Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1123 | Why Boys Are Failing Kindergarten | Guest: Dr. Leonard Sax

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Today, we sit down with Dr. Leonard Sax, family physician and author, to discuss the effects of social media on children and what the upcoming TikTok ban means for our young people. He gives us some insight into the dangers that modern entertainment and the shifting American culture pose to children. We also talk about how bad gentle parenting is for children and how to actually enforce boundaries with kids. And what really are the differences between raising boys and girls, and what does this mean for early childhood schooling? Buy Dr. Sax' latest book, “The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups”: https://a.co/d/iKcUeLn Buy Allie's new book, "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion": https://a.co/d/4COtBxy --- Timecodes: (01:32) Dr. Leonard Sax Introduction (02:02) TikTok ban (09:27) Modern American culture harming kids (25:50) Changing values & respect of elders (30:28) Permissive vs. gentle parenting  (41:08) How to discipline children (46:40) Differences in parenting boys and girls (52:15) Boys vs. girls in education ---   Today's Sponsors: We Heart Nutrition — Get 20% off women's vitamins with We Heart Nutrition, where 10% of every purchase supports pregnancy care centers; use code ALLIE at https://www.WeHeartNutrition.com. Good Ranchers — Go to GoodRanchers.com and use code ALLIE at checkout to claim $25 off, free express shipping, and your choice of FREE ground beef, chicken, or salmon in every order for an entire year. EveryLife — The only premium baby brand that is unapologetically pro-life. EveryLife offers high-performing, supremely soft diapers and wipes that protect and celebrate every precious life. Head to EveryLife.com and use promo code ALLIE10 to get 10% of your first order today! America's Christian Credit Union — Switch to America's Christian Credit Union today for faith-aligned banking with exceptional rates and nationwide access. ACCU will donate a box of EveryLife diapers to a Christian pregnancy resource center for every new member who opens a checking account before January 31st, and pay a $100 bonus to a new account when you sign up with code "ALLIE". Visit https://www.americaschristiancu.com/allie to get started! --- Related Episodes: Ep 963 | The Dangers of Gentle Parenting, SEL & Empathy | Guest: Abigail Shrier https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-963-the-dangers-of-gentle-parenting-sel-empathy/id1359249098?i=1000648254377 ---   Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Dr. Leonard Sachs is a parenting expert. He has been a physician and a psychologist for over 30 years, has written several books on the differences between parenting girls versus boys, also the rise of permissive or gentle parenting that has really led to what he calls the collapse of parenting. He's got a second edition of this New York Times bestselling book out now, the collapse of parenting, how we hurt our kids when we're we treat them like grown up. So we are getting lots of wisdom from him today on the rise of screen time, the toxicity of parenting culture in the United States, how to properly build a strict but loving relationship with your kids to help them flourish and the distinctions between boys and girls and how we raise them. Lots of good stuff here on today's episode of Relatable. It's brought to you by our friends at Life or DeathCon. I will be speaking at Life or Deathcon in Washington, D.C. On January 23rd, get your tickets at Life or Deathcon.com.

Use code Allie 10 for a discount. That's Life or Deathcon.com. Code Allie 10. Dr. Sachs, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Many have heard you on various shows. But for those who may not know, can you tell them who you are and what you do? Okay. So my name is Leonard Sachs.

I'm a family doctor and I have written four books for parents, why gender matters, boys adrift, girls on the edge and they collapse of parenting. And I travel around the country. I lead workshops for schools and I speak to parents. Yes. And I have heard much of what you've said about gender and we will get into that. First, I do want to talk to you about TikTok. I'm sure that you've heard the news that TikTok is going to be banned.

I personally have never been on the app. Maybe I'm a little old or maybe I just feel like with three kids, I'm too busy to have another thing to be addicted to and scroll on. But this is a big deal for a lot of young people who feel like so much of their lives is on that app. What is your thought? I mean, not from a political perspective, but from a parenting perspective about TikTok, is this going to be a net positive? So we have a lot of research on social media.

Researches who study social media, divide social media basically into three generations. First generation social media is Facebook and apps like Facebook. First generation social media is about connecting you to people you know. So Facebook, you can connect with your first grade classmate, find out what they're doing. Second generation social media is Instagram. So Instagram, not only can you connect with your classmates from school, you can connect with celebrities and people that you'd like to follow and influencers. TikTok is different.

TikTok is not about connecting you with your school classmates or even primarily with connecting you with celebrities. When you sign up for TikTok, the app begins by, asking you, what kind of videos do you like to watch? Tell me a little bit about what kind of videos you'd like to watch. And then it starts offering you some videos. And the algorithm is crazy good. And within minutes, it's showing you things you didn't know were out there. And it's very common to find teenagers saying, TikTok knows me better than I know myself. TikTok knew I was gay before I did. TikTok knew I was trans before I did.

