Abigail Shrier and Glenn Beck argue that over-diagnosing children, harmful social-emotional learning programs, and excessive medication are damaging American youth. They cite CDC data showing one in six young children have diagnoses and criticize school surveys detailing self-harm methods as causing contagion. The hosts contend that "therapeutic parenting" undermines authority, while an addiction economy accommodates every whim. They advocate subtracting technology, restoring discipline, and prioritizing action over empathy to reclaim parental expertise and foster genuine resilience. [Automatically generated summary]
You may have already noticed this, but America's young people are struggling hard.
One in six American children between the ages of two and eight have already been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.
The American Psychological Association says that more than 20% of the teens have a serious problem with suicide.
They have seriously considered it.
A growing number of our young people are taking multiple psychiatric drugs at once, more and more.
They are telling us they are not okay.
The question is, why?
What has gone so drastically wrong?
Is it them?
Is it us?
Is it the iPhones?
What is it?
Maybe our kids' mental health is just yet another victim of the expert class inserting themselves where they don't belong and making a mess of our families.
We've listened to the experts when they told us how to raise our kids.
We listened when they diagnosed them as having some sort of disorder.
We listened when they offered solutions that clearly haven't worked.
Maybe it's time we tell the experts to take a hike.
My next guest is no stranger to controversial topics.
She became well known for her book, Irreversible Damage, where she exposed the transgender phenomena for what it was, a social contagion.
She is now being backed up by all kinds of research since that book came out.
She took a pounding for it.
Now she's been proven right.
She is now peeling back the curtain on our mental health establishment, and what she found, I think, will in some way shock you.
Her latest book is Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.
Please welcome journalist and best-selling author, Abigail Schreier.
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1-800-4-RELIEF-RELIEFFACTOR.COM Abigail, how are you?
I'm doing great.
It's great to see you.
Yeah, it's good to see you again.
How's the family?
We're good.
Thanks for asking.
How's yours?
Good.
I appreciate that you don't.
travel very much because of your kids.
I think that's remarkable.
Good for you.
Your new book is filled with things that I think, if you're a common sense person, they occurred to you.
But I also feel like people feel trapped in a way because we're dealing as parents, we're dealing with things we didn't deal with as kids.
And I often say to my wife, well, I tell you what my grandfather would say.
Right.
And that's not what the world tells you to do.
Right.
And that's, yeah.
Go ahead.
That's exactly why I wrote the book.
I write the book because, you know, a lot of us have common sense.
A lot of us have wisdom from our families.
And you know what?
It's good stuff, that wisdom, but we don't have the proof.
You know, people can, you know, conservatives, you often hear conservatives saying things like, I've been yelling this from the rooftops for years.
Well, that doesn't do very much good, unfortunately, sometimes.
So what I try to do is I go in, I do a full investigation.
I bring them the psychological research that is actually on the side of what our grandparents used to tell us.
And now I say, here, go.
I want to give parents the resources and also the metal to go in and say, I knew it.
I knew this was the right thing.
And I knew you all were trying to put one over on me.
And now I'm not going to let you.
Well, I tell you, the refreshing part of the book, for me at least, is the experts.
I mean, I think we went wrong as a society when we started holding experts up as, no, the experts say do this.
We stopped listening to ourselves.
And that's one of the bigger problems, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And especially when it comes to things that don't require expertise.
Raising good children, good people into good citizens does not require expertise and it doesn't require knowledge of the brain, which most science, you know, most of these therapists will tell you that it does.
And I went in and I looked at their, you know, often phony expert, you know, research on the brain or very, very limited, very, very crude.
And I wanted to give parents the resources so when that teachers and school administrations and therapists try to make them feel stupid or crazy, they know that they're in the right.
So what was the biggest shock that you found?
What were the things that just you either just thought, thank God I found this, I know this, or that shocks me.
I had no idea.
I think it would have to be the mental health surveys we're giving to kids, which are terrifying.
Honestly, I wouldn't, you normally use the words diabolical, but with giving kids a series of methods.
Have you tried this for self-harm?
Burning, cutting, choking?
Have you tried a choking game?
Here are some drugs.
Have you tried the following drugs?
Games?
And they use all the nicknames.
I mean, if you wanted to break down children, teach them the world is a dark place, give them the impression that everyone around them is engaging in self-harm or suicidal ideation or all kinds of drugs, these surveys would be a great way to do it.
You know, in page 148, how mental surveys hurt students, I read this and I was shocked.
During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stop doing some unusual activities?
During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously attempt suicide?
The past 12 months, did you make a plan about how you would attempt suicide?
Past 12 months, how many times did you actually attempt suicide?
If you're attempting suicide in the last 12 months, did any attempt to result in an injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse?
And then it goes on about feeling sad and empty and hopeless and angry.
My gosh.
I mean, this is so far away from a childhood that I had.
And I know things have changed, but our kids, why is they're suggestible?
Why is this happening?
And it's put out by the CDC.
That's what I want people to know.
It's put out by our national mental health organizations.
It's all across the country.
They're giving them in every school.
And I want parents to know something else.
At the bottom of these surveys, they often say that if you're, if this survey, if the questions cause you distress, maybe you should, you know, here is our suicide hotline.
So even the authors of the surveys know they aren't good for kids.
And, you know, that kind of stuff shocks parents.
But what I did was I tried to bring in the research to show that parents' better instincts, that this is not good for kids is exactly what our research on suicide and suicide contagion shows.
So give that to me.
Give that to me.
Yeah, so they took this amazing, it's called the Vienna Suicide Study, Subway Suicide Study.
