Bad Therapy, Weak Parenting, Broken Children | Abigail Shrier | EP 427

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this. I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

This is where I'm most optimistic: it's what parents can do. We've known this for, you know, since the beginning of time how to raise good people, and we've done it. And the way to do it in our overtreated kids is to proceed by subtraction: remove the psych meds they don't need, the diagnosis you don't believe in, the over-monitoring, over-coddling, over-accommodation. If you do that, you will raise good kids. And you don't have to be as afraid of the teacher in school who doesn't share your values, and you don't have to be as terrified of social media because your kid is ready.

Hello everyone! Today I'm talking to Abigail Shrier. I last talked to her about two years ago when I first reemerged on the podcast scene. She was the first person I talked to in this new series of podcasts, and she had just published her book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters." So I was quite apprehensive about talking to her because, I mean, that's a hot topic now, but it was like a verboten topic at that point, and I was barely on my feet. Anyways, we had a very good conversation, which I think eventually YouTube took down, if I remember correctly, because, as you know, there's nothing that you can't talk about less than the transgender issue.

Anyways, Abigail has a new book coming out, "Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up," which is slated for release in early 2024, but which is available for purchase now. She moved from her concern with the transgender phenomena and the medical barbarism that accompanied its hypothetical treatment to a broader analysis of what has gone wrong with the therapeutic enterprise as such. Now that's something about which you can talk for a very long time, and we do, in fact, talk about that for about an hour and a half on YouTube, and then peripherally for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side. So you can join us for that. Welcome aboard!

I think it's about two years since we talked, and if I remember correctly, you were the first guest I had on again after I more or less got back on my feet, and it made me very nervous because you'd written this contentious book, and I was sure that we'd get thrashed to death by YouTube, which we did. But what you've done is extremely useful, and it looks to me to some degree as if the tide might be turning. I don't know what you think about that; maybe you could start by telling people about your second last book, and then we can talk about your new one, which is going to be releasing relatively soon. Let's walk through your first book and tell everybody.

Sure! Thank you so much for having me on again, Jordan. It's great to be here. My first book was about the sudden rise in transgender identification among teen girls. We were seeing this huge rise in it. Of course, it was very contentious subject matter and I hypothesized it was part of a social contagion—kids on the internet, you know, on social media, talking to each other, their friends, and therapists actually, and deciding they were transgender and rushing to start hormones and surgeries. One of the things I learned when I interviewed hundreds of parents, as I did—and at this point, I've talked to over a thousand—is first of all, how much therapy kids were getting. Second, how much parents were relying on therapists to not only help them with their kids but to guide their parenting. And three, I learned just how much mischief therapists were making because they often made this sense of being transgender much, much worse. They reified it in these kids.

So then I began to wonder what other kinds of mischief were therapists making with kids.

I see. So you're trying to make yourself even more popular than you've already been made, huh?

Yeah! Well, you know, seven years ago, I started to think—well, longer than that, but I suppose I said it publicly—seven years ago, I started to think that the universities were doing more harm than good, you know? And that's a hell of a thing to think after you've spent 25 years at top-tier universities trying to provide people with a genuine education. Now, I certainly believe the universities are doing more harm than good. We saw a spectacular example of that in D.C. last week, which was, I thought, when I watched that clip of the MIT, U Penn, and Harvard presidents, it was the worst thing I'd seen on the news in my life. You know? Just that glimpse it gave everyone into this bottomless pit of victim-victimizer false moral narrative and its unbelievably simple-minded and pernicious effects. Stunning!

But you know, I have thought too increasingly in recent years that therapy does more harm now than it does good. I think the reason for that is, you know, when I was at McGill in the 80s and then through most of my career, the clinical psychologists I knew had it pretty hard to become a clinical psychologist. They were well-trained, scientifically trained, and were careful and methodical. Especially the behaviorists, you know, and the psychoanalysts. They were rare and generally extremely intelligent, more creative and open. I thought the therapeutic enterprise was pretty admirable. I really enjoyed being a clinician. But the whole field got invaded by people with nowhere near the intelligence or the wisdom to be doing what they're doing—the sort of naive social worker types who are ideology-addled to the nth degree. I had a colleague at Harvard, Richard McNally, who was very concerned about the instilling of false memories by foolish therapists that started to become a real issue in the 1990s. And, you know, it was all a consequence of therapists who had one theory about pathology insisting that it explained absolutely everything in the universe of moral striving. That weakness that was obvious has magnified itself tremendously.

So this is my fear and my shame, for that matter. Tell me what—so you broadened out from your concern, the concern you started to develop in relationship to the trans phenomenon per se. So tell me more about what you saw there in terms of the therapists facilitating these identity disorders. Tell me why you became curious about that generalization and then, most painfully of all, explain what you discovered.

Sure! So, in researching "Bad Therapy," first of all, I started out with a totally different hypothesis. I knew that we were these kids were getting more mental health intervention than any generation prior. The rising generation—I knew that they were getting more diagnosis and more psych meds and more therapeutic intervention in schools. But I still didn't think therapy was necessarily the problem because while 40% of them were getting therapy, it still wasn't a majority. Yet, we had seen their mental health fall apart. We knew that the rise in therapy and therapeutic intervention was somehow coinciding with worse mental health. Of course, that shouldn't be the case. Like with breast cancer, you know, more access, more treatment, better treatment, and more access to it has seen, you know, rates of death from breast cancer plummet. That's what we would expect to see with mental health, and we're not seeing that. But I still thought, you know, it was possibly just the way kids were being raised. Maybe they were being raised differently, or perhaps it was just a smartphone.

Then I began to look into what the iatrogenic effects of therapy are—what are the ways that therapy can hurt you? There's a literature on this, unfortunately, and it's not a literature most therapists want to acknowledge. They want to claim that therapy has this amazing power to heal but can never hurt. Of course, there's no treatment for which that's true. Anything, you know, Tylenol can damage your liver. Anything that can help can also harm. So I began to look into, were these kids getting a lot more therapy? Not only were the harms we were seeing in this generation—the lack of agency, the listlessness, the family alienation, the anxiety, depression—all effects of, you know, iatrogenic effects of therapy, harmful effects of bad therapy, but we were seeing this. We were seeing this, you know, in—sorry, it was being applied not only from actual therapists but all over the schools and from parents. Parents were having therapists guide their parenting, and schools were having therapists do trauma-informed care with all the kids. So I started realizing these kids were getting a lot more psychological intervention than I realized, and that it was bad.

Okay. So what? Let's talk about trauma-informed care and let's talk about why you concluded that it was bad. I mean, you pointed, first of all, to the fact that as there's been more and more therapeutic intervention, you know, as the schools and the universities have been turned into therapeutic hotbeds, the outcome is that mental health has become worse. Now, you know obviously self-serving therapists are going to say, "Well, that's just more evidence that even despite our efforts, even more therapy is necessary!" Right? That's the logical response to that. But obviously you're not convinced that that's the case, and you're implying at least, or maybe making a direct accusation, that there's something about the therapeutic industry per se that's actually making mental health worse. Now, Greg Lukianoff certainly has, is making that case, and I would say it's a case that Jonathan Haidt is probably—what would you say, he’s supportive of that implication. Why did you come to the conclusion that the enterprise is doing more harm than good, and what evidence is there for that, do you think?

