The Exchanges

Q Get 30% off your order at ProTech.com slash knowledge. That's P-R-O-T-E-K-T dot com slash knowledge. Or use code knowledge at the checkout for 30% off. I was thinking about how to start this conversation, and I think we should actually start with the inverse. Instead of talking about how to raise strong, healthy, capable children who are independent, how would we raise them to be as mentally unstable as possible?

A That's something I looked at. And, um, the, the answer seems to be, you know, I'm a journalist. I interviewed a lot of, uh, experts in terms of people who are familiar with the psychological research. So not, not the people who hold themselves out as mental health experts guiding everyone, but the people who are actually conducting and familiar with the psychological research. And if we wanted to make kids dysregulated, here's what we would do. We would obsess over their emotions. We would ask them constantly how they were feeling about things. We would ask them to pay attention to their feelings. So therefore broadcast that their feelings were an important and reliable guide to, um, whether how they were doing in life. Um, we would Treat them as in isolation. Treat them as very special and unique and isolated from everyone else. Unique in the world. Um, never give them a sense that their actions had an, had a effect on others, so therefore they had no responsibility to others to sort of be a good citizen, whether that's on, you know, an airplane or in a classroom, but constantly talk about them as unique. Uh, we would give them diagnosis. Uh, diagnoses for ordinary behaviors. We would pathologize ordinary behaviors and treat them to see themselves as disordered. Oh, that's just, you know, you have ADHD. Oh, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. That's why you acted out. …

AI assessment note: “if we wanted to make kids dysregulated, here's what we would do.”

Q You mentioned the term social emotional learning. What is that?

A So that is a project in schools that's been around for over 15 years now, and it's across the West. They have various forms of it, ah, across the West, but the idea was to teach kids emotional regulation, and it specifically is a therapeutic intervention. It doesn't use moral language. It's not about character. It's always puts it in terms of non-judgmental, ah, coping techniques, or wellness techniques, or anti-bullying techniques, or empathy education of various sorts. And the problem with it is that, however intended, in practice, it does everything we would do if we were going to dysregulate children, like constantly asking them to check on their emotions, constantly talking to them about their bad feelings, constantly having them think about a time when they were sad, lonely, left out, or disappointed. So it becomes very much like a sort of group therapy, and the other, and, and They've done these studies now, so we have some indication that, that, that it absolutely is leading to the results, because they were actually able to do, researchers in Australia and England actually tested this, separate groups of researchers, and they were able to show that the kids in the control group who didn't go through these practices ended up happier, better adjusted, better in, in terms of depression and anxiety, and, ah, lower depression, lower anxiety, and, and also, ah, less alienate…

AI assessment note: “the idea was to teach kids emotional regulation, and it specifically is a therapeutic intervention.”

Q What role do you think technology and social media play in the mental health challenges faced by today's kids, and how conversely do you think parents and even therapists who are listening to this can help address these issues?

A Sure. So I think that social media has absolutely played a big role. It's been an accelerant for all kinds of deteriorating mental health. It's encouraged people in the idea that they have a diagnosis. It's spread social contagions, um, mental health, you know, diagnoses. So, so things like gender dysphoria, I wrote my last book about, um, social media absolutely played a big role, but I don't think it's the whole story. And the reason I don't think it's the whole story is a few reasons, but, but for instance, just to give you one statistic, in 2016, the CDC came out with a report that one in six American children between the ages of two and eight had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. One in six American kids in 2016, they were not on social media. They're not on social media today between the ages of two and eight, but they definitely weren't back in 2016. It's not just about the phones, and I think the phones are bad, but it's not just about the phones. It's about the lives we're giving them, and the constant, constant therapy in the culture, the constant sense that their feelings are all important. They are tyrannized by their own feelings, and they're tyrannizing each other. When they should be learning to put their feelings to one side and get on with life. And you know what? Turns out their feelings will get better. You know, they will be more manageable. If you ho…

AI assessment note: “social media has absolutely played a big role. It's been an accelerant”

Q When you say parental authority, what does that mean specifically?

