Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright

Investigative journalist Abigail Shrier reveals an uncomfortable truth: our culture's overwhelming embrace of therapy might be harming the next generation. In this thought-provoking conversation, she challenges conventional wisdom about mental health, drawing from extensive research and disturbing patterns among lifelong therapy patients. Learn when therapy helps, when it hurts, and how successful parents navigate emotional resilience in their children. Newsletter - I share timeless insights and ideas you can use at work and home. Join over 700k others every Sunday and subscribe to Brain Food. Try it: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ My Book! Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results is out now - https://fs.blog/clear/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/shaneparrish Join our membership: https://fs.blog/membership/ (00:00) Intro (05:44) Inverse: How do we raise mentally unstable kids? (08:29) How we got to now (11:45) Bad therapy...or just social trends? (13:21) Being your kids' friend: good or bad? (15:55) The parenting type that raises the BEST kids (21:35) Is this all the parents' fault? (29:53) Is "Bad Therapy" a world-wide problem? (32:57) Talk to your kids' therapist about these things (42:09) The importance of facing adversity in childhood (47:06) Can we blame grad schools for all of this? (49:14) On technology and social media (51:03) Schools should "never" have gotten involved in mental health (54:43) Did COVID accelerate "bad therapy?" (56:07) How to return to normalcy (58:21) Why Shane shares negative YouTube comments with his kids (01:01:23) Shrier's experience being "cancelled" (01:04:13) On prestige media (01:07:47) Small steps parents can take to return to normal (01:11:02) Dealing with schools saying one thing and parents saying another (01:13:32) Why is the silent majority...silent? (01:16:32) If this continues, what happens? (01:18:19) What makes someone a successful parent? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy. Bad therapy is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. And by that, I mean, we're teaching them over and over, your feelings are the most important thing. That's what we're broadcasting when we constantly ask them how they're feeling. When we constantly ask them if they're happy, we're fretting over their happiness. So we've made happiness a goal. Making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy. We're teaching kids they can never ignore any distress. They've never ignored any pain, and so they're not able to do it.

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a biweekly podcast exploring the powerful ideas, practical methods, and mental models of others. In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. Before we dive in, I have a quick favor to ask. If you're enjoying the show and listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, please hit the follow button now. The more followers we have, the better guests we can bring on to share their knowledge with you. Thank you for your support. If you want to take your learning to the next level, consider joining our membership program at fs.blog/membership.

• 1:30Shane Parrish?

  As a member, you'll get my personal reflections at the end of every episode, early access to episodes, no ads or hearing this, exclusive content, hand-edited transcripts, and so much more. Plus, you'll support the show you love. Check out the link in the show notes for more information.

• 1:50Shane Parrish?

  Okay, if you're listening with a child around, now might be a good time for you to put on your headphones. While this is bound to be a controversial episode, I want to remind you that, as is the case with all of our guests, my job is to explore a subject through the eyes of our guest in a nonjudgmental way. If you have a real mental health issue, this episode is not for you. If, however, you have a nagging feeling that therapy isn't helping you or your kids as much as you thought it should, or you just want to learn more about the topic, sit back and listen. Today, my guest is Abigail Schreier, author of the book Bad Therapy. In a world where mental health challenges are on the rise, particularly among youth,

• 2:32Shane Parrish?

  Abigail's work offers a critical examination of the failings in our current approach to therapy. In this episode, we use the counterintuitive question, how would we raise children to be as mentally unstable as possible in order to explore the key principles and practices that are essential for fostering resilience and independence in our children and ourselves? We don't just talk about kids. We also explore the concept of therapist as best friend for adults, questions you can ask before engaging a therapist, and when it's time to end your relationship with a therapist. We also discuss the societal trends contributing to the decline in mental health, the role

• 3:14Shane Parrish?

  of technology and social media, and the responsibility of parents and therapists in addressing these issues. Abigail shares insights on how other cultures approach childrearing differently and what we can learn from their successes. Throughout our conversation, we uncover problems in the mental health field, from the protocols that prioritize ideology over individual needs, to the graduate schools that produce bad therapists. By listening to this episode, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the complex factors shaping our children's mental well-being and the steps we can take to redesign our approach to therapy and parenting. Abigail's insights will empower you to make informed decisions and advocate for change in a system that, at least based on the numbers, is failing our youth.

• 3:58Shane Parrish?

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• 4:40Shane Parrish?

  starting, this means you can go from idea to store in a few minutes, but it also means if you're an existing company, you can save money and time. If you've ever checked out from a store and thought that was so easy, chances are it was Shopify, which is the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. Go to Shopify.com/Shein now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.

• 5:10Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is sponsored by Protec. Protec believes that when you are your best self, you are of the most service to others. Try hydration immediately upon waking before your first cup of coffee and before, during, or after your workout. Try rest one hour before bed and get the best sleep of your life. Improve your hydration and your sleep and become the best version of yourself. Get 30% off your order at protec.com/knowledge. That's P-R-O-T-E-K-T.com/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

• 5:52Shane Parrish?

  children who are independent, how would we raise them to be as mentally unstable as possible?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  That's something I looked at, and the answer seems to be, and I'm a journalist, I interviewed a lot of experts in terms of people who are familiar with the psychological research. So 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 whether, how they were doing in life.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  We would treat them as in isolation, treat them as very special and unique and isolated from everyone else, unique in the world. 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. We would give them diagnosis, 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. So instead of using the sort of lay terms we've always used that have to do with character,

• 7:28Speaker 00

  like, you know, being a jerk in class or being inappropriate in class, we would say, no, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. So treat them to see it as a brain problem so that they never felt they had any agency to do anything about it. And we would teach them to focus on happiness and wellness all the time. And I think if we did all those things, we would end up with what we have, which is a very dysregulated generation.

• 7:50Shane Parrish?

  When you use the word dysregulated, what do you mean?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  We're seeing kids, high school students, university students, who cannot control their emotions. So teachers report that elementary school kids and even high school kids are throwing tantrums in the classroom like they've never seen before. And we're seeing even as, you know, the young, this young, rising generation goes off to the workplace, if, if you, if their feelings are hurt at the workplace, they will complain to HR and try to get their boss fired. That seems to them a reasonable response to something not going the way they expected in the workplace. They want everything to stop for them.

