The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 427. Bad Therapy, Weak Parenting, Broken Children ｜ Abigail Shrier

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. Today I'm talking to Abigail Schreier.

00:01:13.080 I last talked to her about two years ago when I first re-emerged on the podcast scene.

00:01:18.860 She was the first person I talked to in this new series of podcasts, and she had just published her book, Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. 0.95

00:01:29.980 So I was quite apprehensive about talking to her because, I mean, that's a hot topic now, but it was like a verboten topic at that point, and I was barely on my feet.

00:01:38.540 Anyways, we had a very good conversation, which I think eventually YouTube took down, if I remember correctly, because, as you know, there's nothing that you can't talk about less than the transgender issue.

00:01:50.740 Anyways, Abigail has a new book coming out, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, which is slated for release in early 2024, but which is available for purchase now.

00:02:01.460 Now, she moved from her concern with the transgender phenomena and the medical barbarism that accompanied its hypothetical treatment to an analysis, a much broader analysis, of what has gone wrong with the therapeutic enterprise as such.

00:02:16.380 Now, that's something about which you can talk about for a very long time.

00:02:19.720 And we do, in fact, talk about that for about an hour and a half on YouTube and then peripherally for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side, so you can join us for that.

00:02:28.640 Welcome aboard.

00:02:29.360 So I think it's about two years since we talked, and if I remember correctly, you were the first guest I had on again after I more or less got back on my feet and made me very nervous because you'd written this contentious book, and I was sure that we'd get thrashed to death by YouTube, which we did.

00:02:50.620 But what you've done is extremely useful, and it looks to me to some degree as if the tide might be turning, and so I don't know what you think about that.

00:03:03.700 Maybe you could start by telling people about your second last book, and then we can talk about your new one, which is going to be releasing relatively soon.

00:03:11.740 But let's walk through your first book and tell everybody what—

00:03:16.740 Sure.

00:03:17.640 Thank you so much for having me on again, Jordan.

00:03:20.080 It's great to be here.

00:03:21.140 And so my first book was about their sudden rise in transgender identification among teen girls.

00:03:29.120 We were seeing this huge rise in it.

00:03:31.060 Of course, it was very contentious subject matter, and I hypothesized it was part of a social contagion.

00:03:38.240 And kids on social media and talking to each other, their friends and therapists, actually, and deciding they were transgender and rushing to start hormones and surgeries.

00:03:51.880 And one of the things I learned when I interviewed hundreds of parents, as I did, and at this point I've talked to over 1,000, is, first of all, how much therapy kids were getting.

00:04:03.800 Two, how much parents were relying on therapists to not only help them with their kids, but to guide their parenting.

00:04:11.840 And three, I learned just how much mischief therapists were making, because they often made this sense of being transgender much, much worse.

00:04:21.180 They reified it in these kids.

00:04:23.580 So then I began to wonder, what other kinds of mischief were therapists making with kids?

00:04:28.540 I see.

00:04:29.140 So you're trying to make yourself even more popular than you've already been made, eh?

00:04:33.660 Yeah, well, you know, seven years ago, I started to think—well, longer than that, but I suppose I said it publicly seven years ago—

00:04:42.780 I started to think that the universities were doing more harm than good.

00:04:45.940 You know, and that's a hell of a thing to think after you've spent 25 years at top-tier universities trying to provide people with a genuine education.

00:04:55.700 And now I certainly believe the universities are doing more harm than good.

00:05:01.140 And I mean, we saw a spectacular example of that in D.C. last week, which was, I thought, when I watched that clip of the MIT, UPenn, and Harvard presidents,

00:05:11.720 that it was the worst thing I'd seen on the news in my life, you know, just that glimpse that it gave everyone into this bottomless pit of victim-victimizer false moral narrative.

00:05:26.200 And it's unbelievably simple-minded and pernicious effects.

00:05:32.040 Stunning.

00:05:32.920 But, you know, I have thought, too, increasingly in recent years that therapy does more harm now than it does good.

00:05:41.020 And I think the reason for that is that, you know, when I was at McGill in the 80s, and then through most of my career,

00:05:49.700 the clinical psychologists I knew were, it was hard to become a clinical psychologist, and they were well-trained.

00:05:56.780 They were scientifically trained, and they were careful and methodical, especially the behaviorists, you know.

00:06:03.120 And the psychoanalysts, they were rare and generally extremely intelligent and more creative and open.

00:06:09.660 And so I thought the therapeutic enterprise was a pretty admirable, was pretty admirable.

00:06:16.960 And I really enjoyed being a clinician.

00:06:19.760 But the whole field got invaded by people who have nowhere near the intelligence or the wisdom to be doing what they're doing.

00:06:30.260 The sort of naive social worker types who are ideology-addled to the nth degree. 0.97

00:06:35.320 And I had a colleague at Harvard, Richard McNally, who was very concerned about the instilling of false memories by foolish therapists. 0.70

00:06:44.620 That started to become a real issue in the 1990s.

00:06:47.400 And, you know, and it was all a consequence of therapists who had one theory about pathology, insisting that it explained absolutely everything in the universe of moral striving, let's say.

00:07:00.260 And that weakness that was obvious there has just magnified itself tremendously.

00:07:06.960 So this is my fear and my shame for that matter.

00:07:11.180 Tell me what, so you broadened out from your concern, the concern you started to develop in relationship to the trans phenomenon per se.

00:07:19.620 So let's, tell me more about what you saw there in terms of the therapists facilitating these identity disorders.

00:07:27.080 Tell me why you became curious about that generalization.

00:07:30.260 And then, most painfully of all, explain what you discovered.

00:07:34.980 Sure.

00:07:35.700 So in researching bad therapy, I, first of all, I started out with a totally different hypothesis.

00:07:42.160 I knew that we were, these kids were getting more mental health intervention than any generation prior, the rising generation. 1.00

00:07:48.280 I knew that they were getting more diagnosis and more psych meds and more therapeutic intervention in schools.

00:07:54.700 But I still didn't think therapy was necessarily the problem because while 40% of them were getting therapy, it still wasn't a majority.

00:08:03.520 And yet we'd seen their mental health fall apart.

00:08:07.240 We knew that the rise in therapy and therapeutic intervention was somehow coinciding with worse mental health.

00:08:13.060 That, that, that of course, shouldn't be the case.

00:08:15.160 Like with breast cancer, you know, more access, more treatment, better treatment and more access to it has seen, you know, rates of death from breast cancer plummet.

00:08:23.400 And that's what we would expect to see with mental health.

00:08:25.360 And we're not seeing that.

00:08:26.640 But I still thought, you know, it was possibly just the way kids were being raised.

00:08:31.980 Maybe they were being raised differently, or perhaps it was just a smartphone.

00:08:35.560 And then I began to look into what the iatrogenic effects of therapy are.

00:08:43.080 What are the, what are the ways that therapy can hurt you?

00:08:46.300 And there's a literature on this.

00:08:48.700 Unfortunately, it's not a literature most therapists want to acknowledge.

00:08:52.160 They want to claim that therapy has this amazing power to heal, but that it can never hurt.

00:08:58.380 And of course, there's no treatment for, for which that's true. 0.88

00:09:02.300 Anything, you know, Tylenol can damage your liver.

00:09:05.000 Anything that can help can also harm.

00:09:08.300 And so I began to look into, well, were these kids getting a lot more therapy?

00:09:13.500 And not only were the harms we were seeing in this generation, the lack of agency, the listlessness, the family alienation, the anxiety, depression, all effects of, you know, iatrogenic effects of therapy, harmful effects of bad therapy.

00:09:29.160 But we were seeing this, you know, in, in, it was, sorry, it was being applied not only from actual therapists, but all over the schools and, and from parents.

00:09:42.940 Parents were having therapists guide their parenting and schools were having therapists do trauma-informed care with all the kids.

00:09:50.640 So I started realizing that these kids were getting a lot more psychological intervention than I realized and that it was bad.

00:09:57.060 Okay, so what, let's talk about trauma-informed care and let's talk about why you concluded that it was bad.

00:10:06.240 I mean, you pointed, first of all, to the fact that as there's been more and more therapeutic intervention, you know, as the schools and the universities have been turned into therapeutic hotbeds, the outcome is that mental health has become worse.

00:10:20.760 Now, you know, obviously self-serving therapists are going to say, well, that's just more evidence that even despite our efforts, even more therapy is necessary, right?

00:10:32.020 That's the logical response to that. But obviously you're not convinced that that's the case and you're implying at least, or maybe making a direct accusation that there's something about the therapeutic industry per se that's actually making mental health worse.

00:10:46.220 Now, Greg Lukianoff certainly has, is making that case.

00:10:50.320 And I would say it's a case that Jonathan Haidt is probably, what would you say, he's, he's, he's supportive of, of, of that implication.

00:11:00.740 Why did you come to the conclusion that the enterprise is doing more harm than good? And what evidence is there for that, do you think?

00:11:08.300 Well, because they're not treating the sick, they're treating the well.

00:11:11.220 Well, so we know that the risk of iatrogenesis of the healer introducing a harm is greatest when you're treating people who don't need the treatment to begin with.

00:11:21.600 Okay. So we know that if you're, if you're gushing blood, going to an ER is an important thing to do.

00:11:27.440 It's necessary. It's lifesaving.

00:11:28.880 But if you have a small bruise, you're likely to get, you're much more at risk of getting an infection from the ER, picking up, picking up, you know, a MRSA or some other bacteria from an emergency room visit than you are at, you know, than you stand to benefit.

00:11:45.620 And the same is true with preventive care.

00:11:48.240 We shifted from treating kids and treating adolescents with severe mental health problems to the idea that everyone should have therapy.

00:11:57.780 And there we exposed a vast population to risk, the risk of all the known harms of therapy.

00:12:06.760 Now, you know, I'm not someone who's against therapy.

00:12:09.640 I'm not someone who denies that it can be important and very useful and even curative.

00:12:15.060 But when you treat kids who are actually don't have a severe problem, you're at much greater risk that they're just going to the therapist will just introduce harms.

00:12:25.920 And I saw it firsthand, certainly, with the kids who convinced themselves that they were transgender. 0.76

00:12:31.680 Very often with a therapist, the idea was reified.

00:12:34.880 And we see that across the board from everything from anxiety, depression, family alienation, the loss of a sense of agency we're seeing in the rise of generation.

00:12:47.180 They have an external locus of control in rates we've never seen before.

00:12:50.720 They don't believe they can improve their own life.

00:12:52.960 And they are highly treatment dependent.

00:12:55.040 They think they have to call a therapist or an adult before they make any decision.

00:12:58.680 These are young adults who feel that they can't make a decision in their lives.

00:13:02.100 So we're seeing a lot of the harms that therapy can cause in those are the same ones that plague the rising generation.

00:13:11.060 Right.

00:13:11.460 Okay.

00:13:11.760 So you're pointing to a couple of factors that play a causal role, let's say, in the pathologization of therapy recipients.

00:13:20.420 The first would be false diagnosis.

00:13:24.360 So, for example, with the kids who have so-called gender dysphoria, I mean, you can look at this technically and it's quite straightforward thing to do.

00:13:30.960 So basically, when anyone is in a position where they might be seeking or are likely to be offered psychotherapy, the fundamental reason for that is generally an excess of negative emotion and a dearth of positive emotion.

00:13:49.080 So what you essentially see, it's very rare for people to be brought to the attention of the therapeutic enterprise voluntarily or involuntarily unless they're anxious and depressed.

00:13:59.980 So the first thing you assume if you're a therapist, if you have any sense, is that the anxiety and depression is the cardinal reality.

00:14:09.960 Then there's a subset.

00:14:11.420 Then you can become more precise after that.

00:14:13.780 You might say, well, for this adolescent or adult, their proclivity toward excess negative emotion takes the place of bodily concern, for example.

00:14:26.200 That's more common among women, generally speaking. 1.00

00:14:29.400 It's more common among young women. 0.94

00:14:31.520 In fact, it might be almost universally prevalent among young women, especially at that puberty cusp.

00:14:36.460 And then you assume that the misattribution of the depression and anxiety to the bodily transformations is to be the target of the most specific interventions, right?

00:14:53.880 You don't jump to the conclusion that if the person's depressed and anxious and they show signs of body dysmorphia, then they're born in the wrong body and they need surgical intervention.