A Sure, so I'm using the language that Diana Bomerand used as a child psychologist, or sorry, she's an academic researcher, psychologist of the 19 sixties, and she was the first one to invent what was now, what's now known as parenting styles, but she didn't really invent it. She actually was curious, how were Americans raising their kids, and what was the result? And she went in with an open mind, and what she found was there were roughly, you know, three Types, you know, authoritarian, cold, unloving, and obedience, uh, focused. This basically doesn't exist in the West anymore. Uh, authoritative, which just means parents are in charge. They set down rules. Yes, they will punish if kids, you know, deliberately defy those rules, but they're loving and, you know, they're, you know, there to, you know, listen and care about their kids and even, you know, sympathize with them, but, but the parents are ultimately in charge. And those kids always did the best. And this study has been replicated hundreds of times. Authoritative parenting produces the best kids in terms of success, emotional, uh, well-being, and even close, eventual closeness with mom and dad, and, or parents, whoever the parents may be. And then the, then the other type, which also doesn't exist anymore, is permissive parenting. This was the parenting where it was sort of like anything goes, very laissez-faire parentin…

AI assessment note: “authoritative, which just means parents are in charge. They set down rules.”

Q say everything continues. We've probably seen a, you know, they graduate, maybe their parents intervene at work, but that doesn't continue forever, does it? Like, you don't have a forty-year-old whose mother is calling their boss at work. Like, is, are we just delaying sort of becoming an adult? Is that what we're doing here? Or are we sort of preventing becoming an adult and you have this learned helplessness?

A We're preventing them from becoming adults. It's worse, and here's why. Because a child who believes they're unwell and incapable will not feel up to supporting others, and supporting others, being there for others is what adulthood is. It's saying that to the world, I'm strong. You can depend on me to hold down a job. I'm strong. I can raise a family. I can be responsible for others in this society. That's what adulthood is. And what we're doing is we're treating kids like mental patients and because they feel infirm, right? They don't feel up to adulthood. So they don't want to get their driver's license. Driving is scary. They don't want to take the risks that a robust teenager would take. They're afraid of them. And we need to go back. We need to undo this and we need to show them they can. We have high expectations for them and they should, they should absolutely take on The next generation, the mantle of all the responsibility for all the hard work in front of us as a society. We're counting on them, and we are. We're depending on them, whether we like it or not. So we really should tell them, hey, we got a lot of challenges. Let's get to work. Let's see what we can, what we can do, what you'll be able to do to help us going forward as a civilization, as a society, as a community.

AI assessment note: “We're preventing them from becoming adults. It's worse, and here's why.”

Q I was talking to somebody recently who said, you know, the worst thing you can do to a twelve-year-old is try to be their best friend. The worst thing you can do to a forty-year-old is try to parent them. Do you think that we're just trying to be our kids' friends, or how do you see it, like, as a parenting level?

A Yes and no. So I think that's a piece of it, for sure. We're trying to be our kids' friends, but we're also treating them as adults, right? What, that's what that means. When you say you're trying to be your kids' friends, you're saying, first of all, you say, I'm not the authority here. Now, there's great research showing that kids actually do need authority. They need their parents in charge, and if their parents aren't in charge, they go looking for authority elsewhere. Kids really need authority, um, in terms for their mental health, for their stability, for everything, for success in life. They really need their parents in charge. Uh, which doesn't of course mean being cold and unloving. It just means that parents are in charge and they have rules. You said being their friends. It's sort of, in some ways it's, it's worse than that because yes, they're being their kids friends, but they're also assuming that the kids are little adults. So for instance, when they play the role of therapist with a child and say, I'm just here to affirm your emotions. Remember that a kid is still figuring out which of his emotions make any sense at all, right? A toddler will feel rage if you don't give him the, the, you know, the, the snack he wanted, and you have to teach a kid that's not appropriate. You can be, you know, you can be disappointed, but screaming and even feeling rage, that's n…

AI assessment note: “I think that's a piece of it, for sure. We're trying to be our kids' friends”

Q How did parents so easily get convinced that we're not the authority?