And the reason was, is there was a spate of subway suicides in Vienna, Austria, in the 90s.
And what the researchers had found was that valorizing the subject of a suicide, explaining methods, details as methods, and repeated mention of suicide were three things that led to suicide contagion.
So they stopped doing it in Vienna.
They had all the media stop publicizing this suicide.
They were able to depress the rate of suicide by 75%, and they kept it down for five years, right?
What brought it back?
Did they forget about the lesson that they learned?
It's a great question.
I wonder if the media just stopped listening to the ban, stopped obeying the ban.
But they basically had all the media stop doing these things, and the suicide rate plummeted.
Well, we talk about that.
We talk about that with copycat killers.
We don't do that.
So why are we doing it with suicide and expecting that it would be better?
Well, I don't think we expect it would be better.
I think that our institutes of mental health in this country have a separate agenda.
I'm not sure why.
But the materials they're putting in front of children, the aggressive mental health interventions, and I show this in the book, are the opposite of what you would do if you wanted resilient and healthy kids.
They are breaking kids down.
I don't know why, but that is no doubt the effect of what they're doing.
You talk about, and this is so true, you talk about kids have monitors all the time and they're constantly being evaluated and watched.
You know, from just parents, you know, not feeling kids are safe or whatever.
They're monitored all the time.
And if you want somebody to do well at a subject, the last thing you do is you have somebody looking over their shoulder the whole time.
That just makes people nervous and anxious.
And, you know, and is that part of what our kids are feeling?
Absolutely.
Parents are tracking them on their phones.
I mean, one of the wonderful psychologists I interview, academic researchers that I interviewed is Peter Gray, who is a wonderful academic psychologist.
And he told me that in studies, when they do psychological studies on subjects, the way they introduce stress, if they want to introduce stress, is all they do is add monitoring.
And that's enough to create a stress condition for any subject.
So, you know, I think the, and you talk about this, I think the iPhone is a giant experiment that we're running on all of society, all over the planet.
We have no idea.
It says a lot to me that the people who make these things don't allow their children to have them, but they're pushing them for our children.
But that doesn't explain the increase in suicide alone, right?
Right.
It doesn't.
I mean, I'll give you another statistic.
You know, by 2016, according to the CDC, one in six American children between the ages of two and eight already had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis.
Now, two to eight-year-olds weren't on the iPhone.
And by the way, I'm no defender of the iPhone.
They are terrible.
Social media is awful.
And if we ban them, and certainly if we took them out of the schools, it would be an incredible help.
And I think it's a no-brainer that we ought to do that.
But does it explain why two to eight-year-olds were diagnosed at that rate?
One in six of them by 2016?
No, it doesn't.
They didn't have iPhones and they didn't have social media.
So why were they diagnosed with that?
How did that happen?
Is that just we're looking to find something in our children and somebody's willing to give us a diagnosis?
A few things.
So I think that parents were really uncomfortable asserting their own authority with children.
And they very much adopted what I call therapeutic parenting.
They always soliciting the kids' feelings, never punishing, always giving a kid options.
This is what they were told was healthy.
And they ended up with a lot of ungovernable kids.
And then the kids went off to school and they had never heard the word no.
And now you have a kid who the teacher can't control.
And so the first stop is, well, maybe there's something wrong with him.
Maybe he has oppositional defiant disorder.
Maybe he has ADHD.
And one of the things parents told me is that one year a teacher would suggest an ADHD diagnosis and the next year the next teacher would think they were great.
So the schools, of course, were getting involved in the diagnosis business, but they really didn't know what they were doing, of course, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
It really isn't their expertise, but they were nonetheless.
Because if you give a child a drug, it really does bolt them to their seat, depending on which medication you choose.
And it's unfortunately there's a conflict of interest there.
I've had really a lot of friends pull their kids out of school because the teacher or the school demanded that they put their child on drug, on a drug.
And go ahead.
Wow.
No, they feel completely at liberty to do that.
I mean, that alone is astonishing.
I mean, I'll ask you this, Glenn.
How many parents do you know have gotten this email from their school?
You know, we know the whatever the recent catastrophe is, the Uvalde shooting was traumatic.
You might not know how to talk to your children about it.
Here is what our staff, a psych staff suggests for talking to your children about, you know, the mass murder.
Well, you know, the school shooting.
They feel, they've all become parenting experts.
They're all telling us how to talk to our own children.
So can I tell you, I think parents sometimes feel overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed.
They're just trying to hold their head above water.
They feel very, very alone.
And I mean, I've had several suicides in my family.
My mom committed suicide.
My brother committed suicide.
I mean, just it's long pattern.
And so I'm very well aware of the signs.
I'm on hyper alert because it seems to run through my family.
And I had my son attempt suicide.
And I immediately felt like, I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do because the consequences are so high.
And the advice I'm so glad that I received was, he knows you're afraid of that.
So don't be afraid of that.
Life goes on.
And I thought that was insane at first, but he was right.
He was right.
Whoever told you that is exactly, that's brilliant.
I have had a few very rare therapists tell me that.
Most of them, of course, immediately get in there.
They diagnose.
They make the parents so anxious.
And you're right.
That is terrifying.
And what they do is they start with the medications.
And look, I'm not against medication.
There are people who need psychiatric medication.
There's no doubt.
But that person was right.
I've heard that from other people who say that, you know, kids can weaponize this too.
And cutting, often girls will weaponize cutting against their parents because they know it brings the entire household to a halt.
They know their parents love them and they'll do anything the second they give in to any demand.
The second they go down, they start with that.
So you're right.
