The Matt Walsh Show - April 11, 2018


Ep. 7 - Parents in America Need to Start Doing Some Actual Parenting


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

165.41644

Word count

3,712

Sentence count

274

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A girl went to school without her underwear on, and it caused a national outrage. How did the school handle the situation? And what should we do about it? Is it the fault of the school or is it something else?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the show, everybody. Thanks for watching. So let me just say to start with here
00:00:07.140 that I am very sympathetic to parents because I am a parent. I've got three kids. I know how
00:00:15.440 difficult it is to be a parent. Or I should say, we back up for a minute, because parents always
00:00:21.320 like to say, well, being a parent is the hardest job in the world. I've said it myself. That's
00:00:26.560 true with a qualifier. To raise a child to be a good person in this degenerate, disgusting culture,
00:00:37.080 that is the hardest job in the world for sure. That is a 24-7, never sleep, round the clock,
00:00:42.640 relentless, stressful, heartbreaking, strenuous job that just never ends. And every fiber of your
00:00:51.740 being must be invested in it all the time, constantly, if you want to raise your kid to
00:00:56.200 be a good person. So that's the hardest job in the world. But just to raise a kid in general,
00:01:02.680 if by raising a kid, we mean, well, that you have them in your house and you feed them food and you
00:01:07.800 put the TV on for them and you make sure they're wearing some kind of clothing and maybe you take
00:01:14.720 them on a vacation every once in a while. If that's what we mean by raising a kid, well, then no,
00:01:20.040 that's not the hardest job in the world. That in and of itself is not a difficult job at all,
00:01:25.240 actually. Literally anyone can do it and anyone does do it. So that in and of itself is not hard.
00:01:33.580 What is hard is raising your kid to be a good person. I fear that the problem is that many
00:01:39.160 parents in this culture aren't so much worried about the moral formation of their kids. They're
00:01:44.740 not worried about raising their kids to be good people. They're more worried about, well,
00:01:48.880 they need to be a good student. They need to get good grades. We got to get them into a good
00:01:53.100 college. We got to make sure they get a good career. There are parents who aren't worried
00:01:57.620 about any of this stuff whatsoever, but there are plenty of parents who are worried about that.
00:02:01.480 But in terms of the state of their child's soul, well, they don't concern themselves as much with
00:02:08.440 that. And that is just bad parenting. It's not just bad parenting. That is awful parenting. That
00:02:16.380 is non-parenting. That is, you may as well not even be parenting. You could just make a robot with
00:02:25.780 a computer algorithm that could do that. The hard part is the moral formation. And I fear that a lot
00:02:32.320 of us just don't worry about that. I bring that up just as a means of introduction to this topic,
00:02:37.040 which I think is kind of an illustration of a larger problem. So every year, it seems like we
00:02:43.780 get maybe, I don't know, 10 or 12 national dress code outrages. It's always the same thing.
00:02:51.680 A teenager goes to school dressed inappropriately or hardly dressed at all. And the school is forced
00:02:57.760 to reassert its dress code policies. And that, of course, that's a horrible, oppressive thing.
00:03:03.340 And it persecutes the poor child. And she runs home to her mother and tells her mother. And the
00:03:09.020 mother calls the school and alerts the media. And then the child, who, by the way, is so embarrassed
00:03:13.560 by all this and humiliated, then goes on social media and tells everyone in the world, because
00:03:18.280 that's what you do when you're embarrassed about something. You tell everybody. And then that's how
00:03:23.920 it becomes a national outrage. This happens, like I said, probably 10 or 12 times a year.
00:03:28.020 And it really ramps up when we get into the warmer weather. So we're starting to see now.
