YouSaid · the spoken record

Abigail Shrier

lines on the record: 83
first: 2024-05-21
most recent: 2024-05-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Child feel, and this is either demoralized, convincing a child that they have a diagnosis, a brain problem that they'll never get past because they're rehearsing it once a week, right? Or a bad incident that they're rehearsing once a week. And now it's gone from a middle school crush to a giant trauma in their lives that they think they have PTSD from. These are all really common side effects, but I want you to know something else too. If a child brings his or her problem to an aunt, to an uncle, to a grandmother, At some point that person will say, or even to a friend, okay, we've talked about this enough, go play. A therapist will never say that to a child. Now, there are therapists who are really good, who will, who will say we're here for 10 sessions, we're going to work on this phobia. We're going to get your kid past it, and let's measure. Let's actually track that the anxiety is getting better. But I talk to kids who had been in therapy since age six.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, then the therapy should be confined to getting them past that phobia so they can function in life, not to create this perma handholder who also interferes with the parent-child relationship for your kid and passes judgment on the job mom and dad are doing or dad and dad, however the family arrangement, right? That's not a helpful situation. And here's what I want parents to know, okay? And I'm not speaking to if your child's anorexic, but for God's sake, get them help. I'm not poo-pooing therapy for all kinds of things that a child may have need for. What I want parents to know is dropping off their kids to therapy, that's not neutral. And what you want to do, of course, is to get your kid out the door eventually, not to create a permanent situation where this person is constantly overseeing your parenting and making the child.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An essential conversation to have. Here's the thing when you drop your kid off to a therapy, very often it will undermine your authority with your kids because now you have someone who's an adult who seems to be above the parent, who sits around with the child basically judging your interactions with the kid. And very often kids will leave with the sense of, gosh, that was, you know, my mother was emotionally abusive or that was wrong of my mother to say or whatever. That's a very common side effect of therapy now. By the way, with adults, adults can handle that. Adults can brush things off, but a kid doesn't have a context for evaluating, was that abusive of my father DL at me? Is it abuse when a father yells at a kid? Look, a kid shouldn't be in therapy unless they have a real need. First of all, so if they have a real need, then the therapy should focus on that need, whatever the problem is, and it should be confined to that. If they have a phobia,”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a control group who lost a loved one but didn't go to therapy, they did better than the ones who went to therapy. Same thing with, you know, breast cancer survivors, anxiety about it, depression about it. They did worse if they had gone to therapy. And also alienation from a spouse, alienation from parents. All of these are classic diatrogenic effects of therapy. And there's a whole body of research on it. The problem, I'm not saying no one should go to therapy, but it's very troubling to me that while the researchers are very aware of these risks, the practitioners of therapy very often either minimize or deny them. And they seem totally unaware that sitting around with someone weekly can encourage rumination or dwelling on bad feelings, which of course is the biggest symptom of depression.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, there's the interesting research on this is a few things. One, they found that people tend to feel purged after they leave a therapist's office. So they tend to think that therapy is helping even when objectively, when they researchers check it isn't. So sometimes, of course, therapy can be very helpful and very useful and even life-saving. Very often we feel better when we leave a therapist office and we never check that by objective markers, we may be doing no better or even worse. So our own feeling about it isn't a good guide. And when they do do these experiments with things like, and they look into the iatrogenic effects, meaning when the healer introduces the harm in therapy, there's a whole body of research that shows people who've gone through natural bereavement, the loss of a loved one often feel worse after therapy. They did these controlled studies with.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely America's always the worst at everything. And I think Canada, right along with us, seems to be, you know, for these cultural fads, we're just all in together for whatever reason. But I do have some indication that it's not insignificant in Europe. And that is that while I was writing the book, trying to, you know, put together the psychological research and what it showed and how what we were doing in schools was actually counterproductive. What I found literally after I was done with the book was that two teams of researchers were looking into the same things with their own schools, with their own coping techniques and social emotional techniques in their own schools and they were testing it. So the fact that they were testing it with a control group both in the UK and in Australia made me realize, oh, this social emotional learning thing, this feelings focus, this obsessing over kids' feelings and therapy with kids, it's not just an American or North American project.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While we definitely don't valorize grit, we don't valorize putting your emotions to one side and getting on with life, deciding that on a tough day you're going to still show up for practice on time and do a great job for the team. We don't valorize that anymore, right? We don't valorize agency making a turnaround in your life, even though you've been through something hard. And the saddest thing is kids can. These are all things we're born with. The ability to overcome adversity. Instead, we tell the kids the opposite. Your parents are divorced. You've had trauma. Let's talk about it. It's the worst thing we could do for a kid who'd been through something hard. We should be telling them the opposite. Listen, in your family, do you know what your grandfather went through? Do you know what your great-grandfather went through? You shouldn't feel bad about that. You should feel so proud.