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Nov. 20, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show

32:34

Ep. 147 - We Treat Boyhood Like It's A Mental Disorder

We are hurting our boys by treating them like they're sick just because they act like boys. They do not need to be fixed. We are the ones with the problem. Date: 11-20-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Today on the Matt Wall Show, have we medicalized boyhood?
	I think we have, and I want to talk about it.
	Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said something really, really stupid.
	I know that's not news, but this one is really, really stupid.
	So we'll talk about that.
	And also, the online outrage mob attacked an innocent woman, deprived her of her livelihood for no reason.
	What does that say about the people who join these mobs?
	Nothing flattering, I know that.
	We'll talk about all this coming up on the Matt Wall Show.
	You know, I'm on the record saying that we on the right should probably lay off of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a little bit because this obsession with picking apart everything she says is kind of bizarre.
	And it seems almost like conservatives have a bit of a crush on her because they're just constantly talking about her all the time.
	But, I mean, this thing where she doesn't know the branches of government, this is just...
	Oh, this is just bad.
	This is, this is bad.
	And when I first heard about this, I thought, well, she must have, maybe she misspoke or I mean, people are making too much of this, but then I saw the video and it really is.
	Let me, let me, I'm sure you've seen this already, but here's what she said.
	Um, during a conference call, she said, if we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress, uh, rather all three chambers of government, the presidency, the Senate, and the house.
	So what makes this so bad is that she said the wrong thing.
	She caught herself, and then she corrected it to something that's even more wrong.
	So we have to take back all three chambers of Congress.
	Okay, well, that's wrong.
	There are only two chambers, not three, but there are chambers in Congress, and the Democrats want both of them.
	So you hear that and you think, well, okay, she just misspoke.
	But then she plunges forward, she keeps going, and she says, oh, no, no, no, the chambers of government.
	Oh no.
	And then she lists them.
	The Senate, the Presidency, and the House.
	Oh, Alexandria.
	Oh, Alexandria, there is nothing right about that at all.
	That's just wrong in several different ways.
	And the problem is, she made it clear that this is not her misspeaking.
	She really doesn't know.
	She really just simply does not know what the branches of government are, and she doesn't know that they're called branches.
	She thinks they're called chambers.
	How does that happen?
	How do you get to the age of, what is she, 28, 29?
	How do you get to the age of 28 and you don't know the branches of government?
	How have you gone through 12 years of schooling and then college and you've never encountered this information before?
	And then you run for Congress and you don't even know what Congress is!
	Or what it does!
	She can't possibly know what it is or what it does if she doesn't know that it's part of the legislative branch.
	Oh goodness.
	What a, what a, what a sad statement.
	Um, what a sad statement.
	All right.
	I want to kind of follow up.
	I want to do a part two on the show from yesterday.
	If you watch that show or you listen to it, you heard about the, um, well it started with the terrible, tragic, awful case of a nine year old child who killed herself.
	Um, Weeks after starting a new ADHD drug, and the drug had suicidal thoughts as a listed side effect.
	Now, her parents say that she was also bullied in school.
	They think that the drugs, along with the bullying, were factors in propelling her towards this terrible tragedy.
	So we started with that terrible case and talked about Psychiatric drugs and ADHD and the fact that 7 million kids are on psychiatric drugs.
	Is that really is that a good thing?
	Is that a smart strategy to put to put so many kids on these drugs and why?
	You look at the drug companies and the doctors, they seem to exercise basically no caution whatsoever, and that's how we end up with millions of kids on these drugs, despite the side effects, despite the long-term effects, and despite the lack of data, the lack of information that we actually have on how these drugs will affect kids in the long term.
	Now, here's what happens.
	Anytime I talk about this kind of subject, about ADHD, about the dangers of psychiatric drugs for children, and so on, I am going to be informed by people who disagree with my take that I can't possibly know what I'm talking about because my children don't have the disorder.
	I've never been through it.
	I've never experienced it.
	So I need to shut up because I don't know what it's like.
	Now, I'm not sure why or how people feel comfortable making these kinds of declarations about a stranger.
	It's one of the weirdest things about the internet, where if you give an opinion, invariably a bunch of people are going to say, well you don't know what you're talking about, you've never been through it, you've never experienced that, you need to shut up, you don't know what... How do you know what I've experienced?
	You know nothing about my kids or about my life or anything.
	How could you possibly know?
	How could anyone feel comfortable just saying that?
	Well, you clearly have never been through this.
	Do you really just assume that everyone with experiences similar to your own must therefore have the same opinions as you?
	Is that really how you think the world works?
	That nobody who's gone through similar things as you could possibly have arrived at different conclusions?
	That's really the assumption underlying this, is that people think that, well, they've been through this, and anyone who's been through it clearly must have come to the same conclusions as them.
	It's such a narrow-minded way of looking at the world, it's kind of mind-boggling.
	And anyway, I'm not sure what my personal experience has had to do with anything.
	So this, uh, well you can't talk about that topic unless you've been personally affected by it argument, is one of the most cowardly forms of emotional blackmail.
	It's just a way of shutting down discussion.
	It's a way of a person trying to win an argument by claiming this emotional trump card.
	The assumption that people who have been personally affected by a certain thing must therefore be more knowledgeable about it and more credible when discussing it is obviously ridiculous.
	Just because you have car trouble doesn't make you a mechanic, right?
	And if it did, we wouldn't need mechanics.
	So just because you've been through something doesn't mean that your opinions about it, whatever it is, are necessarily more true or more grounded in facts than someone on the outside.
	The fact that you've been through something does not make you an expert, and the fact that someone else has not been through it doesn't mean that they can't know anything about it.
	In fact, your personal experiences could hamper Your judgment and could make your insights could kind of compromise your judgment in a way because they create an obvious bias.
	So, yes, if your kids are on ADHD medication, then hopefully you've learned a thing or two about the medication because your kids are on it.
	So you do have that knowledge.
	But at the same time, you also have a clear incentive to defend the medication no matter what and to ignore the arguments against it because you want to justify the decision that you've already made.
	I just don't think that this strategy, this, uh, this, well, my personal experience trumps your logical arguments thing works.
	I don't think it works in any case, in any situation.
	Now, I'm not saying that your personal experiences are worthless.
	I'm not saying that.
	I think that they're valuable to the conversation.
	I think they can add color, they can add perspective and so on, but they don't supersede facts and they don't supersede logic and they don't give you an exclusive right to have an opinion about a subject.
	Okay.
	That's my point.
	But as it happens, I do have experience.
	I've already shared several times my own personal struggles with getting through public school as a kid with this disorder.
	I was never diagnosed with the disorder officially because that was not a direction that my parents were going to go.
	They were not looking to medicalize my academic problems.
	But I am familiar with ADHD.
	I have read the descriptions.
	I know what the symptoms are.
	And I see myself in pretty much every symptom described.
	Then and now.
	Um, I have a lot of trouble focusing.
	I can't keep my mind going on one track for very long.
	If you listen to this podcast, you probably already noticed that because I'll branch off in a million directions and depart from the point that I was making and then circle back to it.
	That's just how my, my mind works.
	I can't sit still.
	I have trouble going to bed at night because I can't turn my mind off, uh, on and on and on.
	I I've been there.
	I am there.
	So I do know.
	And, um, so you can't like hold it against me that I've never gotten official diagnosis.
	I am opposed to the diagnosis.
	That's why I, I am not going to go and seek one out because of my own personal opinion about this whole, this whole thing.
	I've also been through it as a parent.
	I'm going through it right now.
	So I have two emotional trump cards.
	I guess that means I win, right?
	I guess that means according to the rules of modern debate, I win, because I've got two trump cards.
	My five-year-old son fits the ADHD label by any measure, as many five-year-old boys do, and that's the point.
	But what I can tell you about my Five-year-old son is that is that to just call him energetic would be a huge understatement I mentioned this on the show yesterday, but I want to elaborate here.
	My son is Imagine imagine a squirrel that got into a can of coffee beans and ate all the coffee beans, okay?
