#194 Abigail Shrier: The Parent-Therapy Trap

0:00:00 So, I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy.
0:00:04 Bad therapy is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse.
0:00:09 And by that I mean, we’re teaching them over and over.
0:00:12 Your feelings are the most important thing.
0:00:14 That’s what we’re broadcasting when we constantly ask them how they’re feeling.
0:00:18 When we constantly ask them if they’re happy, we’re fretting over their happiness.
0:00:22 So we’ve made happiness a goal.
0:00:24 Making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy.
0:00:28 We’re teaching kids they can never ignore any distress, they’ve never ignored any pain,
0:00:32 and so they’re not able to do it.
0:00:50 Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a bi-weekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas, practical
0:00:55 methods, and mental models of others.
0:00:58 In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the
0:01:03 best of what other people have already figured out.
0:01:06 I’m your host, Shane Parish.
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0:01:49 Okay, if you’re listening with a child around, now might be a good time for you to put on
0:01:54 your headphones.
0:01:55 While this is bound to be a controversial episode, I want to remind you that, as is the case
0:02:01 with all of our guests, my job is to explore a subject through the eyes of our guest in
0:02:05 a non-judgmental way.
0:02:07 If you have a real mental health issue, this episode is not for you.
0:02:12 If however, you have a nagging feeling that therapy isn’t helping you or your kids as
0:02:16 much as you thought it should, or you just want to learn more about the topic, sit back
0:02:21 and listen.
0:02:22 Today, my guest is Abigail Schreyer, author of the book Bad Therapy.
0:02:27 In a world where mental health challenges are on the rise, particularly among youth,
0:02:32 Abigail’s work offers a critical examination of the failings in our current approach to
0:02:37 therapy.
0:02:39 In this episode, we use the counterintuitive question, “How would we raise children to
0:02:44 be as mentally unstable as possible in order to explore the key principles and practices
0:02:50 that are essential for fostering resilience and independence in our children and ourselves?”
0:02:56 We don’t just talk about kids, we also explore the concept of “therapist as best friend”
0:03:01 for adults, questions you can ask before engaging a therapist, and when it’s time to end your
0:03:07 relationship with a therapist.
0:03:09 We also discuss the societal trends contributing to the decline in mental health, the role of
0:03:14 technology in social media, and the responsibility of parents and therapists in addressing these
0:03:19 issues.
0:03:20 Abigail shares insights on how other cultures approach child-during differently, and what
0:03:24 we can learn from their successes.
0:03:26 Throughout our conversation, we uncover problems in the mental health field from the protocols
0:03:30 that prioritize ideology over individual needs to the graduate schools that produce bad therapists.
0:03:37 By listening to this episode, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the complex factors
0:03:41 shaping our children’s mental well-being, and the steps we can take to redesign our
0:03:45 approach to therapy and parenting.
0:03:48 Abigail’s insights will empower you to make informed decisions and advocate for change
0:03:52 in a system that, at least based on the numbers, is failing our youth.
0:03:58 It’s time to listen and learn.
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0:06:01 I was thinking about how to start this conversation, and I think we should actually start with
0:06:17 the inverse.
0:06:19 Instead of talking about how to raise strong, healthy, capable children who are independent,
0:06:25 how would we raise them to be as mentally unstable as possible?
0:06:30 That’s something I looked at, and the answer seems to be, and I’m a journalist, I interviewed
0:06:35 a lot of experts in terms of people who are familiar with the psychological research.
0:06:41 Not the people who hold themselves out as mental health experts guiding everyone, but
0:06:45 the people who are actually conducting and familiar with the psychological research.
0:06:49 If we wanted to make kids dysregulated, here’s what we would do.
0:06:54 We would obsess over their emotions.
0:06:57 We would ask them constantly how they were feeling about things.
0:07:01 We would ask them to pay attention to their feelings, so therefore broadcast that their
0:07:05 feelings were an important and reliable guide to how they were doing in life.
0:07:13 We would treat them in isolation, treat them as very special and unique and isolated from
0:07:19 everyone else, unique in the world.
0:07:23 Never give them a sense that their actions had an effect on others, so therefore they
0:07:28 had no responsibility to others to be a good citizen, whether that’s on an airplane or
0:07:34 in a classroom, but constantly talk about them as unique.
0:07:38 We would give them diagnoses for ordinary behaviors.
0:07:43 We would pathologize ordinary behaviors and treat them to see themselves as disordered.
0:07:47 “Oh, that’s just, you know, you have ADHD, oh, that’s your oppositional defiance disorder.
0:07:52 That’s why you acted out.”
0:07:53 So, instead of using the sort of lay terms we’ve always used that have to do with character,
0:07:58 like being a jerk in class or being inappropriate in class, we would say, “No, that’s your oppositional
0:08:04 defiance disorder.”
0:08:05 So treat them to see it as a brain problem so that they never felt they had any agency
0:08:09 to do anything about it.
0:08:11 And we would teach them to focus on happiness and wellness all the time.
0:08:16 And I think if we did all those things, we would end up with what we have, which is a
0:08:19 very dysregulated generation.
0:08:21 When you use the word dysregulated, what do you mean?
0:08:23 We’re seeing kids, high school students, university students who cannot control their emotion.
0:08:29 So teachers report that elementary school kids and even high school kids are throwing
0:08:34 tantrums in the classroom like they’ve never seen before.
0:08:38 And we’re seeing even as, you know, the young, this young rising generation goes off to
0:08:42 the workplace.
0:08:44 If their feelings are hurt at the workplace, they will complain to HR and try to get their
0:08:48 boss fired.
0:08:49 That seems to them a reasonable response to something not going the way they expected
0:08:55 in the workplace.
0:08:56 They want everything to stop for them.
0:08:58 How did we get here?
0:09:00 So I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy.
0:09:04 Bad therapy is this, is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse.
0:09:09 And by that, I mean all this feelings focused with kids.
0:09:13 We’re teaching them over and over, your feelings are the most important thing.
0:09:17 That’s what we’re broadcasting.
0:09:18 When we constantly ask them how they’re feeling, when we constantly ask them if they’re happy,
0:09:23 we’re fretting over their happiness.
0:09:25 So we’ve made happiness a goal.
0:09:27 The researchers can tell you, and there’s a lot of good research on this, making happiness,
0:09:32 your goal is a way to make you unhappy because most of life, we’re not exactly happy, right?
0:09:38 We’re thinking about the work we have, we’re frustrated, we have a worry that’s bothering
0:09:44 us.
0:09:45 Whether it’s a rich or an allergy or a slight pain, that we have to repress to get on with
0:09:50 the business of our lives.
0:09:52 And we’re doing the opposite with that.
0:09:54 We’re teaching kids they can never ignore any distress, they’ve never ignored any pain,
0:09:59 and so they’re not able to do it.
0:10:00 But how did that start?
0:10:02 How did this all come into society?
0:10:05 Did it go slowly and then all at once?
0:10:08 Was this one bad actor or one person seeded this idea and it took hold?
0:10:15 Because it seems like everybody’s just following the protocol.
0:10:18 But who’s creating these protocols?
0:10:20 How did this happen?
0:10:21 I think that we created a window or an opening, and parents as a group did.
0:10:27 How did we do this?
0:10:28 We had lived through a lot of divorce, we had a lot of broken homes ourselves, and we were
0:10:34 really worried that we weren’t going to do things properly.
0:10:37 We needed an expert, and in America in general and across the West, we’ve become more and
0:10:42 more reliant on so-called experts, even for ordinary things.
0:10:46 We don’t trust ourselves to handle our lives in the way that we used to.
0:10:51 We think that basically our lives require a certain amount of expertise, and child-wearing,
0:10:56 especially, we’ve become totally unconfident in our ability to raise kids.
0:11:02 Even though the project of raising kids really hasn’t changed in what kids need over centuries.
0:11:08 I mean, kids need the same things from us.
0:11:11 But instead, we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s a highly technical project.
0:11:15 You need to know about a child’s amygdala to do it right.
0:11:19 And that’s what the experts have been saying.
0:11:21 It’s not true.
0:11:22 It flies in the face of all the good psychological research.
0:11:24 But nonetheless, I do think all these factors have undermined our confidence that we knew
0:11:29 what we were doing.
0:11:31 And so then we turned to really bad advice from a whole lot of people who I think very
0:11:37 often mean well, but they’re giving very bad advice.
0:11:39 And sometimes their science is just garbage.
0:11:43 And they’ve been promoting the idea of trauma, trauma is everywhere in our world.
0:11:48 This is their idea that anything we do to get any time you yell at a kid that can traumatize
0:11:53 a kid, that injury, emotional injury can be with them for a lifetime.
0:11:57 It’s not true.
0:11:58 It’s not what the best research has shown.
0:12:00 But nonetheless, they peddle this in the popular culture and it makes parents stricken and afraid
0:12:06 to basically assert themselves as the authority and really have any discipline with their
0:12:11 kids.
0:12:12 A lot of the issues you raise are cultural, sort of like in terms of resilience weakening,
0:12:18 the abdication of parental responsibility.
0:12:20 These are big like social trends that are going on.
0:12:24 How much of the problem do you think goes to therapy versus parenting practices versus,
0:12:29 you know, we’re all just sort of like following the momentum?
0:12:34 So I think it’s all essentially bad therapy and this is why, because who’s in charge?
0:12:40 Who’s running the show?
0:12:42 And today with children, with families, it really is the mental health experts.
0:12:47 If you doubt that, just think for a moment about the fact that the rising generation
0:12:51 never says it’s shy.
0:12:52 They say they have social phobia.
0:12:54 They never say they’re sad.
0:12:55 They say they’re depressed.
0:12:57 They never say, gosh, they went through a tough time in middle school.
0:13:00 They say they have PTSD.
0:13:02 They’re speaking the language of psychopathology to understand themselves and each other.