00:15:06.200 There's so many things wrong with that line of logic that it's almost a miracle that it could ever be established, right?

00:15:12.460 And one of the errors that's most egregious in that regard is that you don't recommend the most damaging potential and irreversible treatment when you could start with something much simpler.

00:15:28.520 Like I interviewed Chloe Cole, right?

00:15:30.980 She's a famous detransitioner. 0.99

00:15:32.580 She's having a rough time on every university campus she goes to, and she's suing the psychopathic butchers who destroyed her physiologically. 1.00

00:15:41.940 And damaged her future.

00:15:44.880 And she told me, when I talked to her, that no therapist had ever even explained to her two simple facts.

00:15:56.440 Number one, that when women hit puberty, when girls hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion reliably rise. 0.93

00:16:05.480 And that they, because boys and girls have about the same level of negative emotion.

00:16:09.400 But it switches at puberty, and then women have more negative emotion, comparatively speaking, on average, for the rest of their life.

00:16:17.200 And there's lots of reasons for that.

00:16:18.640 But the reasons in some ways are irrelevant.

00:16:20.940 It's the fact that's relevant.

00:16:22.340 It's like, well, you're 12.

00:16:24.280 You're confused and anxious.

00:16:26.340 Lots of people who are confused and anxious feel that they're the only people that feel that way.

00:16:31.640 Especially when they're looking at everybody's Facebook page and their Instagram page, and all they see is this glamorous lie that people put forward in relationship to their own life.

00:16:41.820 And then they're, especially if they're isolated kids, they can't talk to anyone about it, and they feel they're the only people in the world who feel that way.

00:16:49.000 So one of the things you do if you're a therapist that has even an iota of a clue is say, all these things that you think are characteristic of you are actually, they're normative.

00:16:59.380 And so you can't be thinking that there's something specifically wrong with you, even though you're suffering.

00:17:04.820 And then, so no one had ever explained that to her.

00:17:08.300 And which is just appalling, right?

00:17:10.340 It's such a lapse of professional standard that it's jaw-dropping.

00:17:14.460 And then, they also didn't explain to her that, here's one of the things that differentiates men from women, is that when men experience negative emotion, they tend to focus on their comparative socioeconomic status.

00:17:30.880 When women experience negative emotion, they tend to focus on bodily image. 0.97

00:17:37.880 And the reason for that, likely, is that men are evaluated by women more harshly for their relative status, and women are evaluated more harshly by men for their physiological appearance, for the general appearance.

00:17:51.100 And so there's a logic to it.

00:17:53.040 But no one explained to her that it was highly likely in the case of an adolescent girl who was undergoing puberty and early.

00:18:01.180 And she also said, she told me that she recognized quite early, maybe around 11, that when she went through puberty, she was going to have a relatively boyish figure.

00:18:12.900 And she had kind of envisioned herself as Khloe Kardashian, right?

00:18:17.080 This super curvy Marilyn Monroe excess, you know, it's almost like a parody in some ways.

00:18:24.320 But you can imagine that standing forward as a kind of ideal.

00:18:27.920 Well, she thought she was going to be boyish, and there was a part of her that thought, well, if I'm going to be boyish, maybe I could just be a boy.

00:18:35.120 You know, which is a really kind of quasi-delusional 11-year-old thought that should be dispensed with by anyone credible in about 15 seconds.

00:18:42.800 But that was enough to start her searching down the wrong rabbit hole.

00:18:46.020 And then, you know, she got herself put in the hands of these absolutely criminally incompetent therapists.

00:18:51.640 And they didn't even offer her the first two bits of information that anyone with any sense would have presented to her. 0.88

00:18:59.420 Instead, they shunted her down the bloody hormonal transformation road. 1.00

00:19:03.880 And that's almost a certain pathway to, you know, longer term, well, trouble for sure, and even surgical intervention.

00:19:10.900 And so, God, it's just, it's just, you just can't believe that such things are happening, you know, and so.

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00:20:53.580 And some of the important things that you mentioned, you know, to me is that are the salient things that you mentioned is, first of all, that's completely standard for therapists.

00:21:05.640 What those therapists did to Chloe Cole is completely standard.

00:21:09.800 Affirming, increasing their, whatever they came in with, agreeing with them, the patient.

00:21:16.440 And, of course, altering their self-understanding with a diagnosis.

00:21:20.020 And when I interview kids, I interviewed this one young woman, Nora, who's at a high school here in Los Angeles area. 0.52

00:21:27.940 And she told me that most of her high school class not only is in therapy, but they all have this diagnosis they identify with, a mental health diagnosis.

00:21:38.200 That is one of the classic negative effects of therapy is that a patient will come to identify with their diagnosis.

00:21:45.300 And we're seeing that across the board.

00:21:48.220 Now, many people say, well, to me, well, isn't it just social media?

00:21:53.320 Isn't this all just coming from social media?

00:21:56.380 I think that's an important question.

00:21:58.860 I certainly am someone who, you know, warned about the harms of social media in my last book.

00:22:03.560 I certainly think it's had a bad impact on youth mental health.

00:22:07.240 But is it just social media?

00:22:09.400 No, I don't think it is.

00:22:11.100 The mental health deterioration we're seeing.

00:22:13.860 And it's for a few reasons.

00:22:16.040 In 2016, the CDC came out with a report that one in six kids between the ages of two and eight had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.

00:22:28.640 One in six kids.

00:22:30.220 That's in 2016.

00:22:31.360 They didn't have social media.

00:22:33.180 Not ages two to eight they didn't. 0.88

00:22:34.920 And they didn't have smartphones either.

00:22:36.240 So we know since the 1950s, American youth and youth in the West that mental health has been in precipitous decline.

00:22:45.120 And I think social media is a part of that.

00:22:47.800 But I don't think it totally answers it.

00:22:50.060 And there are two questions I would put to anyone who would argue, well, the answer is just social media.

00:22:56.740 The first is, why?

00:22:58.540 Why has social media been so bad for youth mental health?

00:23:02.180 A lot of people, they talk about comparing young people's bodies and lives to each other.

00:23:08.420 Certainly teenage girls do that a lot. 1.00

00:23:10.400 But boys don't tend to.

00:23:12.760 So that doesn't totally explain it.

00:23:14.640 And the second is, why in the last eight years have we done nothing about it?

00:23:18.380 In fact, we've given devices and social media to younger and younger kids.

00:23:22.480 So I think both of those answers are intimately connected to what the mental health experts have done.

00:23:31.760 So you talked about it as being standard practice, you know, to affirm.

00:23:39.720 Well, there's something else we should point out here, too, that's part of the absolute toxicity of the present environment,

00:23:45.760 is that it's not only standard practice.

00:23:48.780 If you don't do it as a therapist, your college, your governing board will come after you, especially if someone complains.

00:23:57.440 So if you're a therapist and you dare say, especially you can imagine a situation where you're dealing with an adolescent

00:24:03.360 and the parents have somewhat different views of the problem.

00:24:06.780 And you say to the family, as you should say, don't rush into any long-term decisions.

00:24:14.840 You know, this girl who thinks she's a boy or vice versa, the former is more common. 0.85

00:24:20.780 The evidence suggests that 80% of people in that situation will grow out of it by the time they're 18

00:24:26.460 and that the do-no-harm pathway forward is to provide therapeutic counseling, perhaps, but not to do anything precipitous.

00:24:36.000 Now, one parent takes objection to that, maybe a narcissistic parent with borderline personality disorder,

00:24:41.700 because that tends to be the case in such situations.

00:24:44.840 And decides to write to the College of Psychologists, the governing body, or to the College of Physicians.

00:24:50.400 Well, under the current law and the current culture, the probability that your life will then instantly be turned upside down in some permanent way,

00:25:01.240 and that your livelihood itself will be threatened and your reputation savaged,

00:25:05.860 even assuming that you don't face legal repercussions, is extremely high.

00:25:10.640 So what I've watched, and this has all happened as a consequence of all that bloody flag-waving about eliminating the conversion therapy that was never occurring to begin with, right? 0.70

00:25:21.140 It's all these consequences of these adulpated, ideologically enforced laws.

00:25:25.780 And so, in Canada, I've been faced with the spectacle of my colleagues knowing full well that everything that's happening on the transgender front is a complete bloody murderous lie, 1.00

00:25:37.580 being absolutely unwilling to say anything in public, because if they do, their livelihoods will be instantly threatened by their governing boards.

00:25:44.960 So it's not just standard practice, it's you do it or else.

00:25:50.260 And then that's combined with the fact, in Canada, here's another example,

00:25:54.260 the governing boards that accredit university programs that produce clinical psychologists now,

00:26:02.440 and this is happening with all the therapeutic endeavors,

00:26:04.760 are refusing to grant accreditation to any university that doesn't orient their clinical training towards social justice.

00:26:12.960 And so, let's unpack that.

00:26:15.620 So, now you train therapists that the world is made up of victims and victimizers,

00:26:21.060 and you insist that they adopt that, guys.

00:26:23.680 And now you go out as a therapist, and some poor girl comes to talk to you when she's 13 and confused,

00:26:30.320 and you pay a tremendous amount of attention to her when she puts herself in the victim position.

00:26:35.900 You covertly reinforce that, partly because you have to legally,

00:26:39.640 and partly because you've been addled by your training.

00:26:41.920 And one of the things you know if you're a behavior therapist is that whatever is rewarded will make itself manifest.

00:26:48.000 And so, these poor kids that you're talking about who take their mental health diagnosis as their identity,

00:26:54.320 they do that because they accrue the benefits of differential attention for doing so.

00:26:59.980 It's unbelievably toxic, and it's such an indictment of our entire education system, too.

00:27:05.600 You imagine that what we're offering young people as a vision of the future is so unbearably toxic and counterproductive

00:27:13.760 that they will choose to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder in preference to normality.

00:27:21.780 Yeah.

00:27:22.240 I mean, that's right, obviously.

00:27:23.700 But there's another problem, which is why are parents handing over their kids to therapists

00:27:29.680 at the first indication of any problem?

00:27:34.760 In fact, no matter how minor, deviation from a benchmark, they go to diagnose and medicate.

00:27:40.980 And the problem is not only do we not know what goes on in that room,

00:27:44.960 not only does the profession make no effort to track harmful effects of their interventions,

00:27:53.140 unlike doctors who are mandated to report side effects of their drugs,

00:27:59.020 not only is that going on, but we're seeing kids have these harms,

00:28:05.420 and there's no feedback mechanism.

00:28:07.900 Anxiety is worse.

00:28:09.660 Therapists don't track whether their treatments have made anxiety worse or depression worse for a kid.

00:28:16.760 And we know therapy can do that.

00:28:19.420 And we certainly know the therapeutic interventions, the focus on feelings constantly,

00:28:25.220 constantly ruminating on sad moments in your life, the way they're asked to in school,

00:28:29.900 all of that is very bad for mental health and constantly questioning everything you're going to do before you do it.

00:28:37.800 All of these are the opposite of what we would want young people to do.

00:28:41.660 And that's what therapeutic schooling efforts have done, parenting efforts have done,

00:28:47.180 and actual therapists have done.

00:28:50.120 And I'll say, the last thing is that parents' unwillingness to assert their own authority

00:28:57.100 in their homes has been a disaster because it let therapists in the door to be that authority.

00:29:04.780 And unfortunately, unlike parents, therapists are incentivized to keep the least sick coming back

00:29:10.860 for the longest period of time.

00:29:13.540 Well, I'm going to defend parents for a moment because—

00:29:17.680 Sure.

00:29:18.300 Well, I'd like to shed light on why they do that.

00:29:21.180 I mean, the narcissistic, compassionate types, you know,

00:29:26.800 so they're the ones that tilt towards borderline personality disorder, let's say.

00:29:31.080 So we know, maybe, that about half the mothers of daughters who have rapid-onset gender dysphoria

00:29:38.860 and who move forward with therapy and treatment,

00:29:41.360 up to half of them are diagnosable with something like borderline personality disorder.

00:29:45.800 That's a big problem.

00:29:47.600 So one of the characteristics of people with borderline personality disorder

00:29:51.900 is that they will manipulate other people in any way that you could possibly imagine

00:29:56.180 to gain attention for themselves.

