From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Why The Kids Aren't Alright ft. Abigail Shrier

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Kids and teens used to look forward to the day they could get their license, move out of the house, and start their lives -- but somewhere during the last decade, something shifted. The once independent, driven kids we used to see are now bogged down with depression, anxiety, and fear. So, for a generation that's never experienced a World War or Great Depression, why are today's kids unprecedentedly unwell when it comes to mental health?   Best-selling author of the new book, 'Bad Therapy,' Abigail Shrier weighs in on why the problem with our kids may be how parents are raising them -- as medication and therapy replace parenting and kids are taught happiness and comfort are more important than strength, taking on challenges, and gaining confidence to go for their goals. Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host of the podcast.

She's also my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. It's great to be back, Sean. And we have a great guest today. We have Abigail Schreier. Abigail, I'm going to welcome you right to the table. I'm going to tell everybody, everybody's heard of you. Everybody knows who you are, but I'm just going to still plug your books for you. So the first book, this is how I came to know about you, was through your book, Irreversible

Damage, the transgender craze, seducing our daughters a really important book now you've just written bad therapy why kids aren't growing up I want to talk about your latest book but I can't start Abigail without talking about your last book because we just have this study that came out you've been vindicated

you were right Abigail what the heck I'm waiting by the phone for an apology from the new york times i'm sure it's coming i just know it i'm sure it is don't hold your breath so there's a study that just came out that said most gender confused children grow out of it this landmark 15-year study concludes that that this and that these children who have this you know that maybe there's, you know, they're not in the right gender or maybe we put those ideas in their head that they will phase out of this. And, you know, we can laugh about this because you were taxed so viciously and anyone who agreed with you was was was considered a bad person. was considered a bad person.

And then, you know, the problem is that a lot of really well-intentioned parents who love their kids were being told by the schools, by these professionals, these parent professionals that you're going to talk about in your next book as we talk about that, all the experts said that you were a bad parent and your kid would end up dead and it would be your fault if you didn't transition them. And now this comes out and it's like too late for how many kids that's right made this permanent decision that's right in the time since i published irreversible damage this is in 2020 laying out all the risks and all the ways parents were being lied to um you know in the time since then when the new york times finally got around to

acknowledging that everything in the book was correct, tens of thousands of American children were harmed. And it's irreversible. I mean, when you when you take hormone blockers or you go to the next step of surgery, these are lifelong issues that you're now going to deal with. And it's shameful that we haven't had the medical industry and our schools that are looking out for our young people. We need investigative journalists to call into question what any common-sense American actually knew, which was this is somewhat of an epidemic that's going on because you can't have this massive number of people in a short period of time all of a sudden say they're gender fluid or in the wrong body something else had to be

going on so we appreciate you calling that out abigail i just said wonder what you think happens now i mean i know you're not going to get a call from the new york times but at this point i mean what as a country and we're exporting this to the world and the rest of the world is caught on before us. So as a country, how do we grapple with what we've done? And do you think that this study will make any difference and stop stop what's been happening? It's a good question. I don't know. It's it's we're living in a very different world. Right. So in earlier American history, when you had things like satanic panics and repressed memory scandals, you know, wonderful physicians would go in and testify to the bad protocols.

The repressed memory scandal, for instance, which led to prosecution of innocent people. You would have people testify and say, this is bad medicine. This is bad therapy. This is bad, you know, medical protocol. There's no basis to it. And and that was the end of it. They were sued. You know, basically, you know, bad professionals were sued into oblivion. The problem is we are graduating American doctors with gender ideology in their brains. It is sort of a kind of mind virus. It's, you know, it's or religion, however you want to call it.

It's not factual. And they are graduating with this nonsense. And they are, many of them, energized to implement it, whatever the evidence shows. And it's a real problem because, you know, the risks of puberty blockers have always been there. They have only, all they have done since I wrote about it was we've we've learned even more about those risks. And the fact that that that I was right, there have been subsequent studies showing that there was no you know, commit suicide. There was no proof that it was a cure for suicidality. It was no proof that the gender dysphoria, the biological distress, distress in one's biology, there was no proof that that caused suicidality. So all these things that were said about it were a total lie. And the question is, can we turn this around knowing now what we do, that puberty blockers are really dangerous.

They're really dangerous and of really suspect benefit. And part of the problem is, and it even goes back to COVID, when the medical community, the research community, when they make mistakes, it would be wonderful if they would apologize for the mistakes that they made. If they said, you know what, we actually gave you bad information. As we've done more studies, we now realize that this is where the science is leading us. And what we told you two years ago or 10 years ago was wrong. But because they don't apologize, because they won't remedy the past mistakes, I don't know if it's a social pressure. I think it's really hard

to hold them to account and make a transition into getting back to good science away from bad science. And it seems like scientists aren't really basing their findings and their advice on science. It's more on this sociology, this social movement that's taken over what used to be uh based on the scientific method okay do you want and people make made a lot of money and they're still making money right abigail yeah i mean they are but i think that you know for for my part the bigger issue is that they were captive to this ideology which was not based in science not based in truth they were willing to lie to promote it and they confused a lot of people. They deceived a lot of parents. They confused a lot of children. They led to a great amount of harm. And I don't know if there will ever be a

reckoning because as you said, we're no longer in a position where media, you know, you know, prestige media comes out and says, we got it wrong. They don't do that. They don't issue corrections. They don't own up to They don't issue corrections. They don't own up to mistakes. It's a massive problem. And as you said, they just sort of subtly change the story and pretend that's what they've been saying all along. So it's just like COVID. Yeah, it's just like COVID. It's just like COVID. You see the union people coming out and say, we never said close the school. We just made a suggestion. I'm like, no, you didn't. You shut it down. And you said we had to pay a gazillion dollars in tax dollars for ransom to open it.