• 8:28Shane Parrish?

  How did we get here?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  So I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy. Bad therapy is this, is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. And by that I mean, all this feelings focus with kids, we're teaching them over and over, your feelings are the most important thing. That's what we're broadcasting when we constantly ask them how they're feeling, when we constantly ask them if they're happy, we're fretting over their happiness. So we've made happiness a goal. The researchers can tell you, and there's a lot of good research on, research on this, making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy. Because most of life, we're not exactly happy, right? We're thinking about the work we have, we're frustrated, we have a worry that's bothering us.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Maybe we have an itch, or an allergy, or a slight pain, that we have to repress to get on with the business of our lives. And we're doing the opposite with that. We're teaching kids they can never ignore any distress, they've never ignored any pain, and so they're not able to do it.

• 9:30Shane Parrish?

  But how did that start? Like, how did this all come into society? Like, did it go slowly and then all at once? Like, was this, you know, one bad actor or one person seeded this idea and it took hold? Like, how did? Because it seems like everybody's just following the protocol. But who's creating these protocols? Like, how did this happen?

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• 10:45Speaker 00

  I think that we created a window, or an opening, and parents as a group did. How did we do this? We had lived through a lot of divorce. We had had, we had a lot of broken homes ourselves, and we were really worried that we weren't going to do things properly. We needed an expert. And in America in general, and across the West, we've become more and more reliant on so-called experts. Even for ordinary things, we don't trust ourselves to handle our lives in the way that we used to, right? We think that, basically, our lives require a certain amount of expertise. And childrearing especially, we've become totally unconfident in our ability to raise kids, even though the project of raising kids

• 11:28Speaker 00

  really hasn't changed in what kids need over, you know, centuries. I mean, kids need the same things from us, but instead, we've convinced ourselves that it's a highly technical project. You need to know about a child's amygdala to do it right. And that's what the experts have been saying. It's, it's not true. It flies in the face of all the good psychological research. But nonetheless, I do think they've, all these factors have undermined our confidence that we knew what we were doing. And so then we turn to really bad advice from a whole lot of people who I think very often mean well, but they're giving very bad advice. And some of the times their science is just garbage. And, and, and they've been promoting the idea of trauma. Trauma is everywhere in our world. This is their idea.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  That anything we do, anytime you yell at a kid, that can traumatize a kid, that injury, emotional injury can be with them for a lifetime. It's not true. It's not what the best research has shown. But nonetheless, they peddle this in the popular culture and it makes parents stricken and afraid to basically assert themselves as the authority and, and really have any discipline with their kids.

• 12:35Shane Parrish?

  A lot of the issues you raise are cultural, sort of like in terms of resilience weakening, the abdication of parental responsibility. These are big like social trends that are going on. How much of the problem do you think goes to therapy versus parenting practices versus the, you know, we're all just sort of like following the momentum?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  So I think it's all essentially bad therapy. And this is why, because who's in charge? Who's running the show? And today with children, with families, it really is the mental health experts. If you doubt that, just think for a moment about the fact that the rising generation never says it's shy. They say they have social phobia. They never say they're sad. They say they're depressed. They never say, gosh, they went through a tough time in middle school. They say they have PTSD. They're speaking the language of psychopathology to understand themselves and each other. Parents are practicing the techniques taken from therapists and psychologists. Those are the techniques they're aping when they talk to their children. They're not, there's nothing natural about the way parents now behave with kids.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  They get down to eye level, they constantly solicit their kids' feelings, and they talk in the language, "I see you're having some big feelings now." They're talking, they're, they're reading a script and the script is supplied from therapists. And then it's the final piece is schools where they are openly, their mandate is trauma-informed care across public schools, social, emotional learning. And parent, teachers and counselors, armies of counselors are playing shrink with the kids all day long.

• 14:11Shane Parrish?

  I was talking to somebody recently who said, you know, "The worst thing you can do to a 12-year-old is try to be their best friend. The worst thing you can do to a 40-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?

• 14:25Speaker 00

  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 be, trying to be your kids' friends, you're saying, I, 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 in terms, for their mental health, for their stability, for everything, for success in life. They really need their parents in charge, 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

• 15:07Speaker 00

  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 disappointed, but screaming and even feeling rage, that's not what we feel anger about. We feel anger about lots of things in life, but you can't feel rage and throw your Cheerios across the floor,

• 15:50Speaker 00

  because, across the room, because you didn't get the snack you wanted. And they actually, you have to sort of educate their emotions a little bit. You don't do that with adults, right? Mostly, you want to sort of, you know, as a therapist, therapists usually want to create a space where adults feel comfortable opening up about emotions they might feel embarrassed about, right? But with kids, they're just trying to figure out which of these emotions make any sense. So the last thing we want to do is, what we've been doing, is affirm every one of their emotions, no matter how extreme or dysregulated, and then talk to them as if we're all just, we're all just, you know, feelers here, we're all just emotional feelers,

• 16:35Speaker 00

  trying to understand each other. That's not actually what kids need. They need an adult in charge.

• 16:40Shane Parrish?

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

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Sure, so I'm using the language that Diana Bomerand used. That's a child psychologist, or, sorry, she's an academic researcher psychologist of the 1960s. 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 focused. This basically doesn't exist in the West anymore. Authoritative, which just means parents are in charge. They set down rules. Yes, they will punish if kids, you know, deliberately defy those rules.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  But they're loving and, you know, they're, you know, they're to, you know, listen and care about their kids and even, you know, sympathize with them. 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 well-being, and even eventual closeness with mom and dad, or parents, whoever the parents may be. And 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 parenting. That also had not great results. But what we have today is, I argue, a little worse

• 18:14Speaker 00

  because it's permissive parenting without, at least the kids had independence. So they were able to develop some confidence and capacity on their own. Today, we have surveillance parenting. Parents literally monitoring their kids on their iPhones, not trusting their judgment at all, interfering with, interceding with every teacher, eventually even interceding with their bosses in the workplace, and constantly running interference with kids, but never having any authority with them. So never saying to a kid, avoiding the word "no." So never punishing, never asserting a boundary with a kid in terms of his behavior or her behavior and what you expect from them. But then at the end, but then running interference with them with everybody else in their lives.

