← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
REPLAY | The Dangers of Gentle Parenting, SEL & Empathy | Guest: Abigail Shrier
01:01:37
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- [00:01]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Gentle parenting, empathy therapy. All the things we're told are good for kids are actually very harmful. That's what today's guest argues. Author Abigail Schreier is here today to break it all down for us as we are talking about her book, Bad Therapy, why the kids aren't growing up. Guys, this is an amazing conversation that you need to share with every single parent in your life. Oh, my goodness. I learned so much this episode. This conversation with Abigail Shrier is brought to you by our friends at Good ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com use code ALI at checkout. That's good ranchers.com code ALLY. Abigail, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. All right, you've got another amazing book that's out after irreversible damage. This one is called Bad Therapy. So just set us up. Tell us why you went down this road and decided to write it.
- [01:07]
Abigail Schreier
Sure. So, first of all, thank you so much for having me on, Allie. I really love your show and I really appreciate the invitation. So I'm raising three kids in the rising generation, and what I wanted to know was why did the rising generation seem to be suffering so much? They seem to be in genuine distress, genuinely fearful, genuinely full of worry and anxiety, and genuinely a little depressed, sad. And they hadn't obviously lived through anything that hard until the pandemic. They really hadn't lived through, you know, anything hard at all as a group, as a generation. And, and, and the other strange thing was they received the most mental health treatment, the most coping techniques, the most mindfulness, the most therapeutic intervention, the most diagnosis, the most psych meds of any generation. So they really should have been the picture of mental health wellness. Instead, instead, they were the picture of suffering. So I really wanted to know why. And the other thing I want to know is why did they have no interest in growing up? Why did they, you know, 18 to 25 year olds in numbers we've never seen want to live with their parents? Why did they not want to get driver's license, you know, even more than millennials, why did they not want to be parents or to get married? So, so that's, that's what started me down this path.
- [02:30]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah. That's what made you curious about this. And did your last book, Irreversible Damage, where you talked about this kind of phenomenon of particularly young girls, quote, unquote, transitioning into boys, did that book and the backlash it received from you had, you know, libraries, institutions, saying, oh, this book, your book will cause suicide, and so called Trans youth, did that kind of have an effect on your desire to start looking into the therapy world?
- [03:03]
Abigail Schreier
Well, remember that in almost every case where a girl goes down this path, the parents who called me, they already had a therapist for the girl. In fact, the therapist played a big role in the child's, you know, or teenager's revelation that she was trans. Either a therapist the family had or the school counselor invariably played a very large role. So I knew therapists were making terrible mischief with the kids. And what I want parents to know is it wasn't a gender therapist. It wasn't even necessarily an activist therapist. It was just a therapist that parents very often hired to deal with the girl's anxiety or depression, who, when they were done, you know, talking about her, you know, emotional trauma or whatever you know, of, she felt like she had gone through in adolescence. They would say in loud, let's talk about gender. How are you feeling about your gender? And that was really enough to get them off to the races.
- [03:59]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Right? And so that is an example of something that you talk about in the first chapter, this idea that healers can harm. And you use Greek phrase atrogenesis. Is that how you. Is that how you pronounce it?
- [04:15]
Abigail Schreier
Iatrogenesis? Yeah, this is a word that, you know, I wasn't aware of, but everyone should know, because every single intervention, no matter how good, can cause harm. So iatrogenesis refers to when a healer introduces the harm. And of course, that doesn't mean any intervention is all bad. Tylenol causes harm if given too much too often. X rays cause harm. And yes, therapy also comes with harms. And there's actually a large body of research showing the harms of therapy. They include things like making depression worse, making anxiety worse, alienating from your. You, from your parents, making you feel inefficacious in your life, like you can't do anything on your own, making you feel demoralizing you with a diagnosis. All these are known side effects of therapy that all the academic researchers knew. Oddly, though, most of the practitioners I talked to either weren't aware of them or denied them outright.
- [05:12]
Allie Beth Stuckey
And what is it about therapy that is causing that? Particularly what you talked about about young people today not wanting to. To grow up. I've noticed that, too, the just complete lack of interest in getting your driver's license, which, as a millennial, is wild to me. I could not wait. I could not wait. What is it about therapy that is causing that kind of failure to launch?
- [05:35]
Abigail Schreier
Well, the idea of. And it's, you know, these kids are getting therapy, not just from a therapist in school and from their parents who are reading the best, you know, the most popular parenting books written by therapists. And what it is, is anytime you are told to check in and double check and think about everything you're going to do before you do it, that you can't handle any problems on your own. Every time you have a squabble with another kid, you have to go rushing to mom or rushing to a therapist. It creates what they call treatment dependency. You become dependent. And the idea is, I can't take a risk on my own because I could ruin things, it could be ruinous. And so I have to bring everything to an adult. And adults are always standing by. And that's what we're seeing. These kids feel unwell. Over half of the rising generation says their mental health is not good. They report that they don't feel well, and so they don't feel up to the responsibilities of adulthood. Right? Adulthood is a series of responsibilities. That's what it is. It means I'm ready to be someone other people can rely on. I'm ready to form a family. I'm ready to be a good spouse, I'm ready to be a good neighbor and someone you can depend on, and they're opting out of all of that. And, and really, it's no surprise because if you feel weak, you don't think you're ready for those things.