Then we gave you the money. You didn't even open it. So, I mean, all of this is just I think people are losing so much trust in institutions. And that's the loss of trust, I think, that people don't have in what used to be gold standards in science. It's gone. And so now things that they tell us, some of it might be true. Some of them might be really helpful. A lot of us are skeptical. We don't believe them because they've lied to us so much. And that's the problem moving forward, that we don't trust them any longer. So you wrote a book that, oh, go ahead. No, no, you go.

And you're seeing a lot of conspiracy theory as a result, I think, because we don't trust our institutions anymore. And that's bad for everyone. Yeah. And you know, the problem, Abigail, is that all my conspiracy theories came true. Rachel says her conspiracy theories are spoiler alert. All right. So your book is so fascinating to me. So it's called Bad Therapy, Why Kids Aren't Growing Up. So you may not know anything about us abigail but we have nine kids um sean and i between us yeah so between the age of 20 and four we have nine kids rachel had them all albiga i did there's not two families coming together rachel and i oh yeah okay yeah it's not a blended family i did you all work wow and there

are no and there are no twins so I did some of the work, Abigail. Yeah. She did more of it. Sean says the best part about kids is making them. So anyway, we have nine kids. And when I was reading your book, what struck me is that a lot of the stuff that you're suggesting, a lot of the stuff that you're suggesting, this idea of not over-parenting, of not over-analyzing everything, of not getting too crazy involved in helicopter parenting, we can't do anyway, because when you have nine, you just, you can't do that. It's sort of like, to me,

something that happens when you have like two precious kids or one precious child and you do all this stuff and you're trying to manage it and make sure it all comes out perfect. We couldn't do that if we tried because there's just too many of them. And so I wanted to talk to you about it because it seems like the intention of the parents who are sending their kids to therapy. I think you said 40%. I was shocked by that. Is that right? 40% of the rising generation has received mental health professional help. Is this just that these parents are really well-intentioned or is there in the culture telling them they can't handle it in terms of helping their kids and they need these professionals. Yes, I think that, you know, the culture has made, you know, therapy or therapists the king of, you know, the, you know, our guides for parenting. They've never been parenting experts. There's no reason they should be parenting experts. But nonetheless, we look to them to solve

all our problems with our kids. And we turn to childless therapists for parenting guidance. We've done that through the books we read, which are almost all written by therapists and psychologists. But also we drop our kids off to school where teachers and counselors are routinely playing therapists. And it's a huge problem. It's causing way too much focus on kids' feelings. They are absolutely being crushed by the tyranny of each other's feelings and the tyranny of their own. And it's led to more dysregulation, more anxiety and more depression. And what you said about having nine kids, let me tell you, that's so good for kids, as you well know, to think about others, to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves, No, to think about others, to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves, to not be overly precious about their own feelings, which, after all, change all the time and are really actually inaccurate guides to the state of the world.

I mean, that's just a much healthier way for kids to grow up. It seems like there's now become with all of the mental health problems, and I put that in air quotes, Abigail. There's now all of this medication that's funneling into these young bodies. Like no one was medicated in the 80s when I was growing up, it seemed like, and now like every kid seems to be medicated because they have some mental disease or defect and they need to be treated by big pharma. Yeah, we are treating well kids and we're turning them into patients that's what we're doing we are over diagnosing over medicating and way way too much therapy in various forms from the parents from the school teachers we are giving these they are so awash in psychopathology that

none of them thinks they're shy they say they have social anxiety none of them thinks they're sad they all say they have depression right and none of them thinks they're sad. They all say they have depression, right? And none of them says they're worried. It's always my anxiety. And the problem is when you have a brain problem, it's something you can't overcome on your own. So lo and behold, we have a generation that is so used to handing over their own agency to a mental health professional that they don't believe they are capable of adulthood in this world. They don't feel strong enough and they are effectively taking a mental health day off of life, off of adulthood. I remember hearing you talk about this book and you said, you said something about like, you had talked to, for the book, you had talked to a woman who, or I guess she started therapy

because like her grandparent died. And then the parents said, well, you must need a therapist. It's like grandparents die. They've been dying since the beginning of time. And it's sad. I'm dreading the day that, you know, my kids have to deal with that. But it's part of the cycle of life. Like I can understand why if you if you're instantly told you can't handle this here's a therapist or it's not even the parent doing i mean i think when i have when i have problems with my kids my first instinct is to call my mom um you know after i talk to sean um but uh you know if i if