A It's a good question. Question. Why did we all buy in? I think, you know, the culture shifted over time, so you sort of don't notice the temperature of the waters changing, you know? Like, I, I'll give you just one silly example, but from my kid's school, every time there's a national catastrophe or, you know, a school shooting or anything else, I get an email from the kids, my school's guidance department, telling me, informing me of the Of the good tactics for how to talk to my children about this national event. We just accept it. No one's ever asked me, how would you like me to talk to your children about the school shooting? No, they tell me how to talk to my own kids and nobody bats an eye. Now the school mental health staff may not have children. They may have not have raised any of them successfully to adulthood. And we certainly never get to see what the product of their great tips are. But nonetheless, they feel totally comfortable marching into my home and telling me how I should be talking to my kids about a national catastrophe. It really is a slip that happened over time. I mean, I, I took my son to an urgent care clinic for a bad stomach ache that wasn't going away after he got home from summer camp. And after we were done and they decided it was just dehydration, it wasn't appendicitis. They said, oh, now we're going to do our mental health screener. Uh, we aske…

AI assessment note: “the culture shifted over time, so you sort of don't notice the temperature”

Q concern, but this kid is your responsibility. And so like what conversations I'm wondering, practically speaking, can parents have with their therapist to be like, okay, how long are we going to be here? What are we working on? What issues are we talking about? And like, how are we solving this specific problem so that we can get out? Is that a fair conversation to have with a therapist?

A It's an essential conversation to have. Here's the thing. When you drop your kid off to therapy, very often it will undermine your authority with your kids, because now you have someone who's an adult who seems to be above the parent, who sits around with the child, basically judging your interactions with the kid. And very often kids will leave with the sense of, gosh, that was, you know, my mother was emotionally abusive, or that was wrong of my mother to say, or whatever. That's a very common side effect of therapy. Now, Um, by the way, with adults, adults can handle that. Adults can brush things off, but, but a kid doesn't have a context for evaluating, was that abusive of my father to yell at me? Is it abuse when a father yells at a kid? Look, a kid shouldn't be in therapy unless they have a real need, first of all. So if they have a real need, then the therapy should focus on that need, whatever the problem is, and it should be confined to that. If they have a phobia,

AI assessment note: “It's an essential conversation to have.”

Q Because we, we can sort of recognize easier. I mean, with kids, they're so easily, um, I wouldn't, I don't want to say, they're easily influenced. How is that?

A Yes, of course. An adult can say, listen, I've been on this antidepressant for three years. I have no sex drive. I hate it. I'm, I'm ready. I'm ready to taper off it. Can you help me taper? Kid can't say that. They, they might not even know what they're missing when it comes to sex drive. You put a kid early enough on antidepressants. They don't know what a sex drive is for or why they might miss one, right? So you get in and start deleting their natural resources for coping with things. You alter them in some giant way while they're just trying to adjust to life. I mean, how many adults do you know say, yeah, I probably had ADHD as a kid, but You know, nobody diagnosed me, and now I am this incredibly successful adult. A lot, right? I mean, I know so many adults in that situation, and they often say, I wish I had gotten a diagnosis and medication, but they turned out pretty great left to their own devices. Now, of course, I'm not saying that that's true of every child. There may be kids who need the stimulant, but stimulants are profound, and they are given out way, way too readily without first seeing if we can make adjustments in the child's environment to help them, you know, handle their distractibility.

AI assessment note: “An adult can say, listen, I've been on this antidepressant... Kid can't say that.”

Q Speaking of social media and sort of that culture, I mean, the, the public campaign to culture to, to cancel you is pretty huge. What was that like? How did you deal with that? Did it affect you at all?

A Oh, yeah. I mean, look, ah, a few things. So, was it fun? No. But I was right. I wrote a book about a transgender, um, you know, a sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. I thought it was a socially driven phenomenon. I thought these kids were going through reckless medical protocols that really shouldn't be allowed because, or should have given, had more supervision, more oversight, you know, um, and, um, the risks weren't being explained to parents and all that was right. So am I always on some people's blacklist? Yeah, I'm on literal blacklists, but what was the hardest? The hardest part was explaining it to my kids and anything that affected our family. That's always going to be the hardest part is like trying to explain to them, I know that this person treated us badly, but I didn't do anything wrong.