00:29:58.980 And if that means sacrificing their children to their pretensions of compassion,

00:30:03.240 that's no problem at all.

00:30:05.680 Now, if you're in a relationship with someone like that,

00:30:09.300 the probability that you're going to be able to withstand that pressure,

00:30:12.460 especially when the system itself has its guns aimed on you,

00:30:17.300 and if you do stand up and say, you know,

00:30:20.520 I don't think my child should be heading in that direction,

00:30:23.180 that you're going to be pilloried as uncaring and as a victimizer.

00:30:27.340 And then it's even worse because the bloody therapists,

00:30:30.180 and this is where I'm most appalled about my colleagues 0.98

00:30:32.640 who've accepted this claim emanating from the worst of the psychopaths, 0.92

00:30:38.260 that, well, you know, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child? 0.88

00:30:45.300 Now, I tell you, man, there's not a parent, an ordinary parent,

00:30:49.280 like a non-psychologically trained parent on the planet,

00:30:54.260 who, when faced with that accusation by a physician or a psychologist,

00:30:59.140 isn't going to fold, say, oh my God, this is worse than I thought.

00:31:02.580 There's some risk that my child will commit suicide,

00:31:04.620 and if I don't get on board with this in every possible way

00:31:07.940 and something terrible happens, it's going to be laid at my feet.

00:31:11.560 And then if the accusations of being uncaring and victimizing

00:31:16.620 are going along with that, well, it's just...

00:31:19.620 And then the other thing, too, that's happening, Abigail,

00:31:22.160 is that parents just can't believe these things are happening in their schools.

00:31:26.180 You know, like, I'm seeing this in Canada.

00:31:28.280 I know Canadians are so asleep that it's kind of a miracle, 1.00

00:31:31.960 and I've tried to think that through.

00:31:33.780 It's like, okay, how can people be so bloody blind?

00:31:36.320 And then I think, okay, you can stay blind and assume that it's still 1990.

00:31:43.280 So, roughly speaking, the political parties do what they say they'll do,

00:31:47.680 and they're trustworthy.

00:31:48.560 The legacy media isn't lying all the time.

00:31:50.640 The educational institutions aren't completely corrupt.

00:31:53.900 The judiciary is still intact.

00:31:55.640 The legal system hasn't twisted itself into knots.

00:31:58.320 Or you can dismiss all that as some sort of right-wing conspiratorial thinking

00:32:04.620 and continue along your merry path.

00:32:06.620 And if the price you pay for that is that the psychopathic teachers get their claws in your child,

00:32:13.260 by the time you figure that out, it's going to be a bit too late.

00:32:15.820 And I'm really seeing this, especially in Canada.

00:32:18.460 It's like people, even if you bring these things to their attention,

00:32:23.320 they think, and I can understand this,

00:32:25.140 they think there's no way things can be that bad.

00:32:27.760 You have to be imagining it.

00:32:29.620 And now and then I've stepped back and thought,

00:32:31.580 well, Jesus, you know, I did get harassed by my university and my governing board,

00:32:36.240 which is still going on.

00:32:37.300 And so, maybe I've got more paranoid than I should be, you know.

00:32:40.660 And then I see what happened in Washington, D.C.

00:32:43.820 with the presidents of UPenn, MIT, and Harvard.

00:32:46.460 And I think, oh, no, I saw this seven years ago, as clear as a bell.

00:32:51.360 And it's worse even than I think.

00:32:54.480 And certainly, it's making itself manifest in this pathological therapeutic environment, right?

00:32:59.600 Now, you said something very interesting, too.

00:33:02.620 Here's something cool.

00:33:04.500 So, if you do statistical analysis, you can group the statements that people make about themselves into categories.

00:33:16.120 And so, one category is negative emotion.

00:33:19.320 And so, if you're high in the trade of negative emotion,

00:33:24.060 be associated with depression and anxiety,

00:33:26.080 you feel more shame and more guilt, more anxiety, more depression.

00:33:31.480 Self-referential statements of all kinds load with neuroticism.

00:33:36.760 Okay, this is an unbelievably important discovery.

00:33:39.260 They load so completely that the personality test used for assessing neuroticism,

00:33:45.580 the most common one, the neopir,

00:33:48.740 has self-consciousness as a subset of neuroticism.

00:33:53.240 So, that means there's no difference between being self-conscious and being depressed and anxious.

00:33:59.100 They're not linked.

00:34:00.560 They're the same thing.

00:34:01.660 So, now you go to therapy, okay?

00:34:03.740 And the half-wit therapist does nothing but make you self-conscious.

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00:35:17.840 Right, well, why does, so, and the implication is.

00:35:22.760 And your teachers in school do the same thing.

00:35:25.020 Your teachers guide you in social-emotional learning.

00:35:28.180 They do emotions check-ins.

00:35:29.700 They are constantly asking you, how are you feeling?

00:35:33.100 It is the best way to induce depression and anxiety in kids,

00:35:39.040 and that's what they're doing nonstop.

00:35:41.120 And unfortunately, parents are not only handing over their kids to these people,

00:35:44.940 but they're doing it themselves.

00:35:47.120 They're constantly checking in.

00:35:48.300 They're letting therapists guide their parenting instead of taking the reins back

00:35:52.780 and doing what we know works better with kids.

00:35:55.500 Number one is parental authority, which, of course, doesn't mean being cold.

00:36:00.160 It doesn't mean being cruel.

00:36:01.640 It just means that the parents make the rules for the house, not some therapist.

00:36:06.520 Well, we could, so this also speaks to the issue of paucity of identity, you know,

00:36:13.520 and I've been trying to take this apart because I'm so embarrassed about the clinical enterprise now,

00:36:18.260 and I thought, you know, our whole notion of mental health is actually, it's corrupt.

00:36:23.760 And the reason for that is that we think mental health is mental.

00:36:26.880 It's inside, it's subjective, right?

00:36:29.980 And if you're healthy, it's because you're self-actualizing, right?

00:36:33.160 And if you're unhappy, it's because the self isn't properly organized as an interior structure.

00:36:38.860 But the problem with that is it's just, it's actually not true.

00:36:43.540 And you can tell that's not true because you can't be happy in a miserable marriage.

00:36:48.100 And the reason you can't be happy in a miserable marriage is because you're you, but you're also your married self.

00:36:54.920 And then you're your married self plus your friendships and your business relationships and your ties to the broader community.

00:37:00.680 And what psychological well-being is, it's not even the right term.

00:37:07.420 What human well-being is, is proper situation in a hierarchy that includes the social environment.

00:37:13.700 And so what that implies is that the more you think about yourself, the less you're focusing on how to establish solid, reliable, and reciprocal social relations, right?

00:37:27.900 An intimate relationship, friendship, the bonds of a family, and then the, what would you say, the less tightly wound binding that you have with the broader community.

00:37:41.660 In the absence of all that, you concentrate on yourself.

00:37:45.500 Well, not only you're miserable and depressed and anxious, you're also isolated, lonely, and insane.

00:37:51.080 And that all stems from that initial presumption that all we would have to do is get your head straight and you'd be sane.

00:37:57.140 It's like, and so you think, what does that also mean for the identity of kids?

00:38:01.240 Because we should be teaching them, look, you're going to have to take your place in the world.

00:38:05.400 You need a partner.

00:38:06.740 You need some friends.

00:38:08.320 You need an occupation.

00:38:09.540 You need an educational plan.

00:38:10.960 Like, you have to situate yourself in the world.

00:38:13.240 None of that's relevant anymore.

00:38:14.760 All that is, is oppression.

00:38:16.740 It's no bloody wonder that kids choose a mental health diagnosis as the alternative to the normality that's nothing.

00:38:23.980 Well, what we did was we gave kids these incredibly unhealthy lives, as you said, these atomized lives.

00:38:31.060 And we told them that they were so unique in the world and separable, and that that was all that was important.

00:38:37.020 And then we poured mental health resources into an incredibly unhealthy life.

00:38:42.040 And then mental health experts pose as a solution to the unhappy life.

00:38:47.140 Meanwhile, they've been participating the entire time in the idea that kids are weak, in the idea that they can't get through a car ride without an iPad, that they need to be told constantly that they are loved and that they are amazing at everything.

00:39:01.340 They have guided everything in the wrong direction.

00:39:04.220 They have provided nothing that we know to be good for making kids feel, you know, actually achieve happiness.

00:39:11.960 One of them is not focusing on your happiness and not making happiness your goal.

00:39:16.340 Another thing is doing things for others in the world, feeling part of a social fabric.

00:39:21.320 All those things that you said are so important.

00:39:24.080 None of those help have a role for a mental health expert, which is why the mental health experts took us in the wrong direction.

00:39:31.440 Experts, yeah.

00:39:32.240 Well, I watched the bloody social psychologists and the educational psychologists put forward psychological principles that were so appallingly misguided for decades.

00:39:42.800 It was just painful to watch.

00:39:44.500 So one of them, that emerged out of social psychology, which is a discipline with plenty of sins on its conscience.

00:39:50.500 The whole self-esteem movement to me was just a jaw-dropping nightmare, watching that as a trained clinician.

00:39:56.420 It's like, I see.

00:39:58.120 So your presumption is that you can make kids feel good about themselves by celebrating non-achievements.

00:40:07.480 That's your plan.

00:40:08.560 And so that swept through the school system like mad.

00:40:10.880 And so that was just, as Gene Twenge has pointed out, that was just a pathway.

00:40:15.420 It was really what they were doing, Abigail, was they were instructing children in how to be narcissistic.

00:40:22.180 And that narcissism was confused with self-esteem, right?

00:40:25.620 And what's really strange, this is quite interesting.

00:40:28.000 So technically speaking, if you look at self-esteem scales, there's actually no difference between them and scales of negative emotion.

00:40:36.020 It's a false construct.

00:40:38.200 So if you have low self-esteem, which is not something that technically exists, it's no different than being depressed and anxious.

00:40:45.580 And you don't lift people out of depression and anxiety by making them narcissistic, which is what the social psychologist recommended and then the educational psychologist.

00:40:55.680 Okay, then they foster this dependency that you described so that children can't, they can't even go out of their bloody house without asking for permission, right?

00:41:05.900 Everything, every important decision has to be made with guidance, right?

00:41:09.880 So they're fostering dependency like a devouring mother. 1.00

00:41:12.760 So they're teaching narcissism, they're fostering dependence.

00:41:15.840 Then they implement this whole culture of trigger warning and protection, which is exactly the opposite of what you would do if you were an actual, like, credible therapist.

00:41:28.520 Because what you do to make people less anxious is find out what they're afraid of and then expose them in graduated doses to what they're afraid of.

00:41:38.420 You don't say, well, you're a victim and now you have to be protected from everything.

00:41:42.900 What you do if you do that is you make them worse.

00:41:44.800 So Lukianoff has claimed, and I think he's exactly right, is that if the therapeutic community, the educational psychologists and the social psychologists, the social workers all included, had set out to design a course of action to make children as mentally unstable as possible, and they used the proper behavioral techniques to do so, we would have ended up in exactly the situation we're in right now.

00:42:08.300 Now, teach them to be narcissistic, teach them to be, and destroy merit at the same time, teach them to be dependent, shelter them from everything, and have them focus in a never-ending process on their own feelings, right?

00:42:25.460 Right. It's so diabolical that, well, it's the sort of thing that, you know, drives you down conspiratorial webs.

00:42:32.740 I can't believe it's happened. It's jaw-dropping.

00:42:36.840 So what have you seen as the manifestations of this? What have you been writing about specifically in your new book?

00:42:41.840 So to take one example, you know, I interviewed a woman I've known for a long time who runs a major, named Evelyn, I call her Evelyn in the book, who runs a major cellular biology lab at one of our nation's premier research institutions.

00:42:56.020 And she tells me that the kids she's seeing, aside from all their, you know, the anxiety and depression and the fact that they constantly, in the last decade, update her on their mental health regularly, that's not something she's ever asked for, but they now give her updates.

00:43:12.440 But the other thing is, they're afraid to try. For the first time, even the most qualified kids with strong scientific backgrounds are afraid to make a move without checking with her, and they're afraid to do anything on their own.

00:43:27.020 Things that kids with less ability, less scientific grounding, ought to be able to go for it. They can't go for it. Their sense of agency has been eroded.