0:13:07 Parents are practicing the techniques taken from therapists and psychologists.
0:13:12 Those are the techniques they’re aping when they talk to their children.
0:13:15 They’re not, there’s nothing natural about the way parents now behave with kids.
0:13:19 They get down to eye level, they constantly solicit their kids feelings and they talk
0:13:24 in the language, I see you’re having some big feelings now.
0:13:28 They’re reading a script and the script is supplied from therapists.
0:13:32 And then the final piece is schools where they are openly, they’re mandated as trauma-informed
0:13:37 care across public schools, social-emotional learning, and teachers and counselors, armies
0:13:44 of counselors are playing shrink with the kids all day long.
0:13:46 I was talking to somebody recently who said, the worst thing you can do to a 12-year-old
0:13:51 is try to be their best friend.
0:13:53 The worst thing you can do to a 40-year-old is try to parent them.
0:13:55 Do you think that we’re just trying to be our kids’ friends or how do you see it like
0:14:00 as a parenting level?
0:14:01 Yes and no.
0:14:03 So I think that’s a piece of it for sure.
0:14:05 We’re trying to be our kids’ friends, but we’re also treating them as adults, right?
0:14:09 That’s what that means.
0:14:10 When you say you’re trying to be your kids’ friends, first of all, you say, I’m not the
0:14:14 authority here.
0:14:15 Now, there’s great research showing that kids actually do need authority.
0:14:19 They need their parents in charge and if their parents aren’t in charge, they go looking for
0:14:22 authority elsewhere.
0:14:24 Kids really need authority in terms of further mental health, further stability for everything,
0:14:29 for success in life.
0:14:30 They really need their parents in charge, which doesn’t of course mean being cold and
0:14:33 unloving.
0:14:34 It just means that parents are in charge and they have rules.
0:14:38 You said being their friends, in some ways it’s worse than that because, yes, they’re
0:14:44 being their kids’ friends, but they’re also assuming that the kids are little adults.
0:14:50 So for instance, when they play the role of therapist with a child and say, I’m just here
0:14:56 to affirm your emotions, remember that a kid is still figuring out which of his emotions
0:15:01 make any sense at all, right?
0:15:04 A toddler will feel rage if you don’t give him the snack he wanted and you have to teach
0:15:11 a kid that’s not appropriate.
0:15:14 You can be disappointed, but screaming and even feeling rage, that’s not what we feel
0:15:20 anger about.
0:15:21 We feel anger about lots of things in life, but you can’t feel rage and throw your cheerios
0:15:26 across the floor because across the room because you didn’t get the snack you wanted.
0:15:31 And they actually, you have to sort of educate their emotions a little bit.
0:15:35 You don’t do that with adults, right?
0:15:38 Mostly you want to sort of, you know, as a therapist, therapists usually want to create
0:15:42 a space where adults feel comfortable opening up about emotions they might feel embarrassed
0:15:48 about, right?
0:15:50 But with kids, they’re just trying to figure out which of these emotions make any sense.
0:15:55 So the last thing we want to do is what we’ve been doing is affirm every one of their emotions,
0:16:00 no matter how extreme or dysregulated.
0:16:04 And then talk to them as if we’re all just, you know, feelers here.
0:16:09 We’re all just emotional feelers trying to understand each other.
0:16:13 That’s not actually what kids need.
0:16:14 They need an adult in charge.
0:16:16 When you say parental authority, what does that mean specifically?
0:16:20 Sure.
0:16:21 So I’m using the language that Diana Bommerin used as a child psychologist or sorry, she’s
0:16:25 an academic researcher, psychologist of the 1960s.
0:16:29 And she was the first one to invent what was now, what’s now known as parenting styles,
0:16:34 but she didn’t really invent it.
0:16:35 She actually was curious, how were Americans raising their kids and what was the result?
0:16:41 And she went in with an open mind and what she found that what there are roughly, you
0:16:46 know, three types, you know, authoritarian, cold, unloving, and obedience focused.
0:16:52 This basically doesn’t exist in the West anymore, authoritative, which just means parents are
0:16:58 in charge.
0:16:59 They set down rules.
0:17:00 Yes, they will punish if kids, you know, deliberately defy those rules, but they’re loving and,
0:17:07 you know, they’re, you know, there to, you know, listen and care about their kids and
0:17:11 even, you know, sympathize with them.
0:17:13 But the parents are ultimately in charge.
0:17:16 And those kids always did the best.
0:17:19 And this study has been replicated hundreds of times.
0:17:22 Authoritative parenting produces the best kids in terms of success, emotional well-being,
0:17:29 and even eventual closeness with mom and dad and or parents, whoever the parents may
0:17:34 be.
0:17:35 Well, and then the other type, which also doesn’t exist anymore is permissive parenting.
0:17:40 This was the parenting where it was sort of like anything goes very laissez-faire parenting.
0:17:44 That also had not great results.
0:17:47 But what we have today is I argue a little worse because it’s permissive parenting without
0:17:53 at least the kids had independence.
0:17:55 So they were able to develop some, you know, confidence and capacity on their own.
0:17:59 Today we have surveillance parenting parents, you know, literally monitoring their kids on
0:18:04 their iPhones, not trusting their judgment at all, interfering with, you know, interceding
0:18:09 with every teacher, eventually even interceding with their bosses in the workplace.
0:18:14 And you know, constantly running interference with kids, but never having any authority
0:18:19 with them.
0:18:20 So never saying to a kid, avoiding the word no, so, you know, never punishing, never asserting
0:18:25 a boundary with a kid in terms of his behavior or her behavior and what you expect from them.
0:18:30 But then at the end, but then running interference with them with everybody else in their lives.
0:18:35 You mentioned the term social emotional learning.
0:18:37 What is that?
0:18:38 So that is a project in schools that’s been around for over 15 years now and it’s across
0:18:45 the West.
0:18:46 They have various forms of it across the West.
0:18:48 But the idea was to teach kids emotional regulation and it specifically is a therapeutic
0:18:54 intervention.
0:18:55 It doesn’t use moral language.
0:18:56 It’s not about character.
0:18:58 It always puts it in terms of non-judgmental coping techniques or wellness techniques or
0:19:03 anti-bullying techniques or empathy education of various sorts.
0:19:09 And the problem with it is that however intended in practice, it does everything we would do
0:19:17 if we were going to dysregulate children, like constantly asking them to check on their
0:19:23 emotions, constantly talking to them about their bad feelings, constantly having them
0:19:28 think about a time when they were sad, lonely, left out, or disappointed.
0:19:32 So it becomes very much like a sort of group therapy and the other and they’ve done these
0:19:37 studies now.
0:19:38 So we have some indication that it absolutely is leading to the results because they were
0:19:42 actually able to do researchers in Australia and England actually tested this, separate
0:19:47 groups of researchers.
0:19:49 And they were able to show that the kids in the control group who didn’t go through these
0:19:52 practices ended up happier, better adjusted, better in terms of depression and anxiety,
0:19:58 and lower depression, lower anxiety, and also less alienated from parents.
0:20:04 Because the other bad thing about it is it teased up a criticism of parents because of
0:20:08 course, if you’re going to sit around with kids ruminating about a time when they were
0:20:11 sad, lonely, left out, well, whose job was it to keep them safe?
0:20:15 So criticism of parents is almost inevitable.
0:20:18 I remember my mom never asked me how I felt as a kid or what I wanted or where we should
0:20:24 go for dinner or any of these things.
0:20:26 But she also like spanked me and had all these other disciplinary measures.
0:20:30 Do you think we’ve progressed in positive ways as parents or is it all sort of actually
0:20:35 going back to that sort of classic, I would say, 70s and 80s parent is a better thing
0:20:41 for society?
0:20:43 Nobody wants to go back.
0:20:44 Let me just say, nobody wants to go back.
0:20:46 I don’t think we could.
0:20:47 We’re a lot more sort of emotionally as aware as it were as a society.
0:20:52 We’ve decided that it’s really important to be in tune with your kids emotionally.
0:20:56 And we want that closeness with our kids and we want that affection.
0:20:59 And I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t have all those things.
0:21:03 The problem is the question is, what do you want and what do the kids need?
0:21:09 You can be as affectionate as you want, but you can’t not be the authority in your home
0:21:14 because that turns out to be essential for their mental health, thinking the people who
0:21:18 love me the most are the ones in charge, not the therapist, my mom hired, not the pediatrician
0:21:23 who’s bossing my mom around, my mom or dad or wherever the parent is, they’re in charge.
0:21:29 The people who love me most know what’s best for me.
0:21:32 That basic idea is something kids need.
0:21:35 So however your style is beyond that, that’s up to you, right?
0:21:40 If you’re a super lovely person, go for it.
0:21:44 That’s not the stuff there’s good research on.
0:21:47 What there’s good research on is when you have an absence of authority, the kids don’t
0:21:52 do very well.
0:21:53 Do you think this is like systemic of sort of our generation, I assume we’re about the
0:21:58 same age.
0:21:59 I think our kids are close enough that we can say that where I used to see this in the
0:22:04 workplace as well, where people would follow the protocol and they could never get in trouble
0:22:09 following the protocol even if they knew it led to a dead end because it’s like I’m just
0:22:13 doing my job.
0:22:14 And there’s sort of like, I see a parallel here for parenting, which is I’m just relying
0:22:19 on the experts.
0:22:20 I’m just doing like, there’s no sort of agency or response that you know, it’s almost a weird
0:22:25 abdication of responsibility in the sense of I’m just following what other people suggest.
0:22:32 I get that.
0:22:33 I’ll say this, parents are pouring in way more time to their kids than the previous
0:22:39 generations.
0:22:41 So it’s hard for me.
0:22:42 I don’t personally blame parents, right?
