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April 9, 2024 - The Charlie Kirk Show
38:21
How Bad Therapy Wrecks Children

Children today are raised to identify as victims in as many ways as they can and to collect as many mental illnesses as possible. Is it any surprise they’re growing up so messed up? Abigail Shrier joins to discuss her new book "Bad Therapy" and the mental health crisis that is destroying an entire generation. Become a member at members.charliekirk.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Bad Therapy and Addiction 00:14:23
Hey everybody, the legendary Abigail Schreier joins us where we talk about bad therapy, irreversible damage, and more.
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Abigail, thank you so much for joining the program.
Thanks for having me on, Charlie.
It's great to be here.
Thank you.
I want to just compliment you from the get-go.
People were really afraid of talking about this transgender issue for years.
And your book, I think, had one of the most profound effects on moving the Overton window and opening people's eyes.
So I want to thank you for that.
It's an incredible accomplishment.
But I do want to start with your book, Bad Therapy.
Tell us about your new book.
Sure.
So my book, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, it's all about why this generation, the rising generation known as Gen Z, why the generation that has received the most mindfulness tips, the most wellness tips, the most therapy, the most mental health diagnosis, and the most psychiatric medication, they should be the picture of mental health.
Instead, they're the picture of despair.
So the kids who've gotten the most therapy are actually in the most distress.
And I wanted to know why and why do they have no interest in growing up?
And it turns out the flood of therapy they've been getting in the culture, in schools, in offices of therapists have been really counterproductive.
They've convinced a generation that has trauma.
So many of them are nearly 42% have a diagnosis and they believe they are unwell.
Over half of them think they are unwell mentally.
And that's why they are not really feeling up to the challenges of adulthood.
Do you think there's an over-diagnosis problem where you have 42% of young people that say they have some form of a diagnosis?
Is this just kind of the normal speed bumps of life that might get categorized as like general anxiety disorder?
Or is it that there actually is an intake in the an uptick in the objective, let's say, characteristics that would say someone's anxious or depressed?
Or is it just that if you don't have a diagnosis, you're kind of missing out?
So it's both, right?
We've set up a system basically in school, in the culture, where it is valorized to have a mental illness, to have some disorder.
So kids are looking to have it.
And we're way overdiagnosing kids.
I mean, as of 2016, one in six American children between the ages of two and eight had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.
That's one in six little kids.
Those kids were not on social media, but they were in a culture that is way over psychopathologizing normal human adult, you know, normal human emotional reaction.
And that's what we're doing.
We're convincing a whole population of kids that they're unwell.
So let's say, let's take their argument at face value, they being the medical industry, that 42% of kids actually have legitimate mental health issues.
The treatment is not even working for people that might have legitimate issues.
So let's talk about both sides of it.
The sentence you just mentioned is kind of chilling that you're valorized to have a mental disorder.
I just have to stop there.
How did we get there?
Where does that come from?
You know, the mental health industry has just expanded so rapidly over the last few decades.
They've taken over more and more of American life and certainly all of child rearing.
And if you listen to kids today, they never say they're sad.
They say they're depressed.
They never say they had a rough time in middle school.
They say they have PTSD.
They never say they're worried.
They say they have anxiety.
These kids are swimming in the language of psychopathology.
They don't know that it's normal to go through a period and face some adversity.
They don't know that it's normal to face your fears and overcome them and that we all have fears.
They're constantly being told that that's your trauma and it's making them sicker.
And it really is the caretakers of society who I'd imagine are to blame.
Is it the parents in particular?
Is it the medical industry that are throwing out these diagnoses so loosely?
Who is mostly to blame?
It's a good question.
I think mental health experts writt large are mostly to blame.
They've written all the best-selling parenting books.
They've completely undermined parents' sense that they have any confidence in what they're doing, that they know what they're doing.
They've convinced a generation of parents that if they don't know about the amygdala of their children, they can't possibly raise a good child.