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The CDC has great research on this, which is that if you present, if you normalize suicide with kids, if you presented as a means of coping with distress, basically telegraphing, this is something other kids are doing when they feel sad, you constantly ask them, how are they feeling and also present the idea that if you're struggling, this is something some kids do. make a hero of kids who are going through mental health struggles, right? If you valorize it, and we know it's valorized today, and if it's repetitive, if you're repetitive in your mention, then you're going to increase suicide in the population. And that's what we're doing in schools.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, the obsession with suicide with children, and when I say obsession, I don't mean privately being concerned as adults and working on this problem, which is real, but telling the kids all the time, here are the suicide heightlines. We put them around the school constantly giving them surveys about suicide. What you're doing is you're telegraphing kids kill themselves. And also, it's normal to kill themselves to kill yourself and also here are techniques you might be tempted to use. All this stuff is in the mental health surveys. It's the opposite of what you would do if you were being responsible about mental health concerns with young kids.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To kill themselves. It is so irresponsible to be doing this with kids. It's so bananas. But I think we've gradually accepted their greater and greater role in society. By the way, which flies in the face of all kinds of research about suicide and suicide contagion, which we have, but they don't seem to be paying any attention to the research, and they're doing things that are the opposite of what you would do if you're paying attention to the research.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They feel totally comfortable marching into my home and telling me how I should be talking to my kids about a national catastrophe. It really is a slip that happened over time. I mean, I took my son to an urgent care clinic for a bad stomach ache that wasn't going away after he got home from summer camp. And after we were done and they decided it was just dehydration, it wasn't appendicitis. They said, oh, now we're going to do our mental health screener. We asked the parents leave the room. And I got up to leave. And I had already written this book and I still got up to leave. And it was only because I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you getting up to leave that I sat back down and I said, could I please see your mental health screener? And I took a picture of it with my phone and it was created by our National Institute of Mental Health. This is a federal government agency and they decided, and this is part of the protocol, kids age eight and up. They asked the parents to leave. And then they asked the children five escalating questions alone in a room with this person about whether they might want to.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. Why did we all buy in? I think the culture shifted over time. So you sort of don't notice the temperature of the waters changing, you know? I'll give you just one silly example, but for my kids school, every time there's a national catastrophe or, you know, a school shooting or anything else, I get an email from the kids, my school's guidance department telling me, informing me of the good tactics for how to talk to my children about this national event. We just accept it. No one's ever asked me, how would you like me to talk to your children about the school shooting? No, they tell me how to talk to my own kids. And nobody bats an eye. Now, the school mental health staff may not have children. They may not have raised any of them successfully to adulthood. And we certainly never get to see what the product of their great tips are.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But instead, we give them an unhealthy life, and then we pour in mental health resources, and we don't notice they're getting worse and worse.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the kid and also we're not giving the kids the healthy When you start out the day with an iPad with your kid, he's going to have trouble concentrating in school. That doesn't necessarily mean he has a brain problem. We won't know if he has a brain problem unless we make his environment a little cleaner, right? By which I mean less chaotic. Kids really do need structure, right? And they definitely don't need to be constantly titillated by things like an iPad because it will make it harder for them to have an attention span for school, which is more boring usually than an iPad. So, you know, first thing we have to do is give kids a healthier environment, which goes from everything from exercise to time in person with extended family, all things kids need. People who love them and they love back over a lifetime, that's essential for our well-being, whether it's cousins, neighborhood kids, and extended family. So first we have to give them a healthy life.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get that. I'll say this parents are pouring in way more time to their kids than the previous generations. So it's hard for me. I don't personally blame parents, right? They have so little confidence right now because we've done because the mental health industry has done everything it can to divest them of any sense that they know what they're doing, right? I mean, in school materials, they refer to parents as caregivers. They're telling the kids, your parents are just service providers. They're caregivers like any other service provider. And then they have trusted adults in the materials. This is all across America. Trusted adults, who is a trusted adult any adult a child can trust. It could be a school counselor. It could be, but it's definitely not assumed to be the parents. I mean, parents are so denigrated in our society. So it's not surprising that they would feel ill-equipped to handle.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's up to you, right? If you're a super lovey person, go for it. You know, whatever, that's not the stuff there's good research on. What's good? What there's good research on is when you have an absence of authority, kids don't do very well.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody wants to go back. Let me just say nobody wants to go back. I don't think we could. We're a lot more sort of emotionally as aware, as it were, as a society. We've decided that it's really important to be in tune with your kids emotionally. And we want that closeness with our kids and we want that affection. And I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't have all those things. The problem is the question is, what do you want and what do the kids need? You can be as affectionate as you want, but you can't not be the authority in your home because that turns out to be essential for their mental health. Thinking the people who love me the most are the ones in charge, not the therapist my mom hired, not the pediatrician who's bossing my mom around my mom or dad or whoever the parent is, they are in charge. The people who love me most know what's best for me. That basic idea is something kids need. So however your style is beyond that.