we can't figure it out i'm gonna call my mom and look for some wisdom but you're right i thought it was so interesting you said that we're going to these many of these therapists are childless they've never had this experience and and we're going to people many of these areas are childless they've never had this experience and and we're going to people who've never had kids um to get advice on how to raise our kids you know what a parenting expert is it's someone who's actually raised good kids to adulthood productive adulthood i'm not a parenting expert i haven't done that yet okay i have three young kids but that's what a parenting expert actually is someone who's done it and knows what they're doing instead we're relying on these so-called experts who are giving parents these incredibly awkward

scripts for use with their children they are extremely bizarre scripts i'm setting a boundary those are some big feelings it makes it it really bleeds the whole relationship of vitality and a sense that it's your own and attempts to professionalize it with techniques that have no indication that they work. And in fact, many of them make kids more dysregulated because it always is focusing kids back on themselves and their own feelings. We've always been kind of stunned at all of the therapy and the medication as parents. And it's interesting when culture has medication and therapy all over, what happens is your own kids will come home and they'll be self-diagnosing themselves. I think I have ADHD. I need to get medicine like everyone else does in school. And we have to be like, no, you don't rub some dirt on it. You're going to be fine.

You don't have ADHD. We're not going to go down this path. But everyone's on like Adderall and ADHD. They are. But it begs the question, this is a topic that Rachel and I, who haven't done the research like you, haven't written a book like you, but just it didn't make sense to us because we're kind of normal people that were raised in the 80s. How did you come up with this topic, Abigail, to go, you know what, I'm going to spend my time and I'm going to research this issue that I think is such an important issue because it's impacting the kind of young adults we're raising, the next generation, how they're going to be raised. How did you come up with the idea to go, you know raising, the next generation, how they're going to be raised.

How do you come up with the idea that go, you know what, I'm going to put my time in to expose what's happening with mental health with the youth in America? Well, I started just with a question. What I wanted to know is why the kids who had gone through no world war, no depression, who got the most wellness tips, the most coping mechanisms, the most focus on social, emotional learning, and the most therapy, and were on the most psych events, they should have been the picture of mental health. So why were they suffering the greatest?

Why did every one of them think they had gone through childhood trauma? And why were they being debilitated by it? You know, why did they no longer want to grow up? Why did they not want their driver's license? Why did 17-year-old boys see that driving was scary, right? What is wrong with them? I couldn't wait for the day to get my license. I got 17-year-old kids who don't have licenses. I'm like, what's wrong with you? You know, we put the parenting experts, these so-called experts in charge of therapeutic experts. They told kids, you're so unique in the world. This is what they let us do. You're so unique.

You don't have to be responsible for anyone but yourself. So you've got these kids growing up with a sense of total isolation, total focus on their own minds and their own feelings, no sense of greater strength from what their own families have gone through and a sense that they matter, that they have to contribute to the greater good because mom needs me to drive for the other kids, right? that they have to contribute to the greater good because mom needs me to drive for the other kids. Right. And we isolated them. We live they live away from grandparents. And so they don't have the best lives. And then when we and we give them tech and when they're miserable, after all that, we pour in mental health resources expecting it to fix that. And it doesn't. Abigail, we're just going to take a quick break.

Go to commercial and we'll be right back with more. Streaming now on Fox Nation. You believe you were sent by God? Yes. An exclusive new series hosted and narrated by Martin Scorsese. These are stories of the saints. Martin Scorsese presents The Saints, streaming now on Fox Nation. Go to FoxNation.com and sign up today.

All right, Abigail, welcome back to the kitchen table. Rachel, you're up. Well, I was really intrigued by what you said, how we've absolutely changed childhood as we know it. So like when you and me and Sean think about our own childhood, it's very different. I would say that it's changed very rapidly just in the last few years.

And I say that because I have kids that span 20 years. So I think about my older kids versus my younger kids. My older kids, I felt were more social, wanted to go out more than my younger kids do, were begging to go out more than my younger kids ask. I felt like my whole high school year was, you know, years where me begging my mom to let me go out. That's sort of like the overarching memory. And so how has it changed? Is it just the screens? What other ways has childhood changed in your view? So I think the screens absolutely play a big role, right? The social media plays a big role, but it's not the only thing. And we know it's not the only thing for a few reasons. As of 2016, one in six American children between the ages two and eight had a mental health or behavioral diagnosis. Now, those kids weren't on social media. They're not on social media now, but in 2016, they definitely weren't between the ages of two and eight.