• 18:59Shane Parrish?

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

• 19:02Speaker 00

  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 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 always puts it in terms of nonjudgmental coping techniques or wellness techniques or anti-bullying techniques or empathy education of various sorts.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  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 they've done these studies now, so we have some indication 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,

• 20:18Speaker 00

  better adjusted, better in terms of depression and anxiety, and lower depression, lower anxiety, and also less alienated from parents. Because the other bad thing about it is it tees up a criticism of parents because, of course, if you're going to sit around with kids ruminating about a time when they were sad, lonely, left out, well, whose job was it to keep them safe? So criticism of parents is almost inevitable.

• 20:42Shane Parrish?

  I remember my mom never asked me how I felt as a kid or what I wanted or where we should go for dinner or any of these things. But she also like spanked me and had all these other disciplinary measures. Do you think we've progressed in positive ways as parents? Or is it all sort of actually going back to that sort of classic, I would say, 70s and 80s parent is a better thing for society?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Nobody wants to go back, let me just say. Nobody wants to go back. I don't think we could. We're a lot more sort of emotionally aware, as it were, as a society. We've decided that it's really important to be in tune with your kids emotionally. And we want that closeness with our kids and we want that affection. And I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't have all those things. The problem is, the question is, what do you want? And what do the kids need? You can be as affectionate as you want, but you can't not be the authority in your home because that turns out to be essential for their mental health, thinking the people who love me the most are the ones in charge. Not the therapist my mom hired, not the pediatrician who's bossing my mom around. My mom, or dad, or whoever the parent is,

• 21:52Speaker 00

  they are in charge. The people who love me most know what's best for me. That basic idea is something kids need. So however your style is beyond that, that's up to you, right? If you're a super lovey person, go for it. You know, whatever. That's not the stuff there's good research on. What's good, what there's good research on is when you have an absence of authority, the kids don't do very well.

• 22:17Shane Parrish?

  Do you think this is like systemic of sort of our generation? I assume we're about the same age. I think our kids are close enough that we can say that. Where I used to see this in the workplace as well, where people would follow the protocol and they could never get in trouble following the protocol, even if they knew it led to a dead end because it's like, I'm just doing my job. And there's sort of like, I see a parallel here for parenting, which is I'm just relying on the experts. I'm just doing like, there's no sort of agency or responsibility. You know, it's almost a weird abdication of responsibility in the sense of I'm just following what other people suggest.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  I get that. I'll say this, parents are pouring in way more time to their kids than the previous generations. So it's hard for me. I don't personally blame parents, right? They have so little confidence right now because we've done, because the mental health industry has done everything it can to divest them of any sense that they know what they're doing. Right? I mean, in school materials, they refer to parents as caregivers. They're telling the kids, your parents are just service providers. They're caregivers, like any other service provider. And then they have trusted adults in the materials. This is all across America. Trusted adults, who is a trusted adult? Any adult a child can trust. It could be a school counselor.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  It could be, but it's definitely not assumed to be the parents. I mean, parents are so denigrated in our society. So it's not surprising that they would feel ill-equipped to handle the kid. And also, we're not giving the kids the healthiest lives. When you start out the day with an iPad with your kid, he's going to have trouble concentrating in school. That doesn't necessarily mean he has a brain problem. We won't know if he has a brain problem unless we make his environment a little cleaner. Right? By which I mean, less chaotic. Kids really do need structure. Right? And they definitely don't need to be constantly titillated by things like an iPad, because it will make it harder for them to have an attention span for school,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  which is more boring, usually, than an iPad. So, you know, first thing we have to do is give kids a healthier environment, which goes from everything from exercise to time in person with extended family, all things kids need. People who love them and they love back over a lifetime, that's essential for our wellbeing. Whether it's cousins, neighborhood kids, and extended family. So first, we have to give them a healthy life. But instead, we give them an unhealthy life, and then we pour in mental health resources, and we don't notice they're getting worse and worse.

• 24:57Shane Parrish?

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

• 25:03Speaker 00

  It's a good 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'll give you just one silly example. But for 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 this school shooting?" No, they tell me how to talk to my own kids, and nobody bats an eye.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Now, the school mental health staff may not have children. They may 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 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." We asked the parents leave the room. And I got up to leave. And I had already written this book, and I still got up to leave. And it was only because I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you getting up to leave?

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Then I sat back down and I said, could I please see your mental health screener? And I took a picture of it with my phone and it was created by our National Institute of Mental Health. This is a federal government agency and they decided, and this is part of the protocol, kids age eight and up, they ask the parents to leave and then they ask the children five escalating questions alone in a room with this person about whether they might want to kill themselves. It is so irresponsible to be doing this with kids. It's so bananas, but I think we've gradually accepted their greater, greater role in society. By the way, which flies in the face of all kinds of research about suicide and suicide contagion, which we have, but they don't seem to be paying any attention to the research

• 27:16Speaker 00

  and they're doing things that are the opposite of what you would do if you're paying attention to the research.

• 27:21Shane Parrish?

  We're almost encouraging it in a very subtle way, it sounds like.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, the obsession with suicide with children. And when I say obsession, I don't mean privately being concerned as adults and working on this problem, which is real, but telling the kids all the time, here are the suicide guidelines. We put them around the school, constantly giving them surveys about suicide. What you're doing is you're telegraphing, kids kill themselves. And also, it's normal to kill themselves, to kill yourself. And also, here are techniques you might be tempted to use. All this stuff is in the mental health surveys. It's the opposite of what you would do if you were being responsible about, you know, mental health concerns with young kids.

• 28:11Shane Parrish?