	That's my son.
	He runs through the house at a million miles an hour.
	He's running around.
	He's fighting off imaginary pirates and dragons.
	He pole vaults over banisters and jumps over couches and literally balances off the walls.
	He climbs everything.
	He swings on anything that is remotely swingable.
	The kid, he cannot sit still.
	He cannot stop talking.
	He won't even stop talking.
	You can't stop him from talking by leaving the room because he'll continue the conversation even if you're not there.
	He reminds me a lot of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
	Just kind of walking around the house narrating himself, narrating what he's doing.
	That's what he does.
	And he does have trouble learning in a formal setting.
	He does struggle to learn academically.
	Now he's only five years old, but he does have that problem.
	And we do have a comparison here because he has a twin sister.
	And his twin sister is significantly more advanced when it comes to the ABCs and the 1-2-3s and spelling and all that kind of stuff.
	And she is also, and I think this is the reason why she's more advanced in these areas, She can sit still for several minutes at a time.
	She can sit, she'll color, she'll draw pictures, she'll look at a book, she'll brush her doll's hair, so she can do that.
	She likes to clean, for some reason, if you can believe it.
	She actually likes to clean, and she's better at it than I am.
	Like, she'll fold laundry, and she'll make her bed, make it all nice and pretty and neat, and she does it better.
	It looks better at the end than it would have looked if I had done it.
	Um, she had, she pays attention pretty well.
	She remembers things.
	She remembers where things are.
	She, you know, her mind is organized in that way.
	It, this, this is how bad it is when her mom is not around.
	And, uh, and I'm looking for something around the house because I'm totally a stereotypical husband who can't find anything in the house.
	I'm always asking my wife where it is, but the problem is if, if I'm looking for something and my wife isn't there, um, And, of course, the first thing I do is I text my wife, but if she doesn't answer, then what am I going to do?
	So I ask my five-year-old daughter where the thing is, and I do that all the time, and she'll find it for me.
	Now, she's no angel, believe me.
	She can be a challenge in her own way.
	Unfortunately, her brother inherited my ADHD, and she inherited my stubbornness, so we've got both of that going on.
	But she doesn't have, she's not the same as her brother.
	And that's not unusual because boys are much more likely to have ADHD than girls, which is a fact.
	That people who believe in ADHD as a medical diagnosis, they never really grapple with this fact.
	Why is it?
	Have you ever thought about why is it more common in boys?
	Isn't that a weird coincidence?
	That boys just so happen to be more rambunctious and energetic and more likely to run around and all that kind of stuff.
	And they also are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
	Isn't that a weird?
	Have you ever stopped to think about that?
	Doesn't that shake your faith in ADHD as a medical diagnosis a little bit?
	that it just so happens to be so much more common in the types of people who are predisposed anyway
	to be energetic and less focused. Now, so that's my, you know, my son, unlike his sister, can't find
	He probably couldn't find his own feet if I asked him to.
	He loses everything, which is bad because he's also in the habit of taking off his shoes as soon as he enters into a building of any kind.
	He's going to have his shoes off.
	Within about two and a half seconds, the shoes are off and they're also lost.
	So he loses stuff all the time.
	He doesn't like anything that involves sitting and drawing or writing or counting.
	He cleans by picking up all the items that were on the floor, throwing them into a pile on the nearest piece of furniture, and then sometimes he'll even jump into the pile like it's a pile of leaves out in the yard or something.
	The point is, he could easily earn the label ADHD if we sought out that diagnosis.
	I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that my son could get that diagnosis.
	But we're not going to seek that diagnosis because the boy is not sick.
	He's not disordered.
	The boy is just a boy.
	He's more of a handful than some boys.
	He's less of a handful than other boys.
	He has his own personality, and I cannot imagine treating it like the manifestation of a mental disease.
	Besides, like almost every kid with an actual ADHD diagnosis, he can learn, he can focus, he just doesn't always learn the things we want him to learn in the ways we want him to learn them.
	So he can't remember how to spell simple words, but he remembers songs.
	He sings all the time.
	He's constantly singing.