00:03:34.540 And we got our first dose of this, this week, with a national dress code outrage. I think it's
00:03:42.260 our first of the year. One of many, I'm sure, before the year is up. I'm not going to go into the
00:03:47.520 specifics of this story. It doesn't really matter. I'm just using this as an intro, as a means into
00:03:52.520 this larger conversation. I mean, in this case, it was the girl. She went to school without
00:03:57.460 undergarments on. And that was a problem for the school, understandably. They handled the problem
00:04:03.900 in kind of a clumsy, weird way. And so then the daughter went home and told the mom. And the mom
00:04:09.580 and the daughter are now saying that she's persecuted and it's terrible and she's been sexualized and so
00:04:13.820 on and so forth. Now, it is true that schools are very often clumsy, as I said, and awkward and
00:04:21.800 weird in how they deal with this stuff. But I don't fault them for that. Because they shouldn't
00:04:30.840 have to deal with it at all. And there really isn't any non-awkward way for an adult to tell
00:04:39.800 another adult's kid that she's not wearing enough clothing. There is no way to do that,
00:04:45.360 no way at all, that will not be embarrassing to everybody involved in the situation. There's
00:04:51.360 just once you have, as an adult, as a parent, put another adult in the position where they have to
00:04:57.340 have that conversation, you have put them in a lose-lose situation. There's nothing they can do.
00:05:02.160 So the schools, as they're looking at this issue, they have two general avenues they can take. The
00:05:11.360 first avenue is let's do nothing and just accept the fact that our hallways are going to resemble
00:05:18.180 a downtown bar at 1am on a Saturday. We'll just accept that and whatever. Or we can try to impose
00:05:29.760 some basic standard of decency and decorum and dignity in our school. I respect the schools that
00:05:40.100 take the latter approach. I give them a lot of leeway, even when they do it awkwardly.
00:05:44.340 Um, I can generally be pretty hard on the school system, I admit, but, but I acknowledge that they
00:05:50.180 are in an unenviable situation in an almost impossible situation where they're constantly
00:05:57.960 having to do things that parents won't do. And they're constantly having to have these conversations
00:06:06.020 that parents won't have with their kids. Sometimes the, sometimes the schools go too
00:06:11.680 far. They take too much liberty. And so for instance, they'll, you know, they, they want to
00:06:17.360 talk to the kids about sex, like in kindergarten now, because they say, well, the parents aren't
00:06:21.620 doing it. That's something that you got to leave to the parents. And if they don't do it, they don't
00:06:26.340 do it. But that's not for the schools to do at all, except for teaching the kids, the basic
00:06:31.880 biological scientific facts of sex, when it, when, when it's appropriate for their age group
00:06:36.260 in science. But beyond that, to go anymore into sexual ethics or telling them when to have sex and,
00:06:43.320 you know, just that's not for the schools to do. Um, especially government schools, but
00:06:52.160 basic decency, basic modesty. Well, if they don't have a conversation about that with the kids
00:06:59.540 and the parents don't have a conversation with that, about that, with the kids, then we're back
00:07:04.580 to the schools looking like a red light district. And that's not really an acceptable outcome.
00:07:10.980 So the schools have to do something. Now we were discussing this a couple of days ago in my, um,
00:07:17.180 Facebook group, and I received quite a few messages from teachers who, uh, tell me that kids
00:07:25.200 regularly come to school. These are their words, not mine dress like hookers and streetwalkers. 1.00
00:07:33.560 And there's nothing they can do about it. And one thing that all these teachers echoed to me
00:07:37.840 is that those of us who are not in school and those of us who don't have teenagers,
00:07:43.180 um, we probably don't really understand how bad it is, how crazy it's gotten with the outfits and
00:07:52.660 just the inappropriate, ridiculous, as they say, hookerish outfits that these kids are coming to
00:07:58.400 school in. Now, maybe it's not like this in every school, but some of these stories that teachers
00:08:03.880 told me, I mean, it's, I, you know, I, I graduated high school. Um, I don't know how old am I now?
00:08:13.520 I graduated high school like 15 years ago, uh, around there, 15, 20 years ago, 25. I don't know.
00:08:20.140 But for me, it wasn't so long ago that things should have changed that much, but, and it was
00:08:24.880 pretty bad when I went to school, but it's apparently so much worse even now. But if the
00:08:29.000 parents are alerted to the problem, and this is the case, you know, not just with dress code stuff,
00:08:33.180 but just in general, if you listen to the teachers, this is what they say. You try to talk to a parent
00:08:37.520 about a problem involving the kid and the parents will rush to their little darling's defense and
00:08:43.160 become very indignant that anyone would dare give their poor child a lecture. How dare you?
