Office Hour’s Best of Parenting

Welcome to the final episode of The Prof G Pod’s special series featuring some of our favorite Office Hours moments. Today, you’ll hear: Best of Parenting, where Scott offers advice on introducing your children to social media and tips on helping them become great storytellers. After that, we feature an interview with Dr. Shefali, a NYT bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. She is also a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, an international speaker and a wisdom teacher who integrates Eastern philosophy with Western psychology. Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Northwest Registered Agent. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. With Northwest Registered Agent, you don't just form a business, you start a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. That includes registered agent service, a business address, operating agreement, domain, website, professional email, phone number, and built-in privacy. In other words, your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree and start using free resources to build something amazing.

• 0:37Scott Galloway?

  Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree. Welcome to the final episode of the Prof G Pod special series featuring some of our favorite office hours moments. In last week's episode, we featured office hours best of career and answered your questions surrounding how to ask for a promotion at work, when and if you should ditch your full-time job for your side hustle, and when to quit your job entirely. Establish a relationship with a mentor or your boss such that it's informal enough such that you could say, "Which of my expectations be around a bonus or how are bonuses evaluated?" If you want economic security, find something that satisfies you to the extent that you

• 1:21Scott Galloway?

  don't feel the need to do a side hustle and go all in on it. Once you're out of the job market for longer than a year, you begin to smell. I know how terrible that sounds. And I was feeling like, "What is wrong?" And your skills begin to atrophy. Today, you'll hear best of parenting. After that, we'll be featuring an interview with Dr. Shafali, a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. She's also a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, and international speaker, and a wisdom teacher who integrates Eastern philosophy with Western psychology. So with that, first question.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Hi, Scott. This is Jen calling from Toronto. I have a 12-year-old daughter, and this is the first year that she's had her own cell phone. And it seems that this is the year that, quote-unquote, "everyone in her class is on social media." She doesn't have social media yet and hasn't really expressed much of an interest. However, my husband and I have told her that when she does want it, she should let us know. And we will talk to her about it and introduce her to it together. So I would love your thoughts on two things. One is, how would you recommend we introduce her to social media? What warnings or guiding principles would you share with her? And how would you frame the potential dangers for her?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  And number two, what rules and monitoring would you put into place around her usage in the first couple of years? And would you be transparent with her about how we're going to monitor her activity? Would love your thoughts on that. Thanks so very much. Really appreciate it.

• 2:52Scott Galloway?

  Jen from Toronto, thanks so much for the question. And let me be clear, we have not figured this out. One of my sons developed device addiction. You'd think I'd be the last person that would let that happen because I brail on these companies. And yet we woke up one day and realized our son was really struggling and it was because of device addiction. In addition, I think that both my kids are, sadly, one of them is semi, showing semi-addictive behavior to social media platforms. The research is clear. It's worse for you, quite frankly, because you have girls. Boys bully physically and verbally, girls bully relationally, and we have put these nuclear weapons in their hands called the smartphone. And once social went on mobile in 2012, the hospital admissions for self-cutting, self-harm,

• 3:35Scott Galloway?

  teen depression, teen suicide skyrocketed for girls and escalated dramatically for boys. So my first piece of advice is if your daughter is not asking for these things, you know, my general advice is to keep them off of it as long as possible. And here's the hard part. When people say, well, okay, your kid's struggling from social media or depressed, that's your fault. They recommend the dosing. They recommend, well, it's about parental involvement. Anyone who says that doesn't have kids. Because the most recent research, I believe it's from Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, is there's something called the cohort effect.

• 4:18Scott Galloway?

  And that is, once everyone is on SNAP, when you're the kid that's not on it because you don't have it modulated, or it really attacks your self-esteem, you in fact become very depressed because you are ostracized and you are isolated and sequestered from the rest of your peer group. So there's kind of no winning. And what Professor Hight has advocated for, and I think is absolutely right, is to have schools ban phones up until a certain age. Now, assuming at some point she does enter the bravery world of smartphones and social, I can tell you what we do, and that is they are not allowed to take their phones into the room at night. There's been a lot of studies showing that a lot of kids or the number of teens who

• 4:59Scott Galloway?

  are sleep deprived has escalated because their phone is next to them, they hear it buzz, they pick it up, they start talking to their friends, and it goes downhill from there. Also, we try and limit the amount of screen time. We try, we're not great at it. And also, and this sounds very 1984, and initially, we didn't do it, but now we do it, we check their accounts and we check their content. I have wonderful boys that are really well behaved, and I've had already two incidences, one involving bullying and two around really ugly language that my kids were not directly involved in, but part of a circle.