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A sort of group therapy, and the other, and they've done these studies now, so we have some indication that it absolutely is leading to the results because they were actually able to do researchers in Australia and England actually tested this separate groups of researchers. And they were able to show that the kids in the control group who didn't go through these practices ended up happier, better adjusted, better in terms of depression and anxiety and lower depression, lower anxiety, and also less alienated from parents because the other bad thing about it is it teased up a criticism of parents because of course if you're going to sit around with kids ruminating about a time when they were sad, lonely left out, well, whose job was it to keep them safe? So criticism of parents is almost inevitable.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that is a project in schools that's been around for over 15 years now. And it's across the West. They have various forms of it across the West. But the idea was to teach kids emotional regulation. And it specifically is a therapeutic intervention. It doesn't use moral language. It's not about character. It's always puts it in terms of non-judgmental coping techniques or wellness techniques or anti-bullying techniques or empathy education of various sorts. And the problem with it is that however intended in practice, it does everything we would do if we were going to dysregulate children, like constantly asking them to check on their emotions, constantly talking to them about their bad feelings, constantly having them think about a time when they were sad, lonely, left out, or disappointed. So it becomes very much like”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And constantly running interference with kids, but never having any authority with them. So never saying to a kid, avoiding the word no. So, you know, never punishing, never asserting a boundary with a kid in terms of his behavior or her behavior and what you expect from them. But then at the end, but then running interference with them with everybody else in their lives.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In charge. And those kids always did the best. And this study has been replicated hundreds of times. Authoritative parenting produces the best kids in terms of success, emotional well-being, and even eventual closeness with mom and dad or parents, whoever the parents may be. And then the other type, which also doesn't exist anymore, is permissive parenting. This was the parenting where it was sort of like anything goes very lazy-faire parenting. That also had not great results. What we have today is, I argue, a little worse because it's permissive parenting without at least the kids had independence. So they were able to develop some, you know, confidence and capacity on their own. Today we have surveillance parenting. Parents literally monitoring their kids on their iPhones, not trusting their judgment at all, interfering with interceding with every teacher, eventually even interceding with their bosses in the workplace.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so I'm using the language that Diana Bommerind used. That's a child psychologist, or sorry, she's an academic researcher, psychologist of the 1960s. And she was the first one to invent what was now what's now known as parenting styles, but she didn't really invent it. She actually was curious how were Americans raising their kids and what was the result? And she went in with an open mind. And what she found was there were roughly three types, you know, authoritarian, cold, unloving, and obedience focused. This basically doesn't exist in the West anymore. Authoritative, which just means parents are in charge. They sit down rules. Yes, they will punish if kids, you know, deliberately defy those rules, but they're loving and, you know, they're, you know, there to, you know, listen and care about their kids and even, you know, sympathize with them. But the parents are ultimately.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're just trying to figure out which of these emotions make any sense. So the last thing we want to do is what we've been doing is affirm every one of their emotions. Extreme or dysregulated, and then talk to them as if we're all just, you know, feelers here. We're all just emotional feelers trying to understand each other. That's not actually what kids need. They need an adult in charge”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your emotions. Remember that a kid is still figuring out which of his emotions make any sense at all, right? A toddler will feel rage if you don't give him the snack he wanted. And you have to teach a kid that's not appropriate. You can be, you know, you can be disappointed, but screaming and even feeling rage, that's not what we feel anger about. We feel anger about lots of things in life, but you can't feel rage and throw your cheerios across the floor because across the room because you didn't get the snack you wanted. And they actually, you have to sort of educate their emotions a little bit. You don't do that with adults, right? Mostly you want to sort of, you know, as a therapist, therapists usually want to create a space where adults feel comfortable opening up about emotions. They might feel embarrassed about, right? But with kids.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes and no. So I think that's a piece of it for sure. We're trying to be our kids' friends, but we're also treating them as adults, right? What that's what that means. When you say you're trying to be your ken's friends, you're saying, first of all, you say, I'm not the authority here. Now there's great research showing that kids actually do need authority. They need their parents in charge. And if their parents aren't in charge, they go looking for authority elsewhere. Kids really need authority in terms for their mental health, for their stability, for everything, for success in life. They really need their parents in charge, which doesn't, of course, mean being cold and unloving. It just means that parents are in charge. And they have rules. You said being their friends, it's sort of, in some ways, it's worse than that because, yes, they're being their kid's friends, but they're also assuming that the kids are little adults. So for instance, when they play the role of therapist with a child and say, I'm just here to affirm you.