randy Weingarten, for example, over at the American Federation of Teachers.
00:21:10.000That's a very different way of viewing how family structure is supposed to work.
00:21:14.000And 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.
00:21:23.000I 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.
00:21:31.000Because they need a thing to do, and kids need a thing to do, but we're not giving kids a thing to do.
00:21:35.000We'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.
00:21:44.000Yeah, you said so many interesting things.
00:22:34.000You 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.
00:22:42.000That's not fair is completely inapplicable.
00:22:52.000And again, that goes to a set of societal values.
00:22:55.000And 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.
00:23:04.000Another friend, Tim Carney, recently wrote a book about the childlessness of Western culture, and he used as his counter-example Israel.
00:23:11.000He 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.
00:23:34.000If 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.
00:23:45.000In 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.
00:23:58.000Right, 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.
00:24:11.000But 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.
00:24:25.000If you tell people, have more kids, I don't know if they'll have them.
00:24:30.000But if you tell them, actually, here are the benefits, the mental health benefits of toughening your kids up.
00:24:38.000So 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.
00:24:52.000Because 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?
00:25:10.000So it's undeniable that people with You know, bigger families, religious families, intact families, they provide so many mental health benefits to the kid.
00:25:21.000Just that structure, the outward focus, you know, the more kids around, all that connection to grandparents, all that's very good for kids.
00:25:31.000But here's the thing that a secular society, and America's increasingly secular, might not know.
00:25:37.000It'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.
00:25:45.000I know we think it's the gentler, nicer thing to do, but it is turning these kids into emotional basket cases.
00:25:52.000You 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.
00:26:23.000And 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.
00:26:33.000Not only do I see no evidence that that's the case, I see a fair bit of counter evidence
00:26:38.000Bullying in school has probably never been rarer in the United States than it currently
00:26:41.000is, specifically because the schools have been taught to crack down on it for both liability
00:26:45.000reasons and for mental health reasons.
00:26:47.000And second of all, when it comes to actual bullying, as somebody who's viciously bullied
00:26:51.000throughout my youth, I got to tell you, I don't believe it.
00:26:54.000I don't think that the evidence is there, that if people are mean to you, that this
00:26:57.000is what typically makes people suicidal.
00:26:59.000I think that what makes people suicidal is something that goes far deeper than that.
00:27:05.000And this kind of notion that bullying, again, I'm not pro-bullying.
00:27:09.000Bullies should be punched in the teeth.
00:27:10.000In 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.
00:27:15.000It's one that I hope to teach my own kids, and I'm teaching my own kids.
00:27:18.000But 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.
00:27:35.000That, as you say, is creating fragile kids.
00:28:55.000And the research does not support that, that, that trauma myth.
00:28:59.000But what we parents need to know that.
00:29:01.000Yeah, one of the things you're talking about there, which is the ease of parenting, you're totally right about this.
00:29:05.000It is very, very stressful to be a modern parent where your job is to alleviate every single problem that your kid has.
00:29:12.000Whereas in the past, having kids basically meant, okay, they go to school, they are expected to do their homework when they come home.
00:29:17.000And 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.
00:29:25.000You 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.
00:29:34.000My 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.
00:29:59.000But 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.
00:30:09.000I think that's why kids became a pain in the ass, by the way.
00:30:13.000It's because we made it so labor-intensive to hover.
00:30:17.000I mean, you listen to these gentle parenting, you know, these therapeutic parenting experts.
00:30:21.000I 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.
00:30:41.000Now, you can't do that if you have more than one child.
00:30:45.000You're not disciplining, you're being their slave.
00:30:49.000But this is the kind of advice parents get all the time, and it makes having more kids feel impossible.
00:30:55.000Yeah, 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.
00:31:02.000And you're supposed to say to them, I see you're feeling sad, aren't you?
00:31:05.000I see you're feeling really angry, aren't you?
00:31:07.000So we tried that one time with my oldest daughter.
00:31:18.000Like, I don't need you repeating it back to me to feel that.