It's a ridiculous, it's a ridiculous assertion, but literally nearly all of them makes it.
And they've taught parents that they can never punish.
They can never hold kids to high expectations or high standards because that could be emotionally traumatizing.
It isn't true.
I wrote the book to show it isn't true and to try to stop the constant, you know, pushing around of parents by mental health experts.
Yeah, there is a bullying and there's a pushing towards it.
And but it's also, it's part of these campaigns that happen at school as well.
The parents themselves might just be raising their kids in the traditional way that they were raised, but then they'll go to school and they'll say that, you know, hey, this is mental health awareness week or, you know, and then it spreads almost like, dare I say, a social contagion, which that might make this book almost like a sequel to your original.
In a way, it is.
I mean, it's just a broader look at all the ways the mental health experts have convinced a generation of kids and their parents that they're not well and they're not up to the challenges of life.
And you said a social contagion, look, just like they spread and they did, the mental health experts absolutely participated in spreading the idea that teenage girls were suddenly transgender.
Now they're spreading the idea that they all have trauma.
And that's why in schools, they're doing social emotional learning.
The idea is you have to learn to emotionally regulate in a class.
What I did was I looked at this actual psychological research and the whole and the actual psychological research is if you wanted to make kids sadder, more anxious, and have less efficacy, less sense that they could do for themselves, you couldn't design a program better than what's going on in schools today, where the kids are constantly directed to sit around and talk about their bad feelings, focus on their bad experiences and dwell.
That's exactly the number one symptom of depression.
I want to dive into this.
I don't want to say it's narcissism, but it makes kids think about themselves and their feelings a lot more than duty and obligations.
Do you find that to be true?
It's absolutely true and it's totally unhealthy.
Sitting around and thinking about yourself is the worst thing we could be leading kids to do every day.
And people always ask me what would be better than social-emotional learning, which has many, I mean, the proven track record at this point of making kids sadder and more depressed and more anxious.
What can we do that's better than that?
And I say to them, literally anything.
Have them paint the gym, pick up trash around the school.
They could do any activity that isn't sitting around thinking about themselves, and it would be better than this.
Yeah, it's all that idea of what you ought to do to serve and this inward-facing trend.
Now, you mentioned something that I want to pinpoint.
I have no idea what you feel about this, but you mentioned in kind of a string of ineffective therapies.
I have no problem with mindfulness or meditation.
I actually kind of like it at times.
But the, let's just say, the premise of mindfulness is very inward-facing and it is very much about yourself.
That's a very difficult concept for maybe a 12 or 13-year-old to grasp.
Do you think that might be one of the you get what I'm getting here?
Is there an issue here of the general approach?
That's exactly right.
What I want people to know is that adults who go into any form of therapy or mindfulness or whatever, who have developed their own views of the world, their own sense of what they can handle, it's a totally different experience.
If an adult wants to see a therapist once a week and just have a non-judgmental space to talk about problems, by all means, they should do it.
But what I want parents to know is when you take a child and sign them up for therapy of any sort, they are not in a position to say, listen, I know my mom shouldn't have yelled at me, but I don't think I'd call it emotionally abusive.
I don't think I would call my parents toxic.
They're not in a position to know those things.
And so we're seeing things like family alienation at very high rates.
And we're also seeing therapists convince kids or teachers acting as therapists that they've had trauma.
They're buying into this idea.
And guess what?
They're exhibiting the symptoms because they've bought in.
This is such an important topic.
I see frequently.
It's the most suicidal, depressed, alcohol-addicted, and drug-addicted generation history.
And then the therapy you'd think would be somewhat effective.
Not only do you have an issue of diagnosing and people that actually might not have these issues then think they have those issues and it spreads, but then what we do to actually treat them isn't working either.
I want to encourage you to check out Dr. Abigail Schreier's both of her books.
I'm just a fan, to be honest.