0:22:45 They have so little confidence right now because we’ve done because the mental health industry
0:22:49 has done everything it can to divest them of any sense that they know what they’re doing.
0:22:53 Right?
0:22:54 I mean, in school materials, they refer to parents as caregivers.
0:22:57 They’re telling the kids, your parents are just service providers.
0:23:01 They’re caregivers, like any other service provider.
0:23:05 And then they have trusted adults in the materials.
0:23:07 This is all across America.
0:23:09 Trusted adults, who is a trusted adult?
0:23:11 Any adult a child can trust.
0:23:13 It could be a school counselor, it could be, but it’s definitely not assumed to be the
0:23:17 parents.
0:23:18 I mean, parents are so denigrated in our society.
0:23:23 So it’s not surprising that they would feel ill-equipped to handle the kid.
0:23:28 And also we’re not giving the kids the healthiest lives.
0:23:31 When you start out the day with an iPad with your kid, he’s going to have trouble concentrating
0:23:36 in school.
0:23:37 That doesn’t necessarily mean he has a brain problem.
0:23:41 We won’t know if he has a brain problem unless we make his environment a little cleaner.
0:23:45 Right?
0:23:46 By which I mean less chaotic.
0:23:49 Kids really do need structure, right?
0:23:52 And they definitely don’t need to be constantly titillated by things like an iPad because
0:23:55 it will make it harder for them to have an attention span for school, which is more boring
0:24:01 usually than an iPad.
0:24:04 So first thing we have to do is give kids a healthier environment, which goes from everything
0:24:09 from exercise to time in person with extended family, all things kids need.
0:24:16 People who love them and they love back over a lifetime, that’s essential for our well-being,
0:24:21 whether it’s cousins, neighborhood kids, and extended family.
0:24:25 So first we have to give them a healthy life, but instead we give them an unhealthy life
0:24:28 and then we pour in mental health resources and we don’t notice they’re getting worse
0:24:33 and worse.
0:24:34 So how did parents so easily get convinced that we’re not the authority?
0:24:40 It’s a good question.
0:24:41 Why did we all buy in?
0:24:42 I think the culture shifted over time so you don’t notice the temperature of the waters
0:24:47 changing.
0:24:48 I’ll give you just one silly example, but from my kid’s school, every time there’s a national
0:24:54 catastrophe or a school shooting or anything else, I get an email from the kids, my school’s
0:25:01 guidance department telling me, informing me of the good tactics for how to talk to my
0:25:08 children about this national event.
0:25:11 We just accept it.
0:25:12 No one’s ever asked me, “How would you like me to talk to your children about the school
0:25:17 shooting?”
0:25:18 No, they tell me how to talk to my own kids and nobody bats an eye.
0:25:23 Now the school mental health staff may not have children.
0:25:26 They may not have raised any of them successfully to adulthood.
0:25:30 And we certainly never get to see what the product of their great tips are, but nonetheless
0:25:35 they feel totally comfortable marching into my home and telling me how I should be talking
0:25:39 to my kids about a national catastrophe.
0:25:41 It really is a slip that happened over time.
0:25:43 I mean, I took my son to an urgent care clinic for a bad stomach ache that wasn’t going away
0:25:47 after he got home from summer camp.
0:25:49 And after we were done and they decided it was just dehydration, it wasn’t appendicitis,
0:25:53 they said, “Oh, now we’re going to do our mental health screener.”
0:25:56 We asked the parents leave the room.
0:25:58 And I got up to leave and I had already written this book and I still got up to leave.
0:26:03 And it was only because I’m like, “What are you doing?
0:26:05 Why are you getting up to leave?”
0:26:07 Then I sat back down and I said, “Could I please see your mental health screener?”
0:26:10 And I took a picture of it with my phone and it was created by our National Institute of
0:26:15 Mental Health.
0:26:16 This is a federal government agency and they decided, and this is part of the protocol,
0:26:21 kids age eight and up, they asked the parents to leave and then they asked the children
0:26:24 five escalating questions alone in a room with this person about whether they might
0:26:29 want to kill themselves.
0:26:31 It is so irresponsible to be doing this with kids.
0:26:35 It’s so bananas.
0:26:38 But I think we’ve gradually accepted their greater role in society, by the way, which
0:26:43 flies in the face of all kinds of research about suicide and suicide contagion, which
0:26:48 we have, but they don’t seem to be paying any attention to the research and they’re
0:26:52 doing things that are the opposite of what you would do if you’re paying attention to
0:26:56 the research.
0:26:57 We’re almost encouraging it in a very subtle way, it sounds like.
0:27:02 Yeah.
0:27:03 That’s right.
0:27:04 I mean, the obsession with suicide with children, and when I say obsession, I don’t mean privately
0:27:10 being concerned as adults and working on this problem, which is real, but telling the kids
0:27:16 all the time, “Here are the suicide headlines.
0:27:19 We put them around the school, constantly giving them surveys about suicide.
0:27:24 What you’re doing is you’re telegraphing.
0:27:26 Kids kill themselves and also it’s normal to kill themselves, to kill yourself.
0:27:33 And also, here are techniques you might be tempted to use.
0:27:37 All this stuff is in the mental health surveys.
0:27:40 It’s the opposite of what you would do if you were being responsible about mental health
0:27:45 concerns with young kids.
0:27:47 I remember reading about this study they did a long time ago, if I’m getting it right,
0:27:53 there was litter in the forest and they found this spot where people would just leave a
0:27:58 little bit of litter and then they put up a sign saying, “No littering,” and the amount
0:28:01 of litter increased because it reminded people that they could litter in a way.
0:28:07 I don’t know.
0:28:08 It was a really weird finding, but what you were saying reminded me of that.
0:28:12 The CDC has great research on this, which is that if you normalize suicide with kids,
0:28:19 if you present it as a means of coping with distress, basically telegraphing, this is something
0:28:24 other kids are doing when they feel sad, you constantly ask them, “How are they feeling?”
0:28:29 And also present the idea that if you’re struggling, this is something some kids do.
0:28:35 If you make a hero of kids who are going through mental health struggles, if you valorize it
0:28:42 and we know it’s valorized today, and if you’re repetitive in your mention, then you’re going
0:28:48 to increase suicide in the population, and that’s what we’re doing in schools.
0:28:53 Do we valorize other things?
0:28:55 Well, we definitely don’t valorize grit.
0:28:59 We don’t valorize putting your emotions to one side and getting on with life, deciding
0:29:04 that on a tough day, you’re going to still show up for practice on time and do a great
0:29:09 job for the team.
0:29:11 We don’t valorize that anymore.
0:29:13 We don’t valorize agency, making a turnaround in your life, even though you’ve been through
0:29:19 something hard.
0:29:21 And the saddest thing is, kids can.
0:29:23 These are all things we’re born with, the ability to overcome adversity.
0:29:29 Instead we tell the kids the opposite, “Your parents are divorced.
0:29:32 You’ve had trauma.
0:29:34 Let’s talk about it.”
0:29:35 It’s the worst thing we could do for a kid who’d been through something hard.
0:29:39 We should be telling them the opposite.
0:29:41 Listen, in your family, do you know what your grandfather went through?
0:29:44 Do you know what your great-grandfather went through?
0:29:46 You shouldn’t feel bad about that.
0:29:47 You should feel so proud, because that’s what people in our line have overcome.
0:29:53 And you can overcome tough things too.
0:29:55 I know you can.
0:29:57 Is this mostly like a Canada-US problem, or is this like a worldwide Western?
0:30:01 Definitely.
0:30:02 America’s always the worst at everything, and I think Canada, right along with us, seems
0:30:06 to be, you know, for these cultural fads.
0:30:09 We’re just all in together for whatever reason.
0:30:13 But I do have some indication that it’s not insignificant in Europe, and that is that while
0:30:19 I was writing the book, trying to put together the psychological research and what it showed
0:30:24 and how what we were doing in schools was actually counterproductive, what I found literally
0:30:29 after I was done with the book was that two teams of researchers were looking into the
0:30:32 same things with their own coping techniques and social-emotional techniques in their own
0:30:38 schools, and they were testing it.
0:30:40 So the fact that they were testing it with a control group both in the UK and in Australia
0:30:46 made me realize, oh, this social-emotional learning thing, this feelings focus, this
0:30:50 obsessing over kids’ feelings and therapy with kids, it’s not just an American or North
0:30:56 American problem.
0:30:57 And the therapy isn’t just with kids.
0:30:59 I mean, there’s a lot of adults who, I don’t know, like they’re continuously in therapy.
0:31:05 Like it’s not, and I go to therapy, I work on an issue, I solve that issue, and I leave.
0:31:10 It’s like, you become my best friend and I go every two weeks for years.
0:31:15 Right.
0:31:16 I mean, there’s the interesting research on this is a few things.
0:31:19 One, they found that people tend to feel purged after they leave a therapist’s office.
0:31:26 So they tend to think that therapy is helping even when objectively, when they research
0:31:30 your check, it isn’t.
0:31:31 So sometimes, of course, therapy can be very helpful and very useful and even lifesaving.
0:31:37 But very often, we feel better when we leave a therapist’s office and we never check that
0:31:42 by objective markers, we may be doing no better or even worse.
0:31:48 So our own feeling about it isn’t a good guide.
0:31:51 And when they do do these experiments with things like, and they look into the iatrogenic
0:31:57 effects, meaning when the healer introduces the harm in therapy, there’s a whole body
0:32:02 of research that shows people who’ve gone through natural bereavement, the loss of a
0:32:06 loved one often feel worse after therapy.
0:32:08 They did these controlled studies with a control group who lost a loved one, but didn’t go
0:32:13 to therapy.
0:32:14 They did better than the ones who went to therapy.
0:32:17 Same thing with breast cancer survivors, anxiety about it, depression about it.
0:32:22 They did worse if they had gone to therapy and also alienation from a spouse, alienation
0:32:26 from parents.