• 5:39Scott Galloway?

  And it's just, I mean, wouldn't you like to find the people who invented this shit and just kick them in the nuts a few thousand times? It really has been a net negative. I think it's especially bad for girls because, you know, the notion, I don't think we can even imagine what it's like to be faced with your full self, to be presented with your full self 24 by 7. And then you have algorithms that encourage you to say outrageous things or that overly sexualize young girls, specifically Instagram. I mean, the deck is just so stacked against them. For me, what I try and do with my boys, because I think my boys have an easier time relating to me on certain things than they do their mother, I sit them down, I try and sit them down once a week, I'm like, what's going on with you? Are you doing okay?

• 6:24Scott Galloway?

  And what I try to, I try to communicate is that, look, if something bad happens online, this is the deal. I'm going to try and be generous and not judge you and not get mad at you. Maybe you do something really stupid here and something bad happens. I'm going to give you a bit of a hall pass on this stuff. And in exchange for that hall pass, you're going to come to me when something happens that upsets you. Because what you don't want, and where real tragedy strikes here, is that something bad happens online and the kids suffer in isolation and the parents don't even know about it. They don't even know about it. A kid gets bullied online, starts having suicidal ideation, goes down a rabbit hole at night, and the parents don't even know what is going on. Because if your kid develops an addiction of meth

• 7:09Scott Galloway?

  or alcohol or shoplifting, you find out about it. I mean, there's just certain externalities, there's certain functions of those behaviors, there's certain ramifications. You know, the kid has an addiction to alcohol. Before you know it, you're going to figure it out, right? So you can intervene. That's the dangerous thing about these insidious devices is that a lot of times the bullying, the mental health issues can pop up and get very bad, very fast, without you even knowing. So let me finish where I started. I know our household hasn't gotten this figured out and congratulations. If she's not asking for it, I just don't think you're going to regret your 12-year-old daughter not having a smartphone or being on social. If she shows up a little bit late to it,

• 7:54Scott Galloway?

  I showed up a little bit late to alcohol and drugs. I enjoyed both of those things, but I'm glad I didn't do any of those things until I was in college. And I think we're going to look back and the one thing we're going to regret most about tech, big tech, is not that they weaponized our elections, not that they made our discourse more coarse, not that they created more income inequality, not that they abused the monopoly power. We're going to look back on this era and we're going to say, how did we let this happen to our kids? So Jen, you are thinking the right way. I think you need to be all over this stuff. Appreciate the question. Best of luck to you and yours. Question number two.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Dear Prakji, this is Dr. C from Toronto, Canada and Sao Paulo, Brazil. I have just listened to your episode in which you explain why storytelling is the most underrated, yet perhaps the most important skill we should be teaching our children. I couldn't agree more. After 22 years of management consulting, including eight years as a partner, I got to see the upside of superior storytelling. This is in essence what partners do in consulting or investment banking or any other senior positions. As a parent, on the other hand, I have been experiencing mostly the downside of storytelling, either in the form of honest incompetence, when there is subpar fact-checking or no fact-checking at all, or dishonesty in the form of misinformation.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  This honest storytelling is certainly what populists and/or dictators do best. Given the downside of storytelling, I have two questions for you. First, what do you do as a parent so that your child can become a sablier consumer of stories? And second, as an educator, do you think universities should do more on how to become better consumers of stories? Thank you for your wonderful podcast series.

• 9:36Scott Galloway?

  Uh, this is a thoughtful question, Dr. C, that touches on a bunch of things. There's raising kids to be good storytellers, and then there's sort of this post-truth world that we're entering that's really, or have entered that's really unfortunate. As it relates to raising storytellers, or good storytellers, I remember thinking, you know, I do so much virtue signaling on this program, and I pretend to be such a better father than I actually am. And I've been talking about how important storytelling is for a while. And I'm like, well, okay, boss, what are you actually doing about it to try and help your kids be better storytellers? So I've been doing, you know, dumb things like at dinner when, you know, my 12-year-old won't, you know, be quiet, but my 15-year-old won't say anything, I task the 15-year-old with starting a conversation. When they're telling me stuff, I ask them to continue.

• 10:20Scott Galloway?