They're so well written, so well researched.
Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Schreier, and also Irreversible Damage, which I believe was one of the most important pieces of literature to add reason to the transgender insanity that is enveloping the country.
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So let's talk about the therapeutic side.
Let's say somebody does have some legitimate depression.
They might have some anxiety that might be, let's just say, over-exaggerated due to culture, but let's just say there's something there.
Is the therapy itself is not effective.
It doesn't make people break through.
What did your research show from the benzodiazepines to Zolof to Prozac to Ritalin to run us through that, please?
Yeah, that's really important stuff.
So, let me just say, if you have a kid and you cannot stabilize the kid any other way, by all means, they may need therapy and they may need even these different medications.
If they're, you know, if you have a child who's anorexic, I'm not saying there's never a place for therapy.
Sometimes it's essential and even life-saving.
But you have to start that we have to reset our default settings.
So, the default shouldn't be to run to therapy and drugs because they can introduce risks of their own.
Even therapy introduces a known body of research, you know, well-researched risks like increasing anxiety, increasing depression, alienation from family members, and undermining a person's sense of efficacy that they can do in this world on their own without checking in with a shrink.
So, all those are classic side effects.
Now, the drugs, what are the problems with the drugs with kids?
So, every one of these is a different category, as you mentioned, and they all come with different risks.
But so, we can start with ADHD drugs.
So, these are stimulants.
The stimulants, by the way, you know, I'm not against ever introducing a stimulant.
The problem is what we've given kids is an unhealthy life, too much tech, too much, you know, they don't have enough exercise.
And then we put them in a classroom.
And the second a teacher says they aren't bolted to their seat, the teacher refers them.
And teachers are the number one source of referral for ADH diagnosis.
Pediatricians are handing out things like Ritalin to kids.
This is a stimulant.
It has, you have to worry about things like addiction.
It tends to work less well over time, meaning you'll need to up the dose to get the same effect.
And of course, maybe the worst part about it is a kid who is inattentive in school, but is left alone without unmedicated may learn to cope in various ways, like finding out what he's actually more interested in.
If you never even let them sit with that or try other things, you never know what the kid can overcome on his own.
And he'll always feel that he needs a drug to handle life.
Yes.
And also, what if the cure is worse than the disease?
And that is, it's a major issue, especially when it comes to, you know, young people that have developing brains.
We don't quite understand how some of these pharmacological interventions work.
We kind of do.
The Complex Side Effects of SSRIs 00:05:46
Like, I mean, SSRIs are incredibly complex drugs.
They can create addiction problems.
They also can create tons of other side effects.
And that people, I mean, Dr. Jordan Peterson had his own battle publicly, you know, with SSRIs and similar type drugs.
So is it your contention also in your research that most kids will grow out of some of these ailments?
Yeah.
And I believe that very often there are things in the environment that could be making them worse.
Look, let's take SSRIs.
So these are antidepressants.
As you said, we don't know why they work.
So it may be that they're capping all emotions, negative and positive.
You're stripping a child's emotional resources for handling life at the moment they're developing those resources.
This is not an adult.
This is a child.
You get in there and you delete their ability to have a sex drive when they're teenagers.
They won't even know what they're missing.
They'll just have a sense of numbness to their own lives.
We don't know why suicidality is a side effect.
Okay.
We just don't know, but it seems to be for adolescents.
The problem with SSRI is that with all the side effects and the weight gain and the whatever, suicidality, all the big risks, the biggest thing is you're putting a kid in an emotional snowsuit when he's just developing the musculature to his own life.
And let me tell you something.
We've all gone through hard times.
Okay.
A kid going through adolescence, that is a hard time.
But if you never give them the shot of handling that life on their own, handling heartache and disappointment and some amount of failure, which we've all lived through and overcome, they may never feel that they can do it on their own.
And that in some sense is the biggest tragedy of all.