  I remember reading about this, this study they did a long time ago. If I'm getting it right, there was sort of litter in the forest and they found this spot where people would just leave a little bit of litter and then they put up a sign saying, no littering, and the amount of litter increased. Because it sort of reminded people that they could litter in a way. I don't know, like, it was a really weird finding, but what you were saying reminded me of that.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The CDC has great research on this, which is that if you present, if you normalize suicide with kids, if you present it as a means of coping with distress, you know, basically telegraphing, this is something other kids are doing when they feel sad. You constantly ask them, how are they feeling? And also present the idea that if you're struggling, this is something some kids do. If you make a hero of kids who are going through mental health struggles, right? If you valorize it, and we know it's valorized today, and if it's repetitive, if you're repetitive in your mention, then you're going to increase suicide in the population. And that's what we're doing in schools.

• 29:17Shane Parrish?

  Do we valorize other things?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Well, we definitely don't valorize grit. We don't valorize putting your emotions to one side and getting on with life, deciding that on a tough day, you're gonna still come, show up for practice on time and do a great job for the team. We don't valorize that anymore, right? We don't valorize agency, making a turnaround in your life, even though you've been through something hard. And the saddest thing is, kids can. These are all things we're born with, the ability to overcome adversity. Instead, we tell the kids the opposite. Your parents are divorced, you've had trauma, let's talk about it. It's the worst thing we could do for a kid who'd been through something hard.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  We should be telling them the opposite. Listen, in your family, do you know what your grandfather went through? Do you know what your great-grandfather went through? You shouldn't feel bad about that. You should feel so proud, because that's what people in our line have overcome. And you can overcome tough things, too. I know you can.

• 30:21Shane Parrish?

  Is this mostly like a Canada-US problem? Or is this like a worldwide Western?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Definitely. America's always the worst at everything. And I think Canada, right along with us, seems to be, you know, for these cultural fads, we're just all in together for whatever reason. But I do have some indication that it's not insignificant in Europe. And that is that while I was writing the book, trying to, you know, put together the psychological research and what it showed and how what we were doing in schools was actually counterproductive. What I found, literally after I was done with the book, was that two teams of researchers were looking into the same things with their own schools, with their own coping techniques and social emotional techniques in their own schools, and they were testing it. So the fact that they were testing it with a control group, both in the UK and in Australia,

• 31:10Speaker 00

  made me realize, oh, this social emotional learning thing, this feelings focus, this obsessing over kids' feelings and therapy with kids, it's not just an American or North American problem.

• 31:21Shane Parrish?

  And the therapy isn't just with kids. I mean, there's a lot of adults who, I don't know, like, they're continuously in therapy. Like, it's not an, I go to therapy, I work on an issue, I solve that issue, and I leave. It's like, you become my best friend, and I go every two weeks for years.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, there's, the interesting research on this is a few things. One, they found that people tend to feel purged after they leave a therapist's office. So they tend to think the therapy is helping, even when objectively, when the researchers check, it isn't. So sometimes, of course, therapy can be very helpful and very useful and even life-saving. But very often, we feel better when we leave a therapist's office, and we never check that by objective markers, we may be doing no better or even worse. So our own feeling about it isn't a good guide. And when they do do these experiments with things like, and they look into the iatrogenic

• 32:21Speaker 00

  effects, meaning when the healer introduces the harm in therapy, there's a whole body of research that shows You know, people who've gone through natural bereavement, the loss of a loved one, often feel worse after therapy. They did these controlled studies with, you know, a control group who didn't, who lost a loved one, but didn't go to therapy. They did better than the ones who went to therapy. Same thing with, you know, breast cancer survivors, anxiety about it, depression about it. They did worse if they had gone to therapy. And also alienation from a spouse, alienation from parents. All of these are classic iatrogenic effects of therapy, and there's a whole body of research on it. The problem, I'm not saying no one should go to therapy, but it's very troubling to me that while the researchers are very aware of these risks,

• 33:06Speaker 00

  the practitioners of therapy very often either minimize or deny them, and they seem totally unaware that sitting around with someone weekly can encourage rumination or dwelling on bad feelings, which of course is the biggest symptom of depression.

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• 34:13Shane Parrish?

  How do we tackle this as a parent? And, you know, let's say our kid is in therapy now. What conversation should we be having with the therapist about? How's it like, we're sort of pushed to the outside of this, right? Like, what happens in this room is none of your concern, but this kid is your responsibility. And so like, what conversations, I'm wondering, practically speaking, can parents have with their therapist? But 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?

• 34:46Speaker 00

  It's an essential conversation to have. Here's the thing, when you drop your kid off to a 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. 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?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  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, right? Then the therapy should be confined to getting them past that phobia so they can function in life, not to create this perma hand holder, who also interferes with the parent-child relationship for your kid, and passes judgment on the job mom and dad are doing. Or, you know, dad and dad, however the family arrangement, right? That's not a helpful situation. And here's what I want parents to know, okay? And I'm not speaking to, if your child's anorexic, but for God's sake, get them help.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  I'm not, I'm not poo-pooing therapy for all kinds of things that a child may have need for. What, what I want parents to know is, dropping off their kids to therapy, that's not neutral. And what you want to do, of course, is to get your kid out the door eventually, not to create a permanent situation where this person is constantly overseeing your parenting and making the child feel, and this is either demoralized, convincing a child that they have a diagnosis, a brain problem that they'll never get past because they're rehearsing it once a week, right? Or a bad incident that they're rehearsing once a week, and now it's gone from a middle school crush to a giant trauma in their lives that they think they have PTSD from. These are all really common side effects.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  But I want you to know something else, too. If a child brings his or her problem to an aunt, to an uncle, to a grandmother, at some point, that person will say, or even to a friend, "Okay, we've talked about this enough. Go play." A therapist will never say that to a child. Now, there are therapists who are really good who will, who will say, "We're here for 10 sessions. We're going to work on this phobia. We're going to get your kid past it. And let's measure. Let's actually track that the anxiety is getting better." But I talked to kids who had been in therapy since age six because their parents divorced. There was no need. There was nothing wrong with the child, except that the parents divorced. So they figured, "Oh, well, then I have to take my get into therapy."