  What I'm going to start doing, I haven't done it yet, is to actually come up with stories. I started by telling them stories of their grandparents, how they met, immigrating from Britain, uh, you know, moving to Canada, their drive across the US in an Austin mini metro when my mom was seven months pregnant. And they're enthralled by it, and I think that them hearing stories, I hope, gets them to be better storytellers. The schools, I'll give it to them, are trying to pull that out of them. My son went to this wonderful school, or my son's called Gulfstream, and they're eighth grade, every eighth grader has to stand up in front of the entire community of the school, including the parents, and do a 10 or 15-minute talk. And my son did his talk on whaling and the whaling industry in Nantucket.

• 11:06Scott Galloway?

  God, could that be a wider topic? Seriously? All of a sudden, I just felt exceptionally Caucasian and privileged. Anyways, and it's great. And he thinks about it, and he has to do it with slides. And, you know, he's nervous about it, and it's hard for a 13-year-old to stand up in front of people. The only competence I have is communications. Right? I just, I know how to communicate. I know how to write. I know how to put together slides. I know how to, a good twist of phrase, right? And that is how I've made my living. And I immediately recognize with younger people, they have to be able to be good storytellers if they wanted to be a businessman consulting. If you're really amazing with technology, but you can't spin a story, that's the COO or the CTO max.

• 11:48Scott Galloway?

  You can be less good and a great storyteller, and you call that woman CEO. The ability to communicate your ideas and attract capital, human and financial, is the whole shooting match. How do you get people to be good storytellers? One is practice. Two is different mediums. I would start with the written word. I think if you can express your thoughts cogently by writing them out, the other stuff's gonna get much easier. And then just practice, and specifically, a lot of confidence and trial and error around speaking in front of people. And I'm credited with being a good communicator and a good speaker. I get paid a lot of money to speak. And, and, I have panic attacks. Sometimes I get so fucking nervous, and I freak out, and I get on stage, and I start

• 12:30Scott Galloway?

  talking, and I start gasping and swallowing air, and I feel as if I'm dying, and the whole audience freaks out because I look like I'm in the midst of a heart attack. And so, if you're nervous in front of people, if you think I can just never do it and I need to avoid it, think again. Think again. This is how I make my living, and I get panic attacks. And you have to get over it. You have to figure it out. I'm not suggesting you're gonna be Tony Robbins, right? I'm not suggesting you're gonna be, you know, Maya Angelou, but you gotta have a certain minimum acceptable presentation skills. It's painful, take classes, go to Toastmasters, whatever you need to do. I am trying to figure out a way to put my kids in context where they get more of that,

• 13:15Scott Galloway?

  more experience at that, creative writing, et cetera. The second part of your question, I'm really worried about a post-truth world. The biggest fear I have about generative AI is I would say, okay, give me 10 tweets about how vaccines alter your DNA that sound real and like they came from a medical, established agency or a medical think tank. And it'll produce 10 tweets that are false, have no scientific verification or scientific veracity, but sound kind of real. And veracity has really become a function of who, who is the loudest and who has the biggest following, right? If Donald Trump says a lie long enough, it starts to become less of a lie. What do we do about that? I don't know. Invest in organizations that have fact

• 14:00Scott Galloway?

  checking, whether it's the Wall Street Journal, or PBS, or the BBC, or, you know, love them or hate them, The Post and The New York Times, they have a viewpoint, but they do take fact checking very seriously. Don't advertise on Fox News that should be called Fox Entertainment, where the anchors coordinate to spread information and lies that they know are lies because they think it'll inflame their audience and sell more, sell more hearing aids. I mean, that bullshit is really, that's mendacious. That's an abuse of your position and society. What else can we do? Remove Section 230, or have carve outs such as the social media algorithms. If they are circulating lies that result in teen depression, or misuse of medical treatment, or a belief that an

• 14:44Scott Galloway?

  election is rigged when they know it's not rigged, they should have the same type of liability they have out now with the carve out around sex trafficking. If you put information on Facebook, the results in the trafficking of a minor, Meta is liable. And guess what? It reduced it a lot. So do we want to reduce election misinformation, vaccine misinformation, medical information, data or content that gives kids suicidal ideation? Oh, no, it'd be too complex. No, you can do it. They could absolutely do it. Just give them financial incentive to do it. In sum, I haven't figured this out, but I recognize the importance. I'm trying to do some things that help my kids develop those skills. Some of them are uncomfortable. I don't have definitive answers. I just know if we want to appreciate the

• 15:27Scott Galloway?

  truth, we have to appreciate the truth and reward those that are fact checking and punish those that believe they can turn a lie into the truth by just telling it over and over. Thanks for the question. Dr. C. From Toronto, the friendly, clean Canada. Go Leafs! Go Leafs! We'll be right back for our conversation with Dr. Shapala.