I mean, look, you can also talk about the benzos, which are their own, you know, problems.
Yes.
Yeah.
But those are sedated.
I mean, those are used to largely sedate people and just calm down, you know, hospital patients sometimes that have major issues with tremors and so forth.
Yeah, benzos, I mean, they're highly addictive, as we know from the Jordan Peterson experience.
But the other thing is anxiety, depression, these things exist for a reason, believe it or not.
Now, I'm not saying if you have absolutely pathological anxiety and it's ruining your life, don't do anything about it.
Even for a child, you may need to.
But the thing is, with anxiety, it increases performance.
It helps us make clear memories.
The reason we remember our first kiss is maybe because of the anxiety that preceded it.
So there are very good reasons for these emotions and these feelings that we have.
Depression, by the way, you go through a period of depression.
Sometimes that may help you make a change in your life that needs to be made.
If you go in there and delete that feeling, you may never have the will to make an important life change.
So, you know, I'm not saying there's no place for them, but before we go in and do these radical things with our kids, we really ought to at least try to alter their environment and turn their lives upside down to give them a healthier environment.
Yeah.
And they're also, so let's talk about the medical side of this.
Do they acknowledge that these interventions are failing and that they might be doing far more damage than good?
It's interesting.
A team of researchers that I, you know, to quote in the book, and I interviewed several of them, they figured this out and they called it the treatment prevalence paradox when it comes to depression.
Across the Western world, we have been increasing prevalence of treatment.
Sorry, prevalence of the disease of depression has gone up with the increase in treatment.
There's greater access and awareness of depression than ever, and yet our treatments are clearly not working.
I argue that they're actually counterproductive, but they're clearly not working.
All this talk about mental health, you need to be focusing on your mental health, thinking about your mental health, thinking about your feelings.
It's the opposite of what we should be doing with kids.
Yeah, it's just the, is there a pill-pushing agenda?
Let me ask you this question.
Let me ask you this for me.
How many kids are currently on, let's say, aggressive pharmacological agents?
I would use SSRIs, benzodiazepines, Zoloc Prozat.
Is it the millions?
Is it tens of millions?
How many kids under the age of 18?
Do we know the answer to that?
You know, I don't know the answer.
I've seen some statistics and sometimes it's self-reporting and it's not clear how accurate they are.
What I can tell you is that, you know, it's not only gone up tremendously in the last few years, but the FDA just last year approved Lexapro.
This is a very strong SSRI for seven-year-olds.
So you see how we're starting to do that.
We do not quite understand how these drugs work.
And for a seven-year-old, that is just unbelievable to me.
Yeah.
So we're putting very, very young kids on major antidepressants and they're never going to know what it's what.
And we're seeing in college what we would expect, right?
Which is kids having basically nervous breakdowns over the slightest challenge, like being rejected by a friend or whatever, that sends these kids into a world of pain because they've never had to deal with it on their own.
It is something else.
Is there anything in your research of bad therapy that gives you hope?
Is there any good therapy that you came across?
There is good therapy.
There is stuff that gives me hope.
The number one thing that gives me hope is that parents can fix this completely.
They need to assert their own authority with kids.
Stop relying on these phony experts.
I wrote the book to give them all the ammunition they need to push back on the schools and push back on the mental health experts and take back the reins of raising their own kids.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Parents Fixing the Transgender Craze 00:13:25
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So, Abigail, I want to talk about your book, Irreversible Damage.
When you first started to research that topic, did you have any idea first the impact or the backlash you would receive and also the shelf life?
I mean, it is four years later, and we're still talking about it.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know with a book.
You come out with a book.
I had some indication that, you know, it would upset people to give parents the truth about what these interventions involved from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones.
But because Amazon right away would barred my publisher from even placing ads.
We were told in advance of publication that there would be no ads for me.
But I didn't expect the general giant societal backlash that I got, I guess, from, I shouldn't say societal, really from the mainstream institutions.