• 37:42Speaker 00

  This girl, this one young woman I profiled in the book, was now 17, and I asked her what she was working on. She had been in therapy since she was six. I call her Becca in the book. And I said, "What are you working with your therapist on now?" She said, "Well, I'm leaving for college in the fall, and right now, we're working on getting me ready to make friends in college." That is a classic side effect of therapy. It's called treatment dependency, where you don't feel like you can make a move as an adult, things we all learned how to do, without checking in with another adult or expert or your therapist. So we're really undermining kids' agency. By sticking them in a kind of therapy or a kind of emotions check-in situation for their whole lives.

• 38:25Shane Parrish?

  But we do that as parents to like, we have the best intentions, right? So we get divorced and we're like, oh, I want to provide the best environment I can for my kid. So I'm going to go see an ex, I'm going to get them to see a therapist. And then it sort of spirals and like, maybe keeps going beyond. 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.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. I think that we have believed 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 studies 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 preventive mental health, sitting with a therapist and talking through your parents divorce. I don't think there is good in studies showing that that is necessarily good for kids.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  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 thought, wow, what a healthy, normal reaction. I'm sure she was shamed. It sounds like she was shamed. No, of course you have to talk to a therapy. Why don't you want to talk to her? But what the, that's the most natural thing in the world.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  I don't want to share with my stranger about my home breaking up. I want to talk to my parents or someone who really loves me. And yet today, kids are made to feel terrible, right? That's so unsophisticated.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  And so it puts the therapist in the situation, now they've got a kid who doesn't really want to be there, so now they pander to the kid. How do you pander to the kid? By affirming or agreeing with everything the child comes up with. The kid's not ready to do the hard work of therapy, most of the time. Unless they're dealing with a serious problem, like anorexia, or severe OCD, it's interfering with their life. And now they need the help, right? Because they can't get on with their life, they're afraid to leave their house, or they have some severe phobia, or whatever. But sitting around talking about, "Why I'm sad." It's not even clear, very often, what the goal is. Make you less sad? You know what'll make you less sad? Community, getting involved in projects with others? Yeah, sometimes not thinking about why you're sad.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Building new relationships, real and personal relation, in-person relationships, not online. Spending time with extended family. So I think the project of sticking kids who don't have a real problem in therapy, it's got a lot of risk.

• 41:44Shane Parrish?

  And adults, too, I would imagine.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, but adults are different.

• 41:47Shane Parrish?

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

• 41:56Speaker 00

  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 ready, I'm ready to taper off it, can you help me taper?"

• 42:06Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Kid can't say that. 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'm this incredibly successful adult."

• 42:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:08Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned preventative mental health. I do think we can, like, not prevent, but we can position ourselves to handle things through resilience, through overcoming adversity, through... I mean, isn't that preventative mental health in a way where you're not preventing a specific thing, but you're sort of like, I want to put you in a position where you can overcome whatever the world throws at you, and it's not going to beat you down, and you can get through it?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yes, and you know who won't give that to you? Mental health experts, because then there's nothing to come back for. You can join a church group and get that. You can join a bowling league, and all of a sudden, you're happier. Or a dance class, right? You can start to regulate exercise, and you will see mood improve. Now, I'm not talking about people suffering with major depressive disorder. I want to say that again. There are people who absolutely need an intervention, and they should get it. But I'm talking about the average bummed-out person, and certainly the bummed-out kid. The number of things we can do in our life to set ourselves up for a good life? Now, is that preventive mental health care? No, it's called good living. And it doesn't require a therapeutic expert

• 44:20Speaker 00

  who's going to undermine the parent's authority with their kids and make the kids... Because it makes a kid feel like, oh, my problems are too big for my parents to handle. So they needed to call in this other person, who's sort of more expert than they are. That's not a... That's not nothing to introduce. That's a risk. It's messing with the parent-child relationship. It's messing with the child's confidence that the parents know what they're doing, right? So if you have to introduce that, fine, by all means. The child's suffering, bring in the therapist. You know, then it's just a question of what kind of therapy, and who you should trust. But a child who doesn't need it?

• 45:03Speaker 00

  There's a lot of things you can do to give them a good life. But, but sitting around and talking about their feelings with a therapist weekly, I'm not sure is the way to get there.

• 45:12Shane Parrish?

  That's so interesting. I mean, I was on the, the Tim Ferriss podcast and the most controversial part of that segment was that I chose to send my kids to a school that I, I sort of overgeneralized, but doesn't really care how they feel about their homework. Or, you know, if you come in, you didn't do your homework, they'll give you a zero. I mean, my oldest, one of his memories from grade seven was one kid didn't do his homework because he didn't feel like it. And the teacher drew a big zero on his page and crossed it out and then told the whole class that your homework doesn't care how you feel about it, it needs to be done. And I got so much flack for this segment on the show, but I'm sort of like, well, you know, we need to be tough on kids and kids can overcome a lot of this stuff.

• 45:57Shane Parrish?

  We just think they're so fragile and so.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  We're making them fragile. Listen, a kid who gets a zero because they didn't feel like doing their homework. You know what the kid learns? It could be embarrassing. It shames the kid's behavior. But you know what else the kids learn, learned? I matter. When I don't do what I'm supposed to do, someone notices. I'm part of this community. I'm part of this class and my teacher, I, he, he may be upset with, disappointed that I didn't do the work, but he cares. He notices. It matters to him. I have a role to play. And when I do my homework tonight, he's going to notice that too. Or she's going to notice that too. So yes, holding kids to high standards, high expectations gives them a sense, it honors

• 46:44Speaker 00

  them with the sense that they have capacity, they have capability. Obviously, if you disappoint, if, if you're giving a kid a zero, what you're saying is, you could have done this homework. I know you could have done it because I believe in you.

• 46:57Shane Parrish?