0:32:27 All of these are classic iatrogenic effects of therapy and there’s a whole body of research
0:32:32 on it.
0:32:33 The problem, I’m not saying no one should go to therapy, but it’s very troubling to me
0:32:38 that while the researchers are very aware of these risks, the practitioners of therapy
0:32:43 very often either minimize or deny them.
0:32:46 And they seem totally unaware that sitting around with someone weekly can encourage rumination
0:32:51 or dwelling on bad feelings, which of course is the biggest symptom of depression.
0:32:55 How do we tackle this as a parent and let’s say our kid is in therapy now.
0:33:01 What conversation should we be having with the therapist about, we’re sort of pushed
0:33:07 to the outside of this, right?
0:33:09 What happens in this room is none of your concern, but this kid is your responsibility.
0:33:13 And so what conversations I’m wondering, practically speaking, can parents have with
0:33:17 their therapist, be like, okay, how long are we going to be here?
0:33:20 What are we working on?
0:33:21 What issues are we talking about?
0:33:22 How are we solving this specific problem so that we can get out?
0:33:25 Is that a fair conversation to have with the therapist?
0:33:28 It’s an essential conversation to have.
0:33:30 Here’s the thing, when you drop your kid off to therapy, very often it will undermine your
0:33:36 authority with your kids because now you have someone who’s an adult who seems to be above
0:33:40 the parent who sits around with the child basically judging your interactions with the kid.
0:33:46 And very often kids will leave with the sense of, gosh, that was, you know, my mother was
0:33:50 emotionally abusive or that was wrong of my mother to say or whatever.
0:33:54 That’s a very common side effect of therapy now.
0:33:57 By the way, with adults, adults can handle that.
0:33:59 Adults can brush things off, but a kid doesn’t have a context for evaluating, was that abusive
0:34:05 of my father to yell at me?
0:34:07 Is it abuse when a father yells at a kid?
0:34:09 Look, a kid shouldn’t be in therapy unless they have a real need, first of all.
0:34:14 So if they have a real need, then the therapy should focus on that need, whatever the problem
0:34:19 is.
0:34:20 And it should be confined to that.
0:34:22 If they have a phobia, right, then the therapy should be confined to getting them past that
0:34:28 phobia so they can function in life, not to create this perma handholder who also interferes
0:34:36 with the parent-child relationship for your kid and passes judgment on the job mom and
0:34:41 dad are doing or, you know, dad and dad, however they family arrangement, right?
0:34:47 That’s not a helpful situation, and here’s what I want parents to know, okay?
0:34:51 And I’m not speaking to if your child’s anorexic, but for God’s sake, get them help.
0:34:56 I’m not poo-pooing therapy for all kinds of things that a child may have need for.
0:35:02 What I want parents to know is dropping off their kids to therapy, that’s not neutral.
0:35:07 And what you want to do, of course, is to get your kid out the door eventually, not to
0:35:12 create a permanent situation where this person is constantly overseeing your parenting and
0:35:18 making the child feel, and this is either either demoralized, convincing a child that
0:35:23 they have a diagnosis, a brain problem that they’ll never get past because they’re rehearsing
0:35:28 it once a week, right?
0:35:30 Or a bad incident that they’re rehearsing once a week and now it’s gone from a middle
0:35:34 school crush to a giant trauma in their lives that they think they have PTSD from, these
0:35:39 are all really common side effects.
0:35:41 But I want you to know something else too.
0:35:43 If a child brings his or her problem to an aunt, to an uncle, to a grandmother, at some
0:35:49 point that person will say, or even to a friend, okay, we’ve talked about this enough, go play.
0:35:54 A therapist will never say that to a child.
0:35:57 Now there are therapists who are really good who will say we’re here for 10 sessions, we’re
0:36:03 going to work on this phobia, we’re going to get your kid past it, and let’s measure,
0:36:07 let’s actually track that the anxiety is getting better.
0:36:10 But I talked to kids who had been in therapy since age six because their parents divorced.
0:36:16 There was no need.
0:36:17 There was nothing wrong with the child except that the parents divorced.
0:36:20 So they figured, oh, well, then I have to take my get into therapy.
0:36:24 This girl, this one young woman I profile in the book was now 17, and I asked her what
0:36:29 she was working on.
0:36:30 She had been in therapy since she was six.
0:36:32 Call her back in the book.
0:36:34 And I said, what are you working with your therapist on now?
0:36:36 She said, well, I’m leaving for college in the fall, and right now we’re working on getting
0:36:40 me ready to make friends in college.
0:36:43 That is a classic side effect of therapy.
0:36:45 It’s called treatment dependency, where you don’t feel like you can make a move as an
0:36:50 adult, things we all learned how to do without checking in with another adult or expert or
0:36:56 your therapist.
0:36:58 So we’re really undermining kids’ agency by sticking them in a kind of therapy or kind
0:37:04 of emotions check-in situation for their whole lives.
0:37:07 But we do that as parents.
0:37:09 We have the best intentions, right?
0:37:11 So we get divorced and we’re like, oh, I want to provide the best environment I can for
0:37:16 my kids.
0:37:17 So I’m going to go see an ex.
0:37:18 I’m going to get them to see a therapist.
0:37:20 And then it sort of spirals and maybe keeps going beyond.
0:37:23 And maybe that temperature sort of rises slowly.
0:37:26 But how do we get out of that thinking that like, oh, no, there’s no obvious sign my kids.
0:37:32 Is it like we’re trying to be a martyr in some way as a parent or, you know, we’re trying
0:37:35 to create this situation where we’re, I don’t know, I’m struggling with this, but I think
0:37:40 you know what I mean.
0:37:41 Yeah, I do.
0:37:42 I think that we have believed that that is the protocol.
0:37:46 You always stick your kid in therapy.
0:37:48 There is such thing as preventive mental health, by the way, there isn’t, right?
0:37:52 We can deal with actual problems, but preventatively, we’ve never been good.
0:37:56 There’s no good study showing preventive mental health works unless you’re talking about things
0:38:00 like a good life, like connection, you know, doing things for others, getting involved
0:38:04 in community, dancing, you know, exercising, eating, right?
0:38:08 Those are great, right?
0:38:09 Having relationships, in-person relationships, we know all that’s good for you, right?
0:38:14 But preventive mental health, sitting with a therapist and talking through your parents’
0:38:18 divorce.
0:38:19 I don’t think there is good in studies showing that that is necessarily good for kids.
0:38:26 And there are a lot of risks.
0:38:27 And I’ll give you an example.
0:38:28 An adult said to me recently, a friend of mine said to me recently, she said, “You know,
0:38:33 I wasn’t sure I was going to agree with your book, but when my parents divorced, they stuck
0:38:37 me in therapy just automatically.”
0:38:39 And I didn’t want to talk to this stranger about how I was feeling.
0:38:44 I was really sad, and this person was a stranger.
0:38:46 I wanted my mom, like I was angry, but I didn’t want to talk to this stranger.
0:38:50 And I just thought, but she’s like, “But they made me.”
0:38:53 And I had to go once a week, and it was awful.
0:38:55 And I just thought, wow, what a healthy, normal reaction.
0:38:59 I’m sure she was shamed.
0:39:00 It sounds like she was shamed.
0:39:02 No, of course you have to talk to a therapy.
0:39:03 Why don’t you want to talk to her?
0:39:06 But that’s the most natural thing in the world.
0:39:08 I don’t want to share with my stranger about my home breaking up.
0:39:12 I want to talk to my parents or someone who really loves me.
0:39:17 And yet today, kids are made to feel terrible, right?
0:39:20 That’s so unsophisticated.
0:39:23 And so it puts the therapist in this situation, now they’ve got a kid who doesn’t really want
0:39:26 to be there, so now they pander to the kid.
0:39:28 How do you pander to the kid?
0:39:30 By affirming or agreeing with everything the child comes up with.
0:39:34 The kid’s not ready to do the hard work of therapy most of the time, unless they’re dealing
0:39:39 with a serious problem, like anorexia or severe OCD, it’s interfering with our life.
0:39:46 And now they need the help, right?
0:39:47 Because they can’t get on with their life.
0:39:49 They’re afraid to leave their house or they have some severe phobia or whatever.
0:39:52 But sitting around talking about why I’m sad, it’s not even clear very often what the goal
0:39:57 is.
0:39:58 Make you less sad.
0:40:00 You know what’ll make you less sad?
0:40:02 Community getting involved in projects with others.
0:40:05 Yeah, sometimes not thinking about why you’re sad.
0:40:09 Building new relationships, real and personal relations, in-person relationships, not online.
0:40:15 Spending time with extended family.
0:40:18 So I think the project of sticking kids who don’t have a real problem in therapy, it’s
0:40:23 got a lot of risk.
0:40:26 And adults too, I would imagine.
0:40:27 Yeah, but adults are different.
0:40:29 Because we can sort of recognize easier.
0:40:31 I mean, with kids, they’re so easily, I wouldn’t, I don’t want to say they’re easily influenced.
0:40:37 How’s that?
0:40:38 Yes, of course.
0:40:39 An adult can say, listen, I’ve been on this anti-depressant for three years.
0:40:43 I have no sex drive.
0:40:44 I hate it.
0:40:45 I’m ready.
0:40:46 I’m ready to taper off it.
0:40:47 I don’t want me taper.
0:40:48 Yeah.
0:40:49 Kid can’t say that.
0:40:51 They might not even know what they’re missing when it comes to sex drive.
0:40:53 You put a kid early enough on anti-depressants.
0:40:56 They don’t know what a sex drive is for or why they might miss one, right?
0:41:00 So you get in and start deleting their natural resources for coping with things.
0:41:05 You alter them in some giant way while they’re just trying to adjust to life.