00:31:21.000What 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.
00:31:26.000When you calm down, come on back out and then hang out with us.
00:31:29.000It's this sort of mirroring effect also.
00:31:33.000It feels like, it's not just kind of this gentle parenting, it's this empathetic parenting.
00:31:37.000It's all about empathy with the child.
00:31:39.000Well, I mean, again, I don't think that I ought to empathize with what are essentially small, crazy people.
00:31:44.000I mean, I've said to my wife before that being a parent is like running an insane asylum.
00:31:48.000Half the time the kids are wonderful and you're enjoying it, and then half the time they're melting down for legitimately no reason.
00:31:56.000And you're supposed to deal with that.
00:31:58.000And 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.
00:32:14.000Now, you have to educate a child's feelings a little bit.
00:32:23.000An 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.
00:32:34.000But 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.
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00:33:55.000That's good ranchers calm with promo code Shapiro today in many ways and one of the things that's happening also is
00:34:02.000the as you say it's creating a countervailing response in kids
00:34:06.000that significantly worse because You know as we say you have kids I have kids what kids want
00:34:10.000more than anything else is parental attention It's the thing they desperately want parental attention,
00:34:14.000and they will get a negative or they will get a positive They don't really care they they would prefer to have
00:34:18.000negative parental attention than no attention The worst thing that the worst punishment we use with some
00:34:24.000of our kids is we say I'm going to ignore you until you actually
00:34:26.000Start acting like a rational human being and deprive you of that attention
00:34:30.000Because very often kids want the fight because they'd rather have the fight with you than to be ignored completely.
00:34:36.000But what we do when we engage in these sorts of, okay, we're gonna validate your feelings,
00:34:41.000you're actually encouraging them to feel bad in order to get your attention for feeling bad.
00:34:46.000Which, I mean, you see this with your adult friends too.
00:34:48.000There are people who just love being depressed because they can't wait to tell their friends
00:34:51.000about how depressed they are and how terrible their life is
00:34:54.000because, you know, that's what's fun is you get to go out to brunch
00:34:56.000and then talk about how terrible your life is.
00:35:07.000And 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.
00:35:31.000Whenever they bring it up, that's authoritarian parenting and not permissive.
00:35:35.000And we don't have that anymore either.
00:35:36.000We have this surveillance parenting, this hysterical therapeutic surveillance parenting, which has all the detriments of permissive family parenting minus the independence.
00:35:47.000We never give kids independence and they need it.
00:35:50.000They need to be trusted with knives at some point.
00:35:52.000Otherwise they're gonna be like animals in a cage and that's what they are.
00:35:56.000You brought up Jonathan Haidt and I love, I certainly love his hypothesis and we agree about so much,
00:36:03.000but one of the things that I'm worried about with this generation is not just their levels of distress,
00:36:08.000which is very alarming, but also their lack of sense of efficacy
00:36:15.000And 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.
00:36:24.000And that's why I think there are no tech founders in this generation so far.
00:36:29.000So we need to reorient the way these kids are being raised.
00:36:33.000And 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.
00:36:40.000So 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.
00:36:51.000You had suggested that actually it is not radically higher than other segments of the teenage population when you remove other factors.
00:36:58.000I wanted you to kind of explicate that and explain what you mean by that.
00:37:01.000Sure, 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.
00:37:17.000than they are for the adolescents more generally.
00:37:20.000So, 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.
00:37:32.000And 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?
00:37:44.000And so, you know, predictably, transition, gender transition is no cure for it.
00:37:50.000So let's talk about some of the cures that you recommend here.
00:37:53.000So obviously we kind of know who the villains are.
00:37:56.000We know who the, on a general level, but let's get more specific about that.
00:38:00.000So 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?
00:38:10.000Schools have to shrink mental health staff right now.
00:38:13.000What they are doing is they are obsessing with children.
00:38:16.000I 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.
00:38:32.000Her daughter said she was getting them weekly.