And four years ago, researchers reached out to TikTok and said, look, the algorithm is really toxic. It is pulling girls especially down into a rabbit hole that valorizes self-harm and anorexia and suicide. You have to change it. And TikTok said, okay, thank you very much. We'll change it. And then last year, the researchers said, you didn't make it better. He made it worse. it is an astonishingly toxic app.

And we know this. This is not a guess. We know that girls especially who spend time on TikTok are much more likely to become anxious and depressed. And I have corresponded with Gene Twenge, our nation's leading researcher, studying the effects of TikTok. And she has said that the evidence supports. ban on social media for all children and teens under 18 years of age. Now, what is happening in the courts and that the Supreme Court is not a ban on TikTok, it is a ban on Chinese ownership of TikTok.

So kids are still going to be on social media, and what is most likely to happen is that they'll simply move from TikTok, assuming the TikTok is not simply sold to another owner, in which case kids' experience might not change much at all. But if it is indeed banned, first of all, kids will still be able to use it. They just wouldn't be able to download a new kid who isn't on it. It wouldn't be able to download it. It would vanish from the app store. If on January 19th TikTok has not been sold,

then won't be able to download it from the app store. But kids will still have it on their phones. They'll still be able to use it. Okay. And if indeed kids want to download a new app and they're not able to download TikTok, they're most likely just download Instagram Reels, which is a very similar app, just less popular. Quick pause for the first sponsor for the day, and that is WeHeart Nutrition. I rely on my supplements from WeHeart Nutrition every day.

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Use my code Alley for 20% off. Weheartnutrition.com code Alley. Is your belief that people under the age of 18 should not be on social media, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, X? It's my belief that kids in the English-speaking world should not be on Instagram or TikTok. So John Height published a book last mark called The Anxious Generation, and it makes a great deal of the rise in anxiety and depression among kids since roughly 2012

and asserts that cell phones and social media are driving this rise in anxiety and depression. But one point he doesn't mention in his brain. look is that this rise in anxiety and depression is confined to kids in the English-speaking world in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia. It's actually not seen outside the English-speaking world. Kids in Greece, kids in Russia are just as likely to have smartphones and just as likely to be on social media. But the rise in anxiety and depression has not been seen there. So I think it's important for parents to understand that the smartphones, the social media are the vectors. They are spreading this toxic culture, but they are not themselves

the cause. The cause is the culture. And parents need to understand what is toxic about American culture, about English-speaking culture that is driving this rise in anxiety and depression just in the last 15 years or so. American culture has only really really, very recently become a culture that is toxic and harmful to children and teens. It was not so 20 or 30 years ago. Again, this is not a guest. It's not nostalgia. We have very good data on this point, which again is the point of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, where I show how American culture has changed and how it's become a harmful and toxic culture for children. Yeah. Tell us specifically what you mean by that. What has changed in the past 20 years? And what do you mean by toxic? Okay. So again, my brand, if you like, is evidence-based. When I make a claim, I'm always going to show you a scholarly study, a peer-reviewed study that's going to support the claim I'm making. So again, it's a book, The Collapsed Parenting, that has over 400 studies. But let me just share with you one or two that makes this point. One of the studies I cite is from UCLA. They looked at the most popular TV shows marketed to children. and teens every 10 years, starting in 1967.

And they analyzed these TV shows based on what is the show teaching kids about what's important. So most popular TV show, 1967, the Andy Griffith Show, Andy Griffith Show, 1977 Happy Days, 1987 Family Ties, 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those are very different shows, but the researchers found that each of those shows, 1967 through 1997 was communicating the same message that the most important thing is to do the right thing

to tell the truth even if it hurts to be a good friend even when that's not easy being famous was number 15 out of 16 or number 14 or number 16 over those 30 years

there was great consistency in the values that the shows were communicating even though the themes and the production values very different. The values were very consistent. But then the researchers found that between 1997 and 2007, American culture flipped upside down. And in 2007, the most popular shows, shows like Survivor and American Idol, the most important thing, the number one thing, was winning and being famous. Doing the right thing, that's going to get you very voted off the island. Doing the right thing dropped from number one to number 13 between

1997 and 2007. And winning and being famous jumped from number 15 to number one. Why did that happen? Why did American culture flip upside down in 10 years time? And it's only gotten worse since 2007. The researchers asked that question and the answer they gave is social media. Social media transformed American culture. Suddenly it became all about having likes and followers. That's one key element. It's not the whole story. Right.

It's one key element of how American culture has changed in the last 20 years. American culture changed from the culture that was the culture of American culture prior to 1997, in which doing the right thing and being a good person and being good friend was the most important thing. To contemporary American culture were winning and being famous is the most important. working thing. I call it the culture of envy where so again a example for my own practice Charlie Di Amelio a name that I find a lot of old people by which I mean people over 30 don't even know who Charlie DiMelio is but basically every American girl who speaks English know who knows who Charlie DiMileo is she has over 11 billion likes on TikTok which is more

than any other human on the planet. At age 15, she started posting dance videos of herself dancing on TikTok. And she's hugely popular. And last year, she earned over $20 million on TikTok. But when you watch her videos on TikTok, what's really striking is that they're nothing special. She's not that pretty. She's not that great a dancer. And girls look at her and they're like, wow.