00:08:49.100 It's none of your business to which the school should reply. Well, when you send your kid
00:08:55.240 into public half naked, it is our business. Now you've made it our business. I wish it wasn't,
00:09:00.660 but now it is, that's your fault. Be a parent. Um, but of course the real source of their indignation
00:09:08.420 is embarrassment. They are not embarrassed over the conduct of their child. Like they should be
00:09:14.260 they're embarrassed and they feel personally chastised that a school employee had to mop up
00:09:20.220 after their negligent parenting. They realize on some level that they're doing a terrible job
00:09:25.860 parenting. Um, they're not really parenting at all. And so the schools had to do it for them
00:09:30.520 and that makes them feel bad. And that's why, you know, the parents who not, like I said,
00:09:34.680 not just with wardrobes, but when a kid is being disruptive, acting out,
00:09:39.040 and, um, the schools have to talk to a parent about it. When the parent gets defensive and says,
00:09:45.220 no way, how did that? My, my kid didn't do that. You, that's the teacher doesn't like him. It's all
00:09:50.160 your fault. He's being persecuted. Not, not all parents respond that way. That's not how my parents
00:09:55.120 responded when I went to school and I got in trouble. But, um, the parents who do respond that
00:09:59.260 way, it's, they're not defending their kid. They're defending themselves. That's all they're doing.
00:10:06.240 It's just selfishness. It's all about them. They're defending themselves and they're saying,
00:10:09.900 how dare you? Because if it's true that my kid's doing that, then that means that maybe I'm doing
00:10:13.680 something wrong at home and I can't face that fact. So no. Um, but this is what you get parents
00:10:24.000 when you leave the parenting to the school system. It's embarrassing for you. And I, and I imagine it,
00:10:32.880 it must be embarrassing when you've got a,
00:10:36.240 come in and have a meeting with a teacher, talk to a teacher on the phone and hear all these things
00:10:41.120 that your kid's doing wrong. Um, that's embarrassing. But if your kid, you know,
00:10:49.180 if your kid gets a lectured by the assistant principal over her miniskirt or whatever,
00:10:54.480 don't be indignant at the school. The assistant principal was just doing something that you
00:11:00.540 refuse to do. It should have been you giving the lecture, but you didn't do it. So they had to do it.
00:11:05.400 It would have been better coming from you, but you didn't do it. So they did. That's your fault.
00:11:09.040 Be indignant at yourself. Be embarrassed about yourself. Be angry at yourself.
00:11:16.160 If you're not going to do your job, then the school system is going to pinch hit.
00:11:19.760 And the school system has to do a lot of pinch hitting because there are a lot of parents who
00:11:23.980 just aren't doing their job. And I think the school system oftentimes does a bad job of
00:11:28.200 pinch hitting, but it's an indictment on America's parents that they even have to step up to the
00:11:34.680 plate at all because they shouldn't have to. Here is a, here's an idea.
00:11:39.280 Maybe we should instill in our children a sense of dignity and self-respect.
00:11:53.620 Maybe we should teach them modesty and we should teach them to be humble. We should teach them to
00:11:58.520 dress with class and with maturity. Maybe we should teach them to stop seeking attention. Maybe we should
00:12:07.160 teach them to respect authority. Teach them to be adults in a civilized society. The whole, this is
00:12:15.180 the whole point of parenting. If you're not going to see to your child's moral formation, then what
00:12:22.520 are you doing? What, what exactly are you doing? I often hear parents say, well, I mean, uh, I don't
00:12:30.520 want to force my child to be a certain way. I don't want to force him to fit into a box. I want him to
00:12:36.380 find himself. He doesn't know how to find himself. He doesn't know where to look. He's confused. He's a
00:12:45.500 kid. He doesn't know who he is. He's a, he's a, he's a child. He doesn't know anything. He knows
00:12:50.520 nothing about, about anything. That's your job to tell him, to show him, to guide him.