00:43:36.520 That's not from social media, okay? That's not from smartphones entirely, if at all. It's from an idea that you, it's treatment dependency. I have to check with an adult or expert before I do anything.

00:43:51.000 That's what our young adults now think. And I do think that our therapeutic era and our therapeutic so-called experts have taught them this.

00:43:58.460 Ah, okay. Well, there's something else. So, we could add to the litany of ways to teach your children to be neurotic the following.

00:44:08.240 Okay, so let's deem all competition inappropriate. Okay, so any competitive enterprise is inappropriate. Okay, so why would we do that?

00:44:18.120 Well, there is a thrill in victory, but there's a catastrophe in defeat, right? And there's negative emotion associated with defeat.

00:44:25.460 And then you might say as well that the positive emotion associated with victory is morally untenable because it comes at someone else's expense.

00:44:34.080 So, that's an extension of the victim-victimizer narrative. Okay, so now you eradicate competition.

00:44:39.580 All right, so in favor, hypothetically, of cooperation, whatever. You get rid of competitive games, for example, or you dissuade them.

00:44:48.520 So, now what's the consequence of that?

00:44:50.520 Well, we might say, well, why do you teach, why do you encourage children to play competitive games?

00:44:56.660 And you might say, well, they can develop the skills, it's fun, and they have the possibility of winning.

00:45:02.100 But here's a better theory.

00:45:04.380 It teaches them to lose, right?

00:45:07.520 It teaches them that you do lose.

00:45:10.720 It teaches them that you can lose.

00:45:13.340 It teaches them that you can lose gracefully without a catastrophe, and then you can get up on your feet, and you congratulate the winners, and you can go on playing.

00:45:23.440 Okay, so now imagine all of that's been taken away from you, right?

00:45:27.800 Right up to the time you're 18. 0.78

00:45:29.380 You've never failed in your bloody life. 0.87

00:45:32.040 And so now you're terrified of it because you think that at the bottom of the failure pit is nothing but utter insanity. 0.99

00:45:37.320 Well, now that's true for you because you're a complete novice at failing.

00:45:43.100 How the hell are you going to take a risk, right?

00:45:45.540 So part of what, you know, you see this when you go see your kids in a sporting event. 0.99

00:45:50.840 What you hope is that your child has enough sense to be a gracious loser.

00:45:56.800 And the reason, there's no, here's a proposition for you. 0.97

00:45:59.900 There's no difference between being a gracious loser and being resilient.

00:46:06.040 They're the same thing.

00:46:08.180 So we forego competition in the name of the protection of the feelings of the losers.

00:46:13.060 And what we do is we demolish everybody's resilience along with these other four catastrophic failures that we listed.

00:46:19.880 And why did we become afraid?

00:46:21.340 Why did we become afraid of competition?

00:46:23.360 Why did we become suddenly fearful that our child would ever lose?

00:46:26.060 Why did we, the moment they ever did, you know, exhibited any behavior outside of the norm, maybe thought they had a different gender identity?

00:46:35.120 Why did we rush them to an expert?

00:46:36.880 Why, if they'd never reached any metric, do we rush them to an expert?

00:46:42.000 Because we were afraid of trauma.

00:46:44.560 Trauma was at the heart of a lot of this.

00:46:46.780 We became terrified of this bugaboo trauma.

00:46:49.760 Now, it isn't the case that any of these things produce trauma or damage to our kids.

00:46:56.280 The best psychological research, of course, shows that.

00:46:59.080 It's the opposite.

00:47:00.020 Resilience is the norm whenever there's a potentially traumatic event for a child.

00:47:06.060 But parents became so terrified of trauma that they stopped trusting their instincts.

00:47:11.940 They stopped trusting what they knew was right, what they knew in their bones was best for kids.

00:47:16.680 And instead became overly dependent on people who were very much incentivized to want to treat sick kids and to claim that the least sick were actually quite sick and continue to treat them.

00:47:31.440 And that's what we're seeing.

00:47:33.280 All right.

00:47:33.580 So let me offer you a terrible hypothesis, okay?

00:47:36.380 Sure.

00:47:36.540 Because we might as well in for a penny, in for a pound.

00:47:40.180 So behind this, I can't help but see the specter of the devouring mother.

00:47:45.860 So I'm going to lay out a hypothesis for you.

00:47:48.000 And it's a terrible hypothesis, and I hope it isn't true.

00:47:50.840 But you tell me what you think about this.

00:47:53.380 Okay.

00:47:53.580 So now we're in a landscape where half of women who are 30 are childless, and half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret it.

00:48:05.680 Okay.

00:48:05.920 So that's 20% of women. 1.00

00:48:07.300 That's going to be their fate.

00:48:08.340 And according to Jonathan Haidt and his new research, that fate is much more likely among more liberal women. 1.00

00:48:15.680 Okay.

00:48:15.960 So that's the statistical reality.

00:48:18.280 So now we're also in a situation where much of the direct care and administrative work that's associated with the education of children, all the way from kindergarten through university, is in the hands of women from the ages of 20 to 40. 0.64

00:48:36.020 Now, a subset of those women are going to have a hyper-developed maternal side that has the proclivity to treat anything in their view site as an infant. 1.00

00:48:46.220 So I'm thinking that part of the reason that we've transformed the entire educational enterprise, which is fundamentally female-dominated, into an overgrown nursery, is because it's run by women who have misplaced their maternal instinct. 1.00

00:49:05.140 And here's why I think this.

00:49:06.740 Women have this terrible conundrum when it comes to children, and it's a really tough conundrum. 1.00

00:49:13.360 And I think this is probably why human beings are pair-bonding creatures.

00:49:18.540 So my daughter just had a baby, and the baby is a month premature.

00:49:21.920 And she said, the baby just wants to be with me nonstop.

00:49:24.500 It's like it isn't even want, right?

00:49:26.140 It's absolute bloody need.

00:49:27.620 And the right attitude for a woman for the first year of a child's life starts to switch around nine months. 1.00

00:49:34.460 So let's say nine months.

00:49:35.560 The first nine months is every single need that child has is to be regarded as 100% accurate, unquestionable, and to be immediately responded to.

00:49:46.820 And so that instinct has to be extraordinarily powerful, because infants who don't have someone around, who are operating on that basis, they're either going to die or they're not going to thrive.

00:49:59.160 And, I mean, human infants are unbelievably fragile.

00:50:02.260 It doesn't take that much to disrupt that early bond, and that can have catastrophic consequences.

00:50:07.480 Okay, so that means that women, first of all, have that proclivity. 0.99

00:50:11.180 It's at hand, right?

00:50:12.400 And then it also means that they have to undergo this very difficult process when the child starts to mature.

00:50:18.440 The psychoanalysts called it the necessary failure of the good mother, is that you have to step the hell back, right?

00:50:26.020 You've got to stop doing everything for your helpless infant, even though that was the most spectacular manifestation of your love.

00:50:33.700 And you have to let the child bump up against the world and get hurt.

00:50:38.180 And that is a damn difficult thing to negotiate.

00:50:40.580 And to some degree, that's when fathers step in, you know, because they'll encourage, they have a higher threshold for child distress, let's say, especially in that transition from infancy to toddlerhood.

00:50:53.920 Now, you've got to ask yourself, we've had this radical demographic transformation that's unfolded over the last 40 years.

00:51:01.260 And so most women, half of women now at 30, are still childless.

00:51:05.440 What the hell's happening to that maternal proclivity? 0.63

00:51:10.060 And I would say, well, it's over-pouring into the educational establishments.

00:51:15.020 And you see that with the therapeutic industry as well.

00:51:17.780 And so, because when I look at the universities, I think, oh, I see, everyone's an infant.

00:51:23.820 So it's like, there's infants, infant caregivers, and predators.

00:51:28.240 That's the simple world of, that's the most simple, basic, feminine, physiological world. 0.97

00:51:36.680 And I think our institutions have been transformed into, what would you say, never-ending nurseries.

00:51:44.100 You know, Freud, you know, one of the things about Freud that people have forgotten, like, Freud pointed to the pathological narcissism of dependency-inducing mothers as the biggest developmental impediment to human beings.

00:52:00.940 That's the Oedipal situation.

00:52:03.980 No, and that's an unbelievably accurate observation.

00:52:07.280 You know, we are very dependent human beings, and we need our mothers.

00:52:10.780 But the fact that that maternal provision is so absolutely necessary also means it can go spectacularly wrong.

00:52:18.440 And something's like, you're looking for a solution, right?

00:52:22.120 Because you said, well, it can't just be social media.

00:52:24.740 It's not just social media.

00:52:26.420 It can't just be the education system.

00:52:28.960 Like, is it not possible that this is reflective of a more fundamental transformation in the way that men and women are operating in society?

00:52:37.580 There's no question.

00:52:39.000 But we did come to see our kids as weak.

00:52:41.380 We came to see them as infants.

00:52:43.120 The problem is we had traditions of child-rearing.

00:52:46.420 We had a sense of knock it off, shake it off, you'll be fine.

00:52:49.920 Not for a kid who broke an arm, but for minor injuries.

00:52:52.720 We used to tell our kids that.

00:52:54.000 We remember that from our own childhoods.

00:52:55.920 But we stopped trusting ourselves and relied on experts.

00:52:59.840 And they taught us that our kids were weak, that they could never recover.

00:53:03.240 And I'll give you an example.

00:53:04.140 I got a call.

00:53:05.180 I got actually an email from a woman who loved my last book.

00:53:08.940 And she was a child psychologist from a very trained, very well-trained, a very good school.

00:53:13.260 She's in her 60s.

00:53:14.240 And she really wanted to be of help with my new book, Bad Therapy.

00:53:17.540 So, okay.

00:53:18.280 She's a parenting coach and a child psychologist.

00:53:21.180 And she told me with my last book, I was doing the Lord's work.

00:53:24.400 That's what she called it.

00:53:25.500 I said, okay, I would love to talk to you.

00:53:27.200 So I called her.

00:53:28.220 And she said, I said, you know, I'm going to ask you some questions about child, why we're seeing so much pain in the rising generation.

00:53:33.920 Can we speak on the record?

00:53:35.480 And she said, oh, no, no, no, absolutely not.

00:53:37.760 My adult daughter, if she finds out I talk to you, she'll cut me off.

00:53:42.100 Right, right.

00:53:42.780 Now, this is a woman who's a parenting coach. 1.00

00:53:46.880 The number of people she should be advising on parenting is zero.

00:53:51.960 Because she has raised a daughter to adulthood who, if she disagreed with her mother about who her mother talks to, what journalist she talks to, would cut her off.

00:54:03.940 You see, we stopped being devoted to making our kids strong and making them decent.

00:54:11.780 That used to be the goal of parenting. 0.89

00:54:14.120 But instead, we thought, oh, no, the idea of parenting is to make them mentally healthy.

00:54:19.720 We're going to shoot for wellness.

00:54:21.000 And we did a terrible job of that.

00:54:24.100 And we didn't make them strong.

00:54:25.800 And we didn't make them decent.

00:54:28.300 So why?

00:54:29.160 Okay.

00:54:29.420 So let's see if we can figure out why that happened.

00:54:31.880 You know, like, it's often useful.

00:54:35.400 If you do a diagnosis of any given situation properly, the first thing you do is look for contextual factors, right?

00:54:44.500 Now, people generally don't do this to themselves.

00:54:46.580 If they're looking at why they are in trouble, they'll look for a self-attribution, right?

00:54:52.100 And there's something about that that's admirable because it's taking responsibility.

00:54:56.400 But people are more determined by situations, if they're healthy, than they are by their own intrinsic temperament.

00:55:01.960 So the first thing you do as a good diagnostician is you think, okay, what are the overarching contextual issues here that are at play?

00:55:08.120 So maybe we can figure that out.

00:55:09.520 So you're pointing to the fact that somehow parents lost faith in their ability to, even in their children's ability, to direct themselves.

00:55:18.940 So let me offer you a couple of reasons for that.

00:55:21.200 You tell me what you think.

00:55:22.200 Okay.

00:55:22.460 Well, first of all, we have fewer children.

00:55:25.540 So that means every child is more precious.

00:55:28.800 If for no other reason than parents aren't outnumbered.