So the ACLU came out in favor of banning my book.
Libraries still to this day, most American libraries refuse to carry it.
Even when people will donate to the library, a library will refuse it.
So there was a campaign to advertise my book.
People, you know, dug into their own pockets to pay for ads to advertise the book.
These are parents.
It wasn't because of me.
They just wanted to do it.
And the billboard companies shut it down in response to the activists.
So there was a lot of effort to cancel the book and censor the book.
And no, I didn't predict any of that.
Target removed it from its offering.
So anyway, there's a lot, a lot of uproar.
So I want to dive into one aspect of it, and it is the title.
And I'm enjoying reading.
I'm not finishing.
I'm actually reading your book and Dr. Miriam Grossman's book in tandem together.
But it's an interesting approach.
And I hope people understand this.
It's about the transgender craze.
But on the cover, it says the craze seducing our girls.
It's specific towards young ladies, which we see with girls are actually far more susceptible to fall under the spell of this social contagion than boys.
Why is that?
Because girls socialize differently from boys.
Girls tend to co-ruminate.
That means they tend to talk about their pain together as a way of bonding.
And what that means is when you're co-ruminating with another girl, when you're taking on their pain, that's why social contagions spread among girls so often.
A boy, if a boy says to his friend, I feel depressed, the friend might say, let's go play basketball.
But a girl will say, tell me about it.
Oh, that's awful.
I feel sad too.
And that's the pattern that increases, although it makes for very close female relationships.
It can also spread a social contagion.
And that's what we saw with the transgender identification.
Oh, I feel like a boy too.
So in the book, you go through what this phenomenon is, what this craze is, and how we can fight against it.
And also how unsuspecting parents are awakened to find their daughters in the thrall of this.
I have a unique question for you, Abigail.
Four years later, where does this stand?
Has this accelerated more in the culture?
Have we made progress here?
Give us a status update four years post-publication.
So it's been amazing.
I mean, they shut down the clinic in England based on the, you know, exactly what the problems that I warned about in the book, the medical, the lack of oversight, the dangers of things like puberty blockers, the dangers of cross-sex hormones for kids, the complete lack of oversight of girls who are making this decision based on a tough time in adolescence, not based on any medical need, and the lack of indication that this prevents suicide, which was one of the many lies the activists told over and over.
This was the, you know, cure.
This was going to prevent a transgender teen from killing himself.
There was never proof of that.
There wasn't proof that gender, you know, transgender identification was a, you know, a reason for feeling suicidal, nor that it was the medications were the, you know, I shouldn't even call them net medications, the treatments, which were really reckless.
There was no proof that they cured suicidality.
So these were really dangerous and reckless interventions.
And today across Europe, they're curtailing their use because of a lot of the risks I warned about.
So to that extent, I'm really happy.
In this country, I can say that parents are much more aware of the risks.
And that's really what I wanted.
Yeah, they're aware of the risks.
Do you think that there is building consensus or can there be to try to shut down some of these gender affirming clinics?
And what exactly happens in these?
You talk about this in the book.
What exactly occurs in the conveyor belt or the assembly line of quote unquote gender affirming care?
Right.
So it starts with a therapist who very often parents sent a young girl to a therapist.
And this is what sort of made me think about my second book is that, you know, very often they were sent to a therapist for anxiety or depression, not for gender dysphoria, nothing to do with gender.
And they took their, you know, 11, 12 year old and decided she was high anxiety and maybe she needed to see a therapist or maybe she should talk to the school counselor.
And very often together with that counselor or mental health professional, the girl decided her problem was gender.
She decided she had gender dysphoria and the therapist immediately affirmed.
Now, there are conversion therapy bans in most states, which prohibit a therapist from disagreeing with the child's self-diagnosis.
So it's a tricky thing.
But very often, you know, the therapist did encourage the young person down that path.