- [06:57]
Allie Beth Stuckey
And the irony is, is that going to therapy is marketed as the most responsible thing, the most mature thing, the most adult thing that you can do. And in fact, it is the thing we are told that will help you finally be able to love other people. While we've heard this kind of therapeutic mantra of you can't love other people until you love yourself. And loving yourself has to look like constantly thinking about yourself, constantly focusing on yourself, constantly thinking about and examining your feelings and overcoming your trauma and all these things. You can't go out and love other people and be this dependable adult until you take care of those things. But that's right, as long as you're going to therapy, you could think that, well, I still don't love myself perfectly, so maybe I still can't adult. Maybe I still can't be a responsible adult in a faithful relationship because I have it perfectly figured out how to like every nook and cranny of myself, right?
- [07:56]
Abigail Schreier
I mean, here's the thing to know that therapy with a child or teenager is totally different from therapy with an adult, because with an adult, an adult can push back on a therapist. So a lot of the harms that are, that there are risks of are going to be less. An adult can say, you know, I love my wife. I really don't think she meant that. I wouldn't call it, you know, I wouldn't call our relationship toxic. I don't think that's fair. Or an adult can say, you know, honestly, I don't like the way I feel on these medications. I think I, I don't like not having a sex drive. I think I'm gonna try to taper off them. It's very hard from a tea for a teenager to say those things. They don't have enough of life. But also it's very hard for a teen who might be angry with mom to say, you know, I'm not sure I'd agree that my mother's emotionally abusive. And yet. So there isn't that pushback. But also there isn't the buy in. An adult who chooses to go to therapy decides, listen, I feel like I need someone to work on me, work with me on this. I'm unsatisfied with this. I need to work, I want to do this. Okay? But a teen or child who signs up for therapy is strong armed by an adult. So there's the incentive of the therapist to pander to the child. Whatever will make the child feel good and agree with the child. Oh, that was that. I can see why that made you feel terrible that your mom said that. There's every incentive to do that because of course, the child didn't even sign up to be there. So they have to do something to get the kids buy in. Now, of course, if a child has a real problem, that's different. If a child is anorexic, if a child is severely obsessive compulsive disorder or has one of these other problems, then there's no question what the therapist is there to work on. But if you sign your anxious or moody teen up for psychodynamic psychotherapy, just general therapy, general talking about problems, there are real risks that the problems they have will be magnified or the therapist will introduce new ones.
- [09:56]
Allie Beth Stuckey
And in your research, how did you find that we got here? Not just in sending kids to therapy and going to therapy unnecessarily ourselves, but getting to the place of calling worry, anxiety and sadness, depression, diagnosing a normal spectrum of human emotions and then medicalizing them.
- [10:21]
Abigail Schreier
That's right. We didn't even realize. We almost didn't even notice the water slipping in because you're Right. It totally changed our vocabulary. And I mean across the board, liberals, conservatives, religious people, it didn't matter. All of a sudden we were seeing all of humanity as a series of pathologies, psychopathologies and the whole human experience. Every deviation suddenly was a diagnosis and what that meant. And it was. With the rise, there's been a dramatic increase in the growth of mental health staffs at every school, at every university. And of course, you know, they've sort of sit atop our parenting, they write all the popular parenting books and you know, I have various theories for why, you know, part of it may have been, you know, the rise in divorce among that started with Gen X. We saw various problems in America and we thought the solution was to send everyone to therapy. We became convinced this really needed expertise. And so adults started going to therapy in larger numbers and then they sent their kids believing it could only help. And here's the thing, you know, if your child is struggling and they go to their aunt, okay, for help, for advice, their uncle, what, whoever, they're, the, the, the, the family member in general not only has, is generally going to reinforce the parents values, not only generally wants the best thing for the child, but there's no incentive for them to keep the child coming back and making them their confidant. And here's the problem with in general sending a bummed out kid to therapy as opposed to grandma. You send a bummed out kid to therapy, the therapist's incentive is to treat the least sick for the longest period of time. They want that child coming back. And there's no oversight, there's no one saying, you know, you're really undermining her respect for her mother. No one's even tracking it. Unlike with medicine where they're tracking harms, therapists don't even track these. And so no one's measuring it, no one's reporting. Meanwhile, you know, in many ways an 18 or adolescent could be getting worse.
- [12:40]
Allie Beth Stuckey
It also seems like social media has kind of glorified the idea of not just going to therapy as just something that you do if you're having any problem in your life, but also, I mean taking anti depression and anti anxiety medications. I mean there's a whole subset of tick tock that is about the different medications that teenagers can take to alleviate their symptoms of anxiety or whatever. And so probably maybe there's a lot of similarities between what you saw in the social contagion of what's referred to as gender dysphoria and somewhat of a social contagion here that okay, all my friends are going to therapy. All my friends are on Lexapro. Well, I guess that should be what I do too.
- [13:24]
Abigail Schreier
That's right. And you know that's exactly right. There is an element of social contagion. People are valorizing diagnoses. But it's so dangerous to valorize a diagnosis or being on medication for various reasons. First of all, those medications come with real risks, but also because it's so limiting. See, if you say I'm a shy person, well, that doesn't limit you. You can just say, well, I'm going to try to get over my shyness. But if you have social anxiety or social phobia, now you're saying there's a problem with my brain and I need an expert or medication to help me. So you naturally go down the road to feeling less powerful and less able to fix your life.