I'm prettier than she is. I'm a better dancer than she is. And this girl spent two weeks making this perfect TikTok video and posted it, but it's fizzled. Nobody saw it, no likes, very few likes. And this girl is now seething with envy and resentment. Why her? Why not me? It's not fair.

The end result of this culture of envy is literally, millions of girls who are like, why her, why not me, it's not fair. And parents don't understand this. If you've got these girls immersed in this culture, where this girl, with very little effort as near as the other girls can see, becomes this celebrity with 50 million followers and 11 billion likes entering tens of million dollars a year for not doing a whole lot. You know, they recently surveyed 12-year-olds in the United States,

and the number one career aspiration of 12-year-old girls in the United States now is to be a social media influencer. It's not to be an astronaut or a teacher. It's to be a social media influencer. Well, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. You're setting yourself up for frustration and resentment because, you know what, there's a million. other girls who have the same aspiration.

And there's only room for three or four Charlie Diomilios at most. So that's one element, this new culture of envy and resentment. Anybody can be a good person. As Martin Luther King said, 50 years ago, anybody can be great because anybody can serve. More than 50 years ago, 60 years ago. That was the culture of the United States. years ago, anybody can be great because anybody can serve. That was the culture of the anti-Gryphist show. That was the culture that Martin Luther King was trying to teach us. But that's

no longer the culture of the United States. The culture of the United States is now the culture of American Idol and Survivor, which is all about winning, which is a much more toxic culture. That's one change. A second change I highlight in my book, the culture, the collapse of parenting, is the culture of disrespect. And that's also new. That was not characters of the United States 30 years ago or 50 years ago. And so where to begin with that? The Disney Channel. So again, in my own practice, a mom of an eight-year-old boy says to me,

I don't understand. My eight-year-old son is so disrespectful. I don't understand where he's learning these words. His father and I never taught like this. And I said to mom, does he watch Disney? Does he watch Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.? And she said, of course. I said, lock it down.

No more Disney, no more Nickelodeon, no more Nick Jr. And she called me three weeks later. She said it's stopped. He's learning this from the Disney Channel. Jesse, Dog with a Blog, the Bunked, these shows on the Disney Channel, teach kids that it's cute and funny to be defiant, to be disrespectful. But that's just the beginning. You look at the most popular songs, the Billboard Top 100.

Lil Nas X had this incredibly popular song, number one, on the Billboard Top 100, for 12 consecutive weeks, which is an incredible string on the Billboard Top 100, Old Town Road, where he sings, you can't tell me nothing. Can nobody tell me nothing? That's the culture of disrespect in a nutshell. You can't tell me nothing. Can't nobody tell me nothing? So the comedian, Belmar had a big bestseller last year. And one of the things he says in his book, he says one of the fundamental truths of the human experience is that young people are beautiful but stupid. Old people are ugly, but more likely to be wise. So Beaumar continues that any successful human culture will create strong bonds between the beautiful, stupid young people and the wise old. people. Yeah. You can't tell me nothing. Can nobody tell me nothing? The culture of disrespect, which is now the culture that kids who speak English are immersed in, breaks the bonds across generation. You can't tell me nothing. Well, you can't tell me nothing. Why should I spend my time with you? Why go to church? Why hang with old people on weekends? Kids in the United States

do not hang with adults on weekends. They used to. We actually have data on this. 30 years ago, 50 years ago, it would not have been unusual for children and to do stuff. Actually, Robert Pugner at Harvard has documented this. That 50 years ago, you could drive around an American community and you'd find a bunch of men working on a car.

and he is photographs documenting this in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s of boys and men working under the hood of a car in a street in a neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. This was a common sight in this country as recently as 30 years ago, not anymore. Today you drive an American neighborhood on a Saturday afternoon. You might see two old geysers working under the hood of their 65 Corvette, but the teenage boys are not with them. The teenage boys are more likely to be indoors playing video games. The bonds across generations have been broken. The culture of disrespect has broken the bonds across generations. That's factor number two.

Factor number three, there's only three. The big changes in American culture is normophobia. So 15 years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge, which I'm very proud, the Atlantic magazine, called The Best Book about what's going on with girls and young women in America today, but that was 15 years ago. So I interviewed, this is not just just girls in my practices, I interviewed girls across the United States. 15 years ago, American girls wanted to be effortlessly perfect. That was the thing back then.

So the publisher asked me to write an updated version, which I did. But interviewing girls today, I find that girls today don't want to be effortlessly perfect or any kind of perfect. That's boring. That's lame. Now you've got to have something wrong with you. Anxious or depressed, that's good. Trans, that's even better. You know, 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote a book for children called The Magician's Nephew,

in which he said, the problem about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are. is that you very often succeed. Substitute more anxious or more depressed for stupider. The trouble about trying to make yourself more anxious than you really are is that you very often succeed. So I earn my doctorate in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Very strong program. Same program where John Haidt earned his doctorate, Marty Seligman.