00:55:31.720 Like, when you have six kids, you can't focus obsessively on all of them.

00:55:35.360 You just don't have the time.

00:55:37.000 Plus, they're torturing each other and raising each other to a fair degree. 0.88

00:55:40.680 But if you have one child, you can focus all your attention.

00:55:44.700 Now, let's make that worse.

00:55:46.600 Not only do you only have one child, you didn't have that child until you were 30.

00:55:50.000 And so you're pretty bloody attached to that child.

00:55:53.340 And it's your last chance.

00:55:56.080 Right.

00:55:56.800 And you're wealthy or comparatively wealthy.

00:55:59.840 So now you're desperate to make sure that everything that could possibly be good happens to this child.

00:56:06.680 You're not going to get another chance.

00:56:07.900 And you have endless resources to pour into them.

00:56:11.260 Okay.

00:56:11.460 So just those.

00:56:13.520 And then you can imagine this as well.

00:56:17.100 The child doesn't have a lot of siblings.

00:56:18.940 It doesn't have a lot of cousins.

00:56:20.700 And so that means that any proclivity for narcissism that that child might manifest naturally and that might be even encouraged by the parents is not going to be pounded out of them in the various ways that siblings and cousins would absolutely take it out of them.

00:56:35.560 Right.

00:56:36.140 And then you add to that, too, the fact that children are more isolated than they were in terms of their play patterns.

00:56:41.620 They don't play freely together.

00:56:43.160 Almost all play episodes are scheduled. 1.00

00:56:46.140 Even if they're scheduled, the idiot parents will often plop the kids down in front of a TV or a screen so they don't play. 0.99

00:56:52.980 That means they're not socializing each other. 1.00

00:56:54.780 And so that's a that's a very toxic brew.

00:56:58.120 And we have no idea what, you know, the typical Caucasian mother is now first time is old enough to be the typical Caucasian grandmother. 0.95

00:57:08.020 Right.

00:57:08.720 We've almost got to that point.

00:57:10.220 We have no idea.

00:57:11.680 We have no idea what that signifies in terms of of its effect on on reproductive patterns and also the case that we have so many kids that are only children.

00:57:21.200 That older mothers, richer parents, these are massive changes.

00:57:26.640 And it's and maybe maybe part of the consequences exactly what we're talking about is that the children are doomed to being over.

00:57:34.180 Plus, then there's a worse situation, too, because people are more atomized.

00:57:39.360 And so that also means that the multigenerational wisdom that might be a necessity for knowing how to raise children is also disappearing.

00:57:51.700 I just helped my son and my daughter in law work through a disciplinary issue with their 12 month old daughter and my son and my daughter in law pretty together people.

00:58:04.060 And I had I had told them what they could do, but telling them didn't work.

00:58:11.860 I had to show them they couldn't really put what was necessary into practice without have without it being directly modeled.

00:58:21.220 And so we also don't know how much of the intergenerational wisdom that was part and parcel of an intact culture we've completely obliterated because of, you know, extreme social mobility, for example.

00:58:33.820 So I think a lot of the factors you mentioned do play a role.

00:58:37.060 But I want to tell you why I think that the mental health experts and our complete therapeutic flooding with therapy and therapeutic concepts have played a big part in it.

00:58:46.260 OK, and that is because we look at other cultures.

00:58:49.400 I interviewed a woman who runs the Georgetown Emotions Lab who looks and I asked her why kids were so young people were so dysregulated in America.

00:58:56.900 When you look at other cultures and they're doing much better, like Japan, they only have one child in Japan. 0.85

00:59:03.560 And you mentioned that might be a factor, but they don't treat their children as fragile.

00:59:09.320 They're not haunted by the possibility of trauma, that a spanking, that anything could traumatize a child.

00:59:15.400 They're not haunted.

00:59:16.420 And they think independence for a child, meaning going off and doing things without oversight, is a good.

00:59:22.600 In fact, in preschools in Japan, there are areas that the children could get hurt and areas where the teacher can't see.

00:59:29.600 And the idea is kids have to be able to negotiate their own interpersonal conflicts with each other without an adult intermediary.

00:59:37.420 They do the same thing in Israel.

00:59:39.200 In Israel, at age eight, kids are supposed to get on a bus and go to school.

00:59:43.140 You are looked down on if your parents drive you.

00:59:45.640 It is not done in Israel if your parents drive you to school.

00:59:49.040 Why?

00:59:49.300 Because they need to be able to negotiate how to get to a school bus.

00:59:53.560 And by the way, along the way, it turns out, Dr. Cherensova told me this, that she followed these kids because she did research on these kids.

01:00:02.600 And along the way, they were talking.

01:00:04.400 They were going into a bakery and buying themselves something.

01:00:06.780 They were talking to neighbors.

01:00:07.780 They were learning to handle themselves, all the things that kids in the West used to learn to do because the parents gave them the freedom to do it.

01:00:16.740 Before we became surveillance parents, terrified of emotional injury, we let kids be.

01:00:23.300 We let them go off and do things and handle their own conflicts.

01:00:26.420 And it made them stronger.

01:00:28.140 And then we became terrified that we couldn't let them because they were actually weak.

01:00:34.300 And this idea that anything could traumatize your child, anything could leave a lasting psychological imprint that they could never get rid of, this came right from the mental health industry.

01:00:45.120 This came right from the idea that the body keeps the score.

01:00:47.800 It holds on to your trauma forever.

01:00:49.560 You can never let it go.

01:00:50.720 It's not true, according to many, many experts I interviewed.

01:00:55.540 But unfortunately, it's led to all kinds of terror that any childhood trauma causes adult psychopathology.

01:01:04.840 And also false that adult psychopathology isn't necessarily caused by childhood trauma.

01:01:11.640 Neither is true.

01:01:12.680 Nor is it true that being permanently damaged by a traumatic incident is the norm.

01:01:17.580 Resilience is the norm.

01:01:18.700 So, all these bad ideas, I believe, really came through the vector of the mental health experience.

01:01:25.320 Well, I think, okay, so we might as well offer some definition.

01:01:30.320 So, people experience negative emotion when an unexpected obstacle arises in their path.

01:01:39.420 Okay?

01:01:39.740 And those can take two forms.

01:01:41.320 They can be obstacles that you can skirt, or they can be obstacles that stop you in your tracks.

01:01:47.100 Okay?

01:01:48.580 The more important the thing you're pursuing, the more likely an obstacle that stops you in your tracks is to cause trauma.

01:01:58.220 Okay?

01:01:58.600 And what the trauma is, is the dissolution of the structure of direction that you were engaging in.

01:02:05.680 So, here's an example.

01:02:06.820 This would be an example of a relatively serious emotional upset, let's say.

01:02:11.740 So, you decide you want to be a doctor, and you work very hard at it, and you take the MCAT, and you get your results, and you're in the 15th percentile.

01:02:22.420 Okay.

01:02:22.820 So, that's likely to cause a fair bit of emotional upset.

01:02:26.720 And worse, you're not going to be a doctor.

01:02:29.360 That's gone.

01:02:31.700 Now, imagine you put 40% of your resources into that plan.

01:02:37.300 Okay?

01:02:37.520 So, now the trauma is that you have to sacrifice that 40% investment.

01:02:43.180 Now, then you might say, well, the norm is resilience.

01:02:46.980 Okay?

01:02:47.260 So, the way that becomes not a trauma is you decide to become a nurse, let's say.

01:02:52.380 And that works.

01:02:54.400 When you encounter an obstacle, you've got two choices.

01:02:58.060 You can either figure out how to get around it and continue on your path, or you can choose a new path.

01:03:04.580 If you're incapable of choosing a new path, then you're traumatized.

01:03:09.420 Now, you might say, well, you know, how serious is the trauma?

01:03:13.460 And the answer is, well, it depends on how important the plan was.

01:03:16.080 So, here's another example.

01:03:17.660 Let's say you're happily married, and you have been for 10 years, and you trust your husband implicitly.

01:03:22.660 Then you find out that he's a serial womanizer, and he's had affairs that stem back from before you were, right from the time you started going out with him.

01:03:32.040 So, everything you think you know about him is a lie.

01:03:35.440 Okay?

01:03:35.720 So, now the trauma is, your whole past is a lie.

01:03:39.080 Your present no longer exists.

01:03:40.960 And your future, whatever the hell it is, isn't what you think it's going to be.

01:03:44.720 And then it's even worse than that, because if you were that bloody gullible, how much of everything else you do is now up for question.

01:03:53.140 Okay?

01:03:53.320 So, that just does people in.

01:03:55.080 Now, those sorts of things do happen to people, right?

01:03:58.080 And if they're unresolved, they leave a permanent hole.

01:04:02.820 I said, if they're unresolved, right?

01:04:05.060 Now, as you pointed out, generally people resolve such things, but not inevitably.

01:04:10.420 Now, the problem doesn't come so much with the notion that some things are traumatic.

01:04:16.400 The problem comes with being unable to differentiate between trauma, you know, like your marriage is over,

01:04:25.000 and falling off your bike when you're learning to ride a bike when you're going to a playground, right?

01:04:31.160 Because there has to be a distinction between levels of negative emotion.

01:04:35.780 And partly what you want to do with your child is you want to expose them to situations where they encounter obstacles,

01:04:42.140 even serious obstacles, losses, for example, in a championship game, so that they can learn strategies of resilience.

01:04:50.220 So, I don't think it's exactly fair to put the problem at the hands of people who make the claim that such a thing as trauma exists.

01:05:00.580 It's more accurate to put the blame at the…

01:05:01.780 No, no, of course not.

01:05:02.360 Okay, okay, okay.

01:05:03.260 But let me give you a prior story to your story.

01:05:07.540 What if we welded the training wheels onto the bike so they could never be removed?

01:05:12.540 What if we started out childhood where we only gave the kids the softest fabrics and any foods they didn't like,

01:05:18.600 we substituted for foods they did like.

01:05:20.620 And if a dog scared them, we asked all our neighbors to crate their dogs whenever we visited.

01:05:26.180 And what if we told the kids over and over, we affirmed all their worries,

01:05:30.000 and we dropped everything to deal with their worries because that's what the best experts were telling us to do.

01:05:34.960 What if we never let them choose a friend we didn't like or get their hearts broken and then we rushed to intercede the moment they expressed any hurt?

01:05:43.160 They might show up at college so unprepared, not even to fail their medical tests,

01:05:50.120 but even to deal with any minor danger or discomfort,

01:05:55.280 that we would see what we're seeing, kids having nervous breakdowns over the most humdrum challenges.

01:06:01.660 And in fact, you know, this woman who's the head of the Emotions of Albert Georgetown,

01:06:05.500 who I interviewed, Dr. Chantsova Dutton,

01:06:07.120 when she said to me that when she did research cross-culturally on emotional responses to dangers in young adults,

01:06:15.900 that American kids tend to exaggerate the degree of danger posed by small things,

01:06:21.760 like a stranger on the street looking at you funny.

01:06:24.540 That felt dangerous to American kids.

01:06:27.320 Why?

01:06:27.980 Because they'd never had to face even these small risks themselves.

01:06:33.300 We were too afraid to let them.

01:06:35.300 Yeah, well, that's the classic, that's the classic Oedipal nightmare.

01:06:39.520 So in the, in the Disney's Snow,

01:06:42.300 so one of the things you see about classic Disney movies is that there's almost always an evil queen, right?

01:06:48.640 And what the evil queen does is interfere with the development of the prince or the princess, right? 0.99

01:06:54.440 So in Snow White, the evil queen is jealous of the upcoming princess's beauty, 0.99

01:07:00.520 jealous of the fact that she gets a chance to establish a new relationship,

01:07:03.560 and perfectly willing to poison her because of her envy, right?

01:07:08.480 And in Sleeping Beauty, you have Prince, I think it's Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty.

01:07:13.660 She locks him in a dungeon and tells him that she's going to keep him there until he's so old

01:07:19.260 that nobody could possibly find him attractive.

01:07:22.780 And when he does manage to escape with the help of some feminine fairies, little feminine fairies, 1.00

01:07:30.480 which are like emblematic of the mother who's actually useful,

01:07:34.280 she turns into like the dragon that's the ultimate predator and virtually burns him to the ground, right? 1.00

01:07:43.120 Well, so this is, this is, the reason I'm pointing out these symbolic representations

01:07:47.500 is because this proclivity of symbolically feminine overprotection to become the ultimate destructive force 1.00

01:07:56.840 is a motif that's been developed through the entire developmental history of humanity and its literature.