And unfortunately, from there, it's very easy, even without parental approval, to start hormones and surgeries.
So in these states where there's a conversion therapy ban, the doctor's not allowed to do their job.
That's basically, I mean, if somebody comes in and they, for example, and they say, you know, I'm anorexic and I think that I'm 500 pounds and I'm going to go fast myself for the next month.
And the doctor's like, no, it's obviously you're anorexic.
Is the doctor allowed to tell that patient they're wrong?
Or do you have to affirm anorexia?
You do not have to affirm anorexia.
This was specific to LGBTQ.
And they sold it.
And look, across the political spectrum, you'll find that legislators voted for it, these bans.
It's not like it was, you know, one only one political side because it was sold under the idea that all they were banning was gay conversion therapy, which had had a really ugly history of methods that didn't work and were very cruel.
So then they said, oh, we're just banning that, but they slipped in gender identity language.
So now if you tried to convince a girl, you're not a boy, you're just having a hard time in middle school, that could run afoul.
They could argue of the conversion therapy ban.
They could argue that you were trying to convert a transgender child after being out of being transgender.
So explain to me, where did we all of a sudden have a divergence where people doctors affirm and not challenge in a clinical environment?
Isn't it the role of the physician to cure or to treat, not to affirm the ailment, especially when it comes to psychotherapy?
Right.
So the big problem is that it has been the role of therapists mostly to affirm kids and across the spectrum.
And this is what I write about in the book is in bad therapy too, is that you take a kid to a therapist.
It's not like an adult who shows up and says, I want to work on this.
I have a problem.
Let's go.
Like, I want to face this problem and get better.
An adult, a child is strong-armed by an adult into therapy.
So they show up and they're not necessarily ready to work on a problem.
It's a problem that the parents have identified.
So a therapist is put in a position of needing to pander to the kid to get their buy-in.
And very often that looks like affirmation, whether that's exaggerating your trauma of having a pet die or exaggerating the idea that you might really be a boy.
So in addition, Abigail, can you talk about how originally in the DSM, this was considered to be a mental health problem, but it is no longer in the sense where it's not considered a mental illness.
I don't really even know how they categorize it, but you're not allowed to say that, oh, this person has something wrong with them.
The problem is how we're treating that individual.
Can you help explain?
Sure.
I mean, I can try, but I'll just say it doesn't, there isn't a lot of internal coherence.
So for instance, gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in one's biological sex, it appears in the DSM.
That's the classic psychiatry Bible.
And it's the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.
That's the title, mental disorders.
And it's in there.
But then they go around, they sort of, the activists make a lot of headway between moving between, you know, what's actually the codes that you give insurance and what it's actually called and claiming it, no, it's a social identity and it's a minority group.
And therefore, you can never insult a minority group.
Well, of course, you shouldn't want to stigmatize a mental disorder.
There's no reason to make people feel bad.
But they sort of switch between, oh, this is a disorder that needs treatment and this is a beautiful sexual identity we should all affirm and celebrate.
So the activists tend to slip between the two and they do it for very good reason.
It's a way to avoid any criticism.
Well, and so let's also ask if there wasn't a disorder, why do you need medical interventions?
Why do you need surgery?
And so Abigail, let's talk about this.
In the last couple of years, we've seen a furtherance of the surgical interventions and talk about how a young girl could be going to see a therapist at age 13 for anxiety and she could end up on the operating table.
Is there a profit motive to get her through that conveyor belt?
Yeah, I mean, you're talking about someone who's going to become a lifetime patient.
So is there a profit motive?
Yes, but I don't tend to think the activists are largely motivated by profit specifically.
Some of them may be, but generally, they have bought into this ideology, this very pernicious mind virus that any child can be a boy or a girl, depending on their say-so, without any evidence.
And my job is to do this life-saving work of encouraging them on this path.
And that's what they've been doing.
They've been affirming them.