0:41:09 I mean, how many adults do you know say, yeah, I probably had ADHD as a kid, but nobody diagnosed
0:41:15 me.
0:41:16 And now I’m this incredibly successful adult, a lot, right?
0:41:21 I mean, I know so many adults in that situation.
0:41:23 And they often say, I wish I had gotten a diagnosis and medication, but they turned out pretty
0:41:28 great left to their own devices.
0:41:30 Now, of course, I’m not saying that that’s true of every child.
0:41:33 There may be kids who need the stimulant, but stimulants are profound and they are given
0:41:38 out way, way too readily without first seeing if we can make adjustments in the child’s environment
0:41:45 to help them handle their distractibility.
0:41:50 You mentioned preventative mental health.
0:41:54 I do think we can, like not prevent, but we can position ourselves to handle things through
0:42:00 resilience, through overcoming adversity, through, I mean, isn’t that preventative mental health
0:42:06 in a way where you’re not preventing a specific thing, but you’re sort of like, I want to
0:42:10 put you in a position where you can overcome whatever the world throws at you, and it’s
0:42:14 not going to beat you down and you can get through it.
0:42:17 Yes.
0:42:18 And you know who won’t give that to you?
0:42:19 Mental health experts, because then there’s nothing to come back for.
0:42:23 You can join a church group and get that.
0:42:26 You can join a bowling league and all of a sudden you’re happier or a dance class, right?
0:42:32 You can start to regulate exercise and you will see mood improve.
0:42:36 Now, I’m not talking about people suffering with major depressive disorder.
0:42:40 I want to say that again.
0:42:41 There are people who absolutely need an intervention and they should get it, but I’m talking about
0:42:46 the average bummed out person and certainly the bummed out kid.
0:42:51 The number of things we can do in our life to set ourselves up for a good life.
0:42:56 Now is that preventative mental health care?
0:42:58 No, it’s called good living and it doesn’t require a therapeutic expert who’s going to
0:43:02 undermine the parents authority with their kids and make the kids, because it makes a
0:43:07 kid feel like, oh, my parents, my problems are too big for my parents to handle.
0:43:13 So they needed to call in this other person who’s sort of more expert than they are.
0:43:19 That’s not a, that’s not a, that’s not nothing to introduce.
0:43:23 That’s a risk.
0:43:24 It’s messing with the parent-child relationship.
0:43:26 It’s messing with the child’s confidence that the parents know what they’re doing, right?
0:43:30 So if you have to introduce that fine by all means, the child suffering, bring in the therapist.
0:43:37 You know, then it’s just a question of what kind of therapy and who you should trust.
0:43:42 But a child who doesn’t need it, there’s a lot of things you can do to give them a good
0:43:47 life.
0:43:48 But sitting around and talking about their feelings with a therapist weekly, I’m not
0:43:51 sure is the way to get there.
0:43:54 That’s so interesting.
0:43:55 I mean, I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast and the most controversial part of that segment
0:44:00 was that I chose to send my kids to a school that I sort of overgeneralized, but doesn’t
0:44:06 really care how they feel about their homework or, you know, if you come in, you didn’t do
0:44:10 your homework, they’ll give you a zero.
0:44:11 I mean, my oldest, one of his memories from grade seven was one kid didn’t do his homework
0:44:19 because he didn’t feel like it.
0:44:21 And the teacher drew a big zero on his page and crossed it out and then told the whole
0:44:25 class that your homework doesn’t care how you feel it, but it needs to be done.
0:44:30 And I got so much flack for this segment on the show, but I’m sort of like, well, you
0:44:35 know, we need to be tough on kids and kids can overcome a lot of this stuff.
0:44:39 We just think they’re so fragile.
0:44:41 And so we’re making them fragile.
0:44:43 Listen, a kid who gets a zero because they didn’t feel like doing their homework.
0:44:47 You know what the kid learns?
0:44:49 It could be embarrassing.
0:44:51 It shames the kid’s behavior, but you know what else the kids learned?
0:44:55 I matter.
0:44:56 When I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, someone notices I’m part of this community.
0:45:02 I’m part of this class.
0:45:03 And my teacher, he may be upset, disappointed that I didn’t do the work, but he cares.
0:45:11 He notices it matters to him.
0:45:13 I have a role to play.
0:45:15 And when I do my homework tonight, he’s going to notice that too, or she’s going to notice
0:45:19 that too.
0:45:20 So yes, holding kids to high standards, high expectations gives them a sense.
0:45:26 It honors them with the sense that they have capacity.
0:45:29 They have capability.
0:45:31 Obviously, if you’re giving a kid a zero, what you’re saying is, you could have done
0:45:36 this homework.
0:45:37 I know you could have done it because I believe in you.
0:45:39 I was going to say, when I talked to friends who send their kids to private school, they
0:45:42 always say the biggest difference between private and public.
0:45:45 They never mentioned class size first.
0:45:48 They mentioned the expectations the teachers have of the kids or higher.
0:45:52 Expectations are one of the greatest things you can give kids because it’s a way of saying,
0:45:57 I have faith in you.
0:45:58 You can do great things.
0:46:00 And once you introduce the diagnosis and the pill, what you’re saying is, OK, you can’t
0:46:05 totally do it on your own.
0:46:08 You need intervention.
0:46:09 You have a brain problem.
0:46:10 And that will lead a kid to feel like, I can’t do it on my own.
0:46:14 Now, again, if a child absolutely requires it, then they require it.
0:46:18 They need it.
0:46:19 They need the extra help.
0:46:21 But if they don’t, you don’t want to introduce that message with a kid.
0:46:27 Being told, listen, you were lazy last night.
0:46:30 You didn’t do your homework.
0:46:31 You were irresponsible.
0:46:32 You didn’t do what you were supposed to do.
0:46:34 A kid can make a decision.
0:46:36 I’m not going to do that anymore.
0:46:37 But if you tell them they have a brain problem, no, you have ADHD.
0:46:42 We’re going to change all of your requirements now.
0:46:45 What you’re saying is, you can’t.
0:46:47 One of my close friends is a therapist, and she wanted to ask your opinion on something,
0:46:52 which was she said, terrible therapists do terrible work, which leads to terrible results.
0:46:58 Just like anybody in any profession, the terrible people in that profession do terrible work,
0:47:02 get terrible results.
0:47:03 Do you think that grad schools are partly to blame because they’ve graduated idologues
0:47:08 instead of free thinkers who have hearts and souls?
0:47:11 So yes, things have gotten a lot more politicized, a lot more woke in the world of therapy.
0:47:17 There’s no question.
0:47:18 But I think there’s a bigger problem.
0:47:19 And the bigger problem is, we’re over-treating the population with therapy.
0:47:25 I’m not talking about bad therapists.
0:47:28 I’m talking about too much therapy, okay?
0:47:32 Sitting around with a child once a week, talking about their pains, talking about their struggles
0:47:38 is an unhelpful intervention if a child doesn’t need it.
0:47:42 And I don’t care how well-intentioned the therapist is.
0:47:46 You know that you’re not doing them a good service.
0:47:49 You ought to know that.
0:47:50 And the reason is, is they’ve measured things.
0:47:53 You know what, better for mood, for mild to moderate depression than psychotherapy or
0:47:59 antidepressants?
0:48:01 Dancing.
0:48:02 Yeah, exercise, dancing, anything.
0:48:06 You could literally, instead of asking kids in school constantly how they’re feeling,
0:48:10 you could do anything with them.
0:48:13 Have them paint the gym.
0:48:15 Have them pick up trash.
0:48:17 Have them build a structure together.
0:48:19 You could literally have them dance.
0:48:21 They could do almost anything, and it would be better than sitting around talking about
0:48:26 their feelings.
0:48:27 Because, guess what, teenagers have a lot of bad feelings.
0:48:31 They do.
0:48:32 News flash.
0:48:33 If you’re going to sit around once a week and say, “Come talk to me about your feelings,”
0:48:36 wow, they’re going to fill up that session.
0:48:39 And they’re going to leave with, “Wow, I do have a lot of bad things to feel sad about.”
0:48:43 If you don’t do that unless a kid needs it, absolutely requires it.
0:48:50 There is too much treatment of the population.
0:48:53 What role do you think technology and social media play and the mental health challenges
0:48:58 faced by today’s kids, and how, conversely, do you think parents and even therapists who
0:49:03 are listening to this can help address these issues?
0:49:06 Sure.
0:49:07 So, I think that social media has absolutely played a big role.
0:49:11 It’s been an accelerant for all kinds of deteriorating mental health.
0:49:15 It’s encouraged people in the idea that they have a diagnosis.
0:49:18 It’s spread social contagions, mental health diagnoses, so things like gender dysphoria
0:49:25 I wrote my last book about.
0:49:27 Social media absolutely played a big role, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
0:49:32 The reason I don’t think it’s the whole story is a few reasons.
0:49:36 But for instance, just to give you one statistic, in 2016, the CDC came out with a report that
0:49:42 one in six American children between the ages of two and eight had a mental health or behavioral
0:49:48 diagnosis.
0:49:50 One in six American kids in 2016, they were not on social media.
0:49:54 They’re not on social media today between the ages of two and eight, but they definitely
0:49:57 weren’t back in 2016.
0:49:59 It’s not just about the phones, and I think the phones are bad, but it’s not just about
0:50:05 the phones.
0:50:06 The lives we’re giving them, and the constant therapy in the culture, the constant sense
0:50:12 that their feelings are all important.
0:50:14 They are tyrannized by their own feelings, and they’re tyrannizing each other when they
0:50:18 should be learning to put their feelings to one side and get on with life.
0:50:23 You know what?
0:50:24 Turns out, their feelings will get better.
0:50:27 They will be more manageable.
0:50:29 If you hold their conduct to high expectations, if you tell them, “So what?
0:50:32 You were cut from the basketball team.