	He'll wake up the whole house at 6 a.m.
	singing to himself as loudly as he can.
	Sometimes he makes up songs on the spot.
	He freestyles.
	Sometimes it's songs that he heard at church or on the radio.
	So he remembers that.
	He knows his superheroes backwards and forwards.
	He can name all the superheroes for you.
	That might not be useful information, but it is information anyway that he's remembered.
	He knows other, he knows about pilgrims and Indians because that's a story that really fascinates him right now.
	And he's, so he's fixated on that.
	Uh, he knows about ants and, and, and bugs.
	And, uh, just yesterday he randomly started telling me all these facts about George Washington and he was, he was recalling details from our family trip to, uh, Mount Vernon last year.
	We went a year ago and randomly he's talking about this trip and, uh, what he remembered about George Washington.
	He was the first president and so on.
	So we took the kids to see some old warships at the harbor last week and he remembers the ships and he's always talking about the ship.
	He wants to go back and take a more extensive tour of the ships.
	So if my son was in public school, I have no doubt that they would probably tell us he has a learning disability.
	But he doesn't.
	He learns all the time.
	He loves to learn.
	He just likes to learn in his own way and about topics that interest him.
	And he likes to learn in a way that's more hands-on.
	But the fact that he is fascinated, he likes to learn about topics that interest him, and he doesn't like learning about topics that don't interest him, well, is that really the symptom of a disability?
	I'm the same way.
	I think most people are.
	Now, yes, you have to be able to, even if he's not interested in math and spell, he still is going to have to learn the basics there at some point.
	The problem is we look at these boys and we say, well, they can't learn anything.
	They can't pay attention.
	They can't focus.
	Well, in almost every case, that's not true.
	They can focus on some things, just not the things we might want.
	And yeah, that can be a challenge.
	And the fact that he's so rambunctious can also be a challenge.
	It does wear you down sometimes.
	I shared this story on Facebook a couple of days ago.
	Share it again here.
	A couple nights ago, I was, you know, I've had this on my mind because a couple of nights ago I was, um, you know, maybe an hour before the kids were supposed to go to bed and I was feeling especially not in the mood for his antics that, that night.
	I just was kind of in a bad mood.
	I was annoyed.
	I was put off.
	Uh, I just wanted peace and quiet, but my son is running around and doing his whole thing.
	And so I told him very sternly to calm down and be quiet.
	And, um, And then I had to stop, and I realized that I was being selfish.
	You know, there wasn't anything wrong with how he was acting.
	I just didn't feel like dealing with it, right?
	And I think so often, that's why boys are drugged and punished and scolded in our society, because we just don't feel like dealing with them.
	They present challenges that we lack the patience to meet, especially in a school setting.
	And I'm as guilty of this attitude as anyone.
	Even as a man myself.
	I was a young boy once.
	I was a boy just like him.
	But I can very easily lapse into this thing where it's like I don't even remember what it was like to be a five-year-old boy.
	And I expect him to not act like a five-year-old boy.
	I want him to act like a world-weary 32-year-old man sometimes, just because I don't feel like listening to it.
	I caught myself on this particular night and I realized how ridiculous that is and I realized that I was angry at my son for the crime of being happy and exuberant.
	How absurd is that?
	Why should that annoy me?
	Maybe he's got the right idea.
	Maybe we should all be running around the house.
	Why not?
	It's better than sitting on the couch sulking like I was doing.
	So that's what I did.
	I got up and You know, if you can't beat him, join him sometimes as a parent.
	So I ran around the house with him and we wrestled.
	We had a pillow fight.
	We did piggyback rides.
	We played his favorite game, which involves him standing on the coffee table and then jumping onto my chest.
	nearly cracking my ribs and puncturing my lungs in the process.
	And then we got two other kids.
	So then his younger brother and his sister, they also wanted to join in.
	So they were taking turns, just jumping up, pile driving me basically.
	And I barely survived, but they had fun and they went to bed tired and they actually fell asleep relatively quickly, at least by their standards.
	Now, obviously we need to teach our boys to be obedient and respectful.