And whoever gave you that advice was very wise because very often you let the experts in the door and they just go, they start diagnosing and they start with the medication and they don't stop.
I know, I know.
And as you point out in the book, this is going to be a problem.
I'm trying to remember.
He was the president of Google for a while, Schmidt.
And he said to me, this is probably 2009 or 10.
He said, Glenn, there's going to come a time when children are going to have to change their name because there's going to be so much information out there on them.
It will be almost impossible to go to a job interview.
And I said, how do you mean?
He said, it's inescapable, the information that's being gathered.
And it will happen in job interviews probably in the mid-2020s.
You'll start to see this real problem.
And here we are, and you talk about that in the book.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
You know, these kids, there's no question they spend way too much on time online, way too little time with each other.
I mean, one of the things I say in the book is: look, I'm no parenting expert for sure, but what we have done is we've given kids an incredibly unhealthy life.
And then when they are bummed out, when they are stressed out, we just pour in mental health resources, expecting it to fix them.
And it doesn't.
It often makes the condition worse because the problem is their life.
And, you know, I suggest that the real thing to do is proceed by subtraction.
Get some of the stuff out of your kids' life, all the unhealthy stuff, like way too much tech, and give them back the healthy stuff, the in-person stuff, the extended family, all the stuff we know is good for them.
It's so weird.
I don't carry a cell phone.
You know, I don't know.
I lived my whole life without one.
And if you really needed to get a hold of me in an emergency, people have, you know, but my wife won't give one up.
My kids tell me there's no way, dad, we can, we've got to have it.
No, that's not true.
Would you take the cell phone away from children?
My kids don't have them.
Good.
So, I mean, look, my oldest boys are 13.
So, you know, they haven't, they start high school next year.
We'll see what we do.
We haven't, we certainly aren't giving them the full smartphone, you know, whether we give them a flip phone or some version, but kids have done fine bumming calls from their friends when they need to.
I know.
And you know, there's so many around.
The argument is they're going to be, excuse the language, socially retarded.
They're not going to be able to function with all their friends.
It makes them weirdos, outcasts.
And tech is going to be such a huge part of their life.
Oh, it's the opposite, actually.
Undermining Child-Parent Relationships00:16:46
If you want to know the truth, sorry.
They're more socially adept because they have to talk to people.
They're way more.
They have to ask directions.
I mean, there's no question.
It's been a huge, I mean, the question is only how much strength my husband and I have.
The truth is, is it good for them?
It's not even a question.
Are you kidding me?
Right.
They have better attention spans.
They have better, I mean, it's definitely good for them.
And it's socially retarded.
Are you kidding?
Have you seen a kid who has a phone early?
No, I know.
There's nothing worse.
They don't make eye contact.
They, you know, can't sit through a movie.
They'll text each other sitting next to each other.
Right.
You're like to lean over and say something.
It's right.
You want to talk about socially backwards.
So, so there's no question getting that away from them.
And a lot of other things that are bad for them.
You know, The isolation of kids today from community, from higher purpose, from a sense that they're connected, from hearing their grandparents' stories and their, you know, cousins.
They need this stuff.
They need it because they're going to go through hard times and they need to know that their people got through hard times.
I was sitting with my wife's mom last night at the table and my kids were both out and she was just talking, just saying the stuff that my grandmother used to say.
And I so wanted my kids in the house because they have to hear that.
And you may have hated it when you were a kid because you're like, oh, gosh, that story again.
You know, if I heard one more story about the Great Depression when I was a kid, but that makes a difference to me now.
A great difference.
That's right.
You know, I realized something.
We stopped telling those stories completely.
You remember the meme that used to go around, like the joke, and it was on every greeting card.
You know, my parents walked five miles up the hill to school every day.
You don't even see that meme anymore.
And the reason you don't is people stop telling what they're, you know, maybe they exaggerated.
I don't know.
But we stopped telling those stories to our kids.
So now instead, what we do is attend to every minor hurt and worry they have.
It magnifies their worry.
And also they have no proof that they come from tough people, that people who have gotten through harder things.
You know what I mean?
They're going to need that.
I know they do.
I was struggling with some, you know, you know what it's like to stand up against the mobs today.
And I was having a bad time.
And I started doing some work on my family history.
And I found that my great uncle died in Andersonville, which was the horrid prison camp in the South during the Civil War.
And my great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War and was captured.
So they both went to Andersonville.
But that gave me this sense of, I come from people who stand.
I come from people who have been in the worst.
I mean, that's compared to the concentration camps of the 30s.
They endured.
They endured.
And it means something.
That's exactly right.
You know, I interviewed one of the people I interviewed was this wonderful Harvard medical school psychiatrist whose parents had survived to Auschwitz and, you know, other concentration camps.
And one of the, they survived in the sewer pipes in Poland.
They escaped to the sewer pipes.
And one of the things he told me was that not only does that, you know, has that story given him strength, but also one of the things that made his parents, that got them through, was memories of their families, that they would replay in their mind, these beautiful memories of their extended families, and just kept them going.
And he said, he sees young harvest, you know university students, and he says they don't know about their family histories.
Why is that?
Why have we stopped?
I think we decided we were going to stop burdening our young people with their you know, those stories.
Instead, we were going to focus entirely on them as unique and atomized individuals.
It was the opposite of what we would do if we wanted to actually give them a sense of well-being.
But we started treating them as so unique in the world, so precious, that we ripped them from the social fabric, we ripped them from the people they're connected to.
We didn't want to burden them with it, but we also didn't realize it would have strengthened them too.
I have to tell you um, because i've always felt my children are going to need oodles of therapy, because i've always treated them, you know, in appropriate ways.