media. They're not on social media now, but in 2016, they definitely weren't between the ages of two and eight. So the question is, you've got a generation that we have told you're not well, you're not up to life's challenges. And so they don't feel up to it, right? Rather than tell them, shake it off, knock it off. You're going to be fine. You'll live. Remember, you'll live. Remember sticks and stones, right? You don't hear those. You haven't heard those from a generation because we've been telling them the opposite. Oh, you have anxiety. Now you need a testing accommodation. Now we need to make all these changes in your environment to accommodate you. And by the way, if a child absolutely needs these things for, of course they should get them. The problem is they're getting them when they don't need them

because nobody's asking the simple question, will this make my child stronger? Yeah. You'll live. You're right. We heard that all the time. We used to hear, and my sister and I do this, you know, the kids will come in and with a sudden complaint, I'm like, just drink some water, go for a walk. You know, what happened to that? I want to repeat that stat, Abigail, because I pulled that out too, that you quote in your book. I started, it's one in six US children aged two to eight have been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. And you're right, they're not on screens. And your point we want to raise a

culture as a society you would think how can we raise the strongest most well-rounded well-adjusted tough generation that we can and what this is doing is raising a bunch of pansies a bunch of people who can't deal with simple life issues at You're telling them at a very young age that they can't handle it. And the problem is life is hard, right? Some bad things happen. We don't always get what we want. People die. People get sick. We get jobs. We lose jobs. Sometimes we're successful. Sometimes we're not. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. But this is shattering their ability to actually deal with actually

everyday life events. That's right, because we did the opposite. We went in and said, happiness is our goal. Do you feel happy now? How about now? How about now? And we made them neither strong nor happy. But we did something else, too. You know, dad, in general, men used to provide that sort of balance. They used to be able to be the ones very often. It was the men who would say, shake it off. You're fine. Okay. And they know they were so undercut by the mental health experts. They were told that everything they were doing could lead to emotional abuse or trauma that could constitute trauma. So they were so undercut. There was no balance for these kids. All they got was was focus on their feelings. You know, last summer I was trying to get my,

you know, I grew up with kids working. I mean, teenager, I was babysitting since I was 12 years old. My brothers had paper routes. We'd get up really early, like four thirty in the morning on their bikes in the cold and and, you know, take papers around the neighborhood. And so I wanted my kids to get a job at a teenage son. And I told him he had to get a job. And then, like, for weeks, I should say days, I mean, he was still in the house. I'm like, well, I don't understand. Why don't you have to do it? He's like, well, nobody applies in person.

You do it online. And I said, that's not, they're not responding. You have to go and we got in this argument about this and he was like no he's kind of shy so i think he didn't want to do it but also i think the system is set up that i actually think the businesses don't want them to come in he has social anxiety yeah it's not shyness he has social anxiety he needs a medication um so anyway i got so frustrated i said get out of the house i said don't come back till you get a job and he came back with the job when he left i called sean i'm like i think i might have been too hard he left mad i told him

not to come home until he got a job but when he came home he was oddly proud of himself he had a job at a pizza joint that is an awesome story let me tell you because you know why kids are so sad today and so alone they don't even know they matter your son knows that it counts if he shows up for work. He's got a job. He's doing something for others. He is outward focused. And in person, outward focused on other people. That's what these kids need. Okay?

What you gave him is exactly what they need. And that's what we need to get back to. That's what we need to be doing. Worth and success. Can I tell you, if you talk about this, because we kind of talked about what's happening in the medical industry and what's happening with all of the therapy. Rachel and I have been concerned. If you send your child to a therapist or a psychologist, wherever you send your kids, they don't share our values. and all of a sudden I'm going to get this kind of radical therapist that's going to start telling my kids things that undermine what we tell them in the home or tell them they have ailments that

we never knew they had and all of a sudden what you thought was a good action by a parent all of a sudden can blow up because the therapist is going to find all kinds of problems that your kid didn't know they had and you didn't know your child had. And so there's almost a danger, in my view, as a parent in sending your kids to a therapist, because to your point, Abigail, they're not the experts, but they play one on the couch. That's right. And there are these known harms of therapy. There are risks that are worth it if you desperately need it. But if you don't, I wrote the book so that parents would stop being pushed around and they could be aware of these risks. And let me tell you something, even a very well-meaning therapist who sits around, who's really only trying to do good, but is talking to your kid about their bad feelings once a week, they can make those feelings worse.

And of course, it naturally who was there, who was the job? Whose job was it to keep your kids safe? It was, it was your parents. So naturally it can lead to a criticism of a parent, but there's something else too. Look, adults, when they go to therapy, they're looking for a nonjudgmental space. We don't want a nonjudgmental space with our kids, right? We don't want someone to say, Oh, you're having sex at 14. How does that make you feel? Right? No, we don't want that. We don't want that. But you know what? It starts, I remember they were trying when, when my, my older girls were, were teenagers, they wanted to separate my, my, even my son, they wanted to separate when I would take him into the pediatrician,

they wanted to separate me from my son or my daughter so they could talk to them about whether they were sexually active and i'm like excuse me why would it be good for you to know that she's sexually active and not me like like what and so i i said no i said you can't talk to my kids but i think they were mad as heck they made me feel like I was some sort of, you know, prudish, Amish, weirdo, Christian parent. But that's what they do. They make you. And I always thought that was, I always thought that was so weird. So what should parents be doing? I mean, let's, we've sort of diagnosed, like, all these bad things that can happen.