01:08:03.780 It's like that, it's an unbelievable danger, and for some reason, as you pointed out,

01:08:09.160 it's become increasingly dominant in our culture.

01:08:12.120 And it's not something about which people can have very straightforward conversations, you know?

01:08:17.720 But I think the story that you described is exactly right.

01:08:20.820 Now, one of the things we do know, too, is that the mothers who are overbearing in that manner 1.00

01:08:28.040 are also those who are more likely to show the kinds of, they call it cluster B psychopathology.

01:08:36.580 So it's this weird intermingling of hypercompassion, but it's hypercompassion turned for narcissistic purposes.

01:08:44.580 So, look, the mother that you just described, here's what she can do.

01:08:49.420 She can tell all her neighbors and her family how much of a martyr she is

01:08:54.400 for spending every bloody second of her whole life doing nothing but caring for her poor infant.

01:09:00.060 So now she's supermother, and the payoff for her is, well, of course she can't pursue her own career. 0.69

01:09:06.440 Of course she can't take on any responsibilities,

01:09:09.120 because she's so busy pouring out every excess resource she has into this child. 1.00

01:09:14.280 And so she's perfectly motivated to make her child as miserable and wretched as possible, 0.60

01:09:19.980 because that opens up the space for her overweening, what, maternal compassion to dominate completely 1.00

01:09:26.800 so that she can parade her virtue to her friends and her neighbors. 0.88

01:09:31.220 Right.

01:09:31.760 And the child is going, yeah.

01:09:33.960 And the child will end up overtreated.

01:09:35.920 They will end up diagnosed.

01:09:37.200 They will end up on psychotropic drugs so that they never feel life at full force.

01:09:41.180 They never feel they can do things on their own.

01:09:43.620 And, you know, you started by talking about Chloe Cole.

01:09:46.260 And when I was researching about, you know, the rapid rise in transgender identification,

01:09:51.080 one of the things the therapist never told her is that gender dysphoria,

01:09:54.840 like a lot of psychological issues that someone can have or problems someone can have,

01:10:00.520 they actually resolve by growing up.

01:10:03.260 Puberty often cures a lot of gender dysphoria.

01:10:07.580 So too, I mean, this is the subtitle of the book, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.

01:10:11.080 Growing up, believe it or not, you know, adulthood, growing into adulthood is actually the cure

01:10:17.420 for a lot of the troubles teenagers are beset with.

01:10:20.960 And if we gave kids the resources to grow up, if we weren't afraid for them to be two steps away from us

01:10:27.300 or for us not to surveil them constantly, and we let them grow up,

01:10:32.360 a lot of these problems would resolve on their own.

01:10:35.060 We're just not letting them.

01:10:36.560 Well, the clinical literature shows that clearly, is that it's 80% of gender dysphoria conditions

01:10:42.600 resolve on their own by the age of 18.

01:10:44.860 Well, it's also partly, and I think this is tangled into the ideology,

01:10:49.080 like if we regard our culture as such as nothing but oppressive,

01:10:55.660 then taking your place in that culture does nothing but oppress you and make you an oppressor, right?

01:11:02.660 So that pretty much takes everything that adulthood could offer off the table, right?

01:11:06.620 And I certainly see this also in what schools do to young men.

01:11:10.400 Like, schools teach young men that their ambition is nothing but the manifestation of oppressive, patriarchal power.

01:11:19.720 And so you basically take all of the benefits, the moral benefits of becoming an adult, off the table.

01:11:25.060 You don't say to a young man, it's like, well, you know, when you're a child,

01:11:30.000 you have the possibilities of the world at hand and you're relatively free from care and privation.

01:11:40.460 But the price you pay for that is you have no independence.

01:11:43.540 And the beauty of being an adult is you're free to have your adventure.

01:11:49.220 You're free to have your adventure.

01:11:50.660 You can sink or you can swim and there's a real cost to that, but the payoff is you can have your life

01:11:59.800 and you can do great things and you can serve other people and you can take your place as a husband

01:12:04.920 and as an honored member of the community and you can do useful things in the world.

01:12:10.500 And that's so worthwhile that giving up the pleasures of childhood is the obvious thing to do.

01:12:17.780 I, there isn't a school in the country, I think, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration,

01:12:23.260 where that's ever made explicit to young people, you know.

01:12:26.580 That's right, but also not a home.

01:12:28.100 Maybe Hillsdale College and maybe Hillsdale College and that's about it, yeah.

01:12:31.540 Right, but also not a home in the country and that's part of the problem.

01:12:35.560 So in other words, you know, when parents were, felt comfortable being authorities in their own home

01:12:40.600 with their own kids, there was something for kids to aspire to.

01:12:44.640 But through this gentle parenting, the therapist-led parenting that we're seeing,

01:12:49.720 where the role of the parent is really to be an empath, to feel a child's pain and to adjust and accommodate it,

01:12:56.380 there's nothing for a child to graduate to.

01:12:59.180 It doesn't look so great to be a child's slave.

01:13:02.720 And that's what parents have become.

01:13:04.640 So there is no reason to adolesce out of childhood.

01:13:09.120 And we're not offering them a reason.

01:13:11.480 There's no graduation.

01:13:12.720 Well, you can also understand why that's a vicious spiral, right?

01:13:18.240 Because you can also understand why young people would be more loath to have children under those circumstances.

01:13:23.700 You know, when I was counseling young women, my essential, what would you call it, ideological position,

01:13:31.120 I don't think it's ideological, my essential position was,

01:13:33.740 it's good for you to have your career when you have your child,

01:13:38.220 because then what you're doing is modeling for your child the fact that adults have useful things to do.

01:13:44.360 And since your child is going to have to be an adult, that's a good thing to model. 0.87

01:13:48.520 Now, it's going to be tricky for you to figure out how to get the balance right,

01:13:52.260 because you have to attend to your children a lot, especially when they're young,

01:13:55.760 and you're going to want to.

01:13:56.860 But that doesn't mean you should torture yourself with guilt, because as an adult, you have a life.

01:14:02.440 Your children have to see that, so they want to become adults, right? 0.93

01:14:06.260 And so, now, if your destiny as an adult is slave of two-year-old, well, who the hell? 0.99

01:14:14.640 Who the hell? 0.97

01:14:15.120 There's nothing more demoralizing than being a slave to a two-year-old, 0.98

01:14:18.360 partly because they're little tyrants most of the time,

01:14:20.880 and you can't give in to the immediacy of their demands.

01:14:25.200 That's no way to live, and it's stunningly demoralizing for the two-year-old,

01:14:29.040 because there's nothing more hopeless, and I've seen this in children,

01:14:32.400 there is nothing more existentially hopeless than a three-year-old who's in control.

01:14:38.860 It's like, where the hell does he have to go?

01:14:40.920 He's already hit the pinnacle of the social world, as far as he's concerned.

01:14:45.160 Whatever he wants goes.

01:14:47.020 God, brutal.

01:14:47.780 And it's terrifying.

01:14:48.900 It's actually terrifying to them to have that much power.

01:14:53.160 And fear is another thing we're seeing in this generation.

01:14:55.740 They are a terribly fearful generation.

01:14:58.140 They also don't want to have kids.

01:15:00.200 This is the first generation where a majority doesn't want to have kids.

01:15:03.720 Well, we didn't make it look very good, and I think that is part of the problem.

01:15:09.640 We didn't give them something to hold up and say,

01:15:12.700 one day I want to be like that.

01:15:14.200 And I can do it.

01:15:16.840 They really doubt they can do things in the world, that they are ready to raise children.

01:15:22.800 That's so sad.

01:15:23.920 You know, I just talked to my son-in-law, because my daughter just had a baby,

01:15:27.760 and I said to him, look, here's something you have to understand.

01:15:30.800 You need to know this, that this baby that's just been born, this person wants nothing more

01:15:40.260 than to have the best possible relationship with you that it's possible to have with anyone.

01:15:43.920 That's what they're offering you, is that if you're a father and you have a clue and you have a new child,

01:15:51.600 you are being offered the opportunity to establish the best relationship with anyone you've ever had in your life.

01:15:58.480 And the person that you could establish that relationship with wants nothing more than that.

01:16:05.160 So that's a hell of an offer.

01:16:06.500 So then you can just imagine how bloody far we've walked off any sort of reasonable pathway,

01:16:12.820 so that young people now look at that with dread.

01:16:17.480 Right?

01:16:17.720 It's because that notion has become, like, you know, I had a great career,

01:16:22.140 because I started my academic career teaching at Harvard, and that was a pretty damn good deal.

01:16:27.280 And that place was really hopping in the 1990s, and the students were great.

01:16:31.080 I loved my job.

01:16:33.000 And I really enjoyed the consulting I worked and my clinical practice.

01:16:36.340 I had a very fulfilling career.

01:16:38.120 And I would certainly say that that was all well and good,

01:16:41.700 but there was nothing better than being with my kids and my wife.

01:16:45.780 Nothing better.

01:16:46.600 And so, and the fact that people can't understand that,

01:16:49.860 they see that only as a burdensome, what, as a burden.

01:16:53.760 It's so horrible, because it also means that they don't see,

01:16:58.160 they don't, they certainly don't see the best of what life has to offer.

01:17:01.900 I also feel really sorry for young women.

01:17:04.040 It's so perverse, you know, because most of the notion that

01:17:07.820 women shouldn't be locked at home, let's say, barefoot and pregnant with their little kids, 1.00

01:17:13.840 a tremendous amount of that comes from the left.

01:17:16.600 And it's so weird to me, because the leftist ideologues insist that women need to be freed

01:17:23.160 to do what?

01:17:24.400 To enter the corporate world.

01:17:25.940 And I think, okay, well, I thought you guys were left wing.

01:17:28.780 How did we get to the situation where it was obvious that what a young woman should do 0.98

01:17:33.720 is prioritize her slavery to the capitalist endeavor in favor of being at home with her kids, 1.00

01:17:40.380 especially when they're young.

01:17:41.540 Now, I know I'm exaggerating to some degree, but it's so,

01:17:46.940 we lie terribly to young men and we demoralize them.

01:17:50.340 But the lies we tell young women are of a whole different order of magnitude.

01:17:54.620 That the notion that career is going to be more important than anything else,

01:17:58.100 and that you should forego children for that.

01:18:00.040 I don't know if I've ever met anyone for whom that was actually true.

01:18:05.300 I completely agree.

01:18:06.880 And I think that, you know, if we had a more robust confidence among parents,

01:18:13.240 you would see that communicated, because I don't know parents for whom that isn't true.

01:18:17.560 Certainly, it's true for me.

01:18:18.920 There's nothing in my life that has been more gratifying or more imbued my life with more meaning

01:18:23.660 than having my own children.

01:18:25.140 It was by far the most dramatic change in my life when I had kids.

01:18:30.020 And we've forgotten what a profound opportunity and sense of meaning and responsibility it is,

01:18:35.520 because we let the experts analyze it.

01:18:37.800 And we actually started taking on their, oh, we started describing our kids.

01:18:42.220 When I interviewed parents, I would hear them talk about their kids according to their diagnoses.

01:18:47.300 Well, this is my ADHD kid.

01:18:49.440 I would hear them say, you hear that now?

01:18:51.700 Well, my kids spectre me, you know.

01:18:53.920 That's not how parents ever talked about their children.

01:18:57.620 Why?

01:18:58.220 Because they were our kids.

01:18:59.920 And it didn't matter what the experts, what categories they had, what rubrics they fell under.

01:19:04.700 They were our children.

01:19:06.540 And somewhere along the line, we forgot that.

01:19:08.820 And we started looking at our own children through the lens that these experts gave us.

01:19:13.160 And it's wrong.

01:19:14.120 And it's damaging to our relationship with them.

01:19:17.200 How old were you, if you don't mind me asking?

01:19:19.220 How old were you when you had your first child?

01:19:22.060 31.

01:19:23.160 Okay, okay.

01:19:24.120 So, you, okay.