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the script is supplied from therapist. And then the final piece is schools where they are openly, their mandate is trauma-informed care across public schools, social, emotional learning, and teachers and counselors, armies of counselors are playing shrink with the kids all day long.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think it's all essentially bad therapy, and this is why because who's in charge, who's running the show? And today with children, with families, it really is the mental health experts. If you doubt that, just think for a moment about the fact that the rising generation never says it's shy. They say they have social phobia. They never say they're sad. They say they're depressed. They never say, gosh, they went through a tough time in middle school. They say they had PTSD. They're speaking the language of psychopathology to understand themselves and each other. Parents are practicing the techniques taken from therapists and psychologists. Those are the techniques they're aping when they talk to their children. There's nothing natural about the way parents now behave with kids. They get down to eye level. They constantly solicit their kids' feelings and they talk in the language, I see you're having some big feelings now. They're reading a script.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do it right. And that's what the experts have been saying. It's not true. It flies in the face of all the good psychological research. But nonetheless, I do think all these factors have undermined our confidence that we knew what we were doing. And so then we turn to really bad advice from a whole lot of people who I think very often mean well, but they're giving very bad advice. And some of the times their science is just garbage. And they've been promoting the idea of trauma traumas everywhere in our world. This is their idea that anything we do to get anytime you yell at a kid that can traumatize a kid, that injury, emotional injury can be with them for a lifetime. It's not true. It's not what the best research has shown. But nonetheless, they pedal this in the popular culture and it makes parents stricken and afraid to basically assert themselves as the authority and really have any discipline with their kids.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we created a window or an opening, and parents as a group did. How did we do this? We had lived through a lot of divorce. We had a lot of broken homes ourselves. And we were really worried that we weren't going to do things properly. We needed an expert. And in America in general and across the West, we've become more and more reliant on so-called experts, even for ordinary things. We don't trust ourselves to handle our lives in the way that we used to, right? We think that basically our lives require a certain amount of expertise. And child rearing, especially we've become totally unconfident in our ability to raise kids, even though the project of raising kids really hasn't changed in what kids need over centuries. I mean, kids need the same things from us, but instead we've convinced ourselves that it's a highly technical project. You need to know about a child amygdala.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy. Bad therapy is this, is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse? And by that I mean all this feelings focus with kids. We're teaching them over and over your feelings are the most important thing. That's what we're broadcasting when we constantly ask them how they're feeling, when we constantly ask them if they're happy, we're fretting over their happiness. So we've made happiness a goal. The researchers can tell you, and there's a lot of good research on this, making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy because most of life, we're not exactly happy, right? We're thinking about the work we have. We're frustrated. We have a worry that's bothering us. Maybe we have an itch or an allergy or a slight pain that we have to repress to get on with the business of our lives. And we're doing the opposite with that. We're teaching kids they can never.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An effect on others. So therefore, they had no responsibility to others to sort of be a good citizen, whether that's on, you know, an airplane or in a classroom, but constantly talk about them as unique. We would give them diagnosis, diagnoses for ordinary behaviors. We would pathologize ordinary behaviors and treat them to see themselves as disordered. Oh, that's just, you know, you have aviation. Oh, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. That's why you acted out. So instead of using the sort of lay terms we've always used that have to do with character, like, you know, being a jerk in class or being inappropriate in class, we would say, no, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. So treat them to see it as a brain problem so that they never felt they had any agency to do anything about it. And we would teach them to focus on happiness and wellness all the time. And I think if we did all those things, we would end up with what we have, which is a very dysregulated generation.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I looked at, and the answer seems to be, you know, I'm a journalist. I interviewed a lot of experts in terms of people who are familiar with the psychological research. So not the people who hold themselves out as mental health experts guiding everyone, but the people who are actually conducting and familiar with the psychological research. And if we wanted to make kids dysregulated, here's what we would do. We would obsess over their emotions. We would ask them constantly how they were feeling about things. We would ask them to pay attention to their feelings, so therefore broadcast that their feelings were an important and reliable guide to whether how they were doing in life. We would treat them in isolation, treat them as very special and unique and isolated from everyone else, unique in the world. Never give them a sense that their actions had an”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think we got here through a lot of what I call bad therapy. Bad therapy is any therapy that introduces new symptoms or makes existing symptoms worse. And by that I mean we're teaching them over and over. Your feelings are the most important thing. That's what we're broadcasting when we constantly ask them how they're feeling, when we constantly ask them if they're happy. We're fretting over their happiness. So we've made happiness a goal, making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy. We're teaching kids they can never ignore any distress. They've never ignore any pain. And so they're not able to do it.”
2024-05-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Abigail Shrier: Why the Kids Aren’t Alright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT