Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Abigail Shrier is a journalist. She’s a New York Times bestselling author. She’s known especially for her 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and now her latest book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She holds the Baccalaureate degree from Columbia University, a Bachelor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford and a Law Degree from the Yale Law School. Her work has been featured in such journals as City Journal and the American Spectator, as well as her regular Substack entitled The Truth Fairy. It is her most recent book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. That is the topic of our conversation today. Abigail Shrier, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Abigail Shrier:
Oh, thank you so much for having me on.
Albert Mohler:
You have written a deliberately provocative book and I appreciate that. It shows a lot of courage, but you clearly are provoked, and I join you in that. I really would want to start by asking you, why this book right now? Why you?
Abigail Shrier:
Oh, okay. So a few things. Why this book? Right now I’m raising three kids in the rising generation and I always start a book with a question, and the question that has been with me since I started having kids was, why are they so unhappy? Why are they so thoroughly diagnosed? Why does every kid have an ADHD or oppositional defiance disorder? Why is every kid talking about their anxiety? What is going on? So, I really wanted to know about the so-called “mental health crisis” that we see around us, or at least that’s talked about what the origin was. Why me? That’s a really good question. Actually, no one’s asked me that before, but I think there is an answer, and I think the answer is something like, because it turns out that therapy and therapeutic practice and therapeutic culture have been so thoroughly unquestioned and sacrosanct in our culture that it took someone who was willing to sort of look and see, were they actually doing a good job? Were they making kids happier? Was all this medication treatment and therapy improving things? And that turned out to be a question a lot of people were not, especially therapists, but in the mental health industry, were really not comfortable asking
Albert Mohler:
And for good reason. I mean, they have a commercial interest in this. People talk about therapy as if it’s a modality of counseling and meaning and helping people, but frankly, it’s New York Times bestsellers. It’s massive insurance compensation. It’s big business.
Abigail Shrier:
It is, but it is absolutely business. But I think a lot of people have made it into their religion in so far as they don’t seek out a pastor or priest or rabbi, they go to the therapist. That’s just understood by the way, even for religious Americans. And one of the things that a lot of therapists didn’t even know, but certainly people I don’t think knew, was that when you set a child up for therapy, well, first of all, there’s this known body of harms that therapy can introduce and we can talk about those. Those are known risks. They’ve been established in the literature, but there’s something else too. People assume, and Frank Ferdi, the wonderful British sociologist pointed this out to me. We’ve come to assume in the West that informal relationships are somehow suspicious. You need an expert. But here’s one of the differences. Let me just throw out one of the big differences between a child going to an aunt or a pastor or a mother or a grandma for advice and going to a therapist. At some point, the grandmother or aunt is going to not only, first of all, not only are they going to tend to reinforce the family’s values, but at some point, they’re going to say to a child, go play. You’re fine. We’ve talked about this enough. Now go outside. A therapist won’t say that. And that is one of the biggest problems with therapy with kids.
Albert Mohler:
And I don’t mean to imply that the therapists don’t believe in what they’re doing. I think by and large, I should assume that they do. But there is a commercial application to this and a professional pressure because, and you point this out in several different ways in your book, and that is that if they’re ever successful, they’re out of business.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
Because they got to keep it going.
Abigail Shrier:
They’re incentivized to treat the least sick for the longest period of time. It’s very different from doctors. Doctors want to cure the patient. They keep the patient. If your rash goes away, you say, wow, I have a great dermatologist, and you recommend them to your friends. The dermatologist keeps the patient, that’s the moment the therapist says, you’re cured. He’s lost the patient.
Albert Mohler:
Right? Yeah. There’s so much to this, and I want to push back a little bit in time. And so, as an intellectual historian, let me just go back and say, this is a conversation that would’ve been inconceivable a hundred years ago. And there’s some people who think that’s an exaggeration, but it’s not. No one would know what we’re talking about. Even say in the first decade of the 20th century, this is something new. This is not a discussion that is continuous through centuries. This is a very modern issue.