And that's the same place where Aaron Beck. based, Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive psychology. And Aaron Beck developed this whole theory that your, that anxiety and depression arise because you think yourself into being anxious and depressed. And you can think yourself out of being anxious and depressed. And the strategies he developed that we, that he coined the phrase cognitive behavioral therapy,

are really effective. And he showed that you can think yourself into being anxious and depressed. You can think yourself out of being anxious and depressed. The terms that young people now teach each other to use, are you gender conforming or are you gender nonconforming? Are you neurotypical or are you neurodivergent? Well, who wants to be typical? and conforming. That's boring. That's lame. You want to be non-conforming. You want to be

divergent. The very terms that kids teach each other to learn, to use on social media in the English-speaking world teach kids being normal is typical. It's conforming. And nobody wants to be typical and conforming. So the very language that kids are now using one another, teaching one another to use, drives this, what Mary Harrington coined the phrase normophobia, this fear of being normal, and incentivizes kids to convince themselves that they are anxious, that they are depressed, that they are trans. You know, 30 years ago, the American Psychiatric Association posed a question, how common is transgender? And they said, well, it's so rare. It's very hard rise at any accurate number, but we estimate the frequency of transgender as one in 30,000 men

and one in 100,000 women. Last year, the CDC released their latest figures, estimating that 3% of high school kids in the United States are trans. So we went from 1 in 30,000, 30 years ago to 3 in 100. last year. We could have a long talk just about trans. And again, I devote a big chunk of my book Why Gender Matters, second edition, to exploring that. First edition has two sentences on transgender. Second edition has a great deal more. So American popular culture transformed in the last 20 years. It became a toxic culture. And that's why I have to be a

to write a new edition of the collapse of parenting. To explain to parents, look, the culture has become radically more toxic. You need to understand this. Yeah, you do need to lock down the phones and block the social media, but you also have to offer a healthier culture in your home. Second sponsor is Good Ranchers. We love Good Ranchers in our home. We ate their chicken and their salmon last night. It's so good and very versatile. We love their ground beef. I mean, we eat good ranchers most nights of the week. It's a great way to make sure you're getting in your protein and eating healthy at least for one meal a day. It makes your life easier too. You don't have to go to the grocery store and wonder, okay, where is this meat from? You're getting hit with

inflation. You don't have to worry about that with good ranchers. Do you get a box of meat to your front door every month when you subscribe? If you subscribe right now, they add one kind of meat to your box every month for the next year. So that could be a bag of of chicken, a bag of beef, a bag of salmon. It's really an amazing deal. Plus, when you use my code alley, you get $25 off your order. That's good ranchers.com slash alley code alley. You know, as you were talking about the difference in American culture and the non-English speaking cultures and this kind of emergence of a new value system that does not value respect of elders, you know, something that I've noticed, I've got three kids, and as they watch,

some Disney movies that I watched growing up. I've noticed a common theme and a lot of them. Most of these movies, whether you're talking about Cinderella or The Little Mermaid or even Lion King, that we think, okay, this was the 90s. And so it has to be innocent or good. Almost all of these movies, Frozen start out with parent death and or rebellion from parents. Same thing with Moana. Like all of these stories are about parents not really knowing best and kind of being like an inhibitor of their kids happiness or freedom. And kids going down this path of liberation at a very young age to find themselves to chart their own path. When you think about Elsa, and now this is, you know, this is old. I think it came out in 2013, but Frozen is still very popular among young kids today.

the song that she sings, there's no right, there's no wrong, there's no rules for me. I'm free. And she talks about, you know, breaking free from people's expectations and being who she wants to be and going off on her own and all of this. And so it does seem to be extremely ingrained, maybe even over the past 30 years, to some extent, in American culture, this kind of not only independent spirit, but this rebellious spirit. And the more rebellious you are, the more you reject your parents' religion, their belief systems, their authority, the more of a hero you are and the happier you'll be. Do you think all of that, that narrative that I'm describing, kind of plays a part in this toxic change of culture that you're talking about? Well, we could have a lengthy discussion of the first Frozen movie.

I'm actually a huge fan of the first Frozen movie. It's amazing. I mean, it's amazing music. It's a great movie because in fact, Elsa comes to realize that she is mistaken, that there is no escape from the curse inside. And I think there's some very profound messages in that first movie. The second movie I thought was a great disappointment, but the first movie I thought was well constructed. And she comes to realize that a lot of things she said in that first song, that she was. was mistaken, that the moral truths go deeper than she realized. So I'm a big fan of the first

movie, but you're right. It begins with the children being orphans. But it also shows that being orphans comes at a tremendous cost and that you need your parents. And when you don't have them, that's a really bad thing, as opposed to the Disney TV show, Jesse, where the parents, are absent and the kids are completely liberated. And Jesse, I think, is a very toxic show. So the TV shows, I think, tend to be much worse than the movies from the 80s and 90s. But, no, there's been a real shift since the 90s. And I think, again, I don't want to make this just about the Disney Studios.