	And they really do need to calm down and be quiet sometimes.
	But little boys also need to be little boys.
	They need to be able to run around and be crazy and make noise and be rambunctious.
	That's an actual physical need that they have.
	It's not just, it would be nice if they could act that way.
	They need to act that way.
	They need that.
	And I'm afraid that they are rarely given that opportunity these days.
	Especially if you, I mean, the very idea that we take five, six, seven year old boys and we put them down in a classroom and we say, you need to spend the next seven hours doing busy work.
	And then when they struggle mightily to perform that task, we drug them.
	I mean, just think about that.
	Just stop and think about what we're doing.
	Who ever said that a seven-year-old boy is supposed to be able to do that?
	Did we ever stop to think that a kid like that just isn't supposed to be doing that?
	No, I know.
	Well, but if he doesn't do that, we need him to do that because he needs to learn this very quickly so he can go to college and he can get a job at a nine to five and it's a cubicle and, you know, have, you know, so we have his whole life planned out for him.
	We've got his life planned out for him.
	We, we know what the schedule needs to be.
	So you've got to learn this now, then learn that, then learn that, then do that.
	And we've got it all mapped out.
	Do we ever stop to think that our map is wrong?
	Do we ever stop to think that our map is self-serving?
	that this is what we want our kids to do and how we want them to act?
	Little boys are always being told, no, stop, calm down, be quiet, sit still.
	We treat boyhood like something that needs to be medicated or fixed.
	Like this malignant growth that we have to extract and discard.
	We have literally made boyhood into a mental illness.
	And why?
	Because we need them to fit into the systems that we have in place.
	We need them to go with the flow, at our pace, on our schedule.
	I think we are ruining our sons.
	I think we are robbing them of so much of themselves.
	I think that we are the ones who need to change.
	If there is no room in our schools, in our homes, in our culture for boys who act like boys, then our schools and our homes and our culture, not our boys, are sick.
	There is a balance.
	I'm not saying there isn't.
	We can't let them always do what they want.
	We do have to teach them the guidelines and the rules and how to follow them.
	But I also think that sometimes, rather than making them fit in with us and go at our pace, maybe we should try to fit in with them and go at their pace.
	And then they'll burn off a little energy that way.
	And also, you know, everybody has a little bit of fun.
	I think we could learn from our sons how to have some fun in life, at the very least.
	I just think it's... And that's why I just find it so unconvincing, from my own experience, from what I've read, from everything, and then now with my own son.
	When somebody tells me, look, my eight-year-old boy, you don't understand, he just can't sit still at the desk, he just can't do it.
	Yeah, I know he can't.
	Maybe he's not supposed to be doing that.
	Maybe that is a completely unnatural and ridiculous thing to require a young boy to do.
	Maybe he would learn better hands-on.
	Maybe he would learn better going out on field trips and seeing things and actually touring.
	It's like my son.
	If I tried to sit down and say, son, let me read you some facts about old battleships from 100 years ago.
	It wouldn't work.
	But I take him to the harbor, look at the ships, we take a tour, we do all that.
	And he learns and he remembers.
	If I tried to sit him down and just give him a bunch of facts about George Washington and then tell him to write down those facts and repeat them to me, it's not going to work.
	I take him to Mount Vernon, we go on a tour, we see the house, we do all that, and he learns and he remembers.
	Now, I know that we can't always teach our kids that way, so I realize that.
	But we've gone way in the other direction and we try, their entire educational experience almost involves them sitting at a desk, being told information and then having to repeat it.
	And my point is, there are some people who just don't operate that way.
	Unless you drug them.
	But that's the wrong approach because the fact that they don't operate that way isn't wrong.
	It's not disordered.
	That's just how they are.
	And that's okay.
	All right.
	Let's see where we are.
	I briefly wanted to mention one other thing.
	There was a video that went viral on... Do I want to do this today?
	Yeah, I'll just mention it now.
	A video went viral on Friday showing a Chipotle employee, a woman, telling a group of customers, black men, That they had to prove that they had money before she started preparing the food for them.