01:19:25.120 So, now you said, you just said that there wasn't anything in your life that had happened to you that that was, I had a client, very high-achieving lawyer, right?

01:19:35.980 And she was a very attractive person, very hardworking.

01:19:39.120 Like, she had, she was quite an admirable person.

01:19:43.740 And then she had a baby.

01:19:44.980 And she told me, she was quite funny.

01:19:47.600 She said, well, I'd always sort of thought of children as like a fashion accessory up to this point.

01:19:52.600 You know, it's something else you added to your life.

01:19:54.500 And she was absolutely dumbfounded at the degree to which she fell in love with her child.

01:19:58.800 And she had a child pretty late, you know, and it just turned her life upside down.

01:20:02.920 And you see, I saw this with women in law firms all the time is, you know, they were high-performing, career-oriented women. 0.65

01:20:09.040 And then they'd have a child and they'd think, oh, nothing I ever did was nearly as significant as this.

01:20:16.260 So, what, what, did that come as a revelation to you?

01:20:19.480 Like, did you expect that?

01:20:21.340 What happened in your case?

01:20:22.880 I'll tell you a moment where I realized it.

01:20:25.300 When my sons were four years old, they were, they had started playing piano.

01:20:30.000 I have twin sons.

01:20:31.400 And one of my sons, we got to the recital and he was very nervous.

01:20:35.800 And they had the kids get up there and say, my name is Jack.

01:20:39.840 And you had to say your name and identify the piece you were going to play.

01:20:44.320 And he started to get very nervous.

01:20:45.720 He didn't want to get up there.

01:20:47.160 And I didn't know what to do.

01:20:48.640 I thought this could be a catastrophe.

01:20:50.140 Should I take him out?

01:20:51.040 Maybe it's too young.

01:20:52.220 And my husband said to me, just let him, let him be.

01:20:55.560 And I did.

01:20:56.320 I just backed off, let him do this.

01:20:57.660 He was very nervous.

01:20:58.560 I didn't know if, and they called him up there.

01:21:00.920 And he's, he announced to the crowd as loud as, as, as could be, my name is Jack and I'm

01:21:06.840 going to play and announced his piece.

01:21:09.160 And I can tell you, it was the proudest I've ever been in my life.

01:21:13.320 There's nothing I've ever done that brought me more pride than that moment.

01:21:16.640 And I got the first glimpse in that moment that maybe they could, my, my son would be

01:21:22.240 able to handle himself in a world with people.

01:21:24.380 Well, that was so cool, eh?

01:21:25.800 Because that means that's so cool because there's, there was a conjunction there that

01:21:30.180 was a, that was a true moral conjunction, right?

01:21:33.900 So first of all, your husband said the right thing.

01:21:37.460 So he played out his role, right?

01:21:39.920 Second of all, you listened and you backed the hell off.

01:21:44.600 Third, your son stepped forward, right?

01:21:48.240 And so those things all came together beautifully.

01:21:50.960 And, and that meant that you could see that he was on his way, right?

01:21:55.340 And there isn't anything, you know, and that's such a, that's such a integral element of deep

01:22:01.060 human motivation.

01:22:01.980 It's part of mentoring there.

01:22:03.920 One of the things I loved about being a university professor was the opportunity to do that with

01:22:09.240 young people who weren't my own children.

01:22:11.060 It's like, because what you want to do is you want to find someone who's got some wherewithal

01:22:15.740 and provide them with the opportunity to manifest what's next in them, right?

01:22:21.940 And I don't, I really don't believe that there is anything that's more satisfying than

01:22:26.780 participating in that.

01:22:27.920 And it makes sense, right?

01:22:29.040 Because it is part of fostering the maturation process and, and helping other people aim up.

01:22:34.160 But it's so cool that that's not only an instinct that can manifest itself within a family,

01:22:39.180 but that can generalize to your relationship with other people.

01:22:42.000 And in not being able to be a part of that, you know, the great men that I've known, great

01:22:46.600 women as well, but I guess I've probably seen it more in men and maybe it's somewhat more

01:22:52.040 surprising in a way.

01:22:54.440 Most of the great men I knew, I knew who had established remarkable careers, remarkable in

01:23:02.760 every way.

01:23:03.720 One of the things they took prime pleasure in, maybe at the top of the hierarchy was finding

01:23:10.480 young people who had ability and fostering their development.

01:23:15.260 You know, I have my brother-in-law, Jim Keller, great engineer.

01:23:18.740 As he's got older, that's become a bigger and bigger part of his life to find really promising

01:23:23.440 young people and just to lay out opportunities for them and to watch them grow and thrive.

01:23:27.700 And my graduate advisor, Robert Peel, he was like that, man.

01:23:32.340 I mean, I went to his Festschrift, which is a celebration of his academic career.

01:23:36.260 And he had like 30 of his students there, most of whom who did very, very well.

01:23:41.040 And to a man and woman, they said, you know, Bob did everything he could to foster our careers

01:23:47.040 when we worked with him.

01:23:48.020 And you could see, you know, that was just an endless source of delight for him.

01:23:51.440 And the fact that young people don't understand that that possibility is sitting in front of

01:23:55.960 them in relationship to the children they might have is like, that's a cataclysmic indictment

01:24:00.700 of our culture.

01:24:01.940 It's so awful.

01:24:03.360 Well, they haven't been raised to be load-bearing walls.

01:24:06.620 See, when we used to raise kids to be load-bearing walls, they said, I can handle it.

01:24:11.660 And now we've raised a generation that doesn't think it can, that has been taught by so many

01:24:17.040 experts to second-guess itself, to check in, to have an adult oversee everything they do.

01:24:22.160 They don't believe they can.

01:24:24.700 And let me just say, you know, I'm not someone who's against therapy.

01:24:27.740 I talk about therapy I've had, you know, in my book.

01:24:31.240 But I will say something.

01:24:32.120 It's very different when you're an adult in therapy, because you have the ability to push

01:24:36.220 back on a therapist.

01:24:37.200 You can say to a therapist, listen, I think we're blaming my mom a little too much.

01:24:41.180 You can say to her, you know, I'm not sure I gave you the right impression.

01:24:44.820 It's much harder for a child to say, I don't think it's fair to call what my mom did abuse.

01:24:50.040 It's much harder for a child to do that.

01:24:52.460 So there's much more potential for it to be undermining of the child's sense of agency.

01:24:57.220 And efficacy and power in the world.

01:25:00.460 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:01.400 Well, okay, so something you just said there, we haven't taught our children to be load-bearing

01:25:07.320 walls.

01:25:07.980 And so a bunch of ideas ran through my head when you said that.

01:25:11.140 One was, that's a matter of lack of faith, right?

01:25:15.900 Because you actually, you have to offer the proposition that you can bear a load before

01:25:21.580 you're willing to hoist it onto your shoulders, right?

01:25:24.140 I mean, we're in a culture where people assume that you need evidence at every step of the

01:25:30.100 adventure.

01:25:31.400 And that's actually, fundamentally, that's false.

01:25:35.400 Because when you encounter something new, you have no evidence that you can manage it.

01:25:40.640 You can use induction based on your previous success.

01:25:44.420 And to some degree, that's relevant.

01:25:46.180 But induction is famously fallible.

01:25:48.560 And you can assume you can bear a load and then not, right?

01:25:51.980 So you can, even if you have the evidence at hand, that doesn't mean that it's incontrovertible.

01:25:56.940 It means you have to have faith.

01:25:59.060 And you implied that you have to have the faith that you're load-bearing.

01:26:03.840 You know, I've been writing this new book called We Who Wrestle With God.

01:26:07.000 And I'm looking at the psychological significance of the symbolic landscape at the base of our

01:26:12.080 culture, you know?

01:26:12.800 And the fundamental presumption of our culture is that you should bear a load, that you should 0.55

01:26:18.720 and you can, and you'll find your destiny.

01:26:20.740 And that's exactly what hoisting your cross voluntarily means, right?

01:26:25.600 Is that not only can you take a load, you can take the ultimate load.

01:26:30.240 And even better than that, that you find your true calling and destiny in your willingness

01:26:34.600 to take the ultimate load, you know?

01:26:37.240 And that is an optimistic message because life is an unbearable load.

01:26:41.920 And the only possible medication for that in the final analysis is that you're an infinitely

01:26:47.380 load-bearing creature.

01:26:49.800 Because otherwise, how can you manage it?

01:26:51.340 And you might be, you know?

01:26:52.880 And it seems to me the adventure of...

01:26:54.600 And that it will make you stronger.

01:26:56.560 Continually able to bear more.

01:26:58.200 Yes, yes.

01:26:59.080 Right.

01:26:59.480 And that that's the way to build muscle in every sense.

01:27:02.720 And that courage is to be praised, right?

01:27:05.900 Those are the things that are to be praised.

01:27:09.080 And that is what we need to be telling our kids.

01:27:12.820 And I think when we were left to...

01:27:14.520 When parents were more or less left to their own devices, family tradition, wisdom that

01:27:19.560 they had from their parents, other people who had raised good kids to adulthood, that's

01:27:24.260 what we knew.

01:27:25.020 We remembered that, that you were part of a family, that your job was to do well for others

01:27:29.460 and to do the best you could, not to be praised for things you hadn't done or things that were

01:27:33.800 frankly easy to do, right?

01:27:35.820 And I think that they grew up with a much more sense of meaning and purpose and ultimately

01:27:41.940 even happiness than we're seeing today.

01:27:45.240 All right.

01:27:45.560 So we've walked through all this and you've spent a lot of time thinking about it.

01:27:49.060 Um, you got any ideas for a way forward?

01:27:52.700 I mean, I look at the educational system writ large and I think, oh no, it's done.

01:27:59.900 Like it's so corrupt.

01:28:02.640 The faculties of education are absolutely intolerably corrupt and they have been for 60 years.

01:28:10.800 And during that time, they've done nothing but deteriorate.

01:28:14.280 The teachers that are being produced by these faculties are not only incompetent, they're

01:28:20.740 absolutely addled ideologically.

01:28:23.660 And the universities are, are they worse?

01:28:28.500 If it, there's certainly no better, generally speaking, and they might be worse.

01:28:33.000 And so that's a damning indictment.

01:28:35.280 And, well, you know, you started looking at one misapplication of the therapeutic mindset

01:28:45.100 embedded in this broader ideology.

01:28:47.200 And then you broaden to think, oh, well, this is happening all sorts of places.

01:28:50.980 It's like, okay, fair enough.

01:28:53.200 What do we do about it?

01:28:54.740 Practically speaking, you know, like a return to what was, it's vague, you know what I mean?

01:29:00.220 And it's, it's, it's got that, that conservative tendency to, to, to offer the past as a solution.

01:29:07.780 And there's something to that.

01:29:08.880 But where, where do you see bright lights and possibilities moving forward?

01:29:13.600 Absolutely.

01:29:14.320 This is where I'm most optimistic.

01:29:16.020 It's what parents can do.

01:29:17.680 It's what we've always known how to do.

01:29:19.760 Okay.

01:29:20.240 We've known this for, you know, since the beginning of time, how to raise good people.

01:29:24.560 And we've done it.

01:29:25.560 And the way to do it in our over, with these over-treated kids is to proceed by subtraction.

01:29:32.880 Remove the psych meds they don't need, the diagnosis you don't believe in, the over-monitoring,

01:29:39.800 over-coddling, over-accommodation, over-avoidance of everything, unpleasant.

01:29:46.140 And give them more responsibility.

01:29:48.900 Be the authority in your home.

01:29:50.960 Transmit your values and stop allowing intermediaries to come between you and your children.

01:29:57.220 If you do that, you will raise good kids.

01:30:00.640 And you don't have to be as afraid of the teacher in school who doesn't share your values because

01:30:05.480 your kid is armed.

01:30:06.600 And you don't have to be as terrified of social media because your kid is ready by that,

01:30:11.160 by the time you, you finally allow it.

01:30:13.700 And that's what I think we need to focus on.

01:30:15.940 Okay, so you might say, well, why should a parent have any faith in their own ability

01:30:21.080 given the confrontation they have with expertise?

01:30:24.720 And I would say, look, parents, here's something you've got to understand is that

01:30:28.920 if you love someone, you are going to be as powerfully oriented as you can.

01:30:36.180 And so are all your instincts in the right direction.

01:30:38.400 You know, like if I have a child I genuinely love, I want the best for them.

01:30:42.680 That's what love means.

01:30:43.680 And that means that even if I'm not particularly educated or maybe even not particularly perspicacious,

01:30:50.600 I am likely, because of my motivation, to see the right pathways forward.

01:30:55.320 And because I care for that child, that's going to make itself manifest to me.

01:30:59.020 The problem with the bloody experts is that they don't love your children.

01:31:03.140 And they can't.

01:31:04.580 You know, I mean, we have a limit to the degree to which we can shower maternal, true maternal 0.97

01:31:10.860 or paternal love on other people.

01:31:12.500 I mean, I suppose if you became a saint-like expert at it.

01:31:14.800 They don't love your children.

01:31:15.840 Right.

01:31:16.320 And they don't believe in them.

01:31:18.080 And they don't believe in them.

01:31:19.520 They see them as weak.

01:31:20.780 They see them as damaged.

01:31:22.240 They see them as somewhere on a spectrum of dysfunction.

01:31:26.580 They don't know what they can do, but parents do because they're with their kids.

01:31:31.460 And they know what people can handle because it's what they could handle as kids.

01:31:36.120 If you could survive a car trip without an iPad, your kid can.

01:31:42.240 If you could survive a heartbreak without a therapist, your child can too.

01:31:47.700 She can survive the death of a pet without working it through with a therapist.

01:31:53.340 All those things that we've known that kids can, you can get through and emerge stronger

01:31:59.560 on the other side.

01:32:00.840 And there's all kinds of people around, including very many of our own parents who raised good

01:32:05.820 people, people who were productive citizens other people could rely on.

01:32:10.540 Ask them for advice, but not the experts whose own recommendations, what the fruits of that

01:32:18.160 are, anyone's guess.

01:32:20.360 Well, we're seeing what the fruits of it is.

01:32:24.000 And it's not good.

01:32:25.480 It's not good.

01:32:27.380 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:27.980 So how has writing these last two books transformed the way that you live your life?

01:32:37.140 It's funny.

01:32:37.880 They really have, especially this one.

01:32:39.640 This one was much more close to home because it's three kids I'm raising.

01:32:42.520 I didn't have a kid with a gender, transgender identity or anything like that.

01:32:46.980 But I do have three kids who are in this rising generation.

01:32:50.540 And it changed me in a lot of ways.

01:32:53.260 I talked to a lot of parents, a lot of psychologists, a lot of psychiatrists who are very good, very

01:32:57.260 respected academic psychologists, including you.

01:33:00.000 And one of the things I started doing was when my nine-year-old asked if she could walk

01:33:04.680 home from the bus stop alone, I started letting her, even though I hated it. 1.00

01:33:09.140 I hated it.

01:33:09.780 I still hate it.

01:33:10.760 But I let her.

01:33:11.700 And one of the things I learned from parents is if you curtail kids' independence too much,

01:33:15.760 at some point they stop asking.

01:33:17.920 They get used to the cage.

01:33:19.280 They know that it's no triumph to walk home alone at 13, but it is at nine.

01:33:25.620 And I started giving my kids more chores because it was only, none of my hectoring helped make

01:33:31.420 them more responsible.

01:33:32.640 But when I sent them with a backpack and a credit card to the store for me, and they had to come

01:33:37.060 back with the right items.

01:33:38.260 And if they didn't, I sent them back.

01:33:40.040 They started paying attention to getting it right.

01:33:42.700 And no amount of yelling at them had helped them pay attention to those details before.

01:33:47.020 But this did, and they got to know, they got to be able to talk to people on their own,

01:33:51.520 other adults, and navigate things like the grocery store on their own.

01:33:54.900 And that was better for them than any number of lessons I had given them.

01:33:59.800 Summer camp was another thing I did, sleepaway camp, which was a no-technology sleepaway camp.

01:34:05.780 This was phenomenal because the opportunity to be away from my supervision, frankly, was incredibly

01:34:12.540 good for them and their sense of self-esteem.

01:34:15.280 But there are other things, too.

01:34:17.040 Extended family, making sure that even if I thought extended family didn't say the right

01:34:22.540 things or didn't give them the right food, to let it happen.

01:34:26.460 Because you know what?

01:34:27.300 I don't know what situations my kids will fall into.

01:34:29.760 None of us knows.

01:34:30.860 But we do know that these web of connections that they have are very important in a stable

01:34:35.840 and healthy and happy life.

01:34:37.240 And even if I don't love all the influencing comments or all the comments made to them or

01:34:42.240 all the jokes, even if I don't deem them all, you know, the most appropriate at that stage

01:34:46.760 for my kids, that there's something bigger at stake there, that my kids feel connected

01:34:51.260 to a larger family and a larger community and set of stable connections.

01:34:55.680 And I started letting it happen.

01:34:58.840 And that's what I think we need to get back to.

01:35:00.580 So what has that done to your children's attitude towards you?

01:35:07.660 Well, you know, so far, it's so good.

01:35:10.760 I mean, you know, I don't think they have any doubts that, you know, I'm not their friend.

01:35:15.980 But that means they really treasure time with actual friends.

01:35:19.800 They don't rush to confide everything in me.

01:35:22.900 And I think that's okay.

01:35:24.380 I, you know, I need to have, give them that space to even be a little defiant if they want

01:35:31.440 to, or even reject some of my advice.

01:35:33.980 But the most important thing is that I give them my values, that I communicate, you know,

01:35:38.760 we're the only culture, America, and I think North America even, are the other, some of the 0.79

01:35:43.340 only civilizations that don't think, and in the West, actually, in general, we didn't do

01:35:47.760 a great job at communicating our own values to our kids.

01:35:50.680 Everyone else seems to know this is the most important thing.

01:35:53.280 I was at a, I was invited to speak at a university recently, and it was a very, it was a conservative

01:35:58.700 group that had invited me.

01:36:00.520 And one of the gentlemen who was a host said to me, was joking about how his daughter at

01:36:05.980 college is a communist.

01:36:07.460 He said, because of course, you know, you send them to college and they all become communists.

01:36:10.600 And he was sort of laughing about that.

01:36:12.300 And I just thought, wow, we're so comfortable in the West with the idea that someone else will

01:36:18.520 come in and interpose their values with our own children.

01:36:21.680 That should be step one, is making sure our kids share our values.

01:36:26.080 Not that they, you know, not that we oversee everything they do or every interaction they

01:36:30.380 have, but when they pass on their values so they become good and independent and decent

01:36:35.140 people.

01:36:35.820 And that doesn't require expertise.

01:36:38.280 That's why the mental health experts, you know, certainly the therapists in general don't

01:36:42.100 tell you that.

01:36:42.960 But that is what actually leads to a meaningful and good life.

01:36:45.980 Well, Abigail, that's probably a good place to stop.

01:36:50.520 So let's stop.

01:36:52.440 When is your book coming out?

01:36:54.020 Now.

01:36:54.520 It's available now.

01:36:55.160 It's available now.

01:36:56.020 Okay.

01:36:56.380 So for everybody watching and listening, you can pick up this book now and hopefully it

01:37:00.480 will foster your willingness to let your children take the dangerous risks that are necessary

01:37:07.760 to imbue them with real confidence.

01:37:09.940 I'll tell you something that happened to me in Rome.

01:37:12.140 Well, I went to St. Peter's, you know, and the Paeda is at St. Peter's and I think Michelangelo 1.00

01:37:18.860 carved that when he was like 23 or something, you know, some crazy feat of utter genius.

01:37:25.140 And it's very interesting that it's in St. Peter's, right?

01:37:29.060 Because, well, you know, that's a sacred place, obviously a central sacred place.

01:37:33.040 And I spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the feminine in the landscape of the

01:37:38.900 sacred, you know, and our central sacred figure in the Christian West forever has been some

01:37:46.240 variant of the crucifix, right?

01:37:48.100 But the problem with that is that it's a male symbol.

01:37:51.000 And, you know, that's, well, that begs a question.

01:37:54.980 Like, what's the primary female symbol of union with God in the ultimate sacrifice?

01:38:01.760 And I think Michelangelo captured it in the Paeda, and I think that's why it's in St. Peter's. 0.98

01:38:07.080 Because what you have there, once you understand it, it's really something.

01:38:12.460 You know, you could imagine that there are two kinds of sacrifices that you could make in the

01:38:16.920 world that are the most difficult sacrifice.

01:38:19.500 And one would be to sacrifice yourself.

01:38:22.840 And you might think, well, there's nothing worse than that.

01:38:24.840 And I would say, yeah, there might be.

01:38:26.220 Sacrificing a child, I think that most parents would sacrifice themselves before they would

01:38:33.000 sacrifice their child.

01:38:34.120 And so that implies that sacrificing your child is worse, is harder.

01:38:38.500 And that's what a good mother has to do. 1.00

01:38:41.120 And so what you see in the Paeda is this, it's this terrible image of Mary, who's larger than life 0.99

01:38:47.620 in the representation.

01:38:49.000 And she's holding the broken body of her child in her arms.

01:38:54.940 And what that means is that that's what you have to do as a mother.

01:38:59.980 You have to offer your child up to the world.

01:39:02.660 That's part of the sacrificial gesture of eternal motherhood, right?

01:39:05.880 And that takes courage.

01:39:07.840 You know, and it manifests itself in these small decisions, you know, these horrifying decisions.

01:39:13.040 You let your daughter walk home when she's nine.

01:39:15.120 It's like, really?

01:39:17.000 Really?

01:39:17.540 What if something happens?

01:39:18.800 It's like, yeah, that'd be bad.

01:39:22.020 You'd never forgive yourself for that, right?

01:39:24.180 Absolutely.

01:39:24.940 But you have to realize that something's going to happen either way.

01:39:28.100 Yeah, that's right.

01:39:28.940 So either you so shelter a child, she'll never be independent, never be able to navigate herself,

01:39:32.960 never know to recognize real dangers, never know how to calibrate her response.

01:39:37.840 Yeah.

01:39:38.180 Or, you know, either way, something can happen.

01:39:42.600 And the question is, do I want to raise a kid who's always dependent and weak?

01:39:46.780 Or do I want to raise a child who's strong, who can individuate one day?

01:39:50.000 And I think the answer should obviously be the latter.

01:39:53.280 Right, right.

01:39:54.160 Well, that's the right sacrificial gesture.

01:39:56.980 Right.

01:39:57.380 Yeah.

01:39:57.740 Well, so congratulations for figuring that out.

01:40:00.800 Very nice talking to you again.

01:40:02.660 Very nice talking to you.

01:40:03.200 It's great talking to you too.

01:40:04.180 Thank you so much, Jordan.

01:40:05.600 You bet.

01:40:06.300 Congratulations.

01:40:07.280 Congratulations on the birth of your newest grandchild.

01:40:09.580 Oh, thank you very much.

01:40:10.920 Thank you very much.

01:40:11.820 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:12.600 And so, all right, everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.

01:40:17.500 I think you should rush out and buy Abigail's new book, especially if you're a parent and

01:40:21.380 you're struggling with the necessity of being brave enough to allow your child to place themselves

01:40:28.540 wisely in danger, right?

01:40:30.500 Because that's life.

01:40:31.940 That's for sure.

01:40:32.780 That's the adventure of life.

01:40:34.120 So, we all have to bolster ourselves up and accept that as a necessity or celebrate it

01:40:40.660 for that matter, which is a wiser thing to do.

01:40:43.560 I'm going to talk to Abigail for another half an hour, as I do with all my guests on the

01:40:47.560 Daily Wire Plus platform, and I'm going to walk her through, well, her developing interest

01:40:52.180 in the issues that she's been covering over the last couple of years.

01:40:55.120 And so, because I'm curious about that, and you all might be too.

01:40:58.040 And so, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire Plus side, that'd be fine.

01:41:01.340 That way, you can provide them with some support, too, in their attempts to generate another 0.98

01:41:06.340 enterprise of communication and entertainment that provides an alternative to the idiot 0.98

01:41:12.940 legacy establishments that we happen to be saddled with at the moment. 0.94

01:41:16.520 So, thank you very much, Abigail.

01:41:18.660 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 29, 2024

427. Bad Therapy, Weak Parenting, Broken Children ｜ Abigail Shrier

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