Abigail Shrier:
It is. It’s so modern. We no longer even question. It went from something that was non-existent. And even when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, therapy was generally frowned upon. I was treated like something for people with problems. Even then, there was a lot of stigma. Today, it’s so thoroughly unquestioned that people don’t think there could be any harms that come with therapy. Well, as I say in the book, any intervention that has the power to help also by definition has the power to introduce some risk.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I told someone the other day that Woody Allen, for example, helped to introduce Americans and others to the fact that for many Americans therapy is a status symbol. All your friends, all the right people are in therapy. All the right people have any number of therapeutic professionals at beck and call.
Abigail Shrier:
Yes. And I’ll just say this because obviously I’m talking to you, Dr. Mohler, but here’s the sort of thing that no one questions that I think your audience might appreciate. We don’t—even religious people—don’t question whether it’s a good idea to put a child weekly in front of a non-judgmental adult. See, usually you want to put a child in front of an adult who will reinforce your values, not a child in front of an adult who will say, oh, you’re interested in having sex at 14. How does that make you feel?
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, no, I want to say perhaps confession’s good for the soul. So let me tell you this, I’m rather infamous, and the folks around me are rather consistent. I shut down a major graduate school as president of an institution precisely because it was completely given over to the therapeutic modalities. And I thought in a way, it was absolutely in contradiction to the institution’s purpose. So, I don’t think most of the people in, I’ll just say conservative evangelicalism, would be likely to do that, but they’re likely to live next door to someone who’s doing it, or have a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews who are doing it. But I think the greatest threat—and a perceived threat, maybe—in the people to whom I’m closest, would be the fact that when children are out of your sight, they’re being subjected to such. That’s right.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. So we have social emotional learning in the schools. So, if you send your child to the public school, they will be confronted with these non-judgmental therapeutic feelings focus. And we know that that kind encouraged rumination, which is the negative dwelling constantly on negative emotions, It’s the number one symptom of depression. It can make anxiety and fears worse, to sit around talking about your anxiety. And the other thing that often happens, and they’ve now shown this in two different sets of studies in Europe, is parental alienation—sitting around with a school counselor and passing judgment on, “Oh, you were traumatized. Well, who was in charge of keeping you safe?”, and naturally tease up a criticism of the parents.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I want to track how you developed this in your book, but I want to stay for just a few minutes and kind of understanding the background, what happened in the culture that this becomes plausible. I mean, one of the scariest portions of your book is where you just document some of the state board of education principles in dealing with these things and policies. And I think a part of the shock in your book is recognizing that at least some of those states would be considered well, less progressive states.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. It’s not…
Albert Mohler:
This has infected us coast to coast.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. It’s not just blue states. It really isn’t. I mean, you look at the Florida, I believe, has children get mental health access 12 and up without parental permission. I believe Florida is one of the states. But anyway, there are several red states that are in there, but what we have is, and you mentioned the Woody Allen, and I’m a little younger than you, so for me, I think of Goodwill Hunting, which was a movie [which] came a little later, but absolutely the idea, and this really permeated the culture, was you can’t get better until you talk about it with a therapist. It will necessarily help. It always helps to go to a therapist to talk to about your problems. You can’t get better unless you do that. And that’s how you set yourself free to live a good full life. It simply isn’t true. Actually, a lot of, and the research shows this, that a lot of people who don’t want to rehash their trauma know what’s best for them. And in fact, some of the best trauma work that’s done involves not rehashing or retraumatizing a patient and simply moving on and doing lots of important and good things in life that redirect the mind away from the self.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and you deal with this in part, but since you mentioned goodwill hunting, at least a part of the cultural messaging that comes through is not only that you need a therapist, but the only explanation for this is that something bad happened to you that you don’t remember. And so therapy is about recovering something because someone had to have done something to you in order for this to be the challenge of your life.
Abigail Shrier:
Yeah, that’s one of the most pernicious things to enter the culture. It’s this idea of childhood trauma. And a lot of popular therapists promote this idea. You see it in the work, of course, Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score, but basically, it’s just repressed memory theory warmed over. And the idea is that anything that’s gone wrong with you in adulthood, if you’re having trouble holding down a job, if you’re dealing with substance abuse, probably you had some childhood trauma, that’s the source. And we just have to uncover it. And it really rests on the shakiest, if not totally absent scientific foundations. But unfortunately, people really believe it.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think they believe it even to an extraordinary extent because I know of at least one case where simple documentation would indicate that this thing that was remembered couldn’t have happened or certainly couldn’t have happened under those circumstances. But the therapist still declared it to be progress, which I find absolutely astounding. At least the worldview that I hold to says the last thing you want to build your life on is a lie, even if we’re accidentally lying to ourselves.
Abigail Shrier:
I agree with you. The last thing you want to build your life on is a lie. But that is true what you just said, and I’ll give you another example. This wonderful researcher, I think she’s based in England. I don’t know her name, I think it’s Cathy Yem. But I’ve read a lot of her studies, and she does the more rigorous studies. She has done prospective studies, meaning not people thinking they remember a childhood trauma maybe in the past where it’s often open. It was very suggestible and open to lots of error. But she follows children. She has followed them 15-20 years who had documented traumatic experience, sexual abuse, physical abuse and whatnot to see whether they had more psychopathology as adulthood. And she’s done several of these kinds of studies. That is the rigorous way to do them prospectively. You avoid all these selective bias and all the other errors of bias that come in with retrospective studies.
And she found time and again, that children who had been physically abused as children, meaning there was documented abuse at the time, they were no more likely to physically abuse their own children than similarly situated children who had not suffered childhood physical abuse. So there really isn’t the evidence that people claim, but nonetheless, because it’s unfalsifiable, therapists and others in the culture suggest that you must have childhood trauma. And it’s very attractive because it says, oh, it’s not my fault. It tells people it must have been something that happened to you. And then they go hunting for it.
Albert Mohler:
Okay, so I love the way you put that, and I want to come back and ask you a question. So what’s the distinction between normal childhood and traumatic childhood? I’m not denying there’s a distinction, but how does that get framed out in your thinking?
Abigail Shrier:
I think the wonderful researcher George Bonanno at Columbia talks about potentially traumatic events. This is important because he says that and he shows that actually most things we would consider traumatic don’t leave an imprint at all. The reason is we’re actually built for resilience. So things like death of a parent, death of a sibling, all kinds of really scary events we can have in childhood. And he even showed.
Albert Mohler:
Horrifying events…
Abigail Shrier:
Yes, Horrifying. He even showed things that people who lived through losing someone on 9/11 or watching the towers go down on 9/11, that the overwhelming response was actually resilience. People did not end up with things like PTSD. But here’s the interesting thing about the research. If you believe you are traumatized, irrespective of what objectively happened to you, you’re more likely to have adult psychopathology. So the belief in your own traumatic childhood is itself a vulnerability factor for adult psychopathology.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, you talk about building resilience in children, and I greatly appreciate that, but to be a child is to have to suffer disappointments. And now of course we know that there are children who are horribly abused. There are children who suffer criminal and horrifyingly immoral attacks, but there can’t be the assumption that every child does. And furthermore, behind that, there seems to be an absolute resentment to the idea that there could be such a thing as a happy family.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. That’s right. The problem comes in, not that we recognize that some children have gone through something absolutely horrific and may need various kinds of intervention, including therapy, including in some instances medication. The problem is that we’re treating the… well, we’re assuming every child has gone through something horrifying and we’re treating them as either disabled or ill. And so, young Americans are growing up thinking they are ill. They are asking for mental health days off of work, healthy bodied Americans. And that’s the problem
Albert Mohler:
Going back, say half century or more. There were people in the early decades of the therapeutic revolution who did see a problem. I think of Philip Rieff in his book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, which became kind of a milestone book, at least for many, certainly got my attention. And I don’t mean when the book came out that I would’ve been too young, but as I was coming along thinking through these things, I found that Christopher Lash, another who clearly were sounding alarms. And so even in preparation for this conversation, I kind of went back and looked at those two books, and they age pretty well.
Abigail Shrier:
They really do. I quote Christopher Lash in my book, and they absolutely age incredibly well. It’s so funny. They were noting at the time that convincing people, one of the things therapy does is it can convince people that they’re sick, and it can cause… so, that’s called demoralization, or it can cause people to become over-reliant on the therapist, they start feeling like they can’t do for themselves. Now again, of course, if you desperately need the therapy, those risks are worth it. Just like if you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound, it’s worth going to an ER even though an ER may be full of bacteria and other viruses. So, the question is not, “should anyone ever avail themselves of therapy or medication?”, but whether we should be treating the population blanketly with therapy. And that’s what we’re doing with young people, and we are seeing the results.