00:12:58.880 Don't say, oh, he's got to find himself. He's got to figure out his identity. He's got to express
00:13:02.840 himself. He doesn't know any, he's confused. Don't you see that? He's bewildered. He's got,
00:13:08.380 he doesn't know which way is up because you never told him. That's your job. So yes, you should be,
00:13:16.240 you should be getting your child to conform with, with, uh, with, he should be conforming with basic
00:13:23.100 standards of etiquette and decency and courtesy. He should be conforming with some kind of moral
00:13:29.440 structure. He should be conforming with the rules of the family. He should be conforming
00:13:35.100 with the rules in the school. He should be conforming under the authority of those who are
00:13:39.580 above him. He should be conforming with the idea that he should respect his elders. Yes, he should
00:13:45.240 be conforming to all of those things. Those are boxes that he should be fitting in and you should
00:13:50.860 be putting him in those boxes. That's your job. Again, if you're not going to do that as a parent,
00:13:56.520 then, and I say this with all due respect, but as a parent, you're basically useless. You're not
00:14:02.880 doing anything that there are specific things that society needs parents to do. And in this case,
00:14:11.760 if you're one of those, you're not doing any of those things. So what, what's the point? What are you
00:14:19.340 doing? You may as well just ship them to a boarding school or something at that point, because you're not
00:14:26.520 the, the whole, the whole parenting deal you've just checked out on.
00:14:32.580 He's going to find himself. I mean, people say this now about their, uh, you know, people say
00:14:37.980 this now about like their four-year-olds. Oh, he's got to find himself. He's got to,
00:14:41.340 got to figure out his own identity. He's four, you nutcase. What are you doing? He's four years old.
00:14:47.080 Got to find himself. Can't find any, can't even tie his shoes. Doesn't know anything. Yeah. You got
00:14:55.940 to tell him he's a boy. This is what boys do. This is how boys act. Again, that's your job. You're a
00:15:02.500 parent. Um, all right. Got a little worked up there. I, I just, it really, this is the thing.
00:15:16.520 This is the thing above maybe anything else in this society that, uh, irritates me the most.
00:15:24.380 These parents who just categorically refuse to do their job, refuse to do it.
00:15:31.900 One other point, um, one other point I want to make. Okay. And I know this is a thing that gets
00:15:39.660 me into trouble, but, um, when we're talking, you know, just going back specifically to the dress code
00:15:45.380 issue. One of the things that you hear sometimes is that one of the reasons why we should have dress
00:15:53.580 codes and why we should teach our daughters to respect the dress codes is that it can be very 0.99
00:15:58.160 distracting for boys in the school. If the girls are coming in dressed, like they're going to the 1.00
00:16:06.260 beach. Right. Um, and we, when someone makes that argument, we tend to write that off and say,
00:16:12.660 that's a, that's a silly, sexist, patriarchal argument. It's not my problem. What your boy
00:16:18.180 does. It's not my, if your boy can't control himself, it's not my problem. It's not my daughter's
00:16:22.460 problem. He's got to deal with it. That's a terrible attitude. And it's a terrible attitude
00:16:30.480 to instill in your daughter is a terrible, obnoxious, selfish, ugly attitude. Um, it is not sexist 0.90
00:16:38.320 to point out that your daughter's skimpy outfits really are extremely distracting to the boys in
00:16:46.540 her school. They are, if you've never been a teenage boy and you've never been the parent
00:16:54.680 of a teenage boy, then you really do not understand the overwhelming power that a boy's hormones
00:17:03.920 have over him at a certain age. And I know that girls have hormones too, and they've got their own 1.00
00:17:10.160 issues with that. Not downplaying that at all, but those are different issues and it's not the same.
00:17:15.480 And the, the fixation on the opposite sex on sex in general, this is something that is so much more 0.53
00:17:27.920 pronounced for boys than it is for girls. That's just a biological reality. There are exceptions,
00:17:32.820 but they are just that exception for the most part is so much more powerful and pronounced than boys.