- [14:06]
Allie Beth Stuckey
You mentioned that they're not just getting therapy from a professional in an office, but I mean, they're getting it on social, social media. I mean, you follow these self help accounts that claim to have the power to psychoanalyze you and tell you how amazing you are, but they're also getting it, you mentioned, from school. Now, would you say that's primarily from this social emotional learning SEL curriculum that is now in a lot of schools?
- [14:35]
Abigail Schreier
That's it, yes. Social emotional learning is now this giant massive juggernaut. It's an umbrella. It can mean anything. It can mean straightforward, you know, critical race theory which the kids learn about white oppression. So sometimes it's just a cloak for that. But very often it is a process of breaking down kids. That's effectively what it is. It claims to be something that will help kids to make them more resilient. They throw around that word a lot. It will make them stronger by teaching them tricks for emotional regulation. Well, there are various reasons that focusing on yourself, focusing on your emotion, focusing on your pain isn't the way to resilience. It's counterproductive. But these, the discussions of emotion in the classroom almost inevitably end up with discussions of sad emotion, first of all, because the prompts actually direct you there. But second of all, it's just much more interesting. How do you feel? Great. Fine. There's not much to talk about. Actually. I'm feeling really sad because my mom was too busy to help me with my homework last night. Now we're off and running. Now we've got something we can all talk about. And that's what the schools are doing. They're all engaged in this Constant, you know, this constant therapeutic kind of group therapy. And it, you know, there's lots of evidence of this, but basically there's a lot of research showing group therapy often makes people feel worse about their problems. This has been true of breast cancer survivors, burn victims, first responders to catastrophe, you know, all kinds of situations in which, you know, sitting around with a group talking about your pain, bereavement, people who lost loved ones, they ended up feeling worse off than the control group who didn't go to therapy. And we're doing this with kids.
- [16:25]
Allie Beth Stuckey
It reminds me of something in college when I first joined my sorority my freshman year of college, and we had this retreat with the whole sorority and we all sat in a circle and I'm thinking back, I'm like, why did we do this? But whose idea was this? And we were all supposed to share something like really difficult and sad that we had gone through or something like that we had never shared before or something like that. And we were all supposed to be very emotional about it. And everyone, you know, ended up crying. But I remember feeling that it almost turned into a competition of who can give the worst sob story, who can shock everyone the most, who has been through the hardest thing. And like you said, valorizing trauma or difficulty or whatever it is, it even in that just kind of like micro example, I can see that. I could see that competing to see who's had the hardest time can make things a lot worse.
- [17:27]
Abigail Schreier
That's exactly right. And what I want people to know is that's inevitable because they can say, oh, we're just working on our emotions. We're just discussing our emotions. We're working on self regulation. They can say that all they want. But as soon as you get kids in a circle talking about their feelings, there becomes a natural one upmanship occurs to. You don't want to just say something boring, right? It becomes what a great researcher said. To me, it becomes like a memory poker. You start trying to dredge up the worst memory of a painful episode in your life because you want to sort of keep the group engaged. And we're doing this with kids right before they have to take a math test. And sometimes it's the school counselor, sometimes it's the teacher. And the worst part is parents are told this is really good for them. In fact, we're going to interrupt their lessons for really is it's an incredibly good way to break kids down. And that isn't even, you know, the mental health surveys, they're flooded with many of them written by Our cdc, which talk to them about suicide, self harm. What are the ways you might use, you know, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Have you tried cutting, burning, choking? What about a choking game? I mean, it goes through all these with middle schoolers or high schoolers in great depth and as if. Oh, we're just, we're just asking. No harm.
- [18:54]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah. And they do it, of course, in the name of saving lives, and they also do it in the name of representation. I had a woman on my show, she had gone viral a couple of years ago for speaking at her school board because her eighth grader had come home, this was a conservative district in Texas public school, had come home with this horrifying book that was not only very sexually explicit, but also detailed, like how this person was planning to commit suicide. And when she went to the school and she said, what in the world? Why is the English teacher recommending this book to my 13 year old? They said, well, we give these kinds of books to represent so these students can see themselves. What if a student had gone through something like this? What if there was a student who had thought about suicide? What if there was a student who was gender confused even? They justify books with pedophilia in them by saying, well, what if a child has gone through this? And they say it's important to see themselves reflected in this literature, in this content that they're consuming. I mean, to me, not only would it make it worse if a child had gone through that, but also for most kids, you are introducing very, very dark themes into their little form. You know, formative minds or their malleable minds that they can't really safely and fully process in a healthy way.
- [20:28]
Abigail Schreier
And Allie, when a mob goes in and objects, the first thing they do is make her feel stupid or crazy. That's what their response is. Oh, you don't know the literature. Well, I looked into the literature because I wanted to arm moms like that one. And actually the literature backs up the fact that if you valorize suicide, if you present it as a coping mechanism, if you are repetitive in your talk of suicide, we know that that increases suicide. Okay? There have been great studies on this. There's a great Viennese subway study in which that. That showed this. When they stopped doing. When they got the press to stop doing those things in reporting Viennese subway suicides in Vienna, they were able to depress the rate of suicide just by stopping all the talk of it. Stop by, you know, talking about methods and valorizing the subject. And you're right. It absolutely presents the world as dark and dangerous. But here's the other thing I want you to know. Look, my kids are in religious school, okay? They're in a very religious school. A lot of people think and they felt this way with my last book. You know, on the left they kind of, the attitude was always like, why are you picking on this marginalized group? And on the right the attitude is why would you even bother? Like that doesn't, that doesn't apply to us. Who would do that? Like, you know that, that is sort of like irrelevant. Sel is completely in my kids school. They expanded the psych staffs. Right. Even in religious school they bring this stuff in, they smuggle it in, they tell you it's life saving and they, they start to very much like DEI officers in a university, they get to work undermining the school. And that doesn't mean they mean to, but they sort of take over because they can oversee everything in terms of mental health. And now we're no longer talking about morality, we're no longer talking about treating each other correctly or you know, doing what's right. All of a sudden we're talking about feelings and oneness with feelings and that's. And always looking at yourself. It tends to really undermine. Even in the most conservative districts or in the most religious. Religious schools.