  I was going to say, when I talk to friends who send their kids to private school, they always say the biggest difference between private and public, they never mention class size first. They mention the expectations the teachers have of the kids are higher.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Expectations are one of the greatest things you can give kids because it's a way of saying, I have faith in you. You can do great things. And once you introduce the diagnosis and the pill, what you're saying is, okay, you can't totally do it on your own. You need this, you need intervention. You have a brain problem. And that will lead a kid to feel like, I can't do it on my own. Now, again, if a child absolutely requires it, then they require it. They need it. They need the extra help. But if they don't, you don't want to get, you don't want to introduce that message with a kid. Okay. Being told, listen, you were lazy last night. You didn't do your homework. You were irresponsible. You didn't do what you were supposed to do. A kid can make a decision.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  I'm not going to do that anymore. But if you tell them they have a brain problem, no, you have ADHD. We're going to change all of your requirements now. What you're saying is, you can't.

• 48:05Shane Parrish?

  One of 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 ideologues instead of free thinkers who have hearts and souls?

• 48:29Speaker 00

  So, yes, things have gotten a lot more politicized, a lot more woke in the world 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 ought to know that. And the reason is, is they've measured things.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  You know what better 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

• 49:53Speaker 00

  your feelings," wow, they're going to fill up that session. And they're going to leave with, "Wow, I do have a lot of bad things to feel sad about."

• 50:03Speaker 00

  You don't do that unless a kid needs it. Absolutely requires it. There is too much treatment of the population.

• 50:11Shane Parrish?

  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?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  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 spreads social contagions, mental health, you know, diagnoses. So things like gender dysphoria, I wrote my last book about. 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.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  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 and 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 hold their conduct to high expectations, if you tell them, "So what? You were cut from the basketball team.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Let's work harder next time or try a different sport." You let them fail. A little bit.

• 51:58Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 52:02Shane Parrish?

  Do you think schools are incentivized to encourage this because and I'm going to walk through this in as I think out loud here, but it strikes me that schools get more resources as kids to get diagnosed and need exceptions or accommodations. So there's almost like this hidden incentive schools have to sort of nudge parents to get kids, oh, you know, your, your son or daughter is a problem in the classroom and therefore you should go get them tested. And when they get tested, they come back with like, I think in Canada, we call them IEPs, individual education plans.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  We have that too.

• 52:37Shane Parrish?

  Which is like, oh, they really, you know, your, your son or daughter really sucks at writing. So what we're, we're going to do is we're going to pull them out of class and they don't have to write. Now they can just talk into a microphone and that's how we're going to accommodate them. But that requires more resources for the school. So they get funded better from sort of whoever's funding them. And you also conversely, not only are you incentivized to do this and treat every, every child sort of like they're a special snowflake, but you're also not addressing the problem because now you've, you've taken an issue, maybe they, you know, they're in the 30th percentile for writing and you've said, we're not going to work on your writing anymore. You don't have to do that. You can

• 53:19Shane Parrish?

  do this accommodation. And so you're not going to get better at it because you're not actually practicing it.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Right. It's a huge problem. There is a major conflict of interest with schools getting involved in mental health. Huge conflict of interest should never have been allowed, really, except in the cases where you have a kid who's so struggling, they need someone to go to and talk to. And that may be, that's not what we've got. It's a huge conflict of interest. They are incentivized to keep the kids bolted to their seats. That's their incentive. And any kid who's bored, maybe because the teacher isn't good. Or maybe because they're not, you know, they're not good at controlling the class or whatever. That's the person referring you for a pill that should never have been allowed. Only because of the conflict of interest.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  They can be as wonderful as you want, but there's a built in conflict of interest. Just as you said, the kids, schools want more mental health resources. They want more resources. They are implementing these surveys to show how bad kids are struggling and the surveys themselves are distressing. They're asking kids all kinds of questions about suicide and neglect and things that might be going on the home. And, and then they're using these surveys to justify getting more resources. This should never, ever have been allowed. By the way, a school counselor who plays, who engages in therapy with a kid and they're allowed to do it, they're giving counseling sessions to the kids right now. That shouldn't be allowed. Why? Because there's a, there's a dual relationship.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  That is an ethical prohibition every other form of therapist has, which means that if you're a therapist, you're not allowed to give therapy to your own child, to your neighbor's kid, to your, you know, anyone else you have a person, another relationship with. Why? Because of the potential for abuse. A counselor knows all of a child's friends, all of their teachers, and what do they do the second the kid is struggling? They go in and they use the one tool they have, accommodation, and they get the kid excused from, from hard things. So just as you said, they'll never learn to sit through an exam in normal time because that's the only tool the school counselor has. This is a terrible conflict of interest. Really, it shouldn't be allowed.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  And I'm not, I'm not, you know, suggesting anything about the motives of, of school counselors. They can be wonderful, but the conflict of interest is bad.

• 55:42Shane Parrish?

  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.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  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? Mental health organizations. They had nothing to say as the schools headed in, 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.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  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 counselor in America, 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.

• 57:04Shane Parrish?

  What would you do? Like, if you sort of could wave a magic wand and redesign the mental health system, how would you approach it? And, you know, so both the mental health system and sort of like child rearing, like, how do we get back to a baseline now of, let's say, normal, whatever normal is. But like, how do we come back from this? Because it strikes me that it's really, really hard to even slowly walk back from this, once it's got momentum and it's in place and...

• 57:35Speaker 00

  I think we can change this because it's very bad. And the results of all of their work, all the mindfulness techniques for kids, regulation, is a disaster. They failed. So I think we can really easily, you know what the mental health professionals should be doing when it comes to kids or young people? Dealing with the sick. We have so many kids in desperate need of help. We have schizophrenics all over our streets. The need is enormous. But they would rather treat the well because it's easier. And, and, and come up with these techniques with no proven efficacy for just bolstering your sense of well-being. Okay, now, let me just say again, if an adult wants to do that and get something

• 58:19Speaker 00

  out of it, by all means, they should, right? An adult can do any number of things that they decide are good for their, what makes them happy, or feeling in control, or whatever else they want. The problem is with a kid, you're really messing with a lot when you stick him in therapy, or you treat him as unwell, because he's likely to believe it. He's likely to believe that he has PTSD because he was bullied or teased a little bit in middle school, not even really bullied, teased, made fun of.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  The most normal experience in human life. And by the way, kids who are told that's a big deal. Boy, are they in for disappointment. Because the number of times you are going to get insulted or have your feelings hurt in life. Wow, a lot. If you lead a good life, you're going to be criticized. You're going to have your feelings hurt over and over and over. You have to be able to handle it. You have to if you're going to be a strong, productive adult.