Well, because they're not treating the sick; they're treating the well. So we know that the risk of iatrogenesis, of the healer introducing a harm, is greatest when you're treating people who don't need the treatment to begin with. Okay? So we know that if you're gushing blood, going to an ER is an important thing to do; it's necessary, it's lifesaving. But if you have a small bruise, you're at a much greater risk of getting an infection from the ER. Picking up, you know, a MRSA or some other bacteria from an emergency room visit than you are at, you know, than you stand to benefit.

And the same is true with preventive care. We shifted from treating kids and treating adolescents with severe mental health problems to the idea that everyone should have therapy. There we exposed a vast population to risk—the risk of all the known harms of therapy. Now, I'm not someone who's against therapy. I'm not someone who denies that it can be important and very useful and even curative. But when you treat kids who actually don't have a severe problem, you're at a much greater risk that they're just going to—the therapist will just introduce harms.

I saw it firsthand certainly with the kids who convinced themselves that they were transgender. Very often with a therapist—the idea was reified. And we see that across the board from everything from anxiety, depression, family alienation, the loss of a sense of agency. We're seeing in the rise of this generation, they have an external locus of control and rates we've never seen before. They don't believe they can improve their own life, and they are highly treatment dependent. They think they have to call a therapist or an adult before they make any decision. These are young adults who feel that they can't make a decision in their lives. So we're seeing a lot of the harms that therapy can cause, and those are the same ones that plague the rising generation.

Right. Okay. So you're pointing to a couple of factors that play a causal role, let's say, in the pathologization of therapy recipients. The first would be false diagnosis. So for example, with the kids who have so-called gender dysphoria, I mean, you can look at this technically and it's quite straightforward thing to do. So basically when anyone is in a position where they might be seeking or are likely to be offered psychotherapy, the fundamental reason for that is generally an excess of negative emotion and a dire of positive emotion. So what you essentially see, it's very rare for people to be brought to the attention of the therapeutic enterprise voluntarily or involuntarily unless they're anxious and depressed.

So the first thing you assume, if you're a therapist, if you have any sense, is that the anxiety and depression is the cardinal reality. Then there's a subset; then you can become more precise after that: you might say, "Well for this adolescent or adult, their proclivity toward excess negative emotion takes the place of bodily concern," for example—that's more common among women. Generally speaking, it's more common among young women. In fact, it might be almost universally prevalent among young women, especially at that puberty cusp. And then you assume that the misattribution of the depression and anxiety to the bodily transformations is the target of the most specific interventions.

Right? You don't jump to the conclusion that if the person's depressed and anxious, and they show signs of body dysmorphia, then they're born in the wrong body and they need surgical intervention. There's so many things wrong with that line of logic that it's almost a miracle that it could ever be established. Right? And one of the errors that's most egregious in that regard is that you don't recommend the most damaging potential and irreversible treatment when you could start with something much simpler, like—I interviewed Khloe Cole, right? She's a famous detransitioner. She's having a rough time on every university campus she goes to, and she's suing the psychopathic butchers who destroyed her physiologically and damaged her future.

And she told me when I talked to her that no therapist had ever even explained to her two simple facts. Number one, that when women hit puberty, when girls hit puberty, their levels of negative emotion reliably rise. And that they—because boys and girls have about the same level of negative emotion, but it switches at puberty, and then women have more negative emotion comparatively speaking on average for the rest of their life. And there's lots of reasons for that, but the reasons in some ways are irrelevant; it's the fact that's relevant. It's like, well, you're 12, you're confused, and anxious—lots of people who are confused and anxious feel that they're the only people that feel that way, especially when they're looking at everybody's Facebook page and their Instagram page and all they see is this glamorous lie that people put forward in relationship to their own life.

And then they're, especially if they're isolated kids, they can't talk to anyone about it; they feel they're the only people in the world who feel that way. So one of the things you do if you're a therapist that has even an iota of a clue is say, "All these things that you think are characteristic of you are actually normative." And so you can't be thinking that there's something specifically wrong with you, even though you're suffering. And so, no one had ever explained that to her, which is just appalling, right? Such a lapse of professional standard that it's jaw-dropping. And then they also didn't explain to her that here's one of the things that differentiates men from women: when men experience negative emotion, they tend to focus on their comparative socioeconomic status. When women experience negative emotion, they tend to focus on bodily image. And the reason for that, likely, is that men are evaluated by women more harshly for their relative status, and women are evaluated more harshly by men for their physiological appearance, for their general appearance.

And so there's a logic to it, but no one explained to her that it was highly likely in the case of an adolescent girl who was undergoing puberty. And early—and she also said—a she told me that she recognized quite early, maybe around 11, that when she went through puberty, she was going to have a relatively boyish figure. And she had kind of envisioned herself as Khloe Kardashian, right? This super curvy Marilyn Monroe excess, you know, what it's almost like a parody in some ways. But you can imagine that standing forward as a kind of ideal, she thought she was going to be boyish, and there was a part of her that thought, "Well, if I'm going to be boyish, maybe I could just be a boy." You know, which is a really kind of illusory 11-year-old thought that should be dispensed with by anyone credible in about 15 seconds.

But that was enough to start her searching down the wrong rabbit hole. And then, you know, she got herself put in the hands of these absolutely criminally incompetent therapists, and they didn't even offer her the first two bits of information that anyone with any sense would have presented to her. Instead, they shunted her down the bloody hormonal transformation road, and that's almost a certain pathway to, you know, longer-term trouble, for sure, and even surgical intervention. And so, God, it's just—it's just you can't believe that such things are happening, you know? And so—and some of the important things that you mentioned, you know, to me, is that—or the salient things that you mentioned is, first of all, that's completely standard for therapists. What those therapists did to Khloe Cole is completely standard—affirming, increasing their, um, their whatever—they came in with, agreeing with them—the patient— and of course, altering their self-understanding with a diagnosis.

And when I interview kids, I interviewed this one young woman, Nora, who’s at a high school here in Los, in the in Los Angeles area, and she told me that most of her high school class not only is in therapy, but they all have this diagnosis they identify with. A mental health diagnosis that is one of the classic negative effects of therapy is that a patient will come to identify with their diagnosis. And we're seeing that across the board. Now many, many people say, well, to me, "Well, isn't it just social media? Isn't this all just coming from social media?" I think that's an important question. I certainly am someone who, you know, warned about the harms of social media in my last book. I certainly think it's had a bad impact on youth mental health.

But is it just social media? No, I don't think it is. The mental health deterioration we're seeing and it's for a few reasons. In 2016, the CDC came out with a report that—one in six kids between the ages of 2 and 8 had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. One in six kids! That's in 2016! They didn’t have social media, not ages 2 to 8. They didn’t, and they didn’t have smartphones either. So we know since the 1950s American youth and youth in the West has—mental health has been in precipitous decline. And I think social media is a part of that, but I don't think it totally answers it. And there are two questions I would put to anyone who would argue, "Well, the answer is just social media." The first is why has social media been so bad for youth mental health? A lot of people they talk about comparing young people’s me—their bodies and lives to each other; certainly teenage girls do that a lot, but boys don't tend to. So that doesn't totally explain it.