And I do also want to ask you why the schools are getting involved in this. If you're if your book got to the bottom of that, did your book get to the bottom of that? Sure, absolutely. So basically, it's a great question, by the way. And parents have been undermined by these mental health experts for a generation now. We don't even think we just automatically leave the room. Oh, you're going to ask my eight year old about whether he might want to kill himself. Sure, I'll get up and leave because we're so polite and we're so used to being undermined. That's your kid. Do not leave the room. And I go through and I explain what the mental health surveys are that the CDC now gives

across the board in schools and every state. They're giving these surveys in which they present suicide and self-harm to kids. And then they ask, supposedly, to gauge their mental health, they offer a series of methods. And they ask in granular detail, have you ever done this? Have you ever done that? Do you ever feel sad when your parents aren't around? Do they notice when you're feeling sad? They ask intrusive questions about the family. They claim this is for ostensibly to evaluate the need, the mental health need of kids,

but they're anonymous. So it's not going to help a child in desperate need. And it's definitely going to suggest a lot of bad things to a kid who isn't in need. See, that's funny because I thought when you were saying that, I thought, well, maybe they're trying to find, you know, sexual abuse, you know, if there's, you know, finding signs of that. You know, it's funny because when I think about schools, the two people I trust the least in the school faculty are the librarians and the counselors. That's about right. The librarians and the counselors. That's about right. Again, Abigail's book is Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.

Right. That's correct. Right, Abigail? Yes. Yes. You know, I want to be a prosecutor and for 10 years and I did a lot of child sexual assault. That is trauma. And there are a number of things that happen to young people where they probably do need some therapy. And that's not this conversation that we're having here. We know there's some appropriate times for it. We're talking about all of the therapy that kids are getting that they don't need and is undermining their ability to grow up and to have grit and determination and figure out how to

navigate certain problems that will come up in their life. They're going to learn it in a safer place in their home or in their neighborhood. And I just want to be. Yeah, I think that's a great point to be clear. It's a great point. It's a distinction I make in the book. Look, the differences between so-called necessary help, help right intervention when you have an actual problem like anorexia for god's sake go you know go get the help for your child that she needs but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about preventive mental health help you know mental health for everybody therapy for everybody there is no proof that it works there's a lot of reason to think it harms. And nonetheless, it is applied to every kid. As you said, every kid comes home and thinks today that they have anxiety, that they have depression over small things.

Why? Because all their friends have been diagnosed. It's way too much. They're way over treated and it's doing more harm than good. So what should parents do? So your kid comes home. They're impacted by all the mental health stuff that's on social media, all the trauma, you know, talking about on social media or their friends or the school, your kid comes home and says, I think I have, you know, trauma, it's your fault, whatever. What should parents do? What should parents do? Like, how do we handle this in this culture? How

do we handle our own kid in this situation right so a a bunch of things first of all we know what kids need they need authority from parents which doesn't mean being cold or unloving it just means parents willing to be in charge they need in-person contact with real with extended family okay they need people who love them who they love back over time they need to know that they matter they need to hear about their family histories they need people who love them, who they love back over time. They need to know that they matter. They need to hear about their family histories. They need to know what their family went through. It's the only proof they're going to have that they come from tough stuff. OK, we need to tell them those stories so that they know they can overcome really hard things.

And and we can I stop you for a minute minute, Abigail on that, because that is such a great point. It is one of the most under appreciated points. Most of us have a parent or a grandparent or a great grandparent who overcame something horrific. I have a daughter who's now 24 and for her senior project, she went and revisited and she had to talk to my mom and sort of get this history. In fact, I learned things that I didn't even know. I knew the general story, but I didn't know that some of the details of the story until my daughter did this for her senior project. But we, you know, my family escaped communism in Spain, you know, in the Spanish Civil War era. And, you know, we're very much persecuted. We have relatives who were buried

alive by the communists. So this was a remarkable story. And, you know, I'm not throwing it in their face all the time, like, fuck up, you know, your great uncle was buried alive. You know, I'm not doing that, but understanding that people and families survive horrible trauma and, and that, and that generations later we're doing better, that you will do better, that you will do fine. Oh God, Abigail, that is such a great one. None of us would be here if we were, if the so-called lie that gets told about intergenerational trauma forever debilitating you, if that were true, we wouldn't be here. And kids have to know it's the opposite of what therapists tell you to do, right? The therapeutic, the parenting experts say, oh, don't trouble, don't burden your child with that. No, it's the opposite.

You're strengthening your kid. You're saying, look what our family made it through. You're going to go through hard times, but look what you come from. You're going to make it through them, too. You know, Abigail, I think you also make a really good point. And it's you have usually pretty good resources as a parent, whether it's your own parents, whether it's friends who have raised kids to be good young adults. friends who have raised kids to be good young adults. And if you go to them and ask them, what would you do? Or how do I handle this situation? They're probably not going to say, you know, send your kids to therapy, they're probably gonna give you some really good sound advice on how to handle the situation. It can sometimes be easy, Abigail, to send your kid

just to therapy, you can outsource your parenting to the therapist as opposed to going, no, actually this is my job. I have to figure out what's going on, troubling my kid and how we handle it or how we get them to buck up or to kind of rely back on those themes of a prior generation where we played outside together. Kids got in fights and arguments, and they had to resolve those arguments themselves. We didn't hover over them and fix the arguments for them. They had to come up with solutions on their own, which was really good personal development for them.