- [22:43]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah. I mean I think that we all have a natural tendency to be self centered, to think about ourselves and to look at the world through the lens of like, what do I want, how do I feel? And this kind of feeds into that. And also as you've said, it glorifies it. And so it glorifies self centeredness. And you're actually told that self centeredness, being self centered, being self focused, is the best and most moral and the kindest and the most loving thing that you can do. That is how you are a good neighbor, that is how you are a good citizen. You just learn to love yourself more and more. You just understand your feelings more and more. And what you're saying is that it's actually doing the opposite. It's not only making kids stunting their growth, but it's also making them more cruel. Right. Like they're actually less able to see the pain of other people and understand other people's point of view, right?
- [23:37]
Abigail Schreier
That's right. They're living under this tyranny of feelings in which they tyrannize each other with their feelings and they are tyrannized by their own. They're constantly focusing on their feelings and Guess what? When you think about your feelings all the time, you're going to conclude that you're not that happy. You're going to think about every tiny worry and magnify it. I mean, I call them in the book sort of emotional hypochondriacs, by which I don't mean that they're making up their own pain, right? It's not that they're inventing it, they're just making it worse, just like hypochondriacs do. Hypochondriac. What they do is, you know, what they now call illness, anxiety disorder or somatic symptom disorder is these are people and I talk to world experts in hypochondriasis. What they do is they magnify the pains we all have by hyper focus on them, by relentlessly focus on them. And that's what kids are doing with their feelings. And you know, you mentioned empathy. What I learned is that empathy naturally, unlike things like fairness, it causes us. We can't empathize with more than two people at once. It's not possible. So naturally we privilege the person in front of us who's suffering, very often at the expense of the out group. So it actually empathy can lead to a lot of cruelty.
- [24:51]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Right. I think that's such an interesting concept. You're the title of chapter eight is Full of Empathy and Mean as Hell. And I'm actually writing a book that'll be out this fall about how specifically empathy tricks Christian women into taking the progressive position on everything. If you have empathy for the migrant, then you'll be for open borders. If you have empathy for these gender confused young people, you will affirm them, use their pronouns, et cetera. And I never thought about what you said though, that you can't really have full empathy for two people at once. And so whoever is hoisted up in front of you as the worst victim, as the biggest victim, based on their skin color, based on their sexual orientation or gender identity or whatever it is, that's the person that you're going to say is right, needs your full defense, needs your full celebration, needs your full affirmation, even at the expense of everyone else, even at the expense of truth, even at the expense of fairness, even at the expense of safety. Obviously we see that in the gender issue a lot, but there are many other examples of that, how empathy can actually not just be unhealthy, but harmful.
- [26:07]
Abigail Schreier
I love that. That's fascinating. I'm excited for your new book. I mean, that's exactly right. Empathy becomes a tool of manipulation. Right. So you say to a kid, whatever the issue, oh, well, we all need to feel bad for so and so. And I profile in the book a young woman who was treated so cruelly over supposedly a racist and anti Semitic comment. Now it turned out the girl was Jewish and it wasn't. She hadn't made an anti Semitic comment or a racist comment. But the administrators and the children who accused her of the anti Semitism were not even Jewish, but they accused her of antisemitism based on a funny joke she had made that had really nothing to do with anything. You can see it in the book, but it really didn't have very much to do with anything at all. She was joking about Halloween costumes. And they then persecuted her for the rest of the school year and that they felt. But they were only sticking up for the kids who were so pained and injured by this. And no one bothered to say, wait a second, what do you mean you're injured by her anti Semitic comment? You're not even Jewish. She is. What are you talking about? No one said that because they completely forgot every sort of basic principle of what was actually said. Does this make any sense? And they just ran with this girl's feelings.
- [27:26]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah. You know, it reminds me of a phrase that I heard echoed a lot in the era of George Floyd, like the summer of 2020. What matters is the impact, not the intent. That's what they would say, the activists would say is that it doesn't matter what you meant by what you said. What matters is how it made people feel. And really it's both. And like, obviously if you run into someone you didn't mean to run into them, you still apologize to say, I'm sorry that I hurt you, even if you didn't mean to. So it's both. But I think that motto that it's always just the impact and the intent doesn't matter at all. It exemplifies what you're talking about there, that we always have to prioritize how someone feels about what you did or what you said over the truth of what someone might have said. And that is a very unfair world to live in.