Like adult, I treat them with respect um, and so they've gone all over the world with me, they've been with presidents and, but they're expected to behave and listen and contribute, if you can um uh, and I talk to him about the world that's going on and how different it is and that what's changing.
And I think my kids uh, now that they're, you know, 19 and 20 um, are stronger because of that than they can.
They can have conversations with anyone.
I I have no doubt that they are, because the thing is that's what's good for kids, skills.
Give them skills, put them in hard situations like here's a president.
You have to make conversation with whatever it is right and expect them to do it and have high expectations.
Then they'll go out in the world and they'll meet a new challenge and say, I can talk to my boss, I just talked to the president.
So, but is the problem?
Is the problem them or us?
Because, like you just said, I got to tell you man the, you know, Netflix or whatever is such a great break at times and you feel like a bad parent because you're like you know what, sit in front of the tv for a while it because you just need the break.
So is it us, where our parents or grandparents didn't get that opportunity to break, right we're.
We're in overload, right we all are.
I mean, you know everything can be ordered up instantly for us.
We are flooded with information, we are flooded with Netflix, as you say.
I mean, you know people have called it an addiction economy.
It really really is.
But but all that stuff we know and and, by the way, obviously I partake of it too But what we know, we have to proceed by subtraction.
We know it's unhealthy.
It's not actually healthy for us to order up any show any time of day or night.
And the reason it is, is it's accommodating our every whim.
And then we are less able to sit through boredom or anything that displeases us.
It makes us weaker in a way.
And unfortunately.
How do you do that in a now kind of environment?
How do you do that?
Well, I think there's a few things.
The easiest thing to do, of course, would be to ban phones during the school day.
We don't even do that.
I mean, that's a no-brainer, right?
Just don't let them text during the day when they're actually with their friend.
Right.
I mean, there is really no reason to be texting your friend while you're with your friend.
So that would be one obvious and very easy situation.
But the other thing would just be to, you know, reconnect them in person to people who care about them, who love them.
Make sure they see grandparents.
Make sure they have cousins around.
We took them away.
We took everyone who was a non-expert away from the child because we decided their child rearing wasn't expert.
So it was less good.
And we hired people.
The kids knew they didn't really care about them.
You always know that.
And in so doing, we made them a lot less resilient because mom got no or dad, whoever was in charge, got no pushback.
So there was no, we weren't subjecting kids to a range of different styles and approaches.
It was all one.
And it was all being directed usually by mom.
And usually she was directed by some mental health expert.
So, and increasingly so from the schools too.
Talk to me about, you know, subtraction of things that are harmful.
Increasingly, that's our school.
I mean, you know, you are, I think, vindicated here, especially with the latest reports coming out on your first book.
I mean, that is extraordinarily harmful to our kids.
And yet all of this stuff is being preached at school.
Can you do it with your kids in school?
Or is that too much of an influence of the negative?
It's a really good question.
I guess it depends on the school, but is school a problem?
Schools are not your friend.
And when you, they are not parents' friends.
And when they say that, oh, this, well, just having the mental health experts talk to your kids, they're not your friends either.
Right.
That's what parents need to know.
And why do you show me why you say that?
Well, because a few things.
First of all, the last book I wrote was all about an epidemic that was largely encouraged by school counselors, right?
That's what they would do.
They would affirm a child's transgender identity and deceive parents.
The school policy was and still is in many places to lie to the parents.
And as I show in the book, the social emotional learning exercises are very much the same.
The parents, they don't even call them parents, caregivers, that's what we're reduced to, are outsiders.
And who presides over it all?
The teacher, the school counselor, and they know best.
They are the trusted adults that are always talked about in the materials.
And it's the same sort of thing.
The effort to undermine child-parent relationships is real.
And I have to tell you, that's what I argue in the book would happen.
And after I finished the book, two studies came out.
Researchers in Europe were looking into the same things that I was claiming in the book.
In Europe, they were doing these social-emotional exercises with the kids in both Australia and the UK.
And two major reports came out.
This is academic research, peer-reviewed.
And they said that these techniques with kids, the coping mechanisms, the emotional regulation techniques were making kids sadder, more anxious, and more alienated from their parents.
And it's the same thing.
So explain that to me, the coping mechanisms.
Everybody thinks, oh, you know, just give them something to fidget with or give them, you know, a stress ball or they count to 10 and breathe.
Why are those so bad?
Well, because they start by saying, think about a time when you were sad.
Does anyone want to share a time when you were disappointed or let down or sad?
So now we're increasing what they call rumination, the really the number one symptom of depression, which is dwelling on a past pain.
Because in order to teach the mechanisms, you have to first to induce sadness in the group, right?
If there's happiness, there's nothing to teach them.
If you're asking about a time that was great in your life, there's nothing to teach.
So you start by inducing sadness in the class, which of course is bonkers.
But let me tell you something else.
Who's in charge of keeping a child well and safe?
The parents.
So inevitably, it tees up criticism of parents.
Why?
What was happening?
Well, my mom went out that day.
Or my mom didn't have time to look at my homework and I was really sad.
The criticism of the parent is almost inevitable because you're asking kids with this authority to talk about a time when they were sad, to share their trauma.
Well, whose fault is that that the child was traumatized?
So can I jump to this because there's another thing that was shocking to me in the book where Through SEL, they are asking, I can't remember, here it is, homework, I spy.
And seventh graders are encouraged to play a game that might be called Hero of the Soviet Union.
You're a private investigator, it prompts.
You've been hired by an unnamed source to spy on your family.