And the second is why in the last eight years have we done nothing about it? In fact, we've given devices and social media to younger and younger kids. So I think both of those answers are intimately connected to what the mental health experts have done. We are experiencing a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season, the economy is unstable, and political tensions are high. There's no telling what the next few months will bring. How are you protecting your family in the midst of all this chaos? The fact is there is one asset that has withstood famine, wars, and political and economic upheaval dating back to Biblical times, and that's gold. And don't think it's too late to diversify an old IRA or 401(k) into gold. Birch Gold Group can help you do just that.

With Birch Gold, you can create a well-thought-out and balanced investment strategy. They'll help you convert an existing IRA or 401(k) into an IRA Gold without paying a penny out of pocket. Diversify into gold today! Just text Jordan to 989898917350. So, you talked about it as being standard practice. You know, there's something else we should point out here, too, that's part of the absolute toxicity of the present environment, is that it's not only standard practice; if you don't do it, as a therapist, your college, your governing board will come after you, especially if someone complains.

So if you're a therapist and you dare say, especially, you can imagine a situation where you're dealing with an adolescent and the parents have somewhat different views of the problem, and you say to the family, as you should say, "Don't rush into any long-term decisions." You know, this girl who thinks she's a boy, or vice versa—the former is more common. The evidence suggests that 80% of people in that situation will grow out of it by the time they're 18, and that the "do no harm" pathway forward is to provide therapeutic counseling, perhaps, but not to do anything precipitous. Now one parent takes objection to that. Maybe a narcissistic parent with borderline personality disorder, because that tends to be the case in such situations, and decides to write to the college of psychologists, the governing body, or to the college of physicians.

Well, under the current law and the current culture, the probability that your life will then instantly be turned upside down in some permanent way and that your livelihood itself will be threatened and your reputation savaged, even assuming that you don't face legal repercussions—is extremely high. So what I've watched, this has all happened as a consequence of all that bloody flag waving about eliminating the conversion therapy that was never occurring to begin with, right? It's all these consequences of these addled, ideologically enforced laws. And so in Canada, I've been faced with the spectacle of my colleagues knowing full well that everything that's happening on the transgender front is a complete bloody murderous lie, being absolutely unwilling to say anything in public because if they do, their livelihoods will be instantly threatened by their governing boards.

So it's not just standard practice; it's you do it or else. And then that's combined with the fact—in Canada, here's another example—the governing boards that um, that accredit university programs that produce clinical psychologists now, and this is happening with all the therapeutic endeavors, are refusing to grant accreditation to any university that doesn't orient their clinical training towards social justice. And so let's unpack that. So now you train therapists that the world is made up of victims and victimizers and you insist that they adopt that guise.

And now you go out as a therapist and some poor girl comes to talk to you when she's 13 and confused, and you pay a tremendous amount of attention to her when she puts you in the victim position. You covertly reinforce that, partly because you have to legally and partly because you've been addled by your training. And one of the things you know if you're a behavioral therapist is that whatever is rewarded will make itself manifest. And so these poor kids that you're talking about who take their mental health diagnosis as their identity—they do that because they accrue the benefits of differential attention for doing so. It's unbelievably toxic, and it's such an indictment of our entire education system, too.

You imagine that what we're offering young people as a vision of the future is so unbearably toxic and counterproductive that they will choose to be diagnosed with a mental health disorder in preference to normality. Yeah, I mean, that's right, obviously. But there's another problem, which is why are parents handing over their kids to therapists at the first indication of any problem, in fact any—no matter how minor deviation from a benchmark—they go to diagnose and medicate? And the problem is not only do we not know what goes on in that room, not only does the profession make no effort to track harmful effects of their interventions, unlike doctors who are mandated, you know, to report side effects of their drugs, not only is that going on, but we're seeing kids have these harms and there's no feedback mechanism.

Anxiety is worse; therapists don't track whether their treatments have made anxiety worse or depression worse for a kid. We know therapy can do that. And we certainly know that the therapeutic interventions, the focus on feelings constantly, constantly ruminating on sad moments in your life the way they're asked to in school—all of that is very bad for mental health. And constantly questioning everything you're going to do before you do it—all of these are the opposite of what we would want young people to do, and that's what therapeutic schooling efforts have done, parenting efforts have done, and actual therapists have done.

And I'll say, you know, the last thing is that, you know, parents' unwillingness to assert their own authority in their homes has been a disaster because it let therapists in the door to be that authority. And unfortunately, unlike parents, therapists are incentivized to keep the least sick coming back for the longest period of time. Well, I'm going to defend parents for a moment because I'd like to shed light on why they do that. I mean the narcissistic compassionate types, you know, so they're the ones that tilt towards borderline personality disorder, let's say.

So we know maybe that about half the mothers of daughters who have rapid onset gender dysphoria and who move forward with therapy and treatment—up to half of them are diagnosable with something like borderline personality disorder. That's a big problem. So one of the characteristics of people with borderline personality disorder is that they will manipulate other people in any way that you could possibly imagine to gain attention for themselves. And if that means sacrificing their children to their pretensions of compassion, that's no problem at all.

Now, if you're in a relationship with someone like that, the probability that you're going to be able to withstand that pressure, especially when the system itself has its guns aimed on you, and if you do stand up and say, "You know, I don’t think my child should be heading in that direction," then you're going to be pillared as uncaring and as a victimizer. And then it's even worse because the bloody therapists—this is where I'm most appalled about my colleagues who accepted this claim emanating from the worst of the psychopaths—that, "Well, you know, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child?" Now, I tell you, man, there's not a parent, an ordinary parent, like a non-psychologically trained parent on the planet who, when faced with that accusation by a physician or a psychologist, isn't going to fold.

They'll say, "Oh my God, this is worse than I thought! There's some risk that my child will commit suicide, and if I don't get on board with this in every possible way and something terrible happens, it's going to be laid at my feet." And then if the accusations of being uncaring and victimizing are going along with that, well, it's just—and then the other thing too that's happening, Abigail, is that parents just can't believe these things are happening in their schools. You know, like I'm seeing this in Canada.

I know Canadians are so asleep that it's kind of miraculous, and I've tried to think that through. It's like, okay, how can people be so bloody blind? And then I think, okay, you can stay blind and assume that it's still 1990, so roughly speaking, the political parties do what they say they'll do, and they're trustworthy; the Legacy Media isn't lying all the time; the educational institutions aren't completely corrupt; the judiciary is still intact; the legal system hasn't twisted itself into knots; or you can dismiss all that as some sort of right-wing conspiratorial thinking and continue along your merry path. And if the price you pay for that is that the psychopathic teachers get their claws in your child, by the time you figure that out, it's going to be a bit too late.

And I'm really seeing this, especially in Canada. It's like people, even if you bring these things to their attention, they think—and I can understand this—they think there's no way things can be that bad. You have to be imagining it. And then I've stepped back and thought, "Well, Jesus, you know, I did get harassed by my university and my governing board, which is still going on, and so maybe I've got more paranoid than I should be." You know? And then I see what happened in Washington D.C. with the presidents of U Penn, MIT, and Harvard, and I think, "Oh no, I saw this seven years ago as clear as a bell."