But I think the Disney studios have shifted since the 90s in a direction that has been harmful. But again, it's not just about the Disney Studios. It's about American popular culture. And I do look at what's happened not only in television, but in the songs that kids are listening to, the videos that kids are seeing on YouTube, the social media that kids are watching.

The culture has become a toxic culture across the board in social media in the songs that kids here. here. And parents need to understand this and parents need to create strong bonds across generations. You can't just say no to the bad culture. You have to say yes to a healthier culture. You have to offer your kids a healthier culture, your culture, the parents' culture. Tell me about permissive parenting. Is it the same thing as gentle parenting? This has definitely been emergent over the past few years. Good dad. Tell me about it. So that was another reason that we had to have a new addition of the collapse of parenting because gentle parenting wasn't

really a term 10 years ago when I wrote the first edition. But it sure is now. And there are many different gurus of gentle parenting and they each have their own definition. But one thing they agree on is that gentle parenting means letting kids decide. And I begin the new addition. with a story from my own practice where mom brought her six-year-old daughter into be seen. And mom explained that her daughter is sick, and you can see her daughter was sick. She's a fever. She's a sore throat. So, mom explains her daughter has a fever and a sore throat.

I say, okay, time to take a look. Would you please open your mouth and say, ah? And daughter shakes her head, no. And I say, okay, mom, looks like I'm going to need your help here. Would you please ask your daughter to open wide and say ah? And mom says, her body, her choice. Okay, my body, my choice, long-time slogan of abortion rights activists, more recently adopted by activists opposed to COVID-19 vaccines.

Mom is adopting that slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me the examining physician to look at her daughter's throat. That's an extreme example of what you might call gentle parenting, that good parenting means letting kids decide. Look, parenting works only if parents have authority. This is really not a guess. What is childhood for? Literally.

Is it about biological maturation? Well, no, actually. A four-year-old horse is a mature adult. The Kentucky Derby is raised with three-year-olds. and a horse is a bigger animal than a human. So it cannot be just about biological maturation because the horse only needs four years and a horse is a bigger animal than a human. Humans, our children are adolescents for more years than most animals live.

Why? We don't have to guess we have scholars like Dr. Melvin Conner at Emory who's devoted his career to studying this question. And he wrote an 800-page tome, Oxford University Press, The Evolution of Childhood, Comparing Development, in our species, with development in other species, especially other primates, asking the question, why does it take so long in humans? Why is development so prolonged in our species compared to other species? And the answer that he and the other scholars give is that it takes many years

for parents and other adults to teach the kids what the kids need to know, to teach with authority, what the kids need to know. That's what human development is about. It's about authoritative teaching of the grownups to the kids. Letting kids decide is upside down. It's not what human development is supposed to be about. Now, that example I gave at the mom saying her body, her choice, that's an extreme example, and that's unusual. But what's more common, what's much more common is the parent who's unsure, who's uncomfortable exercising authority. So much more typical example, again, from my own practice.

Boy not paying attention in school. 12-year-old boy not paying attention in school. And the teachers have filled out these Connors scales, which is a measure of inattention. The boy's off the chart in every class, not paying attention to any class. Parents take him to the child psychiatrist, who looks at the Connor scales, he's off the chart,

and the doctor says, well, let's try Vivance and see if it helps. Yeah, he's got ADD. Here's some prescription for Viband. tremendously helpful. Huge, huge benefit. Medication is tremendously helpful. But now the boy develops palpitations and loss of appetite and jittery. And the parent Google sings and finds articles have written for the New York Times and Time magazine about the dangers of the medication. So they bring their child to me for a second opinion. And I do a more careful sleep history. And I say, does your son get good night's sleep?

And mom says, oh, absolutely. We make sure he's in bed every night at nine and he's in the bedroom at nine and wake him up next morning at six. So that's nine hours. That's enough, don't you think? And I say to the boy, do you have a video game console in your bedroom? He says, of course, doesn't everybody. Is it where you're playing last night? Of course, doesn't everybody?

Well, who are you playing? RDR2? Excellent. Okay. When did you finish? He says 1.30, 2. And mom's like, You were playing video games at 1.30 last night?

He's playing video games till almost 2 in the morning. He's trying to wake up at 6. He's getting 4 hours of sleep. He needs 8 or 9. He is sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics ADHD of the inattentive variety. There is no Conner's scale. There is no Vanderbilt interview that can distinguish inattention due to sleep deprivation

from inattention due to ADHD. Bivance, immensely helpful. Why? What's Vance? What's Adderall? They're amphetamines, their speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not scheduled two amphetamines.