We’re convincing a whole generation of Americans that they can’t, that there’s something wrong with their brains, that they can’t function without psychiatric medication, that they have some diagnosis that lives with them, and it’s a limitation. And we’re seeing the least risk-taking generation and the least adventurous when it comes to things like adulthood, the responsibilities of growing up. They’re afraid to try. They’re afraid to get their driver’s license, they’re afraid to ask a girl out. They’re afraid to… they’d say they don’t want to get married or have kids. They act as if they’re taking a mental health day off of life.
Albert Mohler:
There’s one little anecdote in your book that I just have to say, I know I smiled as I read it. And that was the, I don’t know, 14, 15-year-old boys who went to a teacher asking him how to put-on clip-on bow ties. And you say he realized they wanted him to put them on for them as if they’re five-year-olds trying to try on a pair of shoes. And I smile about that because I think that’s a picture kind of where we are. And I thought you presented in such a sympathetic way you feel for the boys, you feel for the teacher, but somebody’s got to fix this.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. Somebody’s got to say to them, you can do it. Figure it out. No one ever says to kids today, you’ll live, shake it off, figure it out. So they don’t know. They can surmount even minor distress or obstacles and they’re not trying.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and I think you’re honest about a couple of other things, and even on the shake it off, I am surrounded, I’m thankful to say by an incredibly healthy community here on campus, we’ve got thousands of students and at the undergraduate level they’re showing up. They like they’re supposed to. And at the graduate level, all the things that our parking lot, we need a parking lot for strollers. But we do see played out exactly what I saw played out when I was a boy in a very healthy home, and that was I needed a mom and a dad. And dad was not unsympathetic, but it was very clearly, “a skin knee is only a skin knee. You’re going to get over this now go do this. Go mow the yard or whatever.” And so I looked, and even in your writing before the book, you’ve mentioned that there is at least honest acknowledgement that they’re masculine and feminine, motherly and fatherly ways of influencing children for good here.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. I think we don’t hear that enough in the culture. Now, I don’t know about your community. Maybe it has it, but broadly in America, I do think in even religious communities, you’re hearing this over hysterical coddling in the surveillance and the frantic sense that kids can’t. And I remember, I live in West Los Angeles, which is very different, but I was at my son’s soccer team, my soccer game, and I was watching their soccer game. He was 12 years old, and I was watching… I was standing next to an African American man who was watching his son, and his son—while we were watching—got knocked down pretty hard, and he was on the ground. He was a good player, but he got knocked down really hard by another player. And I hear the father mutter, he’s fine, get up. And the boy did. And I realized it was the first time I had heard that in years… in years.
Albert Mohler:
I have to say as a boy and as a dad, I’m just going to guess that when he got nailed, when he was just, first of all, “am I alive? And yeah, I am.” So, I’m just going to guess that he really cared. His dad was watching what he did next, and his dad loves him unbelievably and was proud of him for getting right back in the game.
Abigail Shrier:
And that’s considered a little unloving today. I mean, the framing is all, “oh, don’t you care about his feelings? What if he had some fracture? Have we considered all the…” you know what? There’s a lot of possibility of danger in every situation. Yes. But we’ve become so obsessive about it. We bring a microscope to every childhood accident, and unfortunately we’re making kids so frantic and so anxious, and I really do think we’re communicating way too much worry to kids.
Albert Mohler:
I have so many big questions for you, and one of the incredible achievements of your book, and I say this in a way that I hope listeners understand the importance of what you’ve done here. You actually go to the studies, you document them, you then go to the even more extensive studies and you deal honestly with them. And I just have to ask the question…. There is so much evidence that this isn’t working. How can a sane society ignore the preponderance of the evidence
Abigail Shrier:
We’ve become this, I guess there are different ways of framing it, but there are a few things going on at the same time. I do think that the lack of religion, we’ve seen a tremendous drop. Of course, this is no surprise to you, but a tremendous drop in things like church attendance, synagogue attendance, religious affiliation, and one thing religion does for a society, I think, it provides a certain herd, immunity to a certain kind of nonsense, just absolutely lack of common sense behavior that would allow parents to think that they have to put their kids through surgical procedures to become the opposite sex. In a religious society a lot of that gets just shrugged off as bananas and then they move on. Now, that doesn’t mean you can solve every problem, of course in a religious, but there’s a certain herd immunity. We don’t have that.