And it's worse even than I think, and certainly, it's making itself manifest in this pathological therapeutic environment right now. You said something very interesting, too. Here's something cool. So if you do statistical analysis, you can group self—you can group the statements that make people—that people make about themselves into categories. And so one category is negative emotion. And so if you have—if you're high in the trait of negative emotion, be associated with depression and anxiety, you feel more shame and more guilt, more anxiety, and more depression—self-referential statements of all kinds load with neuroticism.

Okay? This is an unbelievably important discovery. They load so completely that the personality test used for assessing neuroticism, the most common one, the NEO-P, has self-consciousness as a subset of neuroticism. So that means there's no difference between being self-conscious and being depressed and anxious. They're not linked; they're the same thing. So now you go to therapy, and the halfwit therapist does nothing but make you self-conscious, right? Well, why does—so—and the implication is, and your teachers in school do the same thing. Your teachers guide you in social-emotional learning. They do emotions check-ins. They are constantly asking you how you're feeling. It is the best way to induce depression and anxiety in kids, and that's what they're doing nonstop.

And unfortunately, parents are not only handing over their kids to these people, but they're doing it themselves. They're constantly checking in; they're letting therapists guide their parenting instead of taking the reins back and doing what we know works better with kids. Number one is parental authority, which of course doesn't mean being cold; it doesn't mean being cruel. It just means that the parents make the rules for the house, not some therapist. Well, we could—so this also speaks to the issue of identity. You know, and I've been trying to take this apart because I'm so embarrassed about the clinical enterprise now. And I thought, you know, our whole notion of mental health is actually corrupt.

And the reason for that is that we think mental health is mental; it's inside, it's subjective, right? And if you're healthy, it's because you're self-actualizing, right? And if you're unhappy, it's because the self isn't properly organized as an interior structure. But the problem with that is it's actually not true. And you can tell that's not true because you can't be happy in a miserable marriage. And the reason you can't be happy in a miserable marriage is because you're you, but you're also your married self, and then you're your married self plus your friendships and your ties to the broader community.

And what psychological well-being is, it's not even the right term; what human well-being is, is proper situation in a hierarchy that includes the social environment. And so what that implies is that the more you think about yourself, the less you're focusing on how to establish solid, reliable, and reciprocal social relations. Right? An intimate relationship, friendship, the bonds of a family, and then the—what would you say? The less tightly binding that you have with the broader community. In the absence of all that, you concentrate on yourself. Well, not only are you miserable and depressed and anxious, you're also isolated, lonely, and insane, and that all stems from that initial presumption that all we would have to do is get your head straight, and you'd be sane.

It's like—and so you think, what does that also mean for the identity of kids? Because we should be teaching them, "Look, you're going to have to take your place in the world. You need a partner; you need some friends; you need an occupation; you need an educational plan." Like, you have to situate yourself in the world. None of that's relevant anymore. All that is is oppression. It's no bloody wonder the kids choose a mental health diagnosis as the alternative to the normality that's nothing.

Well, what we did was we gave kids these incredibly unhealthy lives, as you said—these atomized lives—and we told them that they were so unique in the world and inseparable, and that that was all, all that was important. And then we poured mental health resources into an incredibly unhealthy life, and then mental health experts pose as the solution to the unhappy life. Meanwhile, they've been participating the entire time in the idea that kids are weak, in the idea that they can't get through a car ride without an iPad, that they need to be told constantly that they are loved and that they are amazing at everything. They have guided everything in the wrong direction. They have provided nothing that we know to be good for making kids feel, you know, actually achieve happiness.

One of them is not focusing on your happiness and not making happiness your goal. Another thing is doing things for others in the world, feeling part of a social fabric—all those things that you said are so important. None of those help, have a role for a mental health expert, which is why the mental health experts took us in the wrong direction.

Yeah, experts. Yeah, well, I watched the bloody social psychologists and the educational psychologists put forward psychological principles that were so appallingly misguided for decades. It was just painful to watch. So one of them that emerged out of social psychology, which is a discipline with plenty of sins on its conscience, the whole self-esteem movement—to me, was just a jaw-dropping nightmare watching that as a trained clinician. It's like, "I see, so your presumption is that you can make kids feel good about themselves by celebrating non-achievements? That's your plan?" And so that swept through the school system like mad.

And so that was just, as Jean Twenge has pointed out, that was just a pathway—it was really what they were doing, Abigail, was they were instructing children in how to be narcissistic and that narcissism was confused with self-esteem. Right? And what's really strange—this is quite interesting—technically speaking, if you look at self-esteem scales, there's actually no difference between them and scales of negative emotion; it's a false construct.

So if you have low self-esteem—which is not something that technically exists—it's no different than being depressed and anxious. And you don't lift people out of depression and anxiety by making them narcissistic, which is what the social psychologist recommended. And then the educational psychologist—okay, then they foster this dependency that you described so that children can't—they can't even go out of their bloody house without asking for permission, right? Everything, every important decision has to be made with guidance, right?

So they're fostering dependency like a devouring mother. So they're teaching narcissism; they're fostering dependence. Then they implement these—this whole culture of trigger warning and protection, which is exactly the opposite of what you would do if you were an actual, like, credible therapist. Because what you do to make people less anxious is find out what they're afraid of and then expose them in graduated doses to what they're afraid of. You don't say, "Well, you're a victim and now you have to be protected from everything." What you do if you do that is you make them worse.

So Lukianoff has claimed—and I think he's exactly right—is that if the therapeutic community, the educational psychologists, and the social psychologists, the social workers all included had set out to design a course of action to make children as mentally unstable as possible, and they used the proper behavioral techniques to do so, we would have ended up in exactly the situation we're in right now. Right? Teaching them to be narcissistic, teaching them to be—and destroy merit at the same time. Teaching them to be dependent; shelter them from everything, and have them focus in a never-ending process on their own feelings, right?

It's so diabolical that, well, it's the sort of thing that drives you down conspiratorial webs. I can't believe it's happened. It's jaw-dropping. So what have you seen as the manifestations of this? What have you been writing about specifically in your new book?

So to take one example, you know, I interviewed a woman—I’ve known for a long time—who runs a major, I call her Evelyn in the book, who runs a major cellular biology lab at one of our nation's premier research institutions. And she tells me that the kids she’s seeing, aside from all their, you know, the anxiety and depression and the fact that they constantly in the last decade update her on their mental health regularly—that's not something she’s ever asked for, but they now give her updates. But the other thing is they're afraid to try for the first time—even the most qualified kids with strong scientific backgrounds are afraid to make a move without checking with her.

And they're afraid to do anything on their own. Things that kids with less ability, less scientific grounding ought to be able to go for it, they can't go for it. Their sense of agency has been eroded. That's not from social media, okay? That's not from smartphones, entirely, if at all. It's from an idea that you—it's treatment dependency. I have to check with an adult or an expert before I do anything. That's what our young adults now think. And I do think that our therapeutic era and our therapeutic so-called experts have taught them this.