- [28:23]
Abigail Schreier
Right. I mean, remember, empathy is not a moral concept. Right. In other words, you can do good in this world without having empathy for the person you're helping. You might say, I can't really understand what she's feeling, but I'm going to take care of her anyway, or him anyway, or whatever the act is. That's good. Likewise, you can be, you know, very cruel and full of empathy. So we know that con men and all kinds of bad people exploit the fact that they can get inside other people's heads to take advantage of them. So sometimes empathy is not a moral concept. The problem is we're so pushing this with kids, and it takes over. It completely sort of submerges fairness considerations like fairness, what's right, justice, and. And we think we're being so emotionally attuned, but really we're being. You know, the schools are often very tyrannical as they run supposedly with, you know, to take care of someone's feelings.
- [29:26]
Allie Beth Stuckey
You know, I've thought about empathy, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree with this, but I've thought about empathy as something that can be in particular context, helpful. For example, before I had kids, when I went on an airplane and there was a bunch of crying babies, I'd be like, seriously, seriously, can you. Can the parents not just figure this out? I can't believe that you have this crying toddler, this toddler running around. You have all of these silly thoughts in your head of, when I'm a parent, I'll never do that. It'll never be that way. And then you have kids and, wow, you understand. And you have so much compassion for those parents. You understand completely know what they're going through. It's not easy. They're much more stressed out about their crying baby than you are. And that can motivate you to say, okay, how can I help? Now, of course, you can have compassion for someone without having been in their shoes before. But it helps having been in their shoes, it helps having experienced something yourself. It helps to be able to say, not only can I have compassion for you, but I have felt what you feel, and that is what inspires me to help you out or to see things differently or to be more gentle with you. But, oh, go. You know what? Go ahead. You. You answer that. Because I think I've spoken enough about it. I think I've explained.
- [30:45]
Abigail Schreier
Not at all. I, you know, I. I would say just to push back on you, that it's actually coming from your values. So in other words, you could also have empathy just as easily for the stewardess who is trying to get the parent to shut. Shut up or right. In other words, your values lead you to empathize with that mother. But the goodness is coming from your values. Feeling like a young mother is doing something noble. She's raising the next generation, and she's trying to tend to her kids. And I should try to feel for Her. Right. I mean, you see people empathizing with terrorists, empathizing with vandals all over the place. Because empathy is not bad. It's morally neutral. And that's the point. It can. It can be. It can manipulate us. You know, it can manipulate us and be misapplied all over the place.
- [31:35]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yes, I agree. It has to be submissive. Empathy has to be submissive to your values and submissive to the truth. And it is not the same as love. I mean, I've argued before that there really can't be true love without truth. You're not loving someone. Well, by lying to them, you can empathize with someone and lie to them.
- [31:58]
Abigail Schreier
Them.
- [31:58]
Allie Beth Stuckey
I don't think you can love someone and lie to them. So empathy can be good when it is submissive to those superior values of love, truth, principles. And so I. Yeah, I agree with you there. But it is definitely seen as like the reigning, you know, stamp of virtue today, that if you are empathetic, you will do xyz. It's a total tool of manipulation and coercion.
- [32:28]
Abigail Schreier
Yeah. I mean, think about it this way. You know, if you empathize with a child too much, when you're going to give them a shot, you won't give it to them.
- [32:35]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah.
- [32:36]
Abigail Schreier
If you empathize with a child too much who's upset that he's been sent to his room, you'll never punish him. Right. Like, empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing good in this world. And often over empathizing with certain people will keep us from. From taking care of each other for keeping us from doing the right thing. Right. If a police officer over empathizes with someone who is, you know, a criminal, he might not arrest him and then the criminal could go on to harm others. So, you know, in all kinds of situations, empathy is just not. It's amoral and it won't necessarily produce the best result.
- [33:17]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Right, Right. Tell me how this leads into gentle parenting. Would you say that it is that the idea of gentle parenting, that it is led by the idea that empathy must be first and must be foremost when it comes to how we treat our children?
- [33:40]
Abigail Schreier
I love that that's not how I described it in the book, but I love your characterization. I think that's great. I mean, yes, that's a way of looking at it. It is a therapeutic method which constantly solicits the child's feelings, focuses on the feelings, puts the parent at the same level as the child, and it's constantly a conversation about how are we feeling about this, do we? And giving a child endless options. Now, there are a number of problems with this. There are a number of reasons that it's not good for kids. And the number one thing is that we've known now for really millennia that kids need parental authority, which doesn't mean cruelty. It doesn't mean, you know, an unloving laying down of rules. But ultimately, the parent has to be in charge. A child will feel much more safe and secure if the parent is in charge. But if you empathize too much with a child, you'll never do what's right for the kid.
- [34:36]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah, this is such a debate right now among young moms. And I think that there is some. There's somewhere in between. I mean, obviously only being a disciplinarian or a nag or a nitpick or someone who never gives credit to what your child is feeling, that's one thing.
- [34:54]
Abigail Schreier
But who is that today? I mean, does that even exist today? We don't have authoritarian parents anymore. We surround our kids with these therapeutic, empathic adults. No one is laying down any rules or high expectations almost in any situation they're in. The problem isn't that they have empathetic mothers or empathetic fathers. It's that they're getting therapy from every angle. And no one's saying, you're fine. Go on, keep playing soccer. You'll be fine. No one's saying, knock it off. No one's saying, shake it off. No one's saying, handle your problems yourself. And that's the problem. It's so extreme. And I'll tell you something else. Empathy can be much crueler. And I'll give you an example why. Let's say you don't set down rules for your child. Let's say you always solicit their opinion. You always worry about their feelings. You just hug them when they're in distress. You never punish them when they punch their little sibling. Right now you're going to send them off to school where they have to obey the teacher's rules and they won't be able to do it. So tell me, what ended up the most compassionate? Was that compassionate? The teacher's gonna now want to put your child on drugs.