00:38:45.000These kids are so oppressively being asked about whether they're thinking about suicide, whether it's presented as a coping mechanism.
00:38:55.000You 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.
00:39:09.000They're constantly obsessing over kids' bad feelings, and it's way too much for kids.
00:39:15.000When 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?
00:39:26.000What 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.
00:39:34.000Now, what is social-emotional learning?
00:39:51.000For 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.
00:40:31.000So this kind of social emotional learning for those reasons that feelings focus leads to kids who are more dysregulated.
00:40:38.000Now as I was writing the book, I predicted all of this.
00:40:40.000I explained why I thought this was really bad for kids based on the research.
00:40:44.000But 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.
00:40:51.000So a team of researchers in Australia evaluated something called the WISE Teens Program.
00:40:56.000This was social-emotional techniques offered to kids in school in Australia.
00:41:00.000And another team of researchers was doing a meta-analysis of these techniques in England.
00:41:06.000Everything from anti-bullying techniques, to wellness tips, to social-emotional techniques.
00:41:11.000And in both sets of studies, they concluded the same.
00:41:15.000Kids, 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.
00:41:27.000It really is amazing that there's this bizarre bifurcation in how we think about kids in America and in Europe as well.
00:41:34.000On the one hand, we treat kids as absolutely fragile, gotta be super careful not to scratch or dent them.
00:41:41.000On the other hand, we pour all this stuff into their heads with the assumption that they can't be damaged.
00:41:47.000As 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.
00:41:58.000I mean, this is, in fact, how you actually get kids to think in a particular way.
00:42:01.000They're unbelievably malleable at this age.
00:42:03.000And 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?
00:42:11.000If you keep saying things to kids, they will end up doing this sort of stuff.
00:42:14.000And by the way, we actually do know that from the best social research with regard to suicidal ideation.
00:42:18.000It turns out that suicide is actually fairly contagious.
00:42:21.000And that when you continue to tell kids, in a particular social circle, that one kid has committed suicide, have you thought about committing suicide?
00:42:28.000If 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.
00:42:36.000When it comes to politically correct diseases, Then all of a sudden, there's no social contagion at all.
00:42:40.000Then if you say, for example, that gender dysphoria is socially contagious, which it clearly is, then no, no, no, no, no.
00:42:48.000When 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+.
00:42:58.000And when you look at people who are below the age of 20, you're looking at probably a quarter of the population.
00:43:03.000Now, that doesn't seem like an evolutionary bottleneck.
00:43:05.000That seems like a social, no, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
00:43:07.000It can't be that if you keep speaking into people's brains over and over, it has any impact on their brains.
00:43:12.000So on the one hand, highly, highly bubble-wrapped, don't let anything touch them.
00:43:16.000On 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.
00:43:23.000And it will fly under the flag of mental health.
00:44:05.000We know, and the CDC came out with, and others have issued reports on what makes suicide contagious.
00:44:11.000Things like presenting it as a coping mechanism.
00:44:14.000Things like normalizing it and valorizing the subject.
00:44:18.000This 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.
00:44:27.000And 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.
00:44:44.000We're telling kids that the kids around them are barely getting by.
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00:45:53.000So, again, we talked about the schools.
00:45:55.000When it comes to sort of the professionals outside of school, what changes need to happen there?
00:46:00.000Because 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.
00:46:10.000Then they funnel that person to an actual psychologist.
00:46:13.000And then people say, okay, well, a psychologist is a doctor.
00:46:15.000That person went to actual medical school, or at least to PsyD.
00:46:18.000You know, they at least have some sort of background in this.
00:46:21.000But it seems like the psychology profession has also become unbelievably captured by a lot of this ideology.
00:46:28.000So what I want to do is reset the default settings.
00:46:33.000Parents 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?
00:46:45.000If 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?
00:46:56.000Should it be something like cognitive behavioral therapy?
00:46:59.000But 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.
00:47:09.000They might end up with exactly what we're seeing, a population that is nursing every injury, nursing every emotional hurt.