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Oh, okay, well, there's something else we could add to the litany of ways to teach your children to be neurotic: the following. Okay, so let's deem all competition inappropriate, okay? So any competitive enterprise is inappropriate. Okay, so why would we do that? Well, there is a thrill in victory, but there is a catastrophe in defeat, right? And there's negative emotion associated with defeat. And then you might say as well that the positive emotion associated with victory is morally untenable because it comes at someone else's expense. So that's an extension of the victim-victimizer narrative, okay?

So now you eradicate competition. Alright, so why? So in favor, hypothetically, of cooperation. Whatever. You get rid of competitive games, for example, or you dissuade them. So now what's the consequence of that? Well, we might say, "Well, why do you teach? Why do you encourage children to play competitive games?" And you might say, "Well, they can develop the skills, it's fun, and they have the possibility of winning." But here's a better theory: it teaches them to lose. Right? It teaches them that that you do lose. It teaches them that you can lose gracefully without a catastrophe.

And then, you can get up on your feet and you congratulate the winners, and you can go on playing. Okay? So now imagine all of that's been taken away from you, right? Right up to the time you're 18, you've never failed in your bloody life. And so now you're terrified of it because you think that at the bottom of the failure pit is nothing but utter insanity. Well, now that's true for you because you're a complete novice at failing. How the hell are you going to take a risk, right?

So part of what—you see this when you go see your kids in a sporting event. What you hope is that your child has enough sense to be a gracious loser, and the reason there's no—here's a problem position for you—there's no difference between being a gracious loser and being resilient. They're the same thing. So we forgo competition in the name of the protection of the feelings of the losers, and what we do is we demolish everybody's resilience, along with these other four catastrophic failures that we listed.

And why did we become afraid? Why did we become afraid of competition? Why did we become suddenly fearful that our child would ever lose? Why did we—the moment they exhibited any behavior outside of the norm, maybe thought they had a different gender identity, why did we rush them to an expert? Why, if they never reached any D metric, do we rush them to an expert? Because we were afraid of trauma. Trauma was at the heart of a lot of this. We became terrified of this bugaboo trauma.

Now, it isn't the case that any of these things produce trauma or damage to our kids. The best psychological research, of course, shows that it's the opposite: resilience is the norm whenever there's a potentially traumatic event for a child. But we parents became so terrified of trauma that they stopped trusting their instincts; they stopped trusting what they knew was right, what they knew in their bones was best for kids, and instead became overly dependent on people who were very much incentivized to want to treat sick kids and to claim that the least sick were actually quite sick and continue to treat them. And that's what we're seeing.

Alright, so let me offer you a terrible hypothesis, okay? Because we might as well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So behind this, I can't help but see the specter of the devouring mother. So I'm going to lay out a hypothesis for you, and it's a terrible hypothesis, and I hope it isn't true. But you tell me what you think about this, okay? So now we're in a landscape where half of women who are 30 are childless and half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret it.

Okay, so that's 20% of women—that's going to be their fate. And according to Jonathan Haidt and his new research, that fate is much more likely among more liberal women. Okay, so that's the statistical reality. So now we're also in a situation where much of the direct care and administrative work that's associated with the education of children— all the way through from kindergarten through university—is in the hands of women from the ages of 20 to 40. Now a subset of those women are going to have a hyper-developed maternal side that has the proclivity to treat anything in their viewsite as an infant.

So I'm thinking that part of the reason that we've transformed the entire educational enterprise, which is fundamentally female-dominated, into an overgrown nursery is because it's run by women who have misplaced their maternal instinct because—and here's why I think this—women have this terrible conundrum when it comes to children, and it's a really tough conundrum. And I think this is probably why human beings are pair-bonding creatures.

So my daughter just had a baby, and the baby is a month premature. And she said the baby just wants to be with me nonstop. It's like it isn't even want; it's absolute bloody need. And the right attitude for a woman for the first year of a child's life starts to switch around 9 months. So let's say in 9 months, the first nine months is that every single need that child has is to be regarded as 100% accurate, unquestionable, and to be immediately responded to.

And so that instinct has to be extraordinarily powerful because infants who don't have someone around who are operating on that basis—they're either going to die, or they're not going to thrive. And I mean, the human infants are unbelievably fragile. It doesn't take that much to disrupt that early bond, and that can have catastrophic consequences. Okay, so that means that women first of all have that proclivity; it's at hand, right? And then it also means that they have to undergo this very difficult process when the child starts to mature—the psychoanalysts called it the necessarily, the necessary failure of the good mother—is that you have to step the hell back, right?

You got to stop doing everything for that helpless infant, even though that was the most spectacular manifestation of your love, and you have to let the child bump up against the world and get hurt. And that is a damn difficult thing to negotiate. And to some degree, that's when fathers step in, you know, because they'll encourage—they have a higher threshold for child distress, let's say—especially in that transition from infancy to toddlerhood.

Now you got to ask yourself, we've had this radical trans demographic transformation that has unfolded over the last 40 years, and so most women—half of women now at 30 are still childless. What the hell's happening to that maternal proclivity? And I would say, well, it's overpouring into the educational establishments, and you see that with the therapeutic industry as well.

And so because when I look at the universities, I think, "Oh, I see. Everyone's an infant," so it's like there's infants, infant caregivers, and predators. That's the simple world of—of—that's the most simple basic feminine physiological world. And I think our institutions have been transformed into what would you say? Never-ending nurseries. You know Freud, you know, one of the things about Freud that people have forgotten, like Freud pointed to the pathological narcissism of dependency-inducing mothers as the biggest developmental impediment to human beings. That's the edle situation, no? And that's an unbelievably accurate observation.

You know, we are very dependent human beings, and we need our mothers. But the fact that that maternal provision is so absolutely necessary also means it can go spectacularly wrong. And something like you're looking for a solution, right? Because you said, "Well, it can't just be social media." It's not just social media; it can't just be the education system.

Like, is it not possible that this is reflective of a more fundamental transformation in the way that men and women are operating in society? There’s no question, but we did come to see our kids as weak. We came to see them as infants. The problem is we had traditions of child rearing. We had a sense of knock it off, shake it off, you'll be fine—not for a kid with a broken arm, but for minor injuries.

We used to tell our kids that. We remember that from our own childhoods, but we stopped trusting ourselves and relied on experts, and they taught us that our kids were weak, that they could never recover. And I'll give you an example. I got a call—I got actually an email from a woman who loved my last book, and she was a child psychologist from a very trained, very good school. She's in her 60s, and she really wanted to be of help with my new book, "Bad Therapy."

So okay, she's a parenting coach and a child psychologist. I said, "I would love to talk to you." So I called her and said, you know, I'm going to ask you some questions about child why we're seeing so much pain in the rising generation. Can we speak on the record? And she said, "Oh, no, no, absolutely not! My adult daughter—if she finds out I talked to you, she'll cut me off!" Right?