0:50:34 Let’s work harder next time,” or try a different sport, you let them fail a little bit.
0:50:40 Yeah.
0:50:41 Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
0:50:43 There you go.
0:50:44 Do you think schools are incentivized to encourage this?
0:50:49 I’m going to walk through this as I think it out loud here, but it strikes me that schools
0:50:55 get more resources as kids get diagnosed and need exceptions or accommodations.
0:51:00 There’s almost this hidden incentive schools have to nudge parents to get kids, “Oh, your
0:51:07 son or daughter is a problem in the classroom, and therefore, you should go get them tested.”
0:51:13 When they get tested, they come back with, I think in Canada, we call them IEPs, Individual
0:51:18 Education Plans, which is like, “Oh, your son or daughter really sucks at writing,
0:51:24 so what we’re going to do is we’re going to pull them out of class and they don’t have
0:51:27 to write.”
0:51:28 We just talk into a microphone, and that’s how we’re going to accommodate them, but that
0:51:33 requires more resources for the school, so they get funded better from whoever’s funding
0:51:38 them.
0:51:39 You also, conversely, not only are you incentivized to do this and treat every child like they’re
0:51:46 a special snowflake, but you’re also not addressing the problem because now you’ve
0:51:51 taken an issue.
0:51:52 Maybe they’re in the 30th percentile for writing, and you’ve said, “We’re not going
0:51:57 to work on your writing anymore.
0:51:58 You don’t have to do that.
0:52:01 You can do this accommodation, and so you’re not going to get better at it because you’re
0:52:05 not actually practicing it.”
0:52:06 Right.
0:52:07 It’s a huge problem.
0:52:08 There is a major conflict of interest with schools getting involved in mental health.
0:52:13 Huge conflict of interest should never have been allowed, really, except in the cases
0:52:18 where you have a kid who’s so struggling, they need someone to go to and talk to, and
0:52:23 that may be.
0:52:24 That’s not what we’ve got.
0:52:26 It’s a huge conflict of interest.
0:52:28 They are incentivized to keep the kids bolted to their seats.
0:52:32 That’s their incentive, and any kid who’s bored, maybe because the teacher isn’t good,
0:52:37 or maybe because they’re not good at controlling the class or whatever.
0:52:42 That’s the person referring you for a pill that should never have been allowed, only
0:52:47 because of the conflict of interest.
0:52:48 They can be as wonderful as you want, but there’s a built-in conflict of interest.
0:52:52 As you said, the kids, schools want more mental health resources.
0:52:55 They want more resources.
0:52:57 They are implementing these surveys to show how bad kids are struggling, and the surveys
0:53:02 themselves are distressing.
0:53:05 They’re asking kids all kinds of questions about suicide and neglect and things that might
0:53:09 be going on at home.
0:53:11 Then they’re using these surveys to justify getting more resources.
0:53:14 This should never, ever have been allowed.
0:53:16 By the way, a school counselor who engages in therapy with a kid, and they’re allowed
0:53:22 to do it, they’re giving counseling sessions to the kids right now.
0:53:26 That shouldn’t be allowed.
0:53:27 Why?
0:53:28 Because there’s a dual relationship.
0:53:31 That is an ethical prohibition every other form a therapist has, which means that if
0:53:35 you’re a therapist, you’re not allowed to give therapy to your own child, to your neighbor’s
0:53:41 kid, to anyone else you have a person, another relationship with.
0:53:46 Why?
0:53:47 Because of the potential for abuse.
0:53:50 A counselor knows all of a child’s friends, all of their teachers, and what do they do?
0:53:55 The second the kid is struggling, they go in and they use the one tool they have, accommodation,
0:54:00 and they get the kid excused from hard things.
0:54:04 Just as you said, they’ll never learn to sit through an exam in normal time, because that’s
0:54:09 the only tool the school counselor has.
0:54:10 This is a terrible conflict of interest.
0:54:12 Really, it shouldn’t be allowed.
0:54:14 I’m not suggesting anything about the motives of school counselors.
0:54:21 It can be wonderful, but the conflict of interest is bad.
0:54:24 What role, if any, did COVID play?
0:54:26 Was it another accelerant, or did it change our perception of mental health?
0:54:31 I know a lot of people I know started going to therapy during COVID, and they’re still
0:54:37 in therapy.
0:54:38 The lockdowns were very hard on kids, as parents knew they would be.
0:54:42 Parents protested to keep the schools open.
0:54:44 You know who didn’t protest?
0:54:46 Mental health organizations.
0:54:47 They had nothing to say, as the schools headed into a second year of lockdowns.
0:54:53 Parents knew this was going to be bad, and it was.
0:54:56 It was very bad that we had kids in isolation, because they need those connections.
0:55:00 Now mental health experts present themselves as the solution.
0:55:04 Look, if a child developed some severe problem, then they may need that solution.
0:55:11 In general, do I think they can be trusted?
0:55:14 No, not as the solution to a problem that was obvious and foreseeable, that they said
0:55:19 nothing about.
0:55:21 In American, I can tell you the school counselor’s association, school psychologist’s association.
0:55:26 None of these organizations had anything to say about their foreseeable damage that was
0:55:32 going to happen to kids.
0:55:34 Maybe they just didn’t know.
0:55:37 Maybe they were afraid to speak up, but in any case, the idea that they’re now the solution
0:55:41 to the struggles we’re seeing, I don’t think in general they’re the solution.
0:55:46 What would you do if you could wave a magic wand and redesign the mental health system?
0:55:54 How would you approach it?
0:55:58 Both the mental health system and child-during, how do we get back to a baseline now of, let’s
0:56:05 say normal, whatever normal is, but how do we come back from this?
0:56:08 It strikes me that it’s really, really hard to even slowly walk back from this once it’s
0:56:14 got momentum and it’s in place.
0:56:17 I think we can change this because it’s very bad.
0:56:21 The results of all of their work, all the mindfulness techniques for kids regulation
0:56:26 is a disaster.
0:56:27 They’ve failed.
0:56:28 I think we can really ease, you know what the mental health professionals should be doing
0:56:32 when it comes to kids or young people dealing with the sick?
0:56:36 We have so many kids in desperate need of help.
0:56:39 We have schizophrenics all over our streets.
0:56:41 The need is enormous, but they would rather treat the well because it’s easier and come
0:56:50 up with these techniques with no proven efficacy for just bolstering your sense of well-being.
0:56:56 Now, let me just say again, if an adult wants to do that and get something out of it, by
0:57:02 all means they should.
0:57:04 An adult can do any number of things that they decide are good for their, what makes
0:57:09 them happy or feeling in control or whatever else they want.
0:57:13 The problem is with a kid, you’re really messing with a lot when you stick them in therapy
0:57:18 or you treat him as unwell because he’s likely to believe it.
0:57:23 He’s likely to believe that he has PTSD because he was bullied or teased a little bit in middle
0:57:29 school.
0:57:30 He’s likely bullied, teased, made fun of.
0:57:34 The most normal experience in human life.
0:57:36 And by the way, kids who are told that’s a big deal, boy, are they in for disappointment
0:57:41 because the number of times you are going to get insulted or have your feelings hurt
0:57:46 in life, wow, a lot.
0:57:49 If you lead a good life, you’re going to be criticized.
0:57:53 You’re going to have your feelings hurt over and over and over.
0:57:56 You have to be able to handle it.
0:57:58 You have to.
0:57:59 If you’re going to be a strong, productive adult.
0:58:01 Yeah.
0:58:02 It’s funny you mentioned that my youngest had his feelings hurt in class and got shamed
0:58:06 for something.
0:58:07 He got a poor score and one of his college or student friends called it out to the class
0:58:13 and was like, “Look how low that is.”
0:58:16 He calls me and he’s crying and I’m like, “Oh, yeah.
0:58:19 This is going to happen all through life and we’ll deal with it and you’re strong enough
0:58:23 to get through this.”
0:58:24 And then he got home at night.
0:58:25 We just pulled up some of my YouTube videos.
0:58:27 I was like, “Let’s read some of the comments.”
0:58:29 Right?
0:58:30 Exactly.
0:58:31 Exactly.
0:58:32 And so I pointed out things that people were saying about me and he’s like, “Why would
0:58:36 people say those things about you?”
0:58:38 And I was like, “Nobody who does anything in the arena.
0:58:42 Nobody who’s struggling is doing that.”
0:58:45 Right?
0:58:46 You don’t see Elon Musk jumping on my YouTube video saying, “This guy’s a nitwit.”
0:58:50 No, they never comment like that stuff.
0:58:53 So I thought it was really interesting and he’s like, “Huh.”
0:58:56 And I was like, “Anybody in the arena trying, they might not say anything, despite what
0:59:02 they think, but they’re not going to try to pull you down.
0:59:04 The people who pull you down, you’ve got to ignore those people.
0:59:08 If I listened to all these people, I’d stop doing what I do for a living and that doesn’t
0:59:13 make sense because I don’t want to do that.”
0:59:15 So you just have to ignore it.
0:59:17 That’s awesome that you told him that.
0:59:19 Yeah.
0:59:20 We used to say this.
0:59:21 We used to say, “Sticks in stones may break my bones.”
0:59:23 No one’s heard of that, heard that in a generation.
0:59:26 Right?
0:59:27 You never hear sticks in stones.
0:59:28 Instead, the mom or dad calls the school or calls the other parent and says, “Your child
0:59:33 was bullying my child.”
0:59:34 Well, God, you’re setting them up for a bad life because let me tell you, as you just
0:59:38 said, boy, are we criticized a lot in life as adults by a boss, by whatever.
0:59:42 And one of the things that bosses say is, “I can’t give any constructive feedback to
0:59:46 the rising generation.
0:59:47 I can’t stand them as employees because I try to give them constructive feedback and
0:59:52 they won’t accept it.
0:59:53 They go to pieces.