- [36:04]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Right? Right. And even beyond that, I mean, if that problem extends until they're a teenager, until they're an adult, and they never learn how to work with other people, learn how to share, learn how to not have outbursts or violent reactions when they don't get their way. I mean, you're talking about not you disciplining them, but the state disciplining them. And so you're right at the end of the day, which was the more compassionate option?
- [36:34]
Abigail Schreier
The last book people were always talking about, you know, oh, what about, you know, what we teachers have to get in there and liberate the kids and protect the kids from their horrible, you know, homophobic parents who won't affirm, you know, who are so homophobic they would throw a child out in the street and they invented this bugaboo that didn't exist. I mean, I don't know what, how many decades we have to go back in order to make that a reality of American life, but it has been so many decades until since that even existed. And they were saying this in the most liberal districts in our country. In California there was this idea, oh, that we couldn't trust those homophobic parents. And I think the same gets true when you talk about basic authority and rules and expectations in the home. Where are these cruel, unloving parents who demand obedience? You know, these authoritarian parents? Now we know authoritarian, which is unloving and rule bound. Those kids don't fare very well, but neither do the permissive parents. And study after study has shown this. The ones who, or as I call them, the therapeutic parents, are even worse than permissive because they surveil the kids, they give them no independence and they constantly solicit the kids feelings on everything. Neither of those kids has, has done very well in terms of happiness, anxiety, depression and, and success and all kinds of good relationship with parents long term. None of the those have had good, you know, results. But authoritative parents who just basically set down rules, that's not cruel, that's just parenting.
- [38:09]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Do you think that it's changed because of how the different generations were parented? My grandparents were part of the silent generation. I think like within my age it's probably grandparents in the silent or the great generation. And so, you know, early 20th century to the 30s and 40s, my parents baby boomers and obviously they didn't have as much of an emotional or even affectionate upbringing as I did. And I have a great relationship with my parents and they certainly were not permissive, they were authoritative and they weren't as. Even though I never ever, ever have doubted that my parents love me so much and love my brother so much, I wouldn't call them affectionate necessarily. My husband and I are much more affectionate as parents and maybe a little bit gentler as well than my parents were. And a lot of my friends say the same thing. Say the same thing, that we are just much more affectionate and kind of like, gushy with our children than our parents were, even though we have a great relationship with them. And I just kind of. I wonder why that is.
- [39:24]
Abigail Schreier
Because we. I think we bought into the idea that it was cruel to lay down rules and just say, no, I'm sorry. Those are the consequences. You hate your sister. I'm taking away your toy. You're going to your room. We started feeling like that was abusive, that could cause them trauma. We were afraid to do it even when we needed to. And it became. We also poured way more time into the kids than any generation. We are so devoted to these kids, and we're so determined to have a close relationship with them, in part because we spend all our time devoting ourselves to them. So now we really want to be their besties. And the problem is, look, you can be as affectionate to a kid as you want. That's not harmful. Right? But you can't miss out on being in charge. See, if you stop being in charge, that's when the harms come in. And study after study has shown this. The kids don't do as well in all kinds of metrics, because kids know that someone has to be in charge. And very often, when a kid wasn't raised by anyone who was willing to be in charge, they go looking for daddy elsewhere. And we see radicalism, political radicalism in this generation in rates that are new, that are much higher than before. They are. You know, and many. You know, I interviewed several immigrant parents and people who work with parents whose families have become radicalized. The kids have become radicalized. And they tell me very often these come from the most liberal. These kids come from the most liberal homes before they join antique, FIFA, blm, whatever it is. But they're really looking for daddy. And I. Yeah, you know, that is a consequence of never having high expectations or rules for your own home.
- [41:06]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Totally. I can see that. The importance of discipline and setting. Not just setting the boundaries, but consistently enforcing those boundaries. Kids are always looking for that. Like, even when it comes to non. Not just discipline, but when you see toddlers start developing, they're putting everything kind of into categories, into definitions. They. The difference between mom and dad, male and female, from a very early age. We do this here, we do that there. This is right here. This is wrong. Whatever it is, you can tell that they are looking for those definitions. They're looking for the lines, they're looking for the boundaries. And I think part of their development is to test those boundaries. And it sounds like what you're saying is that parents, in the name of being empathetic and gentle, have said, yeah, keep testing them, just keep pushing them out. And we will keep moving the boundaries further and further out until they basically don't exist. And these radicalized teens are out in search of those boundaries. Finally, like, you know, how extreme can I get? How radical can I get until someone finally tells me to stop?
- [42:12]
Abigail Schreier
Right? I mean, think about it this way. Say you don't punish a five year old who's hitting his sister. Okay, first of all, he could hurt his sister.
- [42:20]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Right?
- [42:20]
Abigail Schreier
Okay, Second of all, now he's in charge because he's dominating things. He's the most powerful. He's asserting a certain rule over his sister. There's something else too. Now you're sending a kid who hits other kids off to school.
- [42:35]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Totally.