AI assessment note: “The hardest part was explaining it to my kids and anything that affected our family.”

Q What can parents do, like, as they're listening to this, if they're still listening, what small steps can they take to sort of start to go back to baseline, if you will, or, or back to building more resilient kids? That's probably a better way to word that.

A I think they need to, first of all, give their kids chores. They need to give their kids more independence and more chores and more things to do so that they feel that they matter in the world, that the family, they are benefiting the family. We expect you to, and we're happy when you do, and we're proud of you. Look what you just did for the family, for someone besides you. And by the way, it makes kids feel good, but that also means we need to control our own anxiety. Let them do things that are a little bit risky, like sharp knives or cooking dinner or whatever it is, get them Get them walking, going around the neighborhood, get them doing things where they have to figure themselves out a little bit and navigate other people like strangers. So all that stuff's really good, but we also need to, we need to have frank conversations. You know what? Sitting around and talking about your feelings all the time. Don't worry about your feelings all the time. If you have a problem, if you're really sad, like when your son called you, that's different. His feelings had been hurt. He didn't know what to do. And you gave him great advice, but constantly checking on their feelings when they don't, when their feelings, there's no indication that there's been any problem, which is what we're doing now preventatively. That's a disaster. And you know what? Telling a kid you're fine. Shake it …

AI assessment note: “first of all, give their kids chores. They need to give their kids more independence”

Q to a school and getting maybe a different message about these things where They are maybe encouraged to talk about their feelings, and they are sort of, uh, do you understand what I'm saying? Like, where we have two different environments for the kids? How do we have that conversation with them? Because we don't control what happens in the school, even if we control what happens in our house.

A Right. So, parents ask me that all the time. They always say, I don't want to undercut the school. The school is doing this project, and I feel, I feel uncomfortable criticizing it to a school. I've interviewed a lot of teachers. You know what they've never said to me? I really don't want to undercut the messages at home. So what I would say to parents is feel free to tell kids what you think about everything, including I had one mom tell me after she read my book, she was going to have her kids fill out the mental health survey and just fill it out at random. Don't read it. Why? Because she doesn't want her kids sitting there hearing about the, um, you know, cutting, choking, all that, burning, all the methods you might choose to self-harm. She was telling her kid, that's not good for you, and I know what's best, and I think parents have every right to say that to their kids, and in some cases, given how much they've been undermined by the schools, You know, with the, with the gender, you know, the transgender identification thing, and the actively deceiving parents, the amount they've been undermined, I, I, you know, I tell my kids, you know what, it makes normal people sad to sit around and think about their feelings. Don't pay attention in SEL. If you have to sit through it, be respectful, be polite, but I just want you to know I, I regard it as a lot of nonsense. Literally…

AI assessment note: “what I would say to parents is feel free to tell kids what you think”

Q and maybe that temperature sort of rises slowly. But how do we get out of that thinking that like, oh no, you know, there's no obvious sign my kids. Is it like we're trying to be a martyr in some way as a parent? Or, you know, we're trying to create this situation where we're, I don't know, I'm struggling with this, but I think you know what I mean.

A Yeah, I do. I think that we have... Believe that that is the protocol. You always stick your kid in therapy. There is such thing as preventive mental health, by the way, there isn't right. We can deal with actual problems, but preventatively we've never been good. There's no good study showing preventive mental health works unless you're talking about things like a good life, like connection, you know, doing things for others, getting involved in community, dancing, you know, exercising, eating right. Those are great, right? Having relationships in person relationships. We know all that's good for you. Right? But, but preventive mental health, sitting with a therapist and talking through your parents' divorce, I don't think there are, is good studies showing that that is necessarily good for kids, and there are a lot of risks. And I'll give you an example. An adult said to me recently, a friend of mine said to me recently, she said, you know, I wasn't sure I was going to agree with your book, but when my parents divorced, they stuck me in therapy. Just automatically. And I didn't want to talk to my, to this stranger about how I was feeling. I was really sad. And this person was a stranger. I wanted my mom. Like I was angry, but I didn't want to talk to the stranger. And I just thought, but she's like, but they made me. And I had to go once a week and it was awful. And I just th…

AI assessment note: “I think that we have... Believe that that is the protocol. You always stick your kid in therapy.”