And in that place, you do find these faith attachments, faith like attachments, developing to other things. And I think therapy is one of them. People become so absolutely attached to their therapist that they will say to me like, “oh my God, my therapist, I couldn’t live without her.” You say to them, “oh, okay, how long have you seen her? 15 years? But she’s amazing.” Well, if you’ve been seeing a therapist for 15 years, it’s worth questioning whether it’s helping. I mean, that should be obvious. And I don’t judge anybody who goes to therapy. I mean, you certainly an adult, an adult who feels they need therapy. I don’t care if you’re what you do, what your hobbies are, what’s your interest. That’s up to you. The problem with a child is a child doesn’t usually have the life experience or judgment or resources to push back to say, “you know what? I know what you’re saying about my mom, but I wouldn’t call her toxic.” Okay. A child can’t say that. A child’s not going to say, “you know what? I know I was bullied a little on middle school, but I don’t think I have PTSD. That sounds to me like an exaggeration.” A child can’t say that. So the ability to really change a self-perception and create damage in the family is so much greater.
Albert Mohler:
I have not been in therapy. Maybe people would say, no, I put people in therapy, but nonetheless, I haven’t had that experience. But you say something that would appear to me to be common sense. And as I got to the end of your book, I thought, that statement made in the beginning of the book is absolutely kind of shocking now. And that is you say that no one should enter into therapy without deciding upfront how long this is going to last.
Abigail Shrier:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Isn’t that counter to everything the therapeutic industry is built upon?
Abigail Shrier:
Yes, yes. And in fact, wonderful therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy that truly attack things like a real phobia that’s interfering with someone’s life or bedwetting, chronic bedwetting. They’ve been very successful with these things. And one of the things that is standard is to say upfront, I’m going to meet with your child for 10 sessions. We’re going to measure that the phobia is being tackled, that they’re doing better, that they’re no longer afraid of dogs, that they can go outside without being so paralyzed by fear of germs or whatever the fear is. I mean, that should be part of the rigorous of therapy, but of course it’s not. And there’s tremendous resistance within the therapeutic profession to saying, why don’t we track and make sure this is actually making us better and set a limited number of sessions. The profession does not require or have any mechanism really for tracking improvement in the patient, at least for most therapies.
Albert Mohler:
I just want to remind us that your book is primarily about the subtitle in one sense why the kids aren’t growing up. So you’re not writing about the problem of the therapeutic enterprise with equal attentiveness to children and adults. You’re dealing with children and adolescents, and I appreciate that because in so many cases, they’re the most vulnerable. And frankly, they’re not even deciding to do this. It is being decided for them. But just given what you said a few moments ago, I want to come back and say, reading your book also caused me to ask a question: if it is not in church or in synagogue, or even in other religious settings where there’s a communal gathering, where are parents with their children going to see other parents and children in an up close, meaningful context over time? And the reason I say this is because my wife and I are among the oldest people in our congregation, which is packed to the gills with young families and young adults and their children. And one of the things that clearly happens is that parents kind of learn from each other. And that’s why it wasn’t just my wife and I when we were new parents, but we had a constant frame of reference. One of the things you point out is that they move kids from school to school, class to class, and they’re not even able, I mean, parents probably never even get to know one another.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. And in fact, the Harvard Grant study the most, the great long-term study on human happiness shows that stable relationships, people you love and who love you back over a lifetime, cousins, family, grandma, all those relations, those are absolutely key to human happiness, not the nanny you hired, not the parenting coach mom goes to. It’s the people who really love your back. Kids feel that even if they’re imperfect friends. And I think one of the big problems, you talk about parents looking to each other, one of the big problems today is that parents are relying on these parenting experts, many of whom their oldest child is seven. And I’m no parenting expert, but please don’t listen to someone whose oldest child is seven because you have no idea how that child will turn out. The only parenting experts in my book are people who have done it successfully and raised good people to adulthood. And to be sturdy adults.
And