• 59:19Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, it's funny you mention that. My youngest had his feelings hurt in class and sort of got shamed for something. He got a poor score and, you know, one of his colleague or student friends like called it out to the class and was like, look how low that is. And, you know, he calls me and he's crying. And I'm like, oh, yeah, like this is going to happen all through life. And, you know, we'll deal with it and you're strong enough to get through this. And then he got home at night. We just pulled up some of my YouTube videos. I was like, let's read some of the comments.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  Right? Exactly.

• 59:49Shane Parrish?

  And I was like.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:51Shane Parrish?

  And so I pointed out things that people were saying about me. And he's like, why would people say those things about you? And I was like, nobody who does anything in the arena, nobody who's struggling is doing that, right? Like, you don't see Elon Musk jumping on my YouTube video saying, you know, this guy's a nitwit. No, they never comment like that stuff. Like, so I thought it was really interesting. And he's like, huh? And I was like, anybody in the arena trying, you know, they might not say anything despite what they think, but they're not going to try to pull you down. The people who pull you down are, you got to ignore those people. Like, if I listened to all these people, like, I'd stop doing what I do for a living. And like, that doesn't make sense because I don't want to do that. So like, you just have to ignore it.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  That's awesome that you told them that. Yeah. Yeah. We used to say this, we used to say, sticks and stones may break my bones. No one's heard of that, heard that in a generation, right? You never hear sticks and stones. Instead, the mom or dad calls the school or calls the other parent and says, your child was bullying my child. Well, God, you're setting them up for a bad life. Because let me tell you, as you just said, boy, are we criticized a lot in life as adults by a boss, by whatever. And one of the things that bosses say is, I can't give any constructive feedback to the rising generation. I can't stand them as employees. Because I try to give them constructive feedback and they won't accept it. They go to pieces. They think it's inappropriate and I'm trying to help them be

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  better workers and more successful. It's the opposite of what kids need. They need to be told, so what? Now, I'll just add one caveat. We were absolutely, we evolved to handle, have being made fun of by our group, by our class, by whatever. But I don't think we were, we evolved to be humiliated in front of a million people on social media. So I don't think social media is a way to toughen kids up, is an effective or normal way to toughen kids up. If you get dumped, if you get cut from the basketball team and you have to go through that humiliation in front of your classmates, you will learn

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  something. You will learn something. You will survive, you will say, I survived it. I'm fine. I went on and did this other thing. I met someone who I liked more, or whatever it is. But humiliation on, on social media at that scale, that in personal context, I don't think it builds the, the same natural resources for resilience.

• 1:02:18Shane Parrish?

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

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, look, a few things. So was it fun? No. But I was right. I wrote a book about a transgender, 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, and 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 blacklist. But what was the hardest? The hardest part was explaining

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  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. Okay, I know that usually people treat you coldly when you're a bad person, but that's not the case here. I didn't do anything wrong. So explaining that to my kids was hard because some people took some things out on my kids. That was the hardest part. And, and look, I can't say I'm like a favorite of the prestige media because they'll never, sort of never forgive me, even though they now run articles saying exactly what I said. Somehow they'll never forgive me for having pointed it out without their permission

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  or auspices or whatever. But that's just stuff I have to deal with. Meaning like, I made a decision. I made a choice freely. I was gonna write this book. I knew there would be blowback or there could be blowback. And those are, those are the stakes. I think, you know, I'm proud of what I did. I felt, I feel like it was the right thing to do. I stand by everything in the book. None of it's been, you know, every, every word of it is true. So, you know, I feel good about it at the end of the day. And, and look, exactly what you said to your son there. I mean, my kids know that. I mean, I've been called every possible name, right? And I hope that they know that, you know, look, they've been called names at school,

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  you know, and just like every kid is. And I just hope they know that we, we survive these things. We get past them. And you just keep going. That's the answer. Just, just keep going.

• 1:04:55Shane Parrish?

  As a journalist, what, 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?

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  Oh, I think there's a lot of really good developments in media. There's a lot of, you know, 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, 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

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  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 bad development.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  It leads people into all kinds of bad places, including scapegoating. And I, of, so I, you know, I wish that they would get back to the project of reporting news and reporting things accurately, wherever the chips may fall. I don't, I don't see that happening for, for most of the mainstream media.

• 1:06:51Shane Parrish?

  Do you think it'll take sort of a crisis for that to come back?

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  It's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. Some of them may just need to fail.

• 1:06:59Shane Parrish?

  Do you think it'll take a crisis for us to sort of tackle collectively the mental health culture?

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  That I think we can fix tomorrow. It's very easy. Doesn't require any money.

• 1:07:10Shane Parrish?

  Do you think we will fix it?

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know. I hope some people will. I hope that, I think that, you know, it depends how many people are aware that, you know, over treating kids with therapy and feelings focus and rumination is all very negative and that therapists have really bad incentives here when they're treating the well. It's not their fault. A lot of, most of them are well meaning, but they set themselves up as the overseers of a child's life. And the very fact of their existence in the child's life introduces risk. So unless they're necessary, we got to get them out of kids' lives. We need to go back to focusing kids outward on things they're doing in the world, things that make you feel good, actually, like community.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  You know, like, like efficacy, feeling capable again in the world, not feeling like they need to run to an adult to handle every problem. So I think this is a very, very fixable. And I certainly hope it doesn't take any money. It just requires subtraction. So I really hope we get on this.

• 1:08:17Shane Parrish?