Now this is a woman who's a parenting coach. The number of people she should be advising on parenting is zero because she has raised a daughter to adulthood who, if she disagreed with her mother about who her mother talks to, what journalist she talks to, would cut her off. You see, we stopped taking the—we stopped being devoted to making our kids strong and making them decent. That used to be the goal of parenting; instead, we thought, "Oh no, the idea of parenting is to make them mentally healthy."

We're going to shoot for wellness, and we did a terrible job of that, and we didn't make them strong, and we didn't make them decent. So why—okay, so let's see if we can figure out why that happened. You know, like it's often useful if you do a diagnosis of any given situation properly. The first thing you do is look for contextual factors, right?

Now, people generally don't do this to themselves. If they're looking at why they are in trouble, they'll look for a self-attribution, right? And there's something about that that's admirable because it's taking responsibility. But people are more determined by situations, if they're healthy, than they are by their own intrinsic temperament. So the first thing you do as a good diagnostician is you think, "Okay, what are the overarching contextual issues here that are at play?"

So maybe we could figure that out. So you're pointing to the fact that somehow parents lost faith in their ability to—in their children's ability to direct themselves. So let me offer you a couple of reasons for that. You tell me what you think. Okay, well, first of all, we have fewer children. So that means every child is more precious, if for no other reason than parents aren't outnumbered.

Like when you have six kids, you can't focus obsessively on all of them. You just don't have the time. Plus, they're torturing each other and raising each other to a fair degree. But if you have one child, you can focus all your attention. Now let's make that worse. Not only do you only have one child, you didn't have that child until you were 30, and so you're pretty bloody attached to that child, and it's your last chance, right?

And you're wealthy, or comparatively wealthy. So now you're desperate to make sure that everything that could possibly be good happens to this child. You're not going to get another chance, and you have endless resources to pour into them. Okay? So just those—and then you can imagine this as well—the child doesn't have a lot of siblings, doesn't have a lot of cousins.

And so that means that any proclivity for narcissism that that child might manifest naturally and that might be even encouraged by the parents is not going to be pounded out of them in the various ways that siblings and cousins would absolutely take it out of them, right? And then you add to that too the fact that children are more isolated than they were in terms of their play patterns. They don't play freely together; almost all play episodes are scheduled.

Even if they're scheduled, the idiot parents will often plop the kids down in front of a TV or a screen. So they don't play; that means they're not socializing each other. And so that's a very toxic brew. And we have no idea what, you know, the typical Caucasian mother is now old enough to be the typical Caucasian grandmother, right? We've almost got to that point. We have no idea—no idea what that signifies in terms of its effect on reproductive patterns.

And also the case that we have so many kids that are only children—that older mothers, richer parents—these are massive changes, and it's—and maybe part of the consequence of exactly what we're talking about is that the children are doomed to being over—plus, then there's a worse situation too because people are more atomized.

And so that also means that the multigenerational wisdom that might be a necessity for knowing how to raise children is also disappearing. I just helped my son and my daughter-in-law work through a disciplinary issue with their 12-month-old daughter, and my son and my daughter-in-law are pretty together people. And I had— I had told them what they could do, but telling them didn't work. I had to show them.

They couldn't really put what was necessary into practice without having—without it being directly modeled. And so we also don't know how much of the intergenerational wisdom that was part and parcel of an intact culture we've completely obliterated because of, you know, extreme social mobility, for example. So I think a lot of the factors you mentioned do play a role, but I want to tell you why I think that the mental health experts in our complete therapeutic flooding with therapy and therapeutic concepts has played a big part in it, okay?

And that is because we look at other cultures. I interviewed a woman who runs the Georgetown emotions lab who looks, and I asked her why kids were so—young people were so disregulated in America when you look at other cultures, and they're doing much better. Like Japan, they only have one child in Japan, and you mentioned that might be a factor.

But they don't treat their children as fragile. They're not haunted by the possibility that trauma—that anything could traumatize a child. They're not haunted, and they think independence for a child, meaning going off and doing things without oversight, is a good. In fact, in preschools in Japan, there are areas that the children could get hurt and areas where the teacher can't see. And the idea is kids have to be able to negotiate their own interpersonal conflicts with each other without an adult intermediary.

They do the same thing in Israel. In Israel, at age eight, kids are supposed to get on a bus and go to school. You are looked down on if your parents drive you. It is not done in Israel if your parents drive you to school. Why? Because they need to be able to negotiate how to get to a bus stop, and by the way, along the way, it turns out, Dr. Chova Dutton told me this—she followed these kids because she did research on these kids—and along the way, they were talking; they were going into a bakery and buying themselves something. They were talking to neighbors; they were learning to handle themselves—all the kid things that kids in the West used to learn to do because the parents gave them the freedom to do it before we became surveillance parents terrified of emotional injury.

We let kids be; we let them go off and do things and handle their own conflicts, and it made them stronger. And then we became terrified that we couldn't let them because they would be afraid because they were actually weak. This idea that anything could traumatize your child, anything could leave a lasting psychological imprint that they could never get rid of, this came right from the mental health industry.

This came right from the idea that "The Body Keeps the Score"; it holds on to your trauma forever; you can never let it go. It's not true, according to many, many experts I interviewed. But unfortunately, it's led to all kinds of terror that any childhood trauma causes adult psychopathology. And also false that adult psychopathology is necessarily caused by childhood trauma. Neither is true; nor is it true that being permanently damaged by a traumatic incident is the norm; resilience is the norm.

So all these bad ideas, I believe, really came through the vector of the mental health experts. Well, thing, okay? So we might as well offer some definitions so people experience negative emotion when an unexpected obstacle arises in their path, okay? And those can take two forms: they can be obstacles that you can skirt, or they can be obstacles that stop you in your tracks, okay? The more important the thing you're pursuing, the more likely an obstacle that stops you in your tracks is to cause trauma, okay?

And what the trauma is, is the dissolution of the structure of direction that you were engaging in. So here's an example: this would be an example of a relatively serious emotional upset, let's say. So you decide you want to be a doctor, and you work very hard at it, and you take the MCAT, and you get your results, and you're in the 15th percentile, okay? So that's likely to cause a fair bit of emotional upset.

And worse is you're not going to be a doctor; that's gone. Now imagine you put 40% of your resources into that plan, okay? So now the trauma is you have to sacrifice that 40% investment. Now you might say, "Well, the norm is resilience," okay? So the way that becomes not a trauma is you decide to become a nurse, let's say, and that works. When you encounter an obstacle, you've got two choices: you can either figure out how to get around it and continue on your path, or you can choose a new path.

If you're incapable of choosing a new path, then you're traumatized. Now you might say, "Well, you know, how serious is the trauma?" And the answer is, well, it depends on how important the plan was. So here's another example: let's say you're happily married, and you have been for 10 years, and you trust your husband implicitly; then you find out that he's a serial womanizer and he's had affairs that stem back from before you were right, right from the time you started going out with him.