• 15:53Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Superhuman. The pace of modern work can be relentless. You're getting a constant influx of messages from a ton of different apps. You haven't closed all your browser tabs in a year. Everything seems urgent and staying on top of it all feels like an impossible task. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, help you be the best version of yourself at work. It handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that only you can do. Whether you need to summarize an endless email thread or prep for a meeting that's happening in five minutes, Superhuman Go works inside the tools and sites you already use, your browser, inbox, docs, and your project tools. And its AI chat is available on the side of your browser and it's always ready.

• 16:38Scott Galloway?

  No new tabs, no switching apps, no losing your place. This is AI that works with you, not on top of you, so that you have the time and brain space to solve the problems that matter. Check it out, find out more at superhuman.com.

• 16:56Scott Galloway?

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• 17:41Scott Galloway?

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• 18:07Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Dr. Sefali, a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and the Awakened Family. Dr. Sefali, where does this podcast find you?

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Hi. Well, in my home in New York. That's where I am right now.

• 18:22Scott Galloway?

  Great. Well, welcome. We appreciate your time. So let's bust right into it. How is parenting or our approach or our perception of parenting changed over the last several decades?

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness. I think, I don't know whether it's changed so much or just progressively deteriorated. You know, I think from our original blueprint of being raised in tribes within community with a deep sense of interdependence to where we are now, this has been the marked skewed deterioration that I am concerned about. Because now we've become progressively more and more isolated, more and more nuclear and increasingly disconnected. The advent of technology and this fast-paced world we're living in

• 19:17Speaker 03

  has really detracted our ability to give our children what they truly need, psychologically and emotionally. And what they truly need is parental presence and parental well-being. With parents more harried, more distracted, more busy and stressed, and more disconnected because they're on technology more than in person, our children are being robbed from the very emotional ingredients that they truly need. And that is of deep concern and, you know, tragic, it's a tragic reality, but here's where we are.

• 20:00Scott Galloway?

  So what I think is original or unique in your work that I haven't seen as much in other people's work is you emphasize on the well-being of the parents. So start there. If parents are working a lot, trying to manage the expectations and capitalist reality that you need to work a lot to provide a safe, secure household where the kids have access to healthcare and education. I mean, I've often heard the best thing you can do for your kids as a husband is to make sure that their mother feels loved, secure, and is in a place of security and comfort. Tell us how parents, if you will reconcile that tension in a capitalist society.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Well, that's it. You, in your question, is the greatest predicament because we've created such an extreme capitalism and a desire for it that now we're stuck in its spiral and all of us are suffocating. So part of what I teach, besides, you know, what do you say to your child to get them to be motivated or go to school or learn and educate themselves, besides those elemental ingredients of parenting, what I really teach is how parents can begin to recognize and reconcile this capitalist matrix that we're

• 21:21Speaker 03

  within. How do we live within it without being a slave to it? How do we live here but really practice presence, practice mindfulness, practice internal reflection, and slow the F down? Just because the entire world is racing by you and the entire world has created a mandate that you are what you do, you don't need to prescribe to that. So my rallying war cry is for parents to wake up, to live differently, albeit in this

• 22:02Speaker 03

  world, but to really regulate themselves and understand that this extreme, superior focus on capitalism is really a wounded. Dysfunctional, diseased, trauma response from a dysfunctional diseased childhood. So here you are. Now you have children. Don't repeat the same pattern. Do it differently. Dare to do parenting differently. And I talk about the traditional parenting paradigm, which is, you know, been in place since we all have been born and way before, which is focused on capitalism, focused on

• 22:42Speaker 03

  consumerism, focused on racing ahead, separatism, comparison, competition, and an extreme focus on these elements will create dysfunctional children.

• 22:56Scott Galloway?