- [42:36]
Abigail Schreier
So is that more compassionate? Is he likely to have friends at school, have people like him, have teachers who want to teach him? No, because nobody likes a kid who's going around hitting other kids. Right? What they do is they suggest a medication. They start telling you he has oppositional defiant disorder. Right? That there's something wrong with him. And if you think that having your kid set up to believe there's something wrong with him just because he never heard the word no, well, to me that's far less kind and compassionate to a kid.
- [43:16]
Allie Beth Stuckey
I worry about my kids being put in school and being around other kids whose parents did not give them boundaries and did not discipline them and did not lay a good foundation for them, did not tell them that self control was a virtue. Of course I believe it's a fruit of the spirit. It's as a good thing the Bible tells us that we're supposed to practice. I worry about that. I worry about, I mean, my kids aren't Gen Z, they're younger than that. But I worry what kind of generation they're gonna grow up with. Kids who put their feelings first only and are unable to really function in a healthy way with everyone else.
- [44:02]
Abigail Schreier
Right? I think we're seeing it. I think we're seeing it in the demand. You must use my pronouns. You must change your course to accommodate me. You must. You know, we're seeing it in the workplace. Do you know how many young people are having their parents call bosses to tell them that they've got, that they're too stressed out on the job? These are adults and they're so infantilized and their feelings are always front and center and honestly, they're tyrannizing others. And they're tyrannized themselves by their own obsession with their feelings.
- [44:35]
Allie Beth Stuckey
No wonder they don't want to get married and don't want to. Don't want to have kids. Because those things they do require commitment. They require you to give up. Up some of what you want. Your complete autonomy and your complete flexibility for the good of someone else. And when sacrifice is seen as not just inconvenience, but as trauma and as something that is actually immoral and dangerous, of course you are going to avoid any kind of commitment that causes you to put yourself second.
- [45:08]
Abigail Schreier
Exactly. That's exactly right. That was perfectly said. You know, I, you know, think of that any time. I mean, when do moms do what they want to do? What feels good to them? I mean, you spend so much time just suppressing your own needs. Right. And taking care of someone else. That's the job. And I'll tell you what, the best email response I got was from someone passed on to me was from a mom who said, you know, I listened to Abigail on a podcast and for the first time this morning, I punished my son without guilt.
- [45:42]
Allie Beth Stuckey
That's amazing.
- [45:43]
Abigail Schreier
And the reason I like that was not because she had punished her son. That's up to her. That was her decision. Not because I told her when to punish or how to punish or whether to punish. That's not my business. But because she was doing what she believed was right without guilt for the first time.
- [45:59]
Allie Beth Stuckey
She was parenting.
- [46:01]
Abigail Schreier
She was parenting. Right. And that's all I seek to. I'm not, I'm no parenting expert. I'm not. I'm not even sure I believe in parenting experts. Okay. Most of the ones I've seen are not terribly impressive. Yeah. But I do believe in parents exercising their inst. Their better instincts without being told they're going to traumatize the child because it isn't true and it isn't helpful.
- [46:22]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah. I think also just like the over emphasis on individuality that everyone is special and that you don't have any similarities to anyone else and you shouldn't. And every single kind of misbehavior or any kind of, you know, lack of character that you have is not negative. It's just another quirk. It's just your personality type. It's just your enneagram number. It's just something special and beautiful about you that doesn't actually need to be worked on at all, but needs to be applauded. I think that also gives parents a sense of guilt that, like I can't punish, I can't discipline, because I am suppressing this snowflake of a person. And while there are, you know, beautiful, unique characteristics of each person, the fact of the matter is, is that we do have to learn how to function in society with other people.
- [47:18]
Abigail Schreier
Gosh, there's so much to say about what you just said. That's totally right. It's why, of course, it's a huge part of why religious families tend to do well. People who pass on religion because they're always pushing the kids to look outward, to think of themselves as connected to something higher, to. To a higher purpose. Community is so important for our well being. We never talk about it. Instead, we tell the kids exactly as you said. They're so unique in the world. Right. They don't need to ever worry about anyone beyond themselves. Well, that's actually very detrimental to their well being. Telling them they're part of something greater is actually really good for their well being. But, you know, there's another thing, too, and that is that part of the reason parents never took away the phones and never even limited their use, even during the school day, was because they became convinced that the child would be cruelly treated and emotionally, you know, tormented if they weren't with their friends, if they weren't always connected to their friends. I can't. That was the most common response I got when I said, why don't you take it away from her if you feel like it's harming her, if you feel like her, you know, transgender identification is getting worse. If you feel like, you know, she's getting more anxiety, more depression, more sleeplessness, less attention. Spanish, why can't you take it away? And the parents would often say to me, because she's connected. That's how she talks to her friends. I can't take her away from her friends. And of course, a generation ago, parents had no trouble saying, I'm sorry, you're grounded. You can't go out with your friends. This is best for you. But in this generation, we were so afraid of the trauma that would come in if we ever cut them off from their friends. And the mental health experts told us that they said that explicitly that, you know, very often kids need to be connected to their friends over their phone and that it was good for them. And they warned parents that it might undermine your relationship with your child if you take away their phone. And so parents couldn't even follow their best instincts.
- [49:14]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah, I think that also, parents just want to avoid bad feelings as much as possible. And if their child says that they feel bad without their phone, or they feel bad because their child says they feel bad, the easiest way to numb that pain is to just give your child what you want. So it takes not only discipline for your kid, but discipline in yourself. Like parents have to be able to manage our bad feelings. And to say, it doesn't feel good to take this away from my child, I don't want to do it. It's making it a lot harder. I have to deal with the tears, I have to deal with the tantrums. I have to deal with the consequences of doing this hard thing. Parents also have to be willing to go through hard things and to deal with hard feelings if we are going to discipline and parent our kids. I think that's, you know, a whole other layer to this.