So everything you think you know about him is a lie, okay? So now the trauma is your whole past is a lie, your present no longer exists, and your future, whatever the hell it is, isn't what you think it's going to be. And then it's even worse than that because if you were that bloody gullible, how much of everything else you do is now up for question? Okay? So that just does people in. Now, those sorts of things do happen to people, right? And if they're unresolved, they leave a permanent ho—

I mean, if they're unresolved, right? Now, as you pointed out, generally people resolve such things, but not inevitably. Now the problem doesn't come so much with the notion that some things are traumatic. The problem comes with being unable to differentiate between trauma, you know, like your marriage is over and falling off your—when you're learning to ride a bike, when you're going to a playground, right? There has to be a distinction between levels of negative emotion, and partly what you want to do with your child is you want to expose them to situations where they encounter obstacles, even serious obstacles, losses, for example, in a championship game, so that they can learn strategies of resilience.

So, I don't think it's exactly fair to—so, well, I don't think it's fair to put the problem at the hands of people who make the claim that such a thing as trauma exists. It's more accurate to put the blame at—

Okay, okay, okay, let me give you a prior story to your story. What if we welded the training wheels onto the bike, so they could never be removed? What if we started out childhood where we only gave the kids the softest fabrics and any foods they didn't like we substituted for foods they did like, and if a dog scared them, we asked all our neighbors to crate their dogs whenever we visited?

And what if we told the kids over and over—we affirmed all their worries, and we dropped everything to deal with their worries because that's what the best experts were telling us to do? What if we never let them choose a friend we didn't like or get their hearts broken? And then we rushed to intercede the moment they expressed any hurt. They might show up to college so unprepared, not even to fail their medical, you know, tests, but even to deal with any minor danger or discomfort that we would see.

We're seeing kids having nervous breakdowns over the most humdrum challenges. And in fact, you know, this woman who's the head of the emotions lab at Georgetown who I interviewed, Dr. Chova Dutton, when she said to me that when she looked, when she did research cross-culturally on emotional responses to dangers in young adults, that American kids tend to exaggerate the degree of danger posed by small things.

Like a stranger on the street looking at you funny—that felt dangerous to American kids. Why? Because they never had to face even these small risks themselves. We were too afraid to let them.

Yeah, well that's the classic edle nightmare. So in the Disney Snow White, one of the things you see about classic Disney movies is that there's almost always an evil queen, right? And what the evil queen does is interfere with the development of the prince or the princess. Right? So in Snow White, the evil queen is jealous of the upcoming princess's beauty, jealous of the fact that she gets a chance to establish a new relationship and perfectly willing to poison her because of her envy, right?

And in Sleeping Beauty, you have Prince—I think it's Prince Philip in Sleeping Beauty—she locks him in a dungeon and tells him that she's going to keep him there until he's so old that nobody could possibly find him attractive. And when he does manage to escape—with the help of some feminine fairies, little feminine fairies, which are like emblematic of the mother who's actually useful—she turns into, like, the dragon that's the ultimate predator and virtually burns him to the ground, right?

Well, so this is—the reason I’m pointing out these symbolic representations is because this proclivity of symbolically feminine overprotection to become the ultimate destructive force is a motif that's been developed through the entire developmental history of humanity and its literature. It's like that's an unbelievable danger, and for some reason—as you pointed out—it's become increasingly dominant in our culture, and it's not something about which people can have very straightforward conversations, you know?

But I think the story that you described is exactly right. Now, one of the things we do know too is that the mothers who are overbearing in that manner are also those who are more likely to show the kinds of—they call it cluster B psychopathology. So it's this weird intermingling of hyper compassion but it's hyper compassion turned for narcissistic purposes. So look, the mother that you just described, here's what she can do: she can tell all her neighbors and her family how much of a martyr she is for spending every bloody second of her whole whole life doing nothing but caring for her poor infant.

So now she's super mother, and the payoff for her is, well, of course she can't pursue her own career, of course she can't take on any responsibilities because she's so busy pouring out every excess resource she has into this child. And so she's perfectly motivated to make her child as miserable and wretched as possible because that opens up the space for her overweening maternal compassion to dominate completely so that she can parade her virtue to her friends and her neighbors. Right?

And the child will end up overtreatment; they will end up diagnosed; they will end up on psychotropic drugs, so they never feel life at full force; they never feel they can do things on their own. And you know, you started by talking about Khloe Cole. And when I was researching about, you know, the rapid rise in transgender identification, one of the things a therapist never told her is that gender dysphoria, like a lot of psychological issues that someone can have or problems someone can have—they actually resolve by growing up.

Puberty often cures a lot of gender dysphoria— So, too, I mean, this is the subtitle of the book, "Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up." You know, adulthood, growing into adulthood is actually the cure for a lot of the troubles teenagers are beset with. And if we gave kids the resources to grow up, if we weren't afraid for them to be two steps away from us, or for us not to surveil them constantly, it, and we let them grow up, a lot of these problems would resolve on their own. We're just not letting them.

Well, the clinical literature shows that clearly is that, that it's 80% of gender dysphoria conditions resolve on their own by the age of 18. Well, it's also partly—and I think this is tangled into the ideology—like if we regard our culture as such as nothing but oppressive, then taking your place in that culture does nothing but oppress you and make you an oppressor, right?

So that pretty much takes everything that adulthood could offer off the table, right? And I certainly see this also in what schools do to young men. Like, schools teach young men that their ambition is nothing but the manifestation of oppressive patriarchal power. And so you basically take all of the benefits, the moral benefits of becoming an adult off the table. You don't say to a young man, it's like, "Well, you know, when you're a child, you have the possibilities of the world at hand, and you're relatively free from care and privation.

But the price you pay for that is you have no independence. And the beauty of being an adult is you're free to have your adventure; you're free to have your adventure. You can sink—or you can swim. And there's real cost to that, but the payoff is you can you can have your life, and you can do great things, and you can serve other people, and you can take your place as a husband and as an honored member of the community, and you can do useful things in the world.

And that's so worthwhile that giving up the pleasures of childhood is the obvious thing to do. I—there isn't a school in the country, I think. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, where that's ever made explicit to young people. You know, maybe Hillsdale College—and that's about it. Yeah, right. But also not a home in the country, and that's part of the problem.

So in other words, you know, when parents felt comfortable being authorities in their own home with their own kids, there was something for kids to aspire to. But through this gentle parenting—the therapist-led parenting that we're seeing, where the role of the parent is really to be an empath, to feel a child's pain and to adjust and accommodate it, there's nothing for a child to graduate to.

It doesn't look so great to be a child's slave, and that's what parents have become. So the P—so there is no reason to adolescent out of childhood. And we're not offering them a reason. There's no graduation. Well, you can also understand why that's a vicious spiral, right? Because you can also understand why young people would be more loath to have children under those circumstances.

You know, when I was counseling young women, my essential, what would you call it, ideological position—I don’t think it's ideological—my essential position was, it's good for you to have your career when you have your child because then what you're doing is modeling for your child the fact that adults have useful things to do. And since your child is going to have to be an adult, that's a good thing to model.

Now it's going to be tricky for you to figure out how to get the balance right because you have to attend to your children a lot, especially when they're young, and you're going to want to. But that doesn't mean you should torture yourself with guilt because as an adult, you have a life. Your children have to see that, so they want to become adults, right?