In the state of California, where I live, minors age 12 and up have the right to this gender-affirming care, the supposedly gender-affirmed care without parental knowledge or say or agreement.
And it's very easy in various states to get to start even with surgeries without parental permission at age 15 and up.
So, you're talking about a situation in which the activists and the activist medical establishment and the gender world has convinced doctors and others that this is an issue between a young child and her therapist or physician, and that they're allowed to go in and make these life-altering changes to her body without really any good reason, even a good, even good medical necessity.
So, they're doing a tremendous amount of damage.
And I'm just very, very happy that America has really woken up to it.
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Protecting Kids from Bad Values 00:04:46
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The American people are waking up to this transgender craze.
And if you check out the book Irreversible Damage and you work through it, you realize that at the root of this is a craze and a social contagion.
So, Abigail, what would you say is the parents' role here versus the political and the societal role?
And for parents that are listening for the first time, and we have several, we have a very big audience of parents, how should they prepare their children for encountering this craze?
Right.
So, the number one thing parents need in their own homes is authority with their children, which means I'm in charge.
I'm your parents.
I don't care what goes on, what other people say.
Fundamentally, I'm in charge.
And, and the second thing is, we've we have to admit, as a society, we've done a lousy job passing on our values to our kids, right?
They're showing up in college campuses, not knowing why we have free speech and not believing in it, right?
All kinds of values across American life.
We're not passing them on.
That's our job.
That's our number one job.
And yes, that includes telling kids what you actually think of gender ideology.
Don't hide that.
Sometimes good people are afraid to because they say they don't want to get involved.
Well, guess what?
There's an army of activists, including maybe teachers your kids will see, who can't wait to tell your kids what they believe.
So, you have to start by telling kids what you believe is true and what you know to be true before they get hit with all the nonsense, either in school or eventually college campus.
And then the last thing I would just say is: don't let these interlopers insert themselves between you and your kid.
Unless you absolutely need a therapist or a mental health professional, do not insert them between you and your child unless they absolutely need it.
And if they absolutely need mental health interventions, then research the therapist like you would any surgeon.
In addition, there's been a 5,000% increase in the amount of trans identifying youth.
We have seen that with proper parenting, cutting off the internet, changing passwords on phones, getting different friends groups, sometimes even moving, the trans identification just kind of fades out.
That puberty is not the problem, but puberty is the solution.
Can you talk about this, Abigail?
Sure.
Another thing that I always tell parents to do is remove for sure, get them off social media where they sit and they saturate in this identity.
You know, social media is no doubt a big problem, and it's a big vector of communicating all of these ideas from I have trauma to I'm really a boy.
I mean, it's communicating a lot of bad values and it's putting your kids in touch with a lot of bad people too.
So there's no question it has played a really ugly role.
But, you know, I interviewed this dad after my book came out.
And, you know, this is sort of a classic story.
He was a Catholic man.
He was, you know, he had let his daughter leave Catholic school because she wanted to go to an art school.
And now she was saturating this transgender identity.
She had been encouraged by her therapist.
And the man had called me because he wanted to know, well, do you have another therapist I can recommend?
And that's why I say parental authority is important because at the end of the day, you have to be willing to fight for your own kid.
Okay.
And an expert's not going to do what you're not willing to do yourself.
And passing on your own values to your kid, making sure if they're in an unhealthy environment, get them out of that environment.
I don't care if it's a fancy art school.
Get them out.
And you have to have a certain amount of confidence in your authority to do that.
And that's what I, you know, hope to encourage parents to have.
Abigail, you're doing such wonderful work.
Anything you want to plug in addition on your website, any other ways that our audience can support you?
Oh, I'm on Twitter at Abigail Schreier.
And, you know, I have a sub stack, The Truth Fairy, available.
So that's where I often publish.
Check out bad therapy and irreversible damage.
Get them as a combo pack.
Thank you so much, Abigail.
Great work.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thanks for everything you do.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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