00:47:18.000I mean, in the book, I argue that they're basically emotional hypochondriacs, which doesn't mean they're faking it.
00:47:29.000It'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.
00:47:43.000The over-diagnosis, the over-therapying.
00:47:46.000Was this a money game or was this an ideological game?
00:47:50.000So Frank Ferretti, he's a wonderful British sociologist, he argues that this has been a steady march across the West of professionalizing all relationships.
00:47:59.000And I think it's very compelling what he says, that we have this natural mistrust of informal relationships.
00:48:09.000And that's why parents think they need to ape therapists in talking to their own kids.
00:48:13.000God forbid you were ever natural with your child, right?
00:48:17.000And as you said about your daughter, she knows when she's being patronized.
00:48:20.000When your mom's pretending to be a shrink, the kid knows it, right?
00:48:24.000When 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.
00:48:37.000Look, 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.
00:48:51.000So, 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.
00:49:01.000We need to hire experts to get in there and fix them.
00:49:04.000One 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.
00:49:14.000You're actually not socializing your kids properly at all, because a professional is paid to have a relationship with you.
00:49:19.000A professional is somebody who is going to put their own personal reaction to what you are doing aside in order to deal with you.
00:49:49.000And that's, it's a really good socializing thing because that is how the world works.
00:49:53.000And 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.
00:50:01.000I'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.
00:50:07.000And 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.
00:50:27.000And 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.
00:50:36.000That'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.
00:50:45.000It'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.
00:50:55.000You know, you mentioned extended family.
00:50:56.000That's one of the things we don't give kids.
00:50:59.000If 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.
00:51:11.000And 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.
00:51:25.000But, 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.
00:51:36.000At 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.
00:51:47.000The therapist will never say, go play.
00:51:50.000So the endless rumination never stops.
00:51:54.000The 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.
00:52:05.000And I'm picking two as sort of the reason, because when kids are two, you can't reason with them.
00:52:09.000When 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.
00:52:15.000And 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.
00:52:22.000And 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.
00:52:30.000Employees 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.
00:52:49.000And what's even more amazing is how many of these corporations are deciding to go along with this.
00:52:54.000This is the part that I don't understand.
00:52:55.000There 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.
00:53:02.000And then there will come a point where somebody becomes an adult.
00:53:05.000And the real world will clock them in the face.
00:53:07.000And 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.
00:53:29.000Well, 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.
00:53:42.000It's really different than a two-year-old, and that's what we've got.
00:53:45.000We've got 25-year-olds together throwing temper tantrums.
00:53:49.000And, you know, as I say in the book, it's the reason they don't want to grow up.
00:53:55.000We'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.
00:54:09.000And that has ramifications for the next generation.
00:54:12.000We're talking about the current young generation, but there's another generation that just is not going to exist because of this.
00:54:17.000Because it turns out that one of the predicates to becoming a parent is actually getting outside yourself.
00:54:22.000In fact, that's most of what being a parent is, is getting outside yourself.
00:54:25.000It's most of what being married is, is forming a relationship with another human being
00:54:28.000where the marriage is about both of you and the institution is more important than either of you
00:54:32.000and the relationship is more important than whatever you're feeling in the moment.
00:54:35.000No one has ever wanted to do the dishes or take out the garbage, but you do it anyway
00:54:38.000because that's what you are supposed to do.
00:54:41.000And if you are not prepared to make that sort of commitment, and then if you're not prepared to make the far fuller
00:54:45.000and more demanding commitment of actually raising another human being
00:54:49.000to be a responsible human being, then what's gonna happen is what is happening,
00:54:52.000which is people are not forming relationships.
00:54:55.000They're averting to pornography or to bots or to 900 number, whatever it is.
00:55:01.000And then even if they do, it'll be sort of a bizarre angsty teenage relationship.
00:55:05.000Like this has been one of my critiques of pop culture for a long time is Taylor Swift is almost as old as I am.