  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 back to building more resilient kids? That's probably a better way to word that.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  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 involved, get them walking, going around the neighborhood, get them doing things where they have to

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  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 off, or you'll live, or you'll be fine, what that does is

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  triage. Right? The actual big problems that they can't resolve on their own, from the ones that they're like, hey, I can, I am fine. And we need to at least give them a shot at realizing that a certain amount of teasing is something they can overcome.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  You know, I remember, I don't know if she'd be mad at me for sharing the story, but my best friend went through a hard time in high school. And I remember she, her, her mom, like her friend group totally cut her. And I remember this, God, we all remember that. Like, I remember being cut by friends in high school and it was so upsetting. You know, your best friend, all of a sudden, she's mad at you and won't speak to you. And it's devastating in high school. It's really, it's, it hurts. And I remember that a bunch of girls had decided they were mad at her. And her mother, who was an immigrant to this country, said, you know what, you, there's a party and she didn't, my friend didn't want to go to it. She was, you know, in high school and she was afraid to go to the party. And her mother said to her, you need to go to that party and you need to wear red.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  And I just kind of thought that encapsulated the, a great message for kids. Right? Like, that is the message that, that we should be giving them. You're gonna be fine. You don't need to cower. You're gonna show up at that party and you're not going to be embarrassed. And at the end of the night, we'll have a laugh about how it all went. But you're not gonna sit at home and we're not gonna rush you off to a therapist because girls, you know, made you feel left out. Because they're gonna keep doing it. They're gonna do it at the workplace. You gotta be able to deal with this.

• 1:11:30Shane Parrish?

  How do we talk to our kids about the difference? If we start doing this at home, right? We start building more agency, building more responsibility, and we're doing our best as parents. How do we talk to the kids who are going 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, 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.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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, you know,

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  cutting, choking, all the 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 transgender identification thing and the actively deceiving parents, the amount they've been undermined. 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 regard it as a lot of nonsense.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Literally, anything you could be doing would be better for your mental health than sitting around and doing these exercises." Also, I have to tell my kids, "Mental health is not something you work on. Something happens while you're living a good life." So, we don't talk about mental health. Okay? We talk about what good you could be doing in the world, what you want to get out there and try, you know? What friend you want to make? What activity we should do? Not, we don't sit around talking about mental health. That's what happens when you're leading a good life.

• 1:14:00Shane Parrish?

  I talked to a lot of teachers and therapists before our interview, and it seems like there's like a silent majority who agree with you, and yet, we're here. Why are they silent?

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  It's crazy, isn't it? I have to tell you, it shocked me. The response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive, and I was expecting tremendous backlash. But my inbox is filled with mental health professionals who say, "I have been seeing this for, you know, decades now. I was hoping someone would write this book." And look, that's what journalists exist for, right? Because nobody wants to criticize their colleagues or what their whole profession is doing.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  They don't generally want to do that. But a journalist can interview researchers and put the story together. And they're just judged based on their journalism. They're not, you know, then treated badly by their colleagues. So, um, yeah, the response to the book has been surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive, even, even by mental health professionals, I'm, I'm happy to say.

• 1:15:07Shane Parrish?

  That's confusing to me as an adult, though, who sends his kids to school. If the vast majority of teachers agree with this, and it takes an outside journalist to change things or bring attention to it, that there's a problem there. And these people are responsible for educating my children.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:15:25Shane Parrish?

  And yet they're, they're feeling helpless. They're feeling like they can't do anything on the inside.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  They are helpless. Here's why. Because the psych staffs are like the DEI staffs of an organ, of a corporation. That's what the psych staff now is at a school. They effectively run the schools. They pass judgment on everything. They control what, what a teacher can assign, what, what kind of test a teacher can assign and to what child. They're effectively running the show. They've been put in charge of the schools, just like, uh, DEI, the DEI groups have been put in charge of corporations that are effectively running and intimidating everyone. That's exactly what the psych staffs are doing. The teachers who are there to teach are miserable. They do not like this, the psych staffs telling them what they can assign and when.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Or when a child needs an anytime pass because his mental health requires him to be able to walk around the school in the middle of class. Guess what? Counselors will tell you that these kids use those passes in the middle of their least favorite class.

• 1:16:25Shane Parrish?

  What's an anytime pass? I don't know.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. That's what they sometimes call them. It's a mental health pass that allows you to walk, take a walk around the school when you're feeling too much stress. And surprisingly, unsurprisingly, the kids abuse them, right? And like, as anyone would. But the mental health staffs will very often insist upon them. So you see that, that the teachers are intimidated for good reason. Good, good school counselors who think they're, this, this is, you know, not what they signed on for are upset.

• 1:16:56Shane Parrish?

  What happens with these kids? Like, let's say everything continues. We've probably seen, you know, they graduate, maybe their parents intervene at work, but that doesn't continue forever, does it? Like, you don't have a 40-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.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:18:42Shane Parrish?

  I love that optimistic note to the ending. And a final question. We normally ask, what is success for you? But I want to ask you a slightly different version of this, which is, what does being a successful parent mean? What is a successful parent?

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  A successful parent is someone who's raised a good child to adulthood, to good adulthood. Someone who has raised a productive citizen, who by the way, has your values, passing on your values to your kid. If they are a strong person with your values, you've done a great job, which basically means, do they value work? Are they reliable? Do they show up for others? Do they want to, and I think they should want to, form a family? Our society depends on it and we should inculcate that in kids. So all these things, whether they want to, you know, be there for others, be strong for others, and be reliable to others.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Build community, build family, build all those things that our society is depending on. No, that doesn't mean that every single person needs to get married. They may choose not to, and that's fine. But in the main, we want people to want those things. We want people to want to be someone others can rely on in a permanent and serious way. No, I should, he's been, he's worked with me. He's been my partner for, in this job for 20 years. We want kids to feel like they can do that. And if they have raised a citizen who can do that, who does that, who is relied upon, gosh, that parent's done a great job. And those are the people, those are, in my book, those are the only parenting experts, the ones who've actually done a good job of it.

• 1:20:26Shane Parrish?

  It's a beautiful way to end this provocative conversation. Thank you so much.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Thank you. Good luck with everything, Shane.

• 1:20:35Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview after the interview. I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me, and I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of The Knowledge Project. You can go to fs.blog/membership, check out the show notes for a link, and you can sign up today. And my reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed.

• 1:21:18Shane Parrish?

  You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Frontline Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision-making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at fs.blog/clear. Until next time.