Q As a journalist, what do you see happening in media right now? You mentioned that they weren't running stories about this, now they are. Like, how do you look at media from the outside, but from the inside as well?

A Oh, I think there's a lot of really good developments in media. There's a lot of, you know, uh, people who are acting outside of the prestige media. I mean, I think, look, the prestige media in America certainly is falling apart in a lot of ways. You know, some of the media outlets are, you know, still very well funded, and they seem to be You know, they seem to be doing fine in a certain sense, but, but they're, they're, it's weird. It's like, you know, they have this sort of Potemkin village they've set up that doesn't actually reflect what's going on in the country because they decided that their mission wasn't going to be about truth. It was going to be about something else, you know? So I think in general, they've, they've, a lot of them have become sort of a PR project rather than a truth organ. And that's, That's dangerous, and I think that they're, you know, I think that their prestige has been damaged by it, and certainly their reliability, the trust people have in them, and I think that's in many ways a good thing. They don't deserve people's trust for all the things they didn't report or cover it up or whatever. Now, that said, we're seeing a lot of conspiracy theory, and that's bad. And I think that when you can't trust the mainstream media to report on stories actively, accurately rather, you, you end up with a lot of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory is very ba…

AI assessment note: “prestige media in America certainly is falling apart in a lot of ways.”

Q my close friends is a therapist, and she wanted to ask your opinion on something, which was, she said, terrible therapists do terrible work, which leads to terrible results, just like anybody in any profession. The terrible people in that profession do terrible work, get terrible results. Do you think that grad schools are partly to blame because they've graduated idologues instead of free thinkers who have hearts and souls?

A So yes, things have gotten a lot more politicized, a lot more woke in the world of, of therapy. There's no question, but I think there's a bigger problem. And the bigger problem is we're over treating the population with therapy. I'm not talking about bad therapists. I'm talking about too much therapy. Okay. Sitting around with a child once a week talking about their pains, talking about their struggles is an unhelpful intervention if a child doesn't need it. And I don't care how well intentioned the therapist is. You know that you're not doing them a good service. You, you ought to know that. And the reason is, is they've measured things. You know what better for, for, for mood, for mild to moderate depression than psychotherapy or antidepressants? Dancing. Yeah. Exercise. Dancing. Anything. You could literally, instead of asking kids in school constantly how they're feeling, you could do anything with them. Have them paint the gym. Have them pick up trash. Have them build a structure together. You could literally have them dance. They could do almost anything, and it would be better than sitting around talking about their feelings, because guess what? Teenagers have a lot of bad feelings. They do. Newsflash. If you're going to sit around once a week and say, come talk to me about your feelings. Wow. They're going to fill up that session and they're going to leave with, wow, I…

AI assessment note: “There's no question, but I think there's a bigger problem.”

Q What role, if any, did COVID play? Was it another accelerant, or did it sort of like change our perception of mental health? I know a lot of my, a lot of people I know started going to therapy during COVID, and they're still in therapy.

A The lockdowns were very hard on kids, as parents knew they would be. Parents protested to keep the schools open. You know who didn't protest? The mental health organizations. They had nothing to say as the schools headed into a second year of lockdowns. Parents knew this was going to be bad, and it was. It was very bad that we had kids in isolation, because they need those connections. And now mental health experts present themselves as the solution. And look, if a child developed some severe problem, then they may need that solution. But in general, do I think they can be trusted? No, not as the solution to a problem that was obvious and foreseeable that they said nothing about the school count in American. I can tell you the school counselors association, school psychologists association, none of these organizations had anything to say about the foreseeable damage that was going to happen to kids. Now, maybe they just didn't know. Maybe they were afraid to speak up, but in any case, the idea that they're now the solution to the struggles we're seeing, I don't think in general they're the solution.

AI assessment note: “The lockdowns were very hard on kids, as parents knew they would be.”