And so now if your destiny as an adult is slave to a two-year-old, well, who the hell—who the hell? There's nothing more demoralizing than being a slave to a two-year-old, partly because they're little tyrants most of the time, and you can't give into their—the immediacy of their demands. There's no—that's no way to live, and it's stunningly demoralizing for the two-year-old because there's nothing more hopeless, and I've seen this in children—there is nothing more existentially hopeless than a three-year-old who's in control.

It's like where the hell does he have to go? He's already hit the pinnacle of the social world as far as he's concerned. Whatever he wants goes. God, and it's terrifying! It's actually terrifying them to have that much power. And fear is another thing we're seeing in this generation. They are terribly afraid. They also don't want to have kids; this is the first generation where a majority does not want to have kids.

Well, we didn't make it look very good, and I think that is part of the problem. We didn't give them something to hold up and say, "One day, I want to be like that. I can do it." They really doubt they can do things in the world, that they are ready to raise children. That's so sad. You know, I just talked to my son-in-law because my daughter just had a baby, and I said to him, "Look, here's something you have to understand. You need to know this: that this baby that's just been born, this person wants nothing more than to have the best possible relationship with you that it's possible to have with anyone."

That's what they're offering you is that if you're a father and you have a clue and you have a new child, you are being offered the opportunity to establish the best relationship with anyone you've ever had in your life. And the person that you could establish that relationship with wants nothing more than that. So that's a hell of an offer. So then you can just imagine how bloody far we've walked off any sort of reasonable pathway so that young people now look at that with dread, right?

It's because that notion has become like, you know, I had a great career. Like, because I started my academic career teaching at Harvard, and that was a pretty good deal. And that place was really hopping in the 1990s, and the students were great. I loved my job, and I really enjoyed the consulting I worked, and my clinical practice—I had a very fulfilling career. And I would certainly say that that was all well and good, but there was nothing better than being with my kids than my wife; nothing better.

And so—and the fact that people can't understand that, they see that only as a burdensome, what—as a burden. It's so horrible because it also means that they don't see—they certainly don't see the best of what life has to offer. I also feel very sorry for young women. It's so perverse, you know, because most of the notion that women shouldn't be locked at home, let's say, barefoot and pregnant with their little kids—a tremendous amount of that comes from the left—and it's so weird to me, because the leftist ideologues insist that women need to be freed to do what? To enter the corporate world?

And I think, okay, well, I thought you guys were left-wing. How did we get to the situation where it was obvious that what a young woman should do is prioritize her slavery to the capitalist endeavor in favor of being at home with her kids, especially when they're young? Now, I know I'm exaggerating to some degree, but—but it's so—we lie terribly to young men, and we demoralize them, but the lies we tell young women are of a whole different order of magnitude. That the notion that career is going to be more important than anything else and that you should forego children for that, I—I don't know if I've ever met anyone for whom that was actually true.

I completely agree, and I think that, you know, if we had a more robust confidence among parents, you would see that communicated. Because I don't know parents for whom that isn't true. Certainly, it's true for me. There's nothing in my life that has been more gratifying or more imbued my life with more meaning than having my own children. It was by far the most dramatic change in my life when I had kids. And we've forgotten what a profound opportunity and sense of meaning and responsibility it is because we let the experts analyze it, and we actually started taking on their—oh, we started describing our kids!

When I interviewed parents, I would hear them talk about their kids according to their diagnosis. "Well, this is my ADHD kid," I would hear them say. You hear that now? "Well, my kid's spectrum-y." You know, that's not how parents ever talked about their children! Why? Because they were our kids! And it didn't matter what the experts—what categories the ed, what rubrics they fell under—they were our children! And somewhere along the line, we forgot that, and we started looking at our own children through the lens that these experts gave us, and it's wrong and it's damaging to our relationship with them.

How old were you, if you don't mind me asking? How old were you when you had your first child?

Okay, okay! So you—okay, so now you said, you know, you just said that there wasn't anything in your life that—happened to you that—that was—I had a client, a very high-achieving lawyer, right? And she was a very attractive person, very hardworking. She had—she was quite an admirable person. And then she had a baby, and she—and she told me she was quite funny. She said, "Well, I'd always sort of thought of children as like a fashion accessory up to this point," you know? As something else you added to your life.

And she was absolutely dumbfounded at the degree to which she fell in love with her child, and she had a child pretty late, you know? And it just turned her love life upside down. And you see, I saw this with women in law firms all the time. You know, they were high-performing, career-oriented women, and then they'd have a child, and they'd think, "Oh, nothing I ever did was nearly as significant as this." So what did that come as a revelation to you? Did you expect that? What happened in your case?

I'll tell you a moment where I realized it. When my sons were four years old, they had started playing piano. I have twin sons. And one of my sons, we got to the recital, and he was very nervous, and they had the kids get up there and say, "My name is Jack," and you had to say your name and identify the piece you were going to play. And he started to get very nervous. He didn't want to get up there. And I didn't know what to do. I thought this could be catastrophe. Should I take him out? Maybe it’s too young?

And my husband said to me, "Just let him be." And I did. I just backed off, let him do this. He was very nervous. I didn't know if—and they called him up there, and he announced to the crowd as loud and as he could be, "My name is Jack and I'm going to play," and announced his piece.

And I can tell you it was the proudest I've ever been in my life. There's nothing I've ever done that brought me more pride than that moment. And I got the first glimpse in that moment that maybe they could—my son would be able to handle himself in a world with people.

Well, that was so cool, A, because that means that's so cool! Because there was a conjunction there—a true moral conjunction, right? So first of all, your husband said the right thing. So he played out his role. Right? Second of all, you listened and you backed the hell off. Third, your son stepped forward! Right?

And so those things all came together beautifully, and that meant that you could see that he was on his way, right? And there isn’t any, you know, and that's such a—that’s such an integral element of deep human motivation. It's part of mentoring.

One of the things I loved about being a university professor was the opportunity to do that with young people who weren't my own children. It's like, because what you want to do is you want to find someone who's got some wherewithal and provide them with the opportunity to manifest what's next in them, right?

And I don't really believe that there's anything that's more satisfying than participating in that. And it makes sense, right? Because it is part of fostering the maturation process and helping other people aim up. But it's so cool that that's not only an instinct that can manifest itself within a family, but that can generalize to your relationship with other people. And in not being able to be a part of that—you know the great men that I've known—great women as well, but I guess I've probably seen it more in men, and maybe it's somewhat more surprising in a way. Most of the great men I knew, I knew who had established remarkable careers, remarkable in every way.

One of the things they took prime pleasure in—maybe at the top of the hierarchy—was finding young people who had ability and fostering their development. You know, I have my brother-in-law, Jim Keller, a great engineer. As he's got older, that's become a bigger and bigger part of his life—to find really promising young people and just to lay out opportunities for them and to watch them grow and thrive.

And my graduate advisor, Robert Peel, he was like that, man. I mean I went to his festschrift, which is a celebration of his academic career, and he had like 30 of his students there, most of whom did very well. And to a man and woman, they said, you know, Bob did everything he could to foster our careers when we worked with him. And you could see, you know, that was just an endless source of delight for him.

And the fact that young people don't understand that that possibility is sitting in front of them in relationship to the children they might have is like that's a cataclysmic indictment of our culture. It's so awful. Well, they haven't