  So this resonates with me, and I want to try and bring it down. One, I always use the podcast as a chance to talk about myself, which I enjoy. And two, I also want to try and make this actionable. In 2009 or 10, I had a startup. My partner, then wife, was working at Goldman Sachs. We had two babies at home. She was waking up at 5:30. I was working around the clock. And we both decided that this was just not the life we wanted to lead. At the same time, we recognized that to stay in New York, we both had to be doing that. And so we moved to Florida. We dramatically cut our cost of living. She left Goldman, continued to work, but had

• 23:39Scott Galloway?

  much more flexible, much more flexible life. But what, so for us, that recognition that you're talking about, that we're not, you know, what's the point if we aren't having a nice life? And at some point, our kids, our kids are going to sense this stress. We dramatically cut our burn rate. And we decided that one person would be at home a lot with the kids. So those are two things. One, I imagine you agree with those things. But what else can, what can a parents do as an audit that helps them create an actionable plan to foot against your more conscious parenting?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Well, every action really needs to come from a deep intention. So I can tell you the action, but you know, I'm all for the deeper intention. But an actionable plan is Stop racing to nowhere, you know, clear out your schedule, or limit your children's extracurricular structured activities between the ages of one and twelve. Children are meant to play and explore and be in this dreamlike state of creativity and inner quest. Putting them in all these manic activities robs them of their ability to explore their inner world. And if you ask me, what is the one disease of today?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  It's that our children do not know how to sit in stillness, in creativity, and be bored and activate their inner resources without governance from parental and other supervisory figures who constantly are telling them what to do, how to do, when to do. And then we wonder why our children by the age of fourteen are listless and motivationalless on the couch. Well, because we've robbed them of that initiative and we've prescribed them into how to be. And no one wants to live according to a prescription. Well, that's what we're doing to our children. It's as if there's only one track to success and joy.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  And that's the mainstream consumeristic, capitalistic track. And it's dangerous. And our children will become actually more antipathic than less because we're taking them into antipathy instead of out of it.

• 25:57Scott Galloway?

  And so you write in your book that we should move away from outcome goals to process goals. What did you mean by that?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Well, our entire culture is based on linearity and the future outcome and how that looks to the outside world. I mean, it's just an externally driven world we live in. And when we are tethered to external goals, looking to the future, looking to tomorrow, we get displaced from the most precious gift of life, which is the present moment. And we're missing life waiting for tomorrow. Childhood.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Is in existence for one reason only, for the experience of childhood, not to raise an adult. We somehow seem to think it's in vogue that we're raising adults. No, we're not raising adults. We're raising children. Children have a very unique developmental phase, quality and value that we are minimizing because we have put stock in the future. So similarly, in the present moment, when we focus on how we are experiencing the present moment, how we are entering the present moment, this lived experience that you and I are

• 27:19Speaker 03

  having right now, if we can awaken to it, alive into it, for the listener right now in their car or on a walk, if they can truly enter their body right here, right now, and examine where they are, now that is process-oriented living.

• 27:35Scott Galloway?

  Have you done any research or thinking around if and what different types of approaches are needed or modifications around parenting girls versus boys?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  I've done a lot of thinking and work around it with my own clients, and I think we do need to recognize that there is a difference biologically between biological males and biological females. I'm not talking about gender, I'm just talking about just their biology, and we need to attune to that. Having said that, we also don't need to get stuck in that, right? There needs to be an attunement to who the child is as they show up, based on what we see right in front of us. So, boy or girl, if they're fidgeting in their chair in fourth grade and they just can't sit still, well, we need to adapt to that.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  I can predict more likely that the boy with a higher testosterone and higher activity level may need more activity, but I don't want to just stereotype it to that. But I always want to be aware that there is a biological difference, and it may not feel avant-garde to say that, but it's, for me, that's a reality.

• 28:52Scott Galloway?

  The thing you were, what you said there that resonated was our need to sort of identify and label in hopes that...

• 29:01Scott Galloway?