The source wants to find out all the various feelings that one or more of your family members have while doing activities at home.
You won't be able to talk to your family.
You don't want to blow your cover.
So you'll have to use your keen skills of observation.
And they're trying to find out from the kids through the parents' body language and the family's body language what's happening in the family.
This is like Nazis, or as you say, hero of the Soviet Union.
I mean, they're asking kids to spy on their families and report back.
And that's a direct quote from the social emotional learning materials.
And, you know, I like that exercise because it just makes explicit what all the others, it runs, it's a theme that runs through all the exercise, you know, so many of the exercises I looked at, which are, look, we're here to talk about your emotions.
Think about a time when you might be sad.
Oh, then bring it into class.
And remember that all these teachers and school counselors are mandatory reporters to child services.
So anything they hear about that sounds fishy to them, like parent yelling at them, which they, some of the materials indicate is abusive in their view, they can easily call child services on.
And that's how they're thinking.
They're encouraging children to think with them about whether their parents are doing a good job.
So let me ask you, and I don't know if you can answer this, but, you know, when medicine was introduced to put you under for a surgery, the surgeons didn't like it.
And the surgeons fought against it because at the time, what made a good surgeon was a fast cut.
Somebody who could go in and amputate a leg the fastest.
Okay.
Somebody who could go in and remove something the fastest.
It wasn't the best.
It was make it stop fast.
Okay.
So when they introduced ether, a lot of these doctors knew, wait a minute, I'm fast.
I'm not necessarily good.
I'm fast.
And so the standards changed and a lot of the doctors fought against anesthesia.
Wow.
Do you have any idea?
Are these, is this whole thing just self-perpetuating on what?
The stupidity on ego on what?
What is the motivation when you can show this stuff is harmful?
Right.
So I tried to go back and go through the psychological research to prove that it's harmful because it's not just our instincts.
I mean, what I wanted parents to know is not just common sense.
There's real data and real research showing that all of this is harmful.
It's exactly what you want.
All of these programs in schools, the social-emotional programs, the expanded psych staffs, the go-see the school counselor, and all the accommodation for kids who don't need it.
It's exactly what you would do if you wanted to make kids weaker, if you wanted to break kids down.
And you can't track motive at all.
I mean, because it's an industry.
Right.
I mean, it's grown.
I can only tell you that since 1986, nearly every decade has seen a doubling in our expenditure on mental health.
And the lion's share of that is going to young people.
It's going to kids and adolescents.
They have presided over the worst downward spiral of mental health that we've seen.
Counterproductive Mental Health Treatments00:03:58
And they've been, you know, working on us the whole time.
And that's the problem.
As I, you know, as I argue, the rates of incidence of problem, of disease, of disorder should be going down with increased treatment.
Instead, it's been skyrocketing.
And I don't think that's an accident.
I don't think the treatments are not only unhelpful, they're counterproductive.
They're making the problem worse.
Getting kids to constantly focus on their feelings, talk about their sad feelings, focus on each other's feelings.
They're creating a tyranny of feelings and they're tyrannizing themselves and tyrannizing each other.
So let me just play devil's advocate here for a second.
My father had some horrible things happen to him when he was young.
Horrible.
His father did things to him that just are unspeakable.
He never told anyone in the family until about 15 years before he died.
He told me because I asked him questions.
Dad, why were you so distant?
I remember a fishing trip.
And I said, that was just the weirdest, awkward moment of our relationship.
Do you remember that?
And he told me what happened on a fishing.
He remembered that.
And he told me what he was trying to avoid because it was such bad memories and I wanted to go fishing.
So he took me.
You know, there are some things that you should share and delve and open up about.
The old generation, World War II, they never talked about it.
Never.
Now everybody's pouring their feelings out.
Is there a happy medium?
Well, that's a question.
It's a good question.
Here's what I'll say, two things.
One is that even the most traumatized people who've gone through horrible things and have been in some ways scarred by it aren't necessarily helped by talk therapy.
Okay.
So it's not always a good thing to just get it out.
Sometimes people know that not talking about it is best.
I interviewed a wonderful man, Richard Bing, who works with ex-convicts in Plymouth, England.
And these people, these ex-convicts went through unbelievable abuses, children.
And he said sometimes the best way to help them is not by pushing them to talk about it because it's re-traumatizing.
And here's what I'm afraid of in the schools.
We're not helping the kids who didn't start out with problems because we're encouraging them to think of themselves as traumatized when they aren't.
And we're not helping the kids who were traumatized.
Why?
Because having a counselor or a school teacher casually ask you about your bad feelings right before your math test when you went through some serious pain.
You don't need a counselor who's going to take the summer off.
You may need serious intervention on an ongoing basis.
But having your teacher inquire about your past pain with the class is counterproductive for someone who actually went through something very hard.
Our American values are under attack.
Our schools are under attack.
Our families are under attack.
Our financial system is under attack from inside and out.
It's frankly broken.
When you have three gigantic CEOs, when you have the head of Citibank selling his shares, when you have Bezos selling his shares in Amazon, and there's three of them, I can't remember what the third one is.
They've sold to the tune of $9 billion of their own shares.
What do they know that I don't know?
Balancing Needs Amidst Attack00:06:22
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Now, back to Abigail.
This is, I'm so glad you are the one who is doing all this research because this is a hard case to make to moms and to people who are naturally nurturing.
You know, it's one thing for a guy to say, buck up, buttercup.
It's another for a mom to say, no, this is not good.
How do you convince the people who really just think they're doing the right thing for their kids by keeping them in swaddling clothes?
Well, here's the problem.
It's not that we need to change every mom, okay?
