Leonard Sax critiques modern parenting’s shift toward "gentle parenting" and child autonomy, citing 2016’s The Collapse of Parenting as a turning point. Extreme cases—like a mother blocking her sick daughter’s exam or refusing to remove a phone worsening sleep deprivation—highlight failures in parental authority, backed by studies linking authoritative styles to better outcomes. He ties teen mental health crises (U.S., UK, Canada) to smartphones and a "cult of fame," where UCLA found fame eclipsed morality in TV messaging by 2017. Sax rejects gender fluidity claims as biologically false, citing Stanford’s brain activity research and Dr. Hillary Cass’s NHS report halting transition therapies for lack of evidence, urging parents to reclaim traditional roles over progressive peer-driven norms. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Dr. Leonard Sachs.
I met Leonard a couple of years ago, I guess, at a conference and was absolutely fascinated with his ideas about parenting, especially about fatherhood, the way he looks at the problems that boys and girls are having.
And I think at this moment, this has got to be one of the most important topics out there.
I think the culture is shifting.
I think I think and hope it is shifting for the good, but obviously it doesn't shift and it doesn't change if we don't change it in our homes where the future is created.
Leonard Sachs is a board certified family physician psychologist.
He's the author of The Collapse of Parenting, Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge.
He's visited more than 500 schools worldwide.
He's appeared on major radio and television programs, including the Today Show, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NPR's weekend edition.
But now he has finally made it after climbing that scale to the Daily Wire.
It's great to see you, Leonard.
How are you doing?
Thanks for inviting me.
No, it's a real pleasure.
So this is Collapse of Parenting is a book you brought out before, but it's a new edition.
And you say that things have changed and that they've actually gotten worse in that time.
So first of all, how long a period of time are we talking about?
And can you just talk about some of those changes, how things have gotten worse?
Sure.
So the first edition came out January 2016, and I'm proud to report was New York Times bestseller.
But yeah, things have gotten, things have gotten a lot worse.
So Trinity United Presbyterian Church hired me to do two days of workshops for parents recently.
And I have a few fans, people who turned out for 12 hours at Leonard Sachs over two days.
And you do that, you get to know some of these people.
And I was talking with this young woman who's a teacher, and she and her husband have been trying to get pregnant for three years.
And they finally succeeded.
And she is pregnant.
And she's very excited about that.
And she was talking to one of her coworkers, a fellow teacher, didn't know real well, but she's very excited.
She's telling everybody.
And she said to her coworker, she said, we just found out I'm having a boy.
And her coworker said, don't you think you should let the baby decide?
So this is Orange County.
That's Southern California.
But this is a thing now.
This is really spreading nationwide.
It's not just Southern California.
And, you know, that really was not a thing nine years ago when I was writing the book.
And it is a thing now, not just in California.
You'll find this in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and really across a big chunk of the United States now, where so many parents now think good parenting means letting kids decide.
Gentle parenting is really a thing now across pretty much half the United States.
Gentle parenting means letting kids decide.
Well, I mean, we can argue about the definitions.
There's a lot of different definitions.
I'm a family doctor.
I encounter this almost every day.
I'm in the office.
And so the new edition begins with a story of something that happened in the office recently.
So mom brings her six-year-old daughter in, and the girl is sick.
She's sick.
She's got a fever of 102.
Mom explains she's got a sore throat, doesn't want to eat anything.
She's visibly ill.
She's flushed.
She's ill.
So mom has told me the story.
I say, okay, time take a look.
Would you please open your mouth and say, ah?
And the daughter shakes her head, no.
And I say, okay, mom, looks like I'm going to need your help here.
Would you please ask your daughter to open her mouth and say ah?
And mom says, her body, her choice.
Okay.
No.
My body, my choice has been a longtime slogan of the abortion rights community.
More recently, it was adopted by activists opposed to COVID vaccines.
Mom is using that slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me, the examining physician, to look at her daughter's throat.
Now, that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting.
That's why I chose to put it in the opening story.
And incidentally, the publisher allowed me to read the audio book.
First time ever, they allowed me to read the audio book.
And if you download the free sample, that's the story that we chose to lead with.
So that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting.
Look, parenting only works if parents have authority to teach the child.
Otherwise, it falls apart.
And that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting.
A parent who has completely abandoned her authority to the detriment of the child.
How am I supposed to make a diagnosis if I can't look at the kid's throat?
There's a lot of reasons kids have a sore throat and fever.
But what is much more common is the parent who is unsure of their authority.
So another example from my own experience as a family doctor.
Kid is not paying attention in school off the chart on the Connor scale.
So Connor scale is a standard thing that teachers use to determine how inattentive a kid is class.
Kid is not paying attention in any class.
Parents take the kid, the child psychiatrist.
Child psychiatrist says, well, it looks like kid has ADD.
Prescribes Vyvance, very popular medication.
And Vivance is tremendously helpful for this kid.
Doing great.
But kid is now jittery and has no appetite and has palpitations.
So parents saw something I wrote for the New York Times about the dangers of these medications and brings the kid in to me for a second opinion.
And I do a careful sleep history, which this particular psychiatrist neglected to do.
I asked the kid, do you have a phone in your bedroom?
Well, of course, doesn't everybody?
Were you on your phone last night?
Well, sure, of course.
Isn't everybody?
What were you doing last night?
I was scrolling through TikTok.
Well, when did you go to bed?
Like midnight after midnight.
So this girl is getting six hours of sleep.
She needs eight or nine.
She's sleep deprived night after night.
She's not paying attention in class.
Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD.
There is no Connor scale or Vanderbilt interview that can distinguish ADHD of the inattentive variety from sleep deprivation.
Vivans, Adderall, they're tremendously helpful because they're amphetamines, they're speed, they compensate for the sleep deprivation.
But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not Schedule 2 amphetamines.
So I say to mom, okay, you got to take the phone from your child at nine o'clock, the latest, so that she can get a good night's sleep.
And mom says, I couldn't take her phone.
She totally freaked out.
And we're talking about a 12-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl.
That's very common.
The first example, the mom who said her body, her choice, that's very unusual.
The second example, the mom who says, I can't take my phone from my, I can't take the phone from my 12-year-old.
That's really common.
And that's also what I mean by the collapse of parenting.
Parents who are unsure of their authority, parents who cannot exercise their authority.
And the result is kids who are struggling, kids who aren't getting the sleep they need, kids who are anxious and depressed.
And again, a big chunk of the book is showing how so many of these problems that we're seeing right now, kids who are anxious, who are depressed, who are overweight.
So many of these problems can be tried directly and clearly to parents' failure to exercise their authority.
But the emphasis of the book is on empowering parents to do their job, especially parents of faith, showing how Deuteronomy 6, Proverbs 16, there's so many clear messages of scripture that this is your job as your parent.
If you are a parent of faith, if you are a Jewish or a Christian parent, you are called to do this.
I have a presentation for parents called evidence-based parenting, which could also be called biblical parenting, because the evidence, the longitudinal cohort studies show that the authoritative parent, that kid is going to have the best outcomes, but the authoritative parent is also the biblical parent.
And what I show in the book is that if you're doing your job as a parent, your kid is going to flourish.
But what has happened is that parents are not looking to the research.
They don't know it for the most part.
And that's, again, the mission of the book is to share that research.
Instead of looking to the research, they're looking to the New York Times and National Public Radio.
And unfortunately, the New York Times and National Public Radio, I cite a column in the New York Times.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a longtime columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column for the New York Times on enlightened parenting, in which she asserted that the enlightened parenting, enlightened parenting, according to Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times columnist, enlightened parenting means, and I quote, setting your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong.
And if in so doing, if in so doing your child becomes a stranger to you, then so be it.
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American Culture's Toxic Shift00:06:08
I have to say, you are on the front lines of this because it would drive me insane to have parents talking like that.
It is amazing what you can convince people of being true.
You know, you mentioned this thing about cell phones, about a child with a cell phone at night, which is even I put my cell phone away from me at night.
I don't sleep much at all.
But, you know, I interviewed Jonathan Haidt, really interesting guy.
Always enjoy his work.
And he's kind of put this at the center of this mental health crisis that we seem to be having.
But you very quickly say, you know, the problem with that reasoning is that the mental health crisis is not universal.
It's not happening everywhere.
Is it only happening here?
I mean, where is it happening?
Yeah.
So as I pointed out in one of my recent essays for the Institute for Family Studies, there's a key point that Professor Haidt neglected to mention in his book, The Anxious Generation.
As he points out in his book, this rise in anxiety and depression is not confined to the United States.
It's also happening in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Australia.
But all those countries are countries where people speak English.
It's not happening in Greece.
It's not happening in Russia.
And we know this.
We've got good data on this.
Kids in Greece and kids in Russia are just as likely to have smartphones.
They have social media.
But there has been no rise in anxiety and depression over the same period of time where we've seen this huge rise in anxiety and depression for kids in English-speaking countries.
And that strongly suggests that the smartphones and the social media are vectors, but not causal agents.
So those are terms I'm borrowing from medicine.
And when I speak to parents, I use the example of malaria.
So malaria, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Anopheles mosquito is the vector.
It spreads malaria, but it's not the causal agent.
The causal agent is the parasite, the microorganism, Osmodium falciparum.
The mosquito spreads it, but it's not the cause of it.
The smartphone, the social media spread it, but they're not the cause of it.
The cause is American popular culture.
Kids in Greece and kids in Russia don't get it because they're not exposed to the causal agent.
So what is it?
And this is what John Haidt is missing.
John Haidt is an atheist who lives in Manhattan, and he loves American popular culture, and he talks about how much he loves it.
And he doesn't see it because he's immersed in it and he loves it.
He doesn't understand how toxic American popular culture is.
So what is so toxic about American popular culture for teens?
This is what I'm really focusing on in my book, The Collapse of Parenting.
There's a couple things that are toxic that are newly toxic.
Because again, John Haidt's big thing is what's happened in the last 15 years?
Okay, what's changed about American popular culture in the last 15 years that has made it so toxic?
Well, there's two things I think we can focus on in the few minutes we have.
And again, I'm not guessing.
My brand is evidence-based.
I'm always going to be, I got over 400 scholarly papers I'm thrown at you in this book.
So one is a study from UCLA.
Scholars at UCLA looked at the most popular TV shows targeting children and teens in the United States from 1967 through 2017.
And they quantified these shows in terms of what are the shows teaching in terms of what's important, what matters.
From 1967 through 1997, they found great consistency in terms of what's important.
Most popular show in the United States for children and teens in 1967 was the Andy Griffith Show.
1977 was Happy Days.
1987 was Family Ties.
1997 was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Now, those were very different shows, but the researchers found the message was very consistent.
And all of four of those shows, 1967 through 1997, the most important thing the researchers found was to do the right thing, to tell the truth, to be a good friend, even if it hurts.
Being famous, winning was number 15 or number 16 out of 16 throughout that time.
But then in 10 years between 1997 and 2007, American culture flipped upside down.
And winning and being famous went from number 15 to number one.
In 2007, the most popular TV shows like American Idol and Survivor, winning is suddenly number one, the most important thing.
Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island.
Dropped from number one to number 13.
And it's only gotten worse since then.
So, and why did this happen?
The researchers asked, why did this happen?
Social media transformed American culture.
Social media, suddenly the most important thing is likes and followers and being followed changed American culture.
And that's really toxic because if you're not famous, then you are a loser.
Transformed American culture.
And American culture became a culture of envy.
And I've talked, just yesterday, I was speaking to students at Delaware County Christian School.
And boy, this resonated with them.
Why Not Me?00:05:00
Why her?
Why not me?
We talked about Charlie DiEmilio, who has 150 billion followers on TikTok and over 11 billion likes.
And it's back and forth talking with the kids.
And the kids told me, they said, you know, usually everyone falls asleep in chapel.
Nobody fell asleep today because they all get this.
They're all on TikTok.
And they've all posted on TikTok.
Why her?
Why not me?
My video is just as funny, but I got seven likes and nobody's following me.
It creates a culture of envy.
Why her?
Why not me?
That's one factor, a cult of fame that creates envy and resentment.
Another, Mary Harrington wrote a really important essay for First Things, Normophobia.
Great norm.
Great piece.
She's wonderful.
So 15 years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge.
And the girls I interviewed back then talked about wanting to be effortlessly perfect, effortlessly perfect.
That was the thing back then.
Girls wanted to be effortlessly perfect.
Not anymore.
I wrote a revised edition more recently.
Girls today don't want to be effortlessly perfect.
That's lame.
That's boring.
That's straight white bitch.
Who wants to be that?