	And they cried racism, and the video went up on Twitter, and everyone on the internet cried racism, and the employee was fired almost immediately.
	And then a couple of days later, It turns out that these guys most likely stole food from that very restaurant earlier in the week.
	And they had previously posted on Twitter openly bragging about dining and dashing, that is, leaving without paying for the food.
	So these guys, they were literally on the internet bragging about stealing food.
	And so that's why the Chipotle employee wouldn't make them food because they're thieves.
	And she recognized them as thieves because they'd stolen from that very store and they've admitted to being thieves.
	Now, so the video comes out out of context.
	Everyone assumes she's a racist, goes viral, she loses her job, her face and her name's out there for everybody to see.
	And then a couple of days later, we get the update of, oh, well, these guys are just thieves.
	And that's why she didn't want to give them food.
	Now, I didn't see the video or hear about it until yesterday.
	But if I had seen it on Friday, I would have said the same thing that I've said in similar situations.
	Which is, it is insane to jump to the conclusion that the girl is racist.
	I mean, to all the people who called her racist, who called her racist right away, demanded that she be fired based on the video they saw on the internet.
	I have this question.
	What did you think?
	Did you think this person had never served a black person before?
	Or did you think that she had some kind of policy for all black people?
	Where they all had to show their money ahead of time because they're black and that somehow we're just now hearing about it and somehow she was never fired for it before.
	No, obviously that doesn't make sense.
	Obviously, if you see this interaction, And then you think, oh, she's just doing that because they're black.
	Then your first question as a common, as a logical person should be, well, wait a minute.
	If she's just doing that because they're black, I mean, she's presumably served hundreds of other black people and apparently she's never done this before.
	So what, did she just suddenly become racist overnight?
	Did she wake up racist?
	She woke up as a KKK slobbering, drooling, crazy racist all of a sudden?
	Did she, did she fall and hit her head and become racist?
	Or, Does she have a specific issue with these specific people for a specific reason?
	Common sense should tell you that there's probably more to the story.
	So, all the people who saw this video and said, she's racist!
	I can only come to one of two conclusions about them.
	Either they are incredibly stupid, That they never made this common sense calculation that any intelligent and rational person would make.
	Or they are liars.
	And they knew that there's probably more to the story.
	They knew that it's very likely that there's a good reason why these guys were treated this way.
	Yet they decided to call her racist and put her name out there and put her face out there.
	Take her job away from her.
	I mean, honestly, put her life in jeopardy.
	When you put someone's face and their name out for the entire world to see, and you say, this person is a racist, you have put their life in jeopardy.
	Because you don't know.
	Somebody recognizes them in public and loses their temper.
	You don't know what's going to happen.
	So it's either that all the people that jumped on the outrage bandwagon, they're a bunch of idiots, or they knew what they were doing.
	And they were willing to destroy this innocent woman's life for no reason, just because.
	And honestly, I don't know what's worse.
	I mean, do I want to believe that the society is really filled with people who are that incredibly stupid?
	Or with people who are that evil?
	It's kind of like those are the two options.
	When you see something like this, and you jump to conclusions, When there are very clearly other logical explanations that could explain what happened.
	I mean, it's either you're just a bad person or you're really stupid.
	I don't know.
	Is there a third option?
	I don't think there is.
	And I'm just so tired of this.
	And I'm so tired of people not... This is someone's life we're talking about.
	This woman who's been unfairly slandered It's her life.
	This is her livelihood.
	This is a human being.
	What is wrong with you people?
	Doing this to her.
	What did she do to you?
	And for all you know, she could be, I don't know anything about her.
	She could be on your side with all this.
	For all we know, she's a liberal person.
	She's on your team.
	And you just rip her apart for no reason?
	You know, we like to think that we have kind of graduated beyond the days of the Colosseum in Rome, when innocent people would be fed to the lions while all the spectators cheered.
	But we have not really graduated from that at all.
	We've just taken that philosophy and we have put it online.
	And we do the cyber version of it.
	It's a very sad statement.
	Alright, we'll leave it there.
	Thanks for watching.
	Thanks for listening.

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