0:59:55 They think it’s inappropriate and I’m trying to help them be better workers and more successful.
1:00:02 It’s the opposite of what kids need.
1:00:04 They need to be told, so what?
1:00:06 Now, I’ll just add one caveat.
1:00:09 We were absolutely, we evolved to handle being made fun of by our group, by our class, by
1:00:16 whatever.
1:00:17 But I don’t think we evolved to be humiliated in front of a million people on social media.
1:00:23 So, I don’t think social media is a way to toughen kids up, is an effective or normal
1:00:30 way to toughen kids up.
1:00:31 If you get dumped, if you get cut from the basketball team and you have to go through
1:00:35 that humiliation in front of your classmates, you will learn something.
1:00:41 You will learn something.
1:00:42 You will say, “I survived it.
1:00:43 I’m fine.
1:00:44 I went on and did this other thing.
1:00:46 I met someone who I liked more or whatever it is.”
1:00:49 The humiliation on social media at that scale, that impersonal context, I don’t think it
1:00:56 builds the same natural resources for resilience.
1:01:00 Speaking of social media and sort of that culture, I mean, the public campaign to cancel
1:01:07 you was pretty huge.
1:01:09 What was that like?
1:01:10 How did you deal with that?
1:01:11 Did it affect you at all?
1:01:13 Oh, yeah.
1:01:14 I mean, look, a few things.
1:01:18 So was it fun?
1:01:19 No.
1:01:20 But I was right.
1:01:23 I wrote a book about a transgender, a sudden spike in transgender identification among
1:01:29 teen girls.
1:01:30 I thought it was a socially driven phenomenon.
1:01:32 I thought these kids were going through reckless medical protocols that really shouldn’t be
1:01:36 allowed because or should have given, had more supervision, more oversight.
1:01:43 And the risks weren’t being explained to parents and all that was right.
1:01:47 So am I always on some people’s blacklist?
1:01:50 Yeah.
1:01:51 I’m on literal blacklist, but what was the hardest?
1:01:53 The hardest part was explaining it to my kids and anything that affected our family.
1:01:58 That’s always going to be the hardest part is like trying to explain to them, “I know
1:02:02 that this person treated us badly, but I didn’t do anything wrong.
1:02:07 Okay.
1:02:08 I know that usually people treat you coldly when you’re a bad person, but that’s not
1:02:13 the case here.
1:02:14 I didn’t do anything wrong.”
1:02:16 So explaining that to my kids was hard because some people took some things out on my kids.
1:02:22 That was the hardest part.
1:02:24 And look, I can’t say I’m a favorite of the prestige media because they’ll never sort
1:02:30 of never forgive me, even though they now run articles saying exactly what I said, somehow
1:02:35 they’ll never forgive me for having pointed it out without their permission or auspices
1:02:39 or whatever.
1:02:40 But that’s just stuff I have to deal with, meaning like I made a decision, I made a
1:02:45 choice freely.
1:02:46 I was going to write this book.
1:02:47 I knew there would be blowback or there could be blowback.
1:02:51 And those are the stakes.
1:02:53 I think I’m proud of what I did.
1:02:55 I feel like it was the right thing to do.
1:02:58 I stand by everything in the book.
1:03:01 None of it’s been, every word of it is true.
1:03:04 So I feel good about it at the end of the day.
1:03:08 And look, exactly what you said to your son there, I mean, my kids know that.
1:03:13 I mean, I’ve been called every possible name, right?
1:03:16 And I hope that they know that, look, they’ve been called names at school just like every
1:03:25 kid is.
1:03:26 And I just hope they know that we survive these things, we get past them.
1:03:33 And you just keep going.
1:03:35 That’s the answer.
1:03:36 Just keep going.
1:03:37 As a journalist, what do you see happening in media right now?
1:03:41 You mentioned that they weren’t running stories about this.
1:03:43 Now they are.
1:03:44 How do you look at media from the outside, but from the inside as well?
1:03:49 Oh, I think there’s a lot of really good developments in media.
1:03:52 There’s a lot of people who are acting outside of the prestige media.
1:03:56 I mean, I think, look, the prestige media in America certainly is falling apart in a
1:04:02 lot of ways.
1:04:04 Some of the media outlets are still very well funded and they seem to be doing fine in a
1:04:10 certain sense, but it’s weird.
1:04:14 It’s like, they have this sort of Potemkin village they’ve set up that doesn’t actually
1:04:19 reflect what’s going on in the country because they decided that their mission wasn’t going
1:04:24 to be about truth.
1:04:25 It was going to be about something else.
1:04:27 So I think in general, a lot of them have become sort of a PR project rather than a
1:04:33 truth organ.
1:04:35 And that’s dangerous.
1:04:37 And I think that their prestige has been damaged by it and certainly their reliability, the
1:04:44 trust people have in them.
1:04:46 And I think that’s in many ways a good thing.
1:04:49 They don’t deserve people’s trust for all the things they didn’t report or cover it
1:04:54 up or whatever.
1:04:55 Now that said, we’re seeing a lot of conspiracy theory and that’s bad.
1:05:02 And I think that when you can’t trust the mainstream media to report on stories actively,
1:05:07 accurately rather, you end up with a lot of conspiracy theory.
1:05:12 Conspiracy theory is very bad development.
1:05:14 It leads people in all kinds of bad places, including scapegoating.
1:05:19 And so I wish that they would get back to the project of reporting news and reporting
1:05:26 things accurately wherever the chips may fall.
1:05:29 I don’t see that happening for most of the mainstream media.
1:05:33 Do you think it’ll take sort of a crisis for that to come back?
1:05:36 It’s a good question.
1:05:37 I don’t know.
1:05:38 I don’t know.
1:05:39 Some of them may just need to fail.
1:05:41 Do you think it’ll take a crisis for us to sort of tackle collectively the mental health
1:05:47 culture?
1:05:48 That I think we can fix tomorrow.
1:05:50 It’s very easy.
1:05:51 It doesn’t require any money.
1:05:52 Do you think we will fix it?
1:05:54 Well, I don’t know.
1:05:55 I hope some people will.
1:05:56 I hope that I think that it depends how many people are aware that over-treating kids with
1:06:03 therapy and feelings focus and rumination is all very negative and that therapists have
1:06:09 really bad incentives here when they’re treating the well.
1:06:14 It’s not their fault.
1:06:15 A lot of most of them are well-meaning, but they set themselves up as the overseers of
1:06:19 a child’s life.
1:06:21 And the very fact of their existence in the child’s life introduces risk.
1:06:26 So unless they’re necessary, we’ve got to get them out of kids’ lives.
1:06:30 We need to go back to focusing kids outward on things they’re doing in the world, things
1:06:34 that make you feel good, actually, like community, you know, like efficacy, feeling capable, again,
1:06:44 in the world, not feeling like they need to run to an adult to handle every problem.
1:06:49 So I think this is very, very fixable.
1:06:52 And I certainly hope it doesn’t take any money.
1:06:54 It just requires subtraction.
1:06:57 So I really hope we get on this.
1:07:00 What can parents do?
1:07:01 As they’re listening to this, if they’re still listening, what small steps can they take
1:07:05 to sort of start to go back to baseline, if you will, or back to building more resilient
1:07:13 kids?
1:07:14 That’s probably a better way to word that.
1:07:16 I think they need to, first of all, give their kids chores.
1:07:19 They need to give their kids more independence and more chores and more things to do so that
1:07:25 they feel that they matter in the world, that the family, they are benefiting the family we
1:07:29 expect you to.
1:07:31 And we’re happy when you do and we’re proud of you.
1:07:33 Look what you just did for the family, for someone besides you.
1:07:37 And by the way, it makes kids feel good.
1:07:38 But that also means we need to control our own anxiety.
1:07:41 Let them do things that are a little bit risky, like sharp knives or cooking dinner or whatever
1:07:47 it is, get them involved, get them going around the neighborhood, get them doing things where
1:07:52 they have to figure themselves out a little bit and navigate other people like strangers.
1:08:01 So all that stuff’s really good, but we also need to have frank conversations.
1:08:05 You know what?
1:08:06 Sitting around and talking about your feelings all the time, don’t worry about your feelings
1:08:09 all the time.
1:08:10 If you have a problem, if you’re really sad, like when your son called you, that’s different.
1:08:16 His feelings had been hard.
1:08:17 He didn’t know what to do.
1:08:19 And you gave him great advice, but constantly checking on their feelings when they don’t,
1:08:24 when they’re feelings, there’s no indication that there’s been any problem, which is what
1:08:27 we’re doing now, preventatively, that’s a disaster.
1:08:31 And you know what?
1:08:32 Telling a kid you’re fine, shake it off, or you’ll live, or you’ll be fine.
1:08:37 But that does a triage, right?
1:08:40 The actual big problems that they can’t resolve on their own from the ones that they’re like,
1:08:46 “Hey, I can.
1:08:47 I am fine.”
1:08:48 And we need to at least give them a shot at realizing that a certain amount of teasing
1:08:53 is something they can overcome.
1:08:56 You know, I remember, I don’t know if she’d be mad at me for sharing the story, but my
1:08:59 best friend went through a hard time in high school and I remember her mom, like her friend
1:09:05 group, totally cut her.
1:09:06 And I remember this, God, we all remember that.
1:09:09 I remember being cut by friends in high school and it was so upsetting.
1:09:12 Your best friend, all of a sudden, she’s mad at you and won’t speak to you and it’s devastating
1:09:16 in high school.
1:09:17 It’s really, it hurts.
1:09:19 And I remember that a bunch of girls had decided they were mad at her and her mother, who was
1:09:23 an immigrant to this country, said, “There’s a party and she didn’t, my friend didn’t want
1:09:29 to go to it.”
1:09:30 She was in high school and she was afraid to go to the party.
1:09:32 And her mother said to her, “You need to go to that party and you need to wear red.”