00:55:11.000And she's still writing songs like she's a 16 year old girl about her latest breakup.
00:55:16.000And it's like, Taylor Swift is the same age as my wife.
00:55:18.000My wife is a doctor with four children.
00:55:21.000I don't know in what world you get to be a youngsty teenager when you're 34, 35 years old.
00:55:26.000At a certain point, in human history, that was a point where some women were grandmothers.
00:55:30.000I 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.
00:55:37.000I 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.
00:55:45.000And 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.
00:55:55.000Thinking of others, doing for others, having that outward focus actually makes you feel less angsty about your own situation.
00:56:04.000And not only are they not being raised to feel ready for that, they don't feel up to it.
00:56:14.000Of 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.
00:56:25.000Because 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.
00:56:35.000Yeah, 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.
00:56:42.000As you say, the more responsibility you give to young people, the happier they are, actually.
00:56:47.000I mean, kids are actually looking for responsibilities.
00:56:49.000They want to be treated as people who are capable of carrying forward those responsibilities.
00:56:54.000We've actually given our kids, in some ways, the worst message, which is, follow your dream, no responsibilities.
00:57:00.000When the reality is, what most people are looking for is a place in life.
00:57:27.000And yet young people in Israel are significantly happier by the numbers than young people in the United States, where they have no such burdens.
00:57:36.000The federal government might relieve your student loans.
00:57:38.000You can go major in something completely useless.
00:57:40.000But in Israel, you are expected to contribute immediately upon hitting the age of 18.
00:57:45.000And 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.
00:57:55.000That used to be the way it was in the United States also.
00:57:58.000I mean, if you go back to the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, that was the way that it was.
00:58:01.000If 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.
00:58:07.000The 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.
00:58:19.000And as we keep delaying this sort of stuff, it's not that people are getting happy.
00:58:22.000It turns out that we now have, you know, what my friend Jordan Peterson would say is choice paralysis.
00:58:28.000We're faced with, you can do anything you want.
00:58:30.000Well, what if I don't want to do any of those things because I don't know which one of those things to choose?
00:58:34.000Right, so what can American parents do?
00:58:38.000Chores 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.
00:58:46.000Look, exactly what you said in the book, you know, I compare other cultures who are doing better than American kids.
00:58:53.000One of them is Israel in terms of things like anxiety and depression.
00:59:11.000We don't give them any responsibility.
00:59:13.000We don't give them any independence we need to.
00:59:15.000They have to be sent to the store or to work on a project that will better the family.
00:59:20.000Okay, so these types of things are really good, but here's the other thing we don't do.
00:59:24.000In 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.
00:59:32.000What they need to be told is, your grandparents and great-grandparents, they've gotten through really hard things, and you can too.
00:59:40.000Yeah, this is the one of the things that I think just as a society we've lost.
00:59:44.000We call them first world problems, but they're really not even first world problems.
00:59:49.000And the modern problems are so much lower in scale and scope than anything that our predecessors had to face.
00:59:55.000This is why when I see young people and they say, I don't have any hope for the future.
00:59:58.000I 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.
01:00:08.000The 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.
01:00:21.000It'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.
01:00:34.000In the sense that those are very simple decisions, right?
01:00:38.000Now the question is, do you eat, do you not eat?
01:00:39.000I 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.
01:00:52.000And when you're pining for that, it's not long until you get there, because you're going to make those circumstances for yourself.
01:00:59.000I 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.
01:01:09.000And 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.
01:01:18.000She eventually was raised by an older sister because her father had four kids and couldn't take care of all of them.
01:01:24.000And she was raised by her older sister.
01:01:27.000She then got polio and spent a year in an iron lung.
01:01:30.000And 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.
01:01:39.000And the idea that she wouldn't be able to form a family never entered her head.
01:01:52.000It wasn't like, you know, being, you know, lockdowns, which were, you know, obviously very hard on kids.
01:01:57.000But 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.
01:02:08.000Hey, 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?
01:02:24.000So 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.
01:02:35.000We'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.