So I said to mom, look, you got to get the video game console out of the bedroom, no screens in the bedroom. When he goes into his bedroom at 9 o'clock, he should be sleeping, not playing video games. And mom says to me, oh, I couldn't do that. He'd totally freak out. We're talking about a 12-year-old boy. This is a mom who's uncomfortable exercising her authority, even though her son is clearly being harmed by playing video games, but mom is uncomfortable exercising her authority, shutting

down the video games. This is very common. And that's a good illustration of what I mean by the collapse of parenting. Parents who are reluctant to exercise their authority and their failure to exercise their authority is harming their child. This is a kid who is sleep deprived. because mom cannot bring herself to turn off the video game so that her son can get a good night's sleep. Next sponsor is EveryLife. Every Life is America's pro-life diaper company. I've told you that we only use

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Is it because it's just difficult, it takes time and effort to argue with your child or to endure their temper tantrum or whatever? Is it because they want their child to like them and to be their buddy? Is it because they truly are ideologically philosophically driven to believe that their child should have full autonomy, creativity, the decision-making power to do whatever they want to do? Are they lazy? Are they dumb? Like, what is what is going on? even when they see the bad effects of this kind of permissive parenting, why won't they exercise their authority?

It's a mix. But I would say some of the most common problems are the parent wants to be the child's friend. And they want the child to love them. And they are terrified of the child saying, I hate you. I hate you. and they read the New York Times or they listen to National Public Radio, which says that you should validate your child's feelings. Or they have succumbed to this notion of gentle parenting,

which absolutely tells them that good parenting means letting kids decide and letting kids with the consequences of their decisions. Well, then this boy says, I want to play video games. Well, good parenting means letting kids. decide so you let him play video games. These gentle parenting is psychotic in the sense that it is utterly detached from reality. Again, the researchers find that human civilization works when you have authoritative parents, when you have parents who set firm boundaries which they enforce. And that means that children have parents so that parents, so that parents,

parents can set those guidelines because parents know better than their children. Parents know that kids need a good night's sleep more than they need to be playing video games. So the authoritative parent needs to limit video games, limit govern and guide, what video games the kid is playing, and how much time they spend playing those video games. And I offer detailed guidance in answer to those questions based on the research. And again, the motivation for writing the collapse of parenting is to empower parents. It's not to berate parents or rant. It is to empower parents and say, look, you have to do this.

You need to do this. You can do this. I've seen parents do this. It's not too late. You can do this. Mm-hmm. You know, as a mom of three, I've noticed so far that it's around two and a half, three years old that all of my kids have kind of started to assert their independence and their defiance to a certain extent.

And I'm curious what you would tell parents of little kids, what is the best way that you've seen to enforce boundaries early? Well, I always encourage parents to read or reread my chapter titled Joy in the collapse of parenting. Good parenting has to be built around a loving parent-child relationship. And parenting is easy if the love is there. Because if the love is there, your child wants to please

you. They don't want to disappoint you. And then it's easy because your child wants to please you. So make the time to do fun stuff together. That should be your priority. I have a presentation for parents of children two, three, four, five, six, seven years of age titled, cancel the play date.

make a family date instead. Because again, in my own practice, I've seen the parents of two and three-year-olds and four-year-olds, they're spending that precious Saturday, driving their kids from one play date to another because they seem to think that it's really important for their three-year-old to spend time with other three-year-olds. It's much more important for their three-year-old

to have good time with you. So cancel the play date and instead take your kid to the part and do fun things with your kid. Do fun things with your kid. kid, things that you enjoy, spend that time with your kid doing fun things with your kid. And if your kid, if the most fun time that your kid has had has been doing fun things with you, then the love is there. And then your kid will want to please you.

And then parenting is a breeze because your kid doesn't want to disappoint you. They don't want to let you down. So when they do disobey you or when they don't want to. eat their vegetables or do something that you want them to do, like get dressed and, you know, a quick manner so you can go out the door and they're disobeying or they're arguing. Like, what do you think is the best strategy for parents to not be permissive parents, but to enact discipline? So you'll notice I never addressed that ever in the class of parenting.

I never talk about punishment. those strategies differ from one family to the next. And certainly it's important for kids to know that actions have consequences. If a child is defined and disrespectful, then they're going to lose privileges. And parents need to enforce those punishments. In the first edition of my book, Why Gender Matters, I did have a chapter on punishments, and I addressed corporal punishment because we actually have a great deal of research. Again, my brand is evidence-based, so I cited all the research.

Yeah. And we actually have a lot of research showing that appropriate corporal punishment to two spanks on the behind is actually very helpful for four-year-old boys, but not for four-year-old. but not for four-year-old girls. Spanking on the behind is appropriate for four-year-old boys, but not for four-year-old girls. Because when you spank a girl, she thinks she don't like her. And that can linger. She thinks she don't like her, and that gets in the way.

Because, as I said, good parenting has to be based on love. And if she thinks you don't love her, that can really be a problem for the parents. child relationship. So in the first edition of Why Gender Matters, I said, you know, limited corporal punishment, two spanks on the behind for a four-year-old boy has a place, but not for girls. Based on the research, this is not a guess. I had lots and lots of scholarly papers that I cited in support of this. In consultation with my editors at Double Day, we struck that chapter from the second edition. There's no mention. of it. For a number of reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with a policy

paper saying corporal punishment is absolutely unacceptable for any child in any context ever. Now, we can talk a lot about the American Academy Pediatrics. Some of its guidelines are evidence-based. Some are not. This one was not. Because, again, there's lots of evidence showing that corporal punishment is beneficial for young boys. not for girls, but they absolutely did not want to go there because they had decided they don't want to honor the categories of male and female. Yeah. On the contrary, they absolutely want to deconstruct the categories of male and female.