The problem is there's no balance.
The dads, no one is telling them you're fine, shake it off.
No one is saying you'll live.
Remember, we used to hear that all the time, you'll live.
Every adult used to say it.
Now no one says it.
Not even their soccer coach is allowed to say it.
So the problem is not is not that moms are over coddling or dads are over coddling.
It's that there's absolutely no balance.
And the dad is very often told, you don't know what you're doing.
I know.
I talked to the expert.
You have to get on the program.
And in my mind, the biggest change in the last generation has not been moms.
It's been dads.
They don't feel like their way, their instincts are good.
They feel like they're inexpert and backwards.
That's what they've been told.
And they're afraid to do any, you know, give the kid any balance.
So it's interesting because I have a wonderful wife.
We have a great relationship and we talk about everything when it comes to the kids and disciplining the kids.
And we both feel that there is to everything there is a season.
Sometimes dad needs to handle it.
Sometimes mom needs to handle it.
Mom doesn't understand how to handle the boy.
And I don't necessarily understand how to handle the girl because I mean, everything, when I say something to my daughter, my wife sometimes will look at me like, what the hell are you even thinking?
I don't know.
And she does that to my son.
My son will walk out of the room and I'll say, what the, that's just, that plays into everything.
It is, you know, and it takes that balance.
You have to have that balance of no, but I love you.
Right.
But yeah.
Exactly right.
It never needs to be cold.
The idea that if you tell a kid no, we're going back to some era of the 50s or whatever imagined era where parents were authoritarian and cold.
No, these kids never hear the word no.
All the gentle parenting therapists are telling parents, never say it.
It's cruel.
Never punish.
That'll cause emotional injury.
These kids are never being told you'll live.
And the problem is kids don't know.
They're looking to parents to decide, should I cry now?
Should I lie on the field or should I try to get up?
That's so great.
There's nothing better than when you're a parent.
You learn this quickly.
Kid falls and you go, who just fell down?
And they laugh.
You say, oh my gosh, they immediately cry.
They do look to you.
It's amazing.
Exactly.
That's exactly.
So the experts are out there and they are growing and growing in power and stature.
And yet you are proving that they are part of the problem.
Like the American Pediatric Association.
Where the hell were they during COVID?
Exactly.
Exactly.
The mental health experts who now hold themselves as the solution to the problem had nothing to say when we were heading into a second year of lockdowns for these children.
And by the way, it was obvious.
Every parent knew it.
Parents protested and they were ignored.
But you know what?
The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, School Counselors Association, you know what they've been preoccupied by?
That's what they had time to lecture the public now on.
Now they think there's the solution to kids' mental health problems when they had nothing to say about the most foreseeable catastrophe.
How is this affecting us?
Because I just thought about this today.
This week, the State of the Union was happening and they're going to talk about IVF.
And I thought, wow, we're in a psychological war with China.
There are people that want to go to war in Ukraine.
Our economy is falling apart.
Kids are killing themselves.
We've got fentanyl across the border.
Times Changed, But Kids Suffer00:03:00
And you want to talk about what?
Not that it's not important, but are you kidding me?
We're not teaching critical thinking and we're not teaching priorities.
It's a big problem.
I couldn't agree with you more here.
Just, you know, I think that's why the group that I trust the most is parents.
They're the only ones with skin in the game.
They're the only ones who are laser focused.
They're beaten down.
They're beaten down.
That's right.
But I write for them.
I mean, that's what I try to get my books into the hands of parents so that they can go in and whatever decision they want to make, at least they have more information.
So what is the difference in the generations far as Generation Z disconnecting from the parents, yet living in the house, you know, not paying for it, not even getting a driver's license.
It's a different world.
And the tendency is to say, well, it's a new generation.
I've thought of this a million times.
My grandfather, he would do things and say things that we'd all go like, he's just grandpa.
Okay.
Because times changed.
And now I'm wondering, am I just out of step and all of this stuff has moved past me?
And you can't say, suck it up, put the damn phone away, go outside and find some rocks and some sticks and build something.
You know, I think that there's no question times have changed, but the problem with this generation is it's so manifestly suffering.
And more importantly, they're not even proud of themselves.
They think they're weak because the truth is, look, hairstyles may change, fashion may change, but a man, a young man or a woman who's living at home with parents because she can't hold down a job and there's nothing wrong with her.
She's living, you know, the number of young people, 18 to 25, who are living with their parents choosing to is alarming.
And it's because, you know, even with our low unemployment, they don't want to leave the house.
They don't want to take on adult responsibilities and they're not really proud of themselves either.
That's the thing.
When you have capacity, when you can do things in the world, when you feel efficacious, you also feel good.
I mean, as I say in the book, you know, adulthood is actually the cure for adolescent angst.
So when we help them avoid adulthood and all responsibilities, we're really doing them a disservice.
Adulthood as the Cure for Angst00:15:21
That same therapist told me, start adopting the phrase, huh?
That's going to be interesting to see how you work that out.
And it takes All of the responsibility that they're trying to shove on you and you say, no, it's your turn now.
You got to do it.
And I'm going to have a good time watching you figure that out because I know you'll come up with a solution.
Good luck to you.
Well, you know, it's also a way, I love that.
And it's also a way of telling your kids, I believe you can.
Yes.
See, when you rush in to solve every problem, what you're telling them is, this is above your pay grade.
You can't.
And you must always check in with me.
Can empathy make us mean?
Yes.
Yes, it can.
It goes along with, and there's great research on this, empathy goes along with an amazing cruelty to the out-group.
So it preferences the feelings of the in-group or the, you know, whoever the victim is at the expense of the out-group.