We know how to do these things. We have to channel kind of what we know and the people that we know that can give us advice as opposed to outsourcing to a therapist. Am I right? You're absolutely right. And I'll tell you something else. We forgot what our job was as parents. Number one, passing on our own values to our children. Every other civilization knows this. It's our job to instill our values in our children. Number one. Number two, we have to make them strong for life. We can't go around pretending that we're going to save them from every heartache. You can't do it. But you have to prepare them by letting them expose themselves to some amount of disappointment, risk next door, in the next room. And that's

what our job is, is to get them ready to be strong, to be load-bearing walls for our future. And unfortunately, instead, we've done the opposite, but we need to get back to what we know how to do. You know, and sometimes it means that we have to look at ourselves. You know, we had our own situation in our family where, you know, Sean was in Congress for almost 10 years. And, you know, the wheels started coming off the bus and we started to see things in our own kids. And we were like, we had to kind of go, wait a minute, this is not working. And we had to make some hard decisions about it. And it ended up in the end, Sean ended up getting out of Congress.

And that's a really hard thing to say and to see, right? Like that, you know, this was too, it reached a point because I kept having babies that, you know, it just got to be too much. And we had to readjust. Maybe my kid didn't need to go to therapy. Maybe what my kid needed was for us to refocus and recalibrate and figure out how we could be a better family and meet all those needs. I think that's part of it. I think gratitude is huge. I feel like I have an advantage because I

grew up as a military brat and I happened to, we happened to be stationed in many third world countries. I also traveled to India as a young woman to travel and do some volunteer work. And I saw like real poverty, real stuff. And sometimes I look at my kids and I'm like, what they need is a mission trip, you know? Right. That's right. Doing things for others, focusing outward. Look, these are all things that religion gives kids. And we know those things are very good. Now, I don't why don't I mention religion in the book? Because religious people get bamboozled, too. Right. They think, oh, bring in social, emotional learning. I want my kids to be

emotionally regulated. Right. And so the question is, what do kids actually need? They need that outward focus. They need feeling like they're part of something greater. And look, you know, there's this funny statistic that just came out in the last year or so. And that was that Gene Twenge, who's the author of this book, Generations, found that boys, even though girls, teen girls had the worst mental health overall, teen boys from liberal families had worse mental health than teen girls from conservative families. Now, that's not why do they what where do you think? Unpack that for me. What do you think that's coming from? Well, we know a few things. Number one, that's not social media. Where do you think? Unpack that for me. What are you thinking that's coming from? Well, we know a few things. Number one, it's clearly an environmental distress that our kids are in. It's not organic because it shouldn't follow politics. And it's

not social media because teen girls are on way more social media than teen boys, whatever the politics of the home. So it has more to do with a few things that more conservative families tend to be willing to give their kids, like authority in the home, like passing on their own values, like not handing over the family to a mental health expert and immediately diagnosing the child. Abigail, would you just quickly, you've talked about this several times, the social emotional learning that's kind of taken over the school system. Rachel and I have talked about it a little bit on some previous podcasts. But why should that be a red flag, the social emotional learning?

And maybe explain what it is, because maybe some parents don't even know their kids are getting social emotional learning. This is, I think, 95% of public schools in America at this point. It's a project that's been going on for 15 years. And the whole idea ostensibly is they're going to teach kids emotional regulation and self-awareness, things like that. There's no good proof that it does any of that, by the way. But what it does do is it's it invites kids into a kind of group therapy in which they're constantly asked. Now, tell me about how you were feeling. Think about a time when you were rejected,

left out, sad, disappointed. Now, why does it always go negative? Because if you talk about a time when you were happy, there's nothing to teach. No one is worried about kids managing their happiness, right? So it always goes negative. It's always to think about a time, dwell on a time when you were sad, angry, left out.

And so kids who go through these programs and now we have two research studies out of Europe, one out of Australia and one out of England where they tried these techniques. One was coping techniques, anti-bullying techniques, mindfulness techniques. And they always led to kids who are more depressed, more anxious and more alienated from mom and dad because whose job is it to kid keep kids safe a mom and dad so it always tees up a criticism of the parents we'll have more of this conversation after this it's weird because like the schools are failing on so many levels i'm just like why do they have time for social emotional learning like let's try reading why yeah It's a lot harder to teach algebra. You're so, so right. What else do you think parents can do to, to, to, to really, I mean, I like authority. We talked about, you know,

you know, toughening them up, but what else, what else would you suggest? Chores. Kids need to know they matter. They can contribute to the household. They have capacity, which by the way, means we also need to stop surveilling them all the time. If you raise a kid right, you teach them right from wrong. Now you got to let them try hard things. If you could do it, they can do it too. So if you could survive, you know, a car trip without an iPad, they can, too. There was a study on chores that came out and this was years and years ago. I'll never forget. I think it was featured on like, you know, 60 Minutes or 2020.

I remember my my oldest kids were very little and it really stuck with me. They analyzed all these kids and the ones that had chores whined less. Did you see that one? I did not. Yeah, they whine less. In our house, we are a chore house. I'd kill myself if I didn't know. It doesn't function without everyone helping out. So our kids know how to do dishes, unload dishwashers, clean dishes. They know how to change babies' diapers. They know how to put baby's diapers they know how to put baby's clothes on my son just this morning we had a we have a garbage problem i don't know

like i think what we have is a raccoon problem i think the raccoons are getting into the trash i'm like sorry he had to spend an hour outside navigating the trash it was cold and it's been raining i'm like and he didn't complain he just went out and he did it and he was a great kid but it's like that but it i think're right. We do have to have chores and they can be, if your kids don't do them, start them small, easy chores, but then build them up. So you make right, you make sure that they're actually productive, helpful members of the family. And I think that also to give some confidence, like Rachel mentioned the story about pizza, there was a sense of confidence and accomplishment that comes from chores or a job that they don't get if they don't do it. And

they might complain at the beginning, but in the end, they're happier, better people. So a couple of weeks ago, our son who drives the kids to school because he can drive, he has a license. He drives. So the little kids have a school right next to the older kids so he drops off them and then well anyway they were driving to school and uh one of them who's in fourth grade uh she said oh no i think i have to throw up and he's driving and so he's got one two three four kids four four other kids in the car, five, including him. So she goes, Oh no, I think I'm going to throw up. She gets car sick. And do you know what he did? It was amazing. He said, take your lunch bag. Cause it's like a canvas lunch bag is take your sandwich and

everything out of your lunch bag and throw up in that. And she did. And then he dropped the other kids off. And then he drove her and himself back to the house where we showered her. I've got to read, but it didn't get all over the car. I threw away the canvas lunchbox, but I thought, you know what? He didn't miss a beat. He didn't miss a beat. That kid was, he's, he's 17 years old. And I know a lot of young moms who would have been frazzled in that situation. I don't feel like two year old dads would be frazzled too.

He's driving and giving instructions on what she should do. And it was, and he saved her lunch, which was amazing. What an awesome story. And when that young man, your son goes off for a job and things don't go exactly right. And he has an obstacle. He's not going to collapse because he's seen it before and he's gotten through it before and he's figured stuff out. And kids don't know that they can figure stuff out because we keep telling them, ask an adult.

We'll handle it. We'll intercede. We'll call your boss. Moms today are calling their young adults bosses to complain if their young adults have a problem at work. That's how bad it's gotten. But, you know, you raise a kid like that with chores where he's responsible for other people, and he learns, I can do this. And that's what we want them to know. That's what I want. You know, Abigail, I want to say thank you.

I think what you have been writing are topics that a lot of people stay away from. They're afraid to talk and do the research on the things that you've done the research on and the books that you've written. And it's such a service. The medical community won't talk about it. The schools won't talk about it, but that you will actually do the research and lay the facts out and take the arrows. You take arrows, you do, but it is a service to parents to go, listen, there is a different way. There is a better way. This is not right. And, and your book a service to parents to go, listen, there is a different way. There is a better way. This is not right.

And your book lays it out, and we're grateful for you writing the book, doing the research, Bad Therapy, Why Kids Aren't Growing Up. Again, topics that are kind of taboo. No, I know. You've hit some third rails. I wanted to ask you quick before you go. Did did you get what was the feedback from the industry, the mental health industry, which, you know, for the part of the thank you, Abigail. Great work. Or did you have some say, hey, we need to hear that.

You know, I'm surprised by how many you know, the research is there. So I'm surprised by how many mental health experts, especially psychiatrists, academic psychiatrists, academic psychologists who reached out and said, thank you for writing this book. But look, if my book's successful, if parents take back control, you're going to see mental health staffs shrink at schools. That's what we want. We want them only treating kids who actually need it, not everybody. And so they're not going to be very happy with it. And I guess that's tough. And then you can hire it on the math teacher, maybe. There you go.

Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be awesome? You could use that. Well, Abigail, so, so great to have you on. We feel very honored. honored and we just love having people who are courageous and smart and are making a positive impact on the most important thing which is our children and our families and god bless you for what you do oh thank you so much god bless you guys thank you so much for everything god bless you abigail get a book bad therapy why kids aren't growing up it is amazing it's a book and by the way give it as a gift if you know kids about to And by the way, give it as a gift. If you know children or kids,

give it to them as a gift. It'll be a great gift of knowledge. And if you don't know enough about the transgender thing that's happening, Irreversible Damage is still a worthwhile read for everybody. You've been

just so vindicated on that. So thanks Abigail. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. Listen, I can tell what Rachel, I think what she's done and is doing is so fantastic.

It is. And again, even if you keep your kid in therapy, making parents think about, is this right? Should I be doing this? Is this the right path for my child, or is there a better path? Do they really need this? It's so important.

So it's not just this reflexive, oh, you got a problem, you must need therapy. Grandma died, you must need therapy. You know, one of the stories that she told, and I think she was on Jill Rogan when I heard this story, she said that the girl who had been in therapy since her grandma died was now getting ready to go to college, was still in therapy. And Abigail interviewed her and said, OK, so why are you in therapy? And she's, well, my my therapist is helping me work on making friends before I go to college. Like this is like make work stuff, right? I mean, this is like ridiculous. You know, a young girl can figure this out. All of us have had ups and downs with friendships, especially girls, you know, have had that growing up.

And that's how we learn to be who we are. We go to our moms, we go to our sisters, our brothers to get advice on those kinds of things and outsourcing that. I mean, imagine she's going to go to college and she's not going to know how to handle it. I think it's better. Listen, if you don't let your kids go out and actually learn how to make friends, they don't actually get that skill set because they've had to do it because you didn't get play-based between two parents. Actually, you had to meet kids on the block and do a pickup game of baseball or kickball or tag or whatever the heck you play. If you don't have that experience, you don't learn the skills. And then you actually do need a therapist when you go to college to go, how do I make friends? It's like, well, hello, parenting failure or therapist failure.

They should have learned that at like three years old. I thought you brought up a good point too, that, you know, you can't, I mean, maybe you could do a ton of research and that might help mitigate this, but by and large, you don't really know, like if the therapist has the exact same values you have. And as she said, so many of the people coming out of the medical community of course that that is probably even more so in the counseling therapy psychology departments are getting fully indoctrinated and so now they're going to be practicing that ideology on your kids so that is a huge problem why would you want to send you're already the problem of people sending their kids off to schools and having their values undone now you're going to pay somebody to reinforce to really screw your

kid up not your values right and and again i think i think so much of this is about letting your kids make mistakes get tough stop trying to helicopter you know we have we have neighbors across the street that are the same relative ages as our younger kids. And they're at their house and they're at our house and I'm, you know, in the kitchen and I'm overhearing, they get in fights with them. They actually, it's funny. They kind of fight like siblings, the neighbors and our kids sometimes. And then I've seen them make up with each other as well.

It's like, this is what social, I mean, they don't have me. I refuse to come in and go, you, you know, you guys need to say sorry to each other as well. It's like, this is what social, I mean, they don't have me. I refuse to come in and go, you, you know, you guys need to say sorry to each other. These kids will work it out. Let them work it out. Stop over analyzing over, you know, parenting these situations. And the lessons they learn are life lessons on how you make up, how you say sorry, how you get along, how you make friends. Or when you're a bad friend, how you kind of end up alone for a while and then you got to figure that out. I just, I want to take a step back. I'm actually shocked that we're doing this podcast.

They're actually having this conversation. Because it's so common sense, right? It's so common sense. But we've gone so off the track, Sean. So off the rails that we have to go, listen, your kid should, you know, play with other kids and learn how to, you know, have friends, deal with fights. And it just shows how far this culture has gone into the sewer and why we're raising these weak kids, which is why her Abigail's book is so important. And again, what we're just doing here is going, hey, let's go back to common sense. Well, Sean, things that we've done in the past because it actually worked. It's not just that we're raising weak kids with this method. You know what I think is the really biggest problem here?

We're creating an environment where we're causing parents to lose confidence in themselves and their own common sense. I think when I first started having babies, one of the things that shocked me the most, because it was sort of like when I first had Evita, it was the start of sort of that whole mommy, you know, blogosphere and all these websites. And I think so many women were not trusting their own instincts, but going on to websites every time they confronted a problem. They didn't even go to their moms. They'd go to the websites to get advice.

I mean, there's all these parenting section for, you know, advice books. You know, we're not trusting our gut and we're not trusting that we can analyze how we were raised, what was good, what we want to maybe do a little different. I just think we're causing a lot of parents to lose confidence in themselves. You can do this. This isn't rocket science. People have been raising resilient, strong kids since the beginning of time. And we have been able, as a species, to learn which things work and which things don't. Can I give you a little pushback on that?

Yeah. I do think that you can do it, right? But if we go back to that space of 24 years ago when we had a new baby, you've never done it before. You've been a kid. You've been raised in your parents' house, but you've never had a child. If I had problems, I would call my mom. I mean, I was not...

So knowing that you should get advice from people who have done it, whether it's your parents or your good friends who have your sister or your sister-in-law. I mean, I always say every mother should have mommy mentors. I always had people who were a little older than me, who admired who i thought did it well did it well and i not only observed them but they were resources for me and i think if you're a young mom and you're listening to this or you're uh you know you have a daughter who's young you know advise her to you know if she's gonna have a baby or has babies to look at who's doing it well that they like and start making that part of your little cabinet of advisors as you go through. Your kitchen table mommy cabinet.

Yes. Yes. There you go. Yes. All right. I'm going to write that down, Sean. That might be my next book. But anyway, that's actually right common

sense um is like the least common thing these days that's so true uh listen I appreciate common sense is not that it's not that common anymore nothing truer has been said on this podcast than that uh we appreciate Abigail for joining us we appreciate you being here with us at the kitchen table. Thank you for listening and or watching. If you like a podcast, you can always rate, review, subscribe, wherever you get your podcast. You can always find us at foxnewspodcast.com. Rate, review, subscribe.

If you would get the notices every time our podcast drops, we'd be grateful for that. And until next time, have a good one. Bye, everybody. Listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. From the Fox News Podcasts Network. Subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. congressman from South Carolina brings you a one-of-a-kind podcast.

Subscribe and listen now by going to foxnewspodcasts.com.