We can talk about that if you want to. Yeah. So, but Double Day is my publisher and non-celebrity authors. You can't argue with your, they're part of Random House. That's a very big publisher. So you basically do as you're told. And I was fine with that. We deleted that chapter.

Yeah. Well, I'm interested to hear more about the differences between parenting boys and girls because it goes well beyond corporal punishment into how you raise not just little kids, although that's what I'm most interested in since I have little kids myself, but also preteens and teens. So can you start from the earliest years? Like, when do we see the difference? between boys and girls when it comes to how they respond to certain parenting tactics? Well, again, beginning with that talk that I do for parents of two through seven-year-olds,

which is titled, cancel the play date, make a family date instead, but there's a lot more in that talk. And the key point of that talk is, again, the overwhelming evidence we have from brain imaging, beginning with brain imaging of babies in their mother's womb in the third trimester of pregnancy. is that boys mature much more slowly than girls. And this is true all the way through. Girls reach full maturity and brain development by 22 years of age, boys not until 30 years of age.

And that explains a lot if you think about it. So again, a story for my own practice. A mom of two children, an older daughter, and a younger son, said to me, you know, when my daughter was 18 months old, old, I could bounce her on my knee and I'd say goo-gou-gaga and she'd say goo-gou and I'd say and she'd say E-E-E-O-O and we could do that for like 20 minutes and we'd just crack each other off we'd just get the biggest kick out of making nonsense noises and bouncing back and forward like that and I tried that with my son he's 18 months old now and I tried it with him and somebody

rode their bike past the front door and he'd turn and looked at that and the house made a noise and he turned at that he's very distractible He's very distractible. And I googled that and it said it could be a sign of autism. What do you think, doctor? Could he be on the spectrum? I said, well, it could be a sign of autism, but it could also be a sign of boy.

It could just be that he's a boy. But I could not reassure her. This was many years ago, many years ago. I was less confident than I am now. she insisted on a referral she insisted on an evaluation i said all right treatment and learning centers tlc next to shady grove hospital rockfield maryland they're very good at play-based assessment of 18 months olds i shouldn't have done that that was a big mistake on my part i should have talked her out of it but i agreed to write the referral huge mistake so she

comes back after the assessment and she's in tears. She said they're concerned. He said he's significantly below average. They estimate his vocabulary is 40 words. They said the average 18 month old child should have a vocabulary of 65 words. He said he said 40 words. Okay, we actually have lots of research on this. The average 18 month old girl has a vocabulary around 90 words. average 18 month old boy has a vocabulary wrote 40 words. 40 plus 90 is 130. 130 divided by 2 is 65. The average 18-month-old child does have a vocabulary of 65 words, but there's no such thing as a child. There's only a boy or a girl. Well, there is something called intersex, but intersex has a maximum incidence of about 2 and 10,000-on-law birth.

So for all practical purposes, when we're talking about kids, we're talking about a boy or a girl. A statement can be true. The average 18-month-old child has a vocabulary average recovery of average recovery of 65 words. That statement is both true, but it's also meaningless because you don't have a child. You either have a boy or a girl. For girls, it's 90. For boys, it's 40. Don't compare your kid to the average child.

Girls should be compared to girls, boys should be compared to boys. This boy has a vocabulary 40. Average boy has a vocabulary 40. He is not below average. He's fine. There's nothing wrong with him. And this was many years ago. This boy did fine.

He is not on the spectrum. So, yeah, what I say to parents who have both boys and girls is don't compare your son to your daughter. That's a big mistake. Right. Compare boys to boys compared to boys compared to girls. Yeah. They're very different. Last ad for the day is America's Christian Credit Union.

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slash alley inter promo code alley when you apply plus they will pay you a hundred dollar bonus to your new account america's christian credit union is federally insured by the nc ua americas christianculeccom slash alley code alley this seems to be an issue in school too and you know i hear a lot of people talk about how the normal school setup is harder for boys especially young boys who are typically a lot more active kind of what you just described i didn't think about it like that, that I'm not saying every school, but education in general is looking at, okay, what is the average for a child and not is what is best for boys versus what is best for girls because those two things aren't the same. And you've talked about the change in

kindergarten assessments and first grade assessments, like what is expected for a kindergartner and first grader versus what was expected 10 years ago or 20 years ago. 40 years ago. 40 years ago. Okay, I'm curious if you can talk about that and if you see that having an impact on boys in particular in school. So 40 years ago, a pastor named Robert Fulgham wrote a book called Everything I Really Need to Know I learned in kindergarten. Yes. And he described his kindergarten experience and the experience that his kids had in kindergarten, which is every day you learn some and play some and sing some and dance.