And in fact, there's a wonderful academic psychologist, Paul Bloom, who wrote a wonderful book about this called Against Empathy.
But what he says in the book is that if you make fairness your guide, you can treat everyone fairly.
But if you make empathy your guide, we only have the ability.
We're only built to empathize with one or two people at the same time.
We can't do it.
So what it often goes along with is great cruelty to everyone else.
That seems to be what is happening throughout the world.
They're teaching equity.
They're teaching social justice.
And I mean, I see it now on the streets with people who will just say, you know, all those people just need to be rounded up.
You know, they're just really, they're really a problem and they just need to go away.
You know, I had somebody on the air.
This is years ago, but I always use it as an example, but it's happening now.
A guy who was a Palestinian called my show right after September 11 and said, look, we wouldn't have a problem with all these Jews if there just weren't all those Jews.
And I empathize with the Palestinian people.
I empathize with the people that are now homeless.
But I also look at this and you have to say, you have to have a right or wrong first.
You have to know, I'm sorry, you are paying a price, but the Germans also paid a price because they were putting people in ovens.
And until you stop that behavior and you all look at each other and go, we shouldn't vote that way anymore.
I can't help you.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
You know, the problem with therapy in general, a therapeutic or empathetic approach, is that it's amoral.
That's the whole point of therapy.
It's non-judgmental.
And if that is your only guide, and I'm not saying therapy can never be useful, of course it can.
But if that is your only guide, if empathy is your only guide, then you're going to lead to what we're seeing now.
We're seeing now stores in San Francisco that have no Zionists allowed sign, which is the same thing as saying no deal.
Believe it or not, believe it or not, that's not San Francisco.
That's Salt Lake City.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, that's what I'm saying.
We're seeing this across the country and they have tremendous empathy.
What they don't have is decency.
So can we talk on a larger scale?
I've seen a lot in my life.
I'm a wannabe historian and self-educated guy.
Just read a lot and study history.
I see the patterns and the cycles that repeat.
And I think we're coming to the end of this cycle where we'll start to swing back.
Now, usually you don't without real tragedy, but people are starting to wake up some and go, you know, none of this is working.
What are we doing?
But I don't know if we can do it in time.
Are you optimistic about society and the future of where we are as a people and a civilization?
You know, I'm optimistic about some of it.
Yes.
And here's the thing.
A lot of our biggest problems we can solve.
So the way kids are being raised, we can fix that.
That's really easy.
It starts in your home and you can absolutely get the bad influences out.
You know, obviously we have certain problems in the country.
We have this open border right now.
I don't know if we remain unserious about that.
I just don't know how we won't end up looking like Europe.
So with this open border, we know that there are people coming in that wish us ill.
It took 19 hijackers.
If we have another terrorist attack and it's a bad one, I could see good people just saying, make it stop.
I don't care how you make it stop.
Make it stop.
And, you know, empathy and compassion and reason and justice and all of that stuff goes way out the window.
And you're seeing this anger and unwillingness to use reason.
That's what concerns me.
And we're seeing this, honestly, all this, you know, the climate hysteria that you see on the left, where parents were so working their children up about the world ending.
And honestly, the parents needed mental health care in many cases.
I mean, you know, there's an incredible study that came out from Gene Twangi showing that conservative boys from, sorry, boys from liberal families had worse mental health than girls from conservative families.
Why?
And so we don't know why.
There are a lot of theories, but clearly a few things.
One, it's clearly environmental.
It's clearly what we're surrounding them with, right?
It's also clearly not social media.
Girls are on a lot more social media than boys, and that's true of every kind of political family, you know, whatever the family is.
Boys are more suicidal in liberal families than conservative girls.
Yes, in terms of anxiety and depression, the girls from conservative families are doing better.
Now, there are a few reasons that might be.
One, parents are much less likely to hand the family over to a mental health expert and bring a mental health expert in the door.
Okay.
So there's that.
But also, you know, religion, sense of higher purpose, all community, all things we know are good for kids.
These aren't expensive.
See, that's what I'm optimistic about.
All of these solutions don't cost anything.
I know.
It doesn't cost anything to keep a phone from your child.
It only costs it, you give it to them.
So it's, yeah.
No, go ahead.
So the biggest things we can give them, grandparents, independence, genuine independence, teaching them a skill and then having them go out and use it.
Whatever it is, all these things that are so good for them, they actually don't cost any money.
And we can do them easily ourselves.
And you say, look, we're sending kids off to these schools and God knows what's in the school.
And that's true.
And some parents may want to just pull their kids out of school.
But you know what we can do?
We can make sure that before our kids go off to school, they know what we believe.
They know what's true.
If you arm them with that, you're already giving them a leg up.
And I have told my kids, look, sitting around talking about your feelings is just a way to make you sad.
You're fine.
I wanted to talk to you about religion and its role.
You said that they have to have something bigger than themselves, but the schools are actually saying social justice.
It's bigger than you.
Racism, bigger than you.
You have to stop caring so much about you and solve this.
Global warming, it's bigger than you.
Why doesn't the bigger than you work there?
And it does many times with God.
Because what they're doing is marinating in a victimhood, right?
So either the victimhood of my diagnosis, the victimhood of my white, of the white oppression, the victimhood of my gay identity, LGBTQ plus identity, whatever it is, it's incapacitating.
All of those identities are saying to a kid, you're limited.
You can't.
You're oppressed.
It's extraordinarily unhealthy.
It's the opposite of what you would do if you were, say, in favor of a liberal movement or the civil rights movement and you wanted to make a positive change in the world.
That's very, very different from sitting around saying, everyone's oppressed you.
Now let's take to the streets and talk about how the world's going to end.
Yeah, I think you're right on that.
I tried to swear off the word evil because I think it's thrown around too much.
There is evil and it's identified.
October 7th, that was evil.
But I couldn't think of another word when it came to an ideology that was preaching there's no forgiveness, there's no way back, and you won't make it unless you stop this.
It's just evil.
It just destroys people.
I think that we're getting, there's a lot of nihilism on the left, but unfortunately, there's a growing amount of gloom and doom on the right as well.
And there is this increasingly strong, you know, you see it in the Andrew Tate type of things where it's very dark and it's turning people against things like marriage and family and the ideas we should give up on all those things.
Well, those things are ultimately the best things in life.
Yes.
And telling people to give up on this country when it's done such remarkable things for all of us is really not a great message for kids.
And it's not right.
I'm sorry.
It's not the right thing to do.
I agree with you, which brings me back to action-oriented and state-oriented.
Talk about that.
Sure.
So there's a reason that the best football coaches at halftime say, let's focus on the game ahead.
Here's what we have to do.
You do this.
You go do this.
You cover him.
Whatever it is.
They lay out a plan and they focus every player on the task ahead.
Why?
Because it turns out if you have a task or a goal orientation, you are more likely to complete it.
But if you adopt the opposite orientation and they say to kids, so how are you doing with your parents' divorce at halftime?
If you focus on your own feelings and state, you are less likely to be able to complete any task.
That's what our schools are doing to kids in the middle of the day.
They're asking kids, tell me how you're feeling.
We're just doing an emotions check-in.
How are you feeling right before the kids have to do something really hard, like take a math test?
It's the opposite of what we should be doing if we want them to actually be successful.
And everything in society is, it used to be action-based.
I mean, I remember, you know, a pout or something.
My mom would say, clean your room, you'll feel better.
You know, go out and do something.
Go out and make something, produce something, make somebody happy, do something.
And now it's all me, And you get trapped in that to the point where you can't take action.
You're just paralyzed.
Exactly.
I mean, nobody's saying that if you have a broken, a kid with a broken leg, you tell them to keep playing soccer, right?
So nobody is saying that.
The point is for minor injuries or minor disappointments, telling a kid to go out and do something is an incredible way of actually lifting them up.
And every study has showed this.
The recent, most recent study was that I think came out a week or so ago, was that dancing does more for your mental health.
It does more for moderate to mild to moderate depression than antidepressants or therapy.
Getting out and moving, any exercise is remarkably good at lifting your mood.
And instead, we're giving kids an unhealthy life and then we're putting them on a series of antidepressants.
It's not helping.
So I remember I didn't really, because we didn't label things when I was growing up, riddled with ADD.
I didn't know it, didn't care, didn't make a difference.
And I think I was probably 35 when my staff finally, we were talking about ADD in the news.
And I'm like, bunch of hogwash.
And they said, Glenn, you know somebody that has ADD like crazy.
And I'm like, who?
And they all said, you.
And so we had a doctor, I'm like, oh, I know, had a doctor come in and analyze on the air.
And, oh, you got like three questions in it.
He's like, you are a case study for ADD.
And so one of the doctors at NYU was writing a book about ADD and how you can either look at that as a blessing or a curse.
And it's a blessing if you adapt.
If you're giving your kids medication, which by the way, I tried medication for ADD.
It'll screw with you so many different ways.
Your kid doesn't know what sides of his personality is good and what's bad and what to shave off.
Never give that stuff to your kids.
And then, and so one day the doctor said, explain your day.
How do you do your job?
And I explained what's in front of me, what's in my ear and everything else.
He said, don't you realize people with ADD either end up under a bridge or they're very successful because they've learned how to process so much stuff all at once.
We're taking blessings and making them into curses.
Turning ADHD Strengths Into Success00:02:18
I love that.
What you just said is perfect.
That's exactly right.
That's exactly what I talk about in the book.
The number of people who are wildly successful with untreated ADHD is shocking.
Shocking.
Now, that doesn't mean you don't do, you know, you don't adapt in certain ways.
Handing your kid a phone all the time, you know, to play on YouTube when they already are having a trouble with attention is probably not great.
You know?
Right, right.
But I'll tell you something else.
You know what they do in other countries?
This is amazing.
I interviewed this wonderful woman who's a cross-cultural psychologist.
And she showed me pictures of classrooms in China and Russia and other countries.
And you know, they're completely bare.
And do you know why?
Because they want all kids to focus on the teacher at the front.
So there are these bare classrooms with the only interesting thing is maybe the alphabet at the front of the room.
What we do in America is we create child's classrooms, looks like Mardi Gras celebrations, right?
And then you have kids with attention spans.
Well, I mean, in my kids' classroom, they had a working traffic light that would go from red to yellow to green.
I'm not saying, you know, that wasn't fun, but I'm just saying like we give these kids these crazy environments and then we're shocked when they can't, you know, pay attention.
Whereas we could do more to help them, but in any case, you're right.
These things become amazing strengths.
See, there are no quirky people in the next generation.
They all just have a mental health diagnosis.
Abigail, thank you so much for all of your hard work.
Thank you for being brave enough to do the things that you've done and really put yourself out there.
You are, in my book, you are a true, courageous woman who will be remembered for a long time.
Thank you.
That's so kind of you to say it.
It's always great to talk to you, Glenn.
It's great to talk to you.
The name of the book, read it.
You will feel vindicated, but you'll understand why, and you'll be able to teach it to others.
Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Schreier.