  That we can help shape the outcome to a better place. And I think that concern comes from a good place. But what I see across households, including ours, is this immediate need, especially I think with boys, although it might be as true with girls, is to immediately label them as someone who either is ADHD or not ADHD. And then if someone who needs medicine or doesn't need medicine. What are your thoughts on ADHD? It's the prevalence of the diagnosis and your general views around prescription medication for ADHD. That's the debate I see playing out in almost every household I'm in contact with.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's several layers to it. So if you look at a lot of the research, they will say that there is an inheritance in ADHD and other spectrum disorders. And I'm not a researcher, so I will just go with that. However, I tend to ask, what is the use of that research? Like, how am I going to use that research? That's more important to me than knowing whether it's inherited or not. So the first thing that that research tells me when I coach parents is that we are dealing with a different kind of brain. But guess what? I say that for every damn child. I say it for every human. Guess what? You have a different kind of brain.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  So, okay, right there, you can relax because we all have a different kind of brain and we need to adapt to that brain. That brain, though, the quote-unquote ADHD brain, seems to require certain things, which, let me tell you, any parent will figure out if you just observe your child. So what are those things? An ADHD kind of brain requires more space, flexibility, creativity, and constant feedback. Because their brain, and research has shown this, has, you know, a more dopamine deficit, they require more of that external feedback to provide that quote-unquote dopamine hit.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  So schedules that are more bite-sized, projects that are broken down into chunks, constant feedback to those kinds of children, and room and flexibility to move, to create, to play, to not follow such a tight schedule. Now, that's just on the brain level. Culturally and societally, we have created

• 31:30Speaker 03

  A cage, cage for children, ADHD brain or non ADHD brain. I remember, and even though I'm quote unquote a girl and I was more socialized to be compliant, I felt stifled in a classroom growing up in India. So, fast forward now, where we've become even more regimented, more achievement oriented, children are being stifled in these little cages that is so detrimental to them. And I, I think it causes ADHD on its own as well. Besides it being an inherited or inherent feature of one's personality and brain function,

• 32:12Speaker 03

  I think we also accentuate it and we actually cause it too. And the third issue is parental stress. And I don't want parents to feel like they are to blame, but we have to look at our co-creation. I think I, in my own life, as mindful as I like to be, I can act completely scattered, distracted, stressed out, which then my daughter absorbs and she immediately feels it. Now she's stressed out, which causes her to not engage in a presence-filled way in her life. So look how many things there are to create this ADHD. Now you asked about medication. My blanket knee-jerk reaction is to be skeptical of medication for young children,

• 32:57Speaker 03

  but I'm also open to each case, right? Sometimes I've had to refer my eight-year-old client to a psychiatrist to just get checked out, but I've loathed, loathed it. Because I know that we can adapt the environment to create a better environment for our children before infusing them with drugs. And, you know, many families with ADHD children will have the preponderance of ADHD somewhere in the family, genetic or situational, it's there. So I help parents, you know, clear up their schedules, clean up their environments,

• 33:40Speaker 03

  calm the hell down and engage with their children, and that helps tremendously. So I will explore all those things before I. Recommend medicine.

• 33:51Scott Galloway?

  What are your views on a parent's role with respect to the intersection between technology, specifically the phone, and kids? Do you have any best practices?

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Yes, you know, given that we've now seen how addictive these screens are, you know, my daughter's 21, so I've already messed it up, but I tell young parents, you know, no screen still teens as much as possible because it's to me giving crack cocaine to your young children and to these young brains, and they are not developmentally ready to handle the influx of all this stimulation that is really designed to rob them of presence, which is the main thing children need to thrive. And children need connected parents. So the more parents are on their screens, the more children are not getting what they

• 34:43Speaker 03

  need in terms of emotional food. So it's just an all out disaster, you know, I think technology to young children is a disaster. But what does a parent need to do, right? The parent needs to fight the matrix as much as possible, not give in, and really try to be as present as they can, which is a big, high, tall order for parents today because now we are all addicted. So what do we do? Our emails are constantly buzzing on the phone and we're called to work now 24/7. Now it's virtuous to work on the go. You know, before, we couldn't check our email if we were on vacation. Now we can check

• 35:23Speaker 03

  our email all the time. So our children are getting exponentially less attention and connection from a present, grounded, undistracted parent than ever before.

• 35:35Scott Galloway?

  I mean, so much of this resonates. I struggle with, I mean, one thing, my parents were worried I was going to get into too much trouble. I'm actually worried that my kids won't get into enough trouble.

• 35:47Scott Galloway?