1:09:38 And I just kind of thought that encapsulated a great message for kids, right?
1:09:47 Like that is the message that we should be giving them.
1:09:50 You’re going to be fine.
1:09:51 You don’t need to cower.
1:09:53 You’re going to show up at that party and you’re not going to be embarrassed.
1:09:58 And at the end of the night, we’ll have a laugh about how it all went.
1:10:02 But you’re not going to sit at home and we’re not going to rush you off to a therapist because
1:10:05 girls, you know, made you feel left out because they’re going to keep doing it.
1:10:09 They’re going to do it at the workplace.
1:10:11 You got to be able to deal with this.
1:10:12 How do we talk to our kids about the difference if we start doing this at home, right?
1:10:17 We start building more agency, building more responsibility and we’re doing our best as
1:10:23 parents.
1:10:24 How do we talk to the kids who are going to a school and getting maybe a different message
1:10:28 about these things where they are maybe encouraged to talk about their feelings and they are
1:10:32 sort of, uh, do you understand what I’m saying, like where we have two different environments
1:10:37 for the kids?
1:10:38 How do we have that conversation with them because we don’t control what happens in
1:10:41 the school.
1:10:42 Even if we control what happens in our house, right?
1:10:44 So parents ask me that all the time.
1:10:47 They always say, I don’t want to undercut the school.
1:10:50 The school is doing this project and I feel, I feel uncomfortable criticizing it to a
1:10:56 school.
1:10:57 I’ve interviewed a lot of teachers.
1:10:58 You know what they’ve never said to me.
1:11:00 I really don’t want to undercut the messages at home.
1:11:04 So what I would say to parents is feel free to tell kids what you think about everything,
1:11:10 including I had one mom tell me after she read my book, she was going to have her kids
1:11:15 fill out the mental health survey and just fill it out at random.
1:11:18 Don’t read it.
1:11:19 Why?
1:11:20 Cause she doesn’t want her kids sitting there hearing about the, um, you know, cutting,
1:11:25 choking, all the burning, all the methods you might choose to self harm.
1:11:31 She was telling her kid, that’s not good for you and I know what’s best.
1:11:35 And I think parents have every right to say that to their kids.
1:11:38 And in some cases, given how much they’ve been undermined by the schools, you know,
1:11:43 with the, with the gender, just, you know, the transgender identification thing and the
1:11:49 actively deceiving parents, the amount they’ve been undermined, I, you know, I tell my kids,
1:11:54 you know what?
1:11:55 It makes normal people sad to sit around and think about their feelings.
1:11:59 Don’t pay attention in SEO.
1:12:01 If you have to sit through it, be respectful, be polite, but I just want you to know I regarded
1:12:06 as a lot of nonsense.
1:12:09 Literally anything you could be doing would be better for your mental health than sitting
1:12:12 around and doing these exercises.
1:12:14 Also I have to tell my kids mental health is not something you work on.
1:12:18 Something happens while you’re living a good life.
1:12:21 So we don’t talk about mental health, okay?
1:12:25 We talk about what good you could be doing in the world.
1:12:28 What you want to get out there and try, you know, what friend you want to make, what the
1:12:35 activity we should do, not, we don’t sit around talking about mental health.
1:12:39 That’s what happens when you’re leading a good life.
1:12:42 I talked to a lot of teachers and therapists before our interview and it seems like there’s
1:12:50 like a silent majority who agree with you, and yet we’re here.
1:12:58 Why are they silent?
1:12:59 It’s crazy, isn’t it?
1:13:01 I have to tell you, it shocked me.
1:13:04 The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive and I was expecting tremendous backlash,
1:13:10 but my inbox is filled with mental health professionals who say, “I have been seeing
1:13:15 this for, you know, decades now.
1:13:17 I was hoping someone would write this book,” and look, that’s what journalists exist for,
1:13:22 right?
1:13:23 Because nobody wants to criticize their colleagues or what their whole profession is doing.
1:13:29 They don’t generally want to do that, but a journalist can interview researchers and
1:13:34 put the story together and they’re just judged based on their journalism.
1:13:38 They’re not, you know, then treated badly by their colleagues.
1:13:41 So yeah, the response to the book has been surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive even
1:13:46 by mental health professionals, I’m happy to say.
1:13:50 That’s confusing to me as an adult, though, who sends his kids to school.
1:13:55 If the vast majority of teachers agree with us and it takes an outside journalist to change
1:13:59 things or bring attention to it, there’s a problem there and these people are responsible
1:14:04 for educating my children.
1:14:07 And yet they’re feeling helpless.
1:14:09 They’re feeling like they can’t do anything on the inside.
1:14:12 They are helpless.
1:14:13 Here’s why, because the psych staffs are like the DEI staffs of a corporation.
1:14:19 That’s what the psych staff now is at a school.
1:14:22 They effectively run the schools.
1:14:24 They pass judgment on everything.
1:14:26 They control what a teacher can assign, what kind of test a teacher can assign, and to
1:14:32 what child.
1:14:34 They’re effectively running the show.
1:14:35 They’ve been put in charge of the schools, just like the DEI groups have been put in charge
1:14:42 of corporations.
1:14:43 They’re effectively running and intimidating everyone.
1:14:45 That’s exactly what the psych staffs are doing.
1:14:48 The teachers who are there to teach are miserable.
1:14:50 They do not like these psych staffs telling them what they can assign and when.
1:14:55 Or when a child needs an anytime pass because his mental health requires him to be able
1:14:59 to walk around the school in the middle of class.
1:15:01 Guess what?
1:15:02 Counselors will tell you that these kids use those passes in the middle of their least favorite
1:15:06 class.
1:15:07 What’s an anytime pass?
1:15:08 I don’t know.
1:15:09 Oh, sorry.
1:15:10 That’s what they sometimes call them.
1:15:11 A mental health pass that allows you to take a walk around the school when you’re feeling
1:15:15 too much stress and surprisingly, unsurprisingly, the kids abuse them, right?
1:15:21 As anyone would, but the mental health staffs will very often insist upon them.
1:15:26 You see that the teachers are intimidated for good reason.
1:15:31 Good school counselors who think this is not what they signed on for are upset.
1:15:38 What happens with these kids?
1:15:40 Let’s say everything continues.
1:15:41 We’ve probably seen they graduate, maybe their parents intervene at work, but that doesn’t
1:15:46 continue forever, does it?
1:15:49 You don’t have a 40 year old whose mother is calling their boss at work.
1:15:53 Are we just delaying becoming an adult?
1:15:57 Is that what we’re doing here?
1:15:58 Or are we preventing becoming an adult and you have this learned helplessness?
1:16:04 We’re preventing them from becoming adults.
1:16:06 It’s worse.
1:16:07 That’s why, because a child who believes they’re unwell and incapable will not feel up to
1:16:13 supporting others and supporting others, being there for others is what adulthood is.
1:16:19 It’s saying that to the world, I’m strong.
1:16:21 You can depend on me to hold down a job.
1:16:25 I’m strong.
1:16:26 I can raise a family.
1:16:28 I can be responsible for others in this society.
1:16:31 That’s what adulthood is.
1:16:33 What we’re doing is we’re treating kids like mental patients and because they feel infirm,
1:16:40 they don’t feel up to adulthood.
1:16:41 They don’t want to get their driver’s license.
1:16:43 Driving is scary.
1:16:44 They don’t want to take the risks that a robust teenager would take.
1:16:49 They’re afraid of them.
1:16:51 We need to go back.
1:16:52 We need to undo this and we need to show them they can.
1:16:55 We have high expectations for them and they should.
1:16:58 They should absolutely take on the next generation, the mantle of all the responsibility for all
1:17:03 the hard work in front of us as a society.
1:17:06 We’re counting on them and we are.
1:17:08 We’re depending on them, whether we like it or not.
1:17:11 We really should tell them, “Hey, we got a lot of challenges.
1:17:14 Let’s get to work.
1:17:15 Let’s see what we can do, what you’ll be able to do to help us going forward as a civilization,
1:17:22 as a society, as a community.”
1:17:24 I love that optimistic note to the ending and final question.
1:17:28 We normally ask what is success for you, but I want to ask you a slightly different
1:17:32 version of this, which is, what does being a successful parent mean?
1:17:37 What is a successful parent?
1:17:39 A successful parent is someone who’s raised a good child to adulthood, to good adulthood.
1:17:45 Someone who has raised a productive citizen who, by the way, has your values, passing
1:17:50 on your values to your kid.
1:17:53 If they are a strong person with your values, you’ve done a great job, which basically means
1:17:58 do they value work?
1:18:00 Are they reliable?
1:18:02 Do they show up for others?
1:18:04 Do they want to, and I think they should want to, form a family?
1:18:08 Our society depends on it, and we should inculcate that in kids.
1:18:13 All these things, whether they want to be there for others, be strong for others, and
1:18:19 be reliable to others, build community, build family, build all those things that our society
1:18:25 is depending on, no, that doesn’t mean that every single person needs to get married.
1:18:30 They may choose not to, and that’s fine.
1:18:32 But in the main, we want people to want those things.
1:18:36 We want people to want to be someone others can rely on in a permanent and serious way.
1:18:42 No, he’s worked with me, he’s been my partner in this job for 20 years.
1:18:47 We want kids to feel like they can do that.
1:18:50 And if they have raised a citizen who can do that, who does that, who is relied upon,
1:18:56 gosh, that parent’s done a great job.
1:18:58 And those are the people, those are, in my book, those are the only parenting experts,
1:19:01 the ones who’ve actually done a good job of it.
1:19:08 That’s a beautiful way to end this provocative conversation.
1:19:11 Thank you so much.
1:19:13 Thank you.
1:19:14 Good luck with everything, Shane.
1:19:17 Thanks for listening and learning with us.
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