00:17:37.960 And they can't control that. They can't, you know, we can try to teach them to control their actions,
00:17:43.040 but they can't control the fixation. They can't control what their mind is doing inside their
00:17:48.060 head. Um, it's not an exaggeration to say that it is very nearly impossible, very nearly impossible
00:17:58.100 for a, for a pubescent boy to focus on his work while his girl classmates are coming to school,
00:18:05.200 barely clothed. It's, it's, you are asking him to do something that is practically impossible
00:18:12.860 for him to do. It would require just, I'll tell you this, let me put it this way.
00:18:19.040 It would require more self-discipline and, um, maturity and moral courage than you probably
00:18:27.660 have right now as an adult. So you're asking him to exhibit a kind of control over his mind and his
00:18:38.300 faculties that you yourself do not exhibit. Um, so this is just a fact of biology.
00:18:50.780 Maybe you as a parent should teach your daughter
00:18:53.160 that her attempts to get attention are harmful, not only to herself, but also to her male classmates
00:19:02.420 who have almost no choice, but to give her the attention she's demanding. It's, it's like a
00:19:09.560 biological imperative that they're going to give that attention. And so she shouldn't be out there
00:19:15.680 seeking it. It's selfish. I mean, it is obviously selfish in more ways than one.
00:19:23.600 Just, just a man. I want you really, I mean, I don't think we empathize enough with boys in this
00:19:27.500 culture. Imagine what this culture is like for boys. And like I said, I remember how it was for
00:19:33.700 me when I was a kid, not all that long ago, and it was very difficult, but it's even it's, it's,
00:19:38.360 it's gotta be 10 times worse even now than it was for me. Um, you're a boy in 2018, there's porn
00:19:46.580 everywhere. There's sex all over the TV, there's sex all over the computer. Uh, and then he goes to
00:19:52.360 school and the girls are dressed like they're going to the club and he just can't escape everywhere.
00:19:57.140 Now he's got his hormones raging. He's going through puberty. He's I, and everywhere he
00:20:00.740 turns, he can't turn anywhere where it's not there. I mean, it's, it's, it's, do you have
00:20:05.140 any idea how difficult we've made it for a boy to be virtuous and chaste, let, let alone productive
00:20:12.200 in this society? And so the, the, the response of a lot of parents of girls is, ah, that's their
00:20:22.260 problem, whatever. I mean, how disgusting of an attitude is that? Why don't you have
00:20:28.120 a little bit of, I mean, look, just stop thinking about yourself for a second. And just, just
00:20:33.020 for a moment, if you can, and try to empathize with these boys, they didn't choose to be this
00:20:38.180 way. This, and they didn't choose to live in this culture either. That is constantly preying
00:20:42.520 upon their weakest impulses at a point in their life when they have not developed the maturity
00:20:49.340 and the discipline to, um, to overcome those impulses. As I said, as, you know, as adults,
00:20:59.780 we don't, we're not prepubescent boys anymore. So we don't have the same impulses. We don't
00:21:04.240 deal with the same, um, struggles that they do internally. But what I'm saying is the amount
00:21:12.600 of self-discipline that we are requiring boys to have in, in this culture, it is a greater
00:21:22.100 self-discipline than even most adults exhibit. Um, and that's not fair. You know, it's just
00:21:32.640 not fair. So I don't know. I mean, that's not the only reason why we should have the dress
00:21:38.840 coats, but that is a reason. I don't think it's an irrelevant reason. I think it's something
00:21:44.380 that we should all be concerned about. And maybe, I mean, we focus so much on the plight
00:21:49.900 of girls in society and what they go through and the societal expectations and everything.
00:21:54.020 And that's great to focus on that because that's an important issue. I have a daughter
00:21:56.840 as well. Um, so I'm worried about that, but we just neglect altogether. We just, we just
00:22:03.360 scoff what boys go through. We just scoff at it. We don't care. We're like, just let them
00:22:07.760 deal with it. It's their problem. Like I said, it's just, it's a disgusting attitude. It really
00:22:13.980 is. Uh, but that's maybe a topic for another day. I mean, I will talk about more about that
00:22:21.120 some other time. Um, but we'll leave it there for now. So thanks for watching everybody and
00:22:25.840 have a great day.