- [50:02]
Abigail Schreier
That's right. But here's the other thing. They get no support. Parents get no support from the culture. None. I mean, the easiest thing to do would be, you know, what, what, you know, the wonderful psychologist Jonathan Haidt has suggested, and we have known for years that take the kids out of, they take the phones out of schools, at least during the school day, don't have them on their phones. This was so obvious and parents knew it. Parents had been complaining about the harms to their children, but they got no support and they were undermined all the time. So they couldn't trust their own instincts. And you're right. Everything we need to do for our kids is hard. There's nothing harder than sending a kid away from the dinner table because he's been rude or disrespectful or done something bad at the dinner table. I mean, it's, it's such a hassle to parents. If anything, you know, it's the hardest thing you ever have to do is discipline your kid or not give them what they want. But it's also necessary.
- [50:59]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Yeah, man, you're so right. I know moms who are trying now to get other parents on board to take the phones out of school, they want other parent support and saying, hey, can't you get on board with this initiative to say no phones in school? And the biggest impediment to that, like the biggest obstacle those, you know, anti phone in school moms have is other moms, other parents. And the biggest reason is I want to be able to text my kid immediately. I want them to text me back. I want to know that they're okay. Well, guess what? For thousands and thousands of years, we never had that luxury. And now it's Parents who are conditioned to that instant gratification of knowing their kid is okay. That's right. And so it is an uphill struggle.
- [51:50]
Abigail Schreier
That's exactly right. We've become so frantic, so anxious. And look, I can tell you, my own kids school, you know, they tried to limit the phones, but I can tell you that every time we have an expert who comes in, they say, well, the phones are good and they're bad. And even the, you know, American Psychological association, which was so late in issuing any statement, when they finally mentioned, you know, the harms of social media, was incredibly equivocal. It was, oh, it can be bad, but also good. You know, they never, the surgeon general never did this with cigarettes. Right. They warned parents of the harms, which, by the way, cigarettes also have positive things about them. Right. They're neural stimulants, they're social. There are things that are good about them, but bottom line is they'll give you cancer. And at least they issued the warning. The psychological associations haven't even issued a clear warning about these things. So it makes it so much harder for parents to organize and try to take them out of schools, even though we've known for eight years that they're bad for kids.
- [52:56]
Allie Beth Stuckey
What would you say, And I know that we have to end. There are a million other things I could ask you. What would you say to the position that says, okay, I hear you, Abigail, but there are some good things about therapy. There are some good things about children learning how to express their emotions and talk about difficult things and talk about their feelings. We don't want all of that pin up because maybe it can manifest itself in bad ways down the line. What do you say to people who say, I've seen some benefits to SEL or to therapy and how dare you take that away from us?
- [53:34]
Abigail Schreier
So I think that, you know, I try to look at the studies because I think that people tend to exaggerate. You often see this with young mothers. They'll see one, you know, one thing that was positive. And then they go around telling every in their five year old and they go around telling everyone, no, no, no, no, SEL is good. It really helped my daughter today. I mean, you have to wait and see how these things play out over time now. So I do think it's good to look at research. There's new research out of Australia and England in which they had a control group. One was a meta study of several different kinds of sel, and then the other looked at coping techniques and teaching, specifically kinds of Regulation skills, coping techniques and social emotional skills. The other looked at anti bullying techniques that were taught. They had a control group and they followed these kids over a year and the kids ended up sadder, more anxious or not helped at all, and more alienated from their parents. So does giving kids a vocabulary about their emotions help them? Of course, but that's not actually what the schools do. You see, what they do is they go in and they give them gobbledygook sometimes. One parent shared with me that her child was being taught anger is red. It was like happiness is yellow. You know, it was all arbitrary nonsense. They aren't always. I mean, I'll give you an example. Let me, let me just say something really fast. I'll give you an example to strengthen that point that you were making. Okay, here's a good example. When my, my husband told me this story, when he was a little boy, his father came to pick him up from a friend's house early. And he's got into the car and he said to his dad, I'm so angry that you picked me up because I was having a good time. And his father said to him, no, you're not. You're frustrated. And that was helpful because now he was saying, no, you're not, you're not angry. Let me give you a new word that's actually going to help you because it's not exactly anger and there's no question that's helpful. But if you go into the schools and look at what they're actually doing, all of this feelings focus inevitably funnels towards obsession over bad feelings, obsession over bad pain, and who's in charge of you. When you're a kid, who's in charge of making sure that you're not hurt, Inevitably it ends up as a criticism of the parents, the people who were supposed to keep you safe. So in practice, those things very, very often go together.
- [56:06]
Allie Beth Stuckey
That's a really good clarifying point. Thank you so much, Abigail. I'm so excited for people to read this book, Bad Therapy, why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. And I just want to say, like, your chapter titles are amazing. The chapter titles are sufficient and getting someone to want to read this book. So good. Thank you so much, Abigail. This book, I'm guessing is available everywhere.
- [56:29]
Abigail Schreier
It's available everywhere. Thank you so much, Ali. I really, really appreciate it.
- [56:32]
Allie Beth Stuckey
Awesome. Thanks so much, Abigail. Have a good day.