Nobody wants to be that.
Okay.
Now you got to have an angle.
You got to, you got to, you know, you know, lesbian, that's good.
Trans, that's even better.
So 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote a children's book called The Magician's Nephew, in which he said, the problem about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
And substitute anxious or depressed.
The problem about trying to make yourself seem more anxious and depressed than you really are is that you very often succeed.
These kids who are presenting themselves on Instagram and TikTok as being anxious and depressed, you very often succeed.
Look, I'm not only a medical doctor, a family doctor.
I also have a PhD in psychology and I know something about psychology.
And I can tell you, if you're presenting yourself as anxious and depressed and tied up in knots, you're going to be anxious and depressed and tied up in knots.
The mind is a complicated place.
And you can talk yourself into being a mess.
And a lot of this is happening.
And it appears to be unique to the Anglophone world.
I'm not holding up Russia as a role model.
I understand any means.
But the United States is now a post-Christian country.
Greece and Russia are not.
They are still Christian countries.
The United States is now a country where the bonds connecting generations have been broken.
Teenagers hang out with other teenagers on the weekend.
Greece and Russia are countries where the bonds across generations are still strong, where kids hang out with the bonds across generations are still strong.
So I think we can learn from them.
I'm not holding them up as role models.
I think we can learn from our own past.
I mean, Robert Putnam at Harvard has documented in his books, Bowling Alone and his other work, that we used to be a country where the bonds across generations were strong.
We can restore those bonds.
And in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, I'm calling on parents, cancel the play date, make a family date instead.
I see parents in my own practice who are driving their four-year-olds around to other families to make play dates so their four-year-olds can play with other four-year-olds.
Don't do that.
Cancel the play date.
Make a family date instead.
Build the bonds within your family and not with other kids, your own kids' age.
Can I go back for a minute to the Mary Harrington piece on normophobia, which I love?
I love that piece.
I think Mary's just a delight, and she's a very, very brilliant lady and coming from it from a totally different angle from me because she was so far to the left before she discovered motherhood, which is so she's kind of coming back in from that angle.
But obviously, one of the central norms, universal norms in human existence, I mean, if you listed human universals, among the top 10 would be the differentiation of the sexes and the differentiation of sex roles in a society.
That was a universal human norm.
So obviously this infection of people, as you say, oh, it's great to be lesbian, it's great to be trans, even better to be trans, and whatever odd thing you can do to destroy the norm.
And then you're a parent and your 12-year-old comes to you and says, oh, you know, I'm not a girl, I'm a boy.
And I know parents in this situation, and it's incredibly painful to them, but they're being schooled to sort of just accept it.
Brain Activity Differences00:03:26
What is the reaction to something like that?
I mean, obviously, you know, fire and brimstone isn't going to get you anywhere, probably.
But I mean, how do you react to something like that?
Okay.
So my brand, as I said earlier, is evidence-based.
And earlier this year, a team of researchers at Stanford Medical School recruited 1,500 young adults and did high-resolution functional MRI scans, look at the activity of the awake human brain and use very sophisticated computational processes to analyze the activity of the brains of these 1,500 young adults, looking at the fingerprint of the human brain.
Every human brain has a fingerprint of activity that is more unique to you than the fingerprint on your fingerprint on your finger.
And then looked at the men and looked at the women.
And the graph is astonishing.
The men are all at the lower right-hand corner, and the women are all at the upper left-hand corner, and there's no overlap between the sexes, which tells us that whatever is going on in the brain of the awake person at rest, what's going on in the brain of the woman is completely different from what's going on in the brain of the man.
And the variation among men is smaller than the difference between men and women.
Now they found something even more interesting by looking at the structure and function of the human brain, of a man's brain, you can predict the man's intelligence with high accuracy by analyzing the activity and function of the brain.
And the model is very accurate, but the model that you use to predict the IQ of the man's brain is of no value in predicting the IQ of the woman's brain.
Wow, that is fascinating.
And conversely, the model that predicts the IQ of the woman's brain is of no value in predicting the IQ of the man's brain, which tells us that whatever it is that predicts the IQ of a man's brain is completely different because women think differently than men.
What predicts the IQ of a woman's brain.
The determinants of intelligence in a man's brain are completely different from the determinants of intelligence of a woman's brain.
Now, if you subscribe to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and you listen to every program on national public radio, you would never have heard of this study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of our leading peer-reviewed journals, by an outstanding team at Stanford Medical School.
If you subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, you would have heard about it.
But if you read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and indeed all of our major newspapers, you would never have heard the paper violated the fundamental tenet of modern mainstream media, which is that male and female are merely social constructs.
Well, they're not observed.
When you say one's in the left, upper left, and one's in the bottom right, what do those quadrants mean?
It's a graph of the activity of the human brain, and they're very, very different.
Leonard Sachs: The Collapse of Parenting00:04:57
And hey, the article was published in the public domain, so you're allowed to reproduce the graph.
And I did in my article for Psychology Today.
I pasted in their graph so that you can see it.
Just Google my name and Psychology Today, and you'll see the article that I wrote demonstrating this astonishing difference.
So that's how I begin answering that parent who says, my 12-year-old daughter just announced that she's a boy and she wants to transition to the male role.
I say, look, every cell in her body is XX.
The claim that a girl can become a boy by cutting off her breasts and taking a male hormone is a false claim.
It will still be the case that every cell in her body is XX.
Yes, she can transition in the sense that she will change her voice.
She will do, she will create irreversible changes to her body, but every cell in her body is still XX.
And look, I have myself been involved in some of these cases.
And the great majority of these kids we now know from good published studies are dealing with psychological and often psychiatric.
They're anxious, they're depressed.
In one case where I was involved, this girl is depressed.
She found a TikTok video that claimed that only girls are depressed.
Boys are not depressed.
Transition to the male role and you won't be depressed.
And so she insisted on transitioning to the male role, but she was mistaken.
The video was lying.
It's not true.
There are boys who are depressed.
I have worked with them.
And transitioning to the male role will not fix her depression.
It will not.
It's not the appropriate role.
Look, adolescents are often confused and mistaken.
That's why we don't allow them to get a tattoo without a parent's consent.
If we don't allow them to get a cat tattoo without a parent's consent, we shouldn't allow them to cut off their breasts without a parent's consent.
Now, in the United Kingdom, they commissioned Dr. Hillary Cass to spend four years leading a team of experts reviewing every study published in every country on the planet of any relevance to this.
And after four years, earlier this year, she published her report saying, stop, stop.
No more hormones, no more cross-sex therapy, no more puberty blockers.
It's not the right thing to do.
And her study was so balanced and so comprehensive that the National Health Service in the UK immediately implemented her recommendations and said, yeah, we're not doing this anymore.
Yeah.
And this is in the United Kingdom with National Health Service.
It's weird.
This country has just elected Donald Trump, and yet our professional organizations are now far to the left of the United Kingdom and Sweden and Denmark, which is a little strange.
I mean, in the United Kingdom, for a while, the police would come to your house.
If you put a post on social media saying a man can't become a woman, you would get a warning from the police because that was considered hate speech.
And that report, I know, was shocking to many people in the UK.
Dr. Leonard Sachs, The Collapse of Parenting is the book, is a brand new edition with new material, charting the things that have been happening and hopefully will soon be reversed.
It's funny when we met, and you gave a talk at the conference I was at.
I remember sitting there listening, thinking, I have never heard some of this before.
As I'm listening to you again, I have the exact same experience.
It is amazing how much this is kept out of the mainstream.
And just, I know so many parents who are suffering from this gentle parenting thing.
It gets into, not only gets into their head, it gets into the social milieu that they're in, and they are expelled for not doing it.
It is just absolutely terrible.
Once again, Leonard Sachs, the collapse of parenting.
Leonard, it's great to see you again.
Thank you for coming on.
I hope we'll talk again soon.
I hope so.
Thanks for inviting me.
Once again, Leonard Sachs, the collapse of parenting, really fascinating guy.
And as he says, he is really attached to evidence.
After the interview was over, we had a small chat talking more about the differences between men and women.
I will invite him back to talk about that as well, because it's really, really interesting stuff that, of course, confirms many of our instincts.
We know the world that we're living in, but goes against all of the wisdom that's being pumped into our poor brains from these idiots in the mainstream media.
Just really interesting stuff.
There'll be more interesting stuff next Friday on the, not the Friday after Thanksgiving, but the Friday after that, the Andrew Clavin Show will return.