  You know, the absence of free play, supervision everywhere. I used to leave my mom's house. It's nine AM on a Saturday morning with a Schwinn bike and Abba Zaba bar and thirty five cents. And I'm not exaggerating, I would come home thirteen hours later. And she had no idea where I was, none. And if I wasn't home by ten or eleven PM, she'd start calling around. But for thirteen hours, if my son is home, is twenty minutes late from school, you know, we call MI six. I mean, it's just, it's just nuts. I mean, how much of this is that the parents need to try and quell their own anxiety? I'm sure you're hearing the terms Jonathan Haidt every other word right now, but one

• 36:30Scott Galloway?

  of the things that Jonathan said that really, really resonated with me is we overparent offline and underparent online. How do we learn to, to stop the overparenting offline?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is one hundred percent our parental anxiety. You know, this, these apps that where you can track your kid twenty four seven and, you know, I refused, I only just recently put it on my phone because my daughter wanted to track me. I was like, what the hell? Why do you want to track me? She's like, I need to know where you are. I said, see, you're falling into your, your current generation's bullshit, sorry, to track people. And I never tracked her. She's twenty one and, and only because she's tracking me now, apparently, have to do it mutually. And I told her, I don't want to track you, not because I don't love you, but I don't want to fall into this plague of constant anxiety around where you are.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  It is overparenting offline because it gives us this illusory sense of control, which is our greatest desire, has always been our longing to control the hell out of other people and especially our children. And our technology has given it to us, but it's an illusion. It's the illusion of control and You know, it's given us tools to micromanage our children, to overproduce them. And of course, our children are now not, you know, rooting for themselves, not flying the roost and just breaking free from us because our tethers are too deep in them.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  And now we've trained them to constantly look to us, rely on us, call us the moment there's a catastrophe in their life, they're like mom, dad, right away on text. We didn't have that. We didn't have the tether. Once you left the house, you left the house. I left at 21 to America without a phone, without, we used to write letters home and it took three weeks for news to reach home and a lot of money to call long distance. We've removed that, you see, but what we've removed is not just inconvenience. We've removed the capacity for resilience, for our children to sit in the mess of their life, to be bored, to sit in the anxiety of waiting for a bus, to wait for their meal,

• 38:51Speaker 03

  to walk to the Encyclopedia Britannica and find it on the shelf and then wait for it to come back because it's been checked out. All that waiting, albeit terribly inconvenient, now has been bypassed. And when you bypass waiting and delaying gratification, you take our life skills, which is dealing, which the main life skill is coping with your discomfort. Why do you think children are more anxious ever today than ever before? Because we have removed discomfort from their life and they don't know how to deal with discomfort. They expect things at their fingertips because we've trained them, our generation did this to them. Don't be blaming children, I always tell our generation of parents.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  We gave them all this technology because we were tired of walking to school, we were tired of cooking. And now we've raised children who are highly indulged and incapable of sitting with messy feelings.

• 39:50Scott Galloway?

  So as we wrap up here, we've talked a bit about parenting, but if, there's a lot of macroeconomic factors at play, right? The child poverty is up. I believe there's a lot of economic policies that make it harder for young parents to be economically secure. If the White House called you and said, Dr. Shafali, what are two or three programs? Or policy changes you would like to see us implement that would make it easier for parents to be more conscious parents. What would those two or three ideas be?

• 40:22Speaker 03

  I would say no child should have a screen, a portable screen till the age of 16. Take it away, it's banned. I would take out the screen from the school. Yeah, and then people will be like, well, what about technology? Well, I would limit it to like an hour a day. I wouldn't make it the way of life. I know parents of today's generation, if there was a rule in place that screens were banned from the home till the child was 16 or 17, all of us would heave, breathe the biggest sigh of relief because we've seen it contaminating our lives at home.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  We've seen our children getting high on the drug of the screen, dopamine, and unable to get off and monsters when they get off. So that's the first thing I would do. The second thing I would do is I would make mindfulness and a meditation practice, completely non-religious secular meditation practice, a must in every school, a must in every corporation, a must for every parent. And the third thing I would do is I would send all parents to my conscious parenting classes so they learn to heal their baggage and learn how to be a conscious parent. I think that would be the saving of the planet.

• 41:40Scott Galloway?

  Dr. Shapali is a New York Times bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and the Awakened Family. She's also a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, and international speaker and a wisdom teacher who integrates eastern philosophy with western psychology. She joins us from her home in New York. Dr. Shapali, we appreciate your time.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  I have one more thing that I'm also now off. Yes, I am now the host of my own parenting podcast called Parenting and You, which is not your typical parenting podcast because I help the parent in this podcast raise themselves and I only do live interventions with parents in real time.

• 42:22Scott Galloway?

  Parenting and You, great. Thank you, Dr. Shapali.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 42:29Scott Galloway?

  That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected].

• 42:45Speaker 04

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