And that was a pretty accurate description of kindergarten back in the 80s when his kids were in kindergarten, which was about duck, duck, goose, and singing in rounds and arts and crafts and field trips to go to the park and splashing upon and chase after tadpoles. And that's actually what kids were doing in kindergarten 40 years ago. But beginning in the 90s, there began to be an academic push to get kids to learn to read and write. in kindergarten. And as beginning 20 years ago, that academic push really took hold. And kindergarten, what kids do at five years of age in the United States today, what kids do in kindergarten today is pretty much what kids did in first grade 30 or 40 years ago. Kindergarten has become first grade. Kindergarten today is about literacy and numeracy. It's about learning to read and write

to arithmetic. It's not at all what Pastor Fulgum had in mind when he wrote his book 40 years ago. And that turns out to be a big problem because the language areas of the brain of the five-year-old boy, it turns out, look like the language areas of the three-year-old girl. It is not developmentally appropriate to expect a five-year-old boy to sit and learn about phonics and diphthongs for 45 minutes. And the result is that many five-year-old boys fail and decide that they're dumb and they decide that they hate school. And researchers, most notably Deborah Stipeck, Dean of Education, for many years, Dean of Education at Stanford, found that these boys develop attitudes by the end of the kindergarten year. They decide that they hate school and they decide that they're dumb.

and she and her students came back and tracked down these boys four years later and they find that they still hate school and they still believe they're dumb and other researchers have found that once those attitudes are formed they are global stable and non-contingent meaning this boy doesn't think global means he doesn't just think he's dumb in reading and writing he believes he's dumb in every subject stable means you track him down in 10th grade he still believes that he's dumb and that the teacher hates him, non-contingent. He doesn't think there's anything he can do about it or anything that you can do about it. So the kindergarten year is very important.

And so I wrote a paper back in 2001 saying don't enroll your boy in kindergarten at five years of age. Give him the gift of an extra year of childhood. Enroll him in kindergarten at six years of age. Kindergarten has become first grade. So enroll him in, quote, kindergarten at six years of age. And I still think that's a good idea. You know, I have noticed a change in that. And maybe this is largely due to your paper.

But back when I was- It's not due to the paper, but a lot of parents have figured this out of their own. Part of it. Maybe so. But when I was in kindergarten, most of us were five turning six. Well, nowadays, most kids are six. And maybe they're five turning six, but they're turning six. really close to the beginning of the year.

And it's changed a lot for girls and boys. Do you see this as a positive development that kids are starting kindergarten later than they were 30 years ago? Well, unfortunately, that is true. Only in affluent communities. Okay. In affluent communities, parents have figured this out that kids need that gift of an extra year of childhood.

And in affluent communities, they can afford an extra year of daycare or paid nursery school or whatever it is they're doing. But in lower income communities, it is not at all true. Parents who cannot afford an extra year of daycare are putting their kids in the public school kindergarten at the earliest opportunity. And kids in low-income neighborhoods are starting kindergarten at five years of age. And kindergartens in those low-income neighborhoods are still too hard for most five-year-olds, you're saying. Yes, they're all about literacy and And so these kids are being set up for failure, especially in those areas, which means that we could see an even bigger education gap between the socioeconomic classes because of that. Yes. And Richard Reeves wrote a book last year called Of Boys and Men, in which he said, hey, guess what?

I just came up with this incredibly brilliant idea to solve the problem of boys. Let's talk. boys in kindergarten at six years of age. He had not seen my article or read about it in the New York Times, which covered my article back in 2001. But I'm glad he thought of it. It came up with the idea independently, 21 years later. But he also has documented in his book that indeed boys of color and low-income neighborhoods are the ones who are suffering the most from the success. accelerated kindergarten curriculum. Well, Dr. Sacks, thank you so much for all the work that you have done over the many years. What would you say is the biggest shift that you've seen in parenting over the past 10 years?

And if you were to be as optimistic as possible, what is the shift that you hope to see in parenting over the next 10? I would say the biggest shift is that parents' day are confused. They think they have to choose between being either strict. or loving. I've been a family doctor for 30 years. And 30 years ago, I would say

many parents understood that the best parent is both strict and loving. But today I find many parents feel they have to choose between being strict or loving. They don't understand

that the best parents are both strict and loving. And I hope that we can somehow change that. And again, that's what I'm trying to achieve in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, is to persuade parents, to show parents examples from my own practice of parents who are both, who are both strict and loving. And I give examples from my own practice using real parents, who I name with their permission, parents who are both

strict and loving, who've had wonderful outcomes of adult kids who, again, who I name with their permission who've turned out great who maybe one one young woman marlowe wasn't happy with her parents as a teenager thought they were too strict and now loves her parents you can do this you can be both strict and loving that's really good well thank you so much dr saxon your new edition the second edition of the collapse of parenting how we hurt our kids when we treat them like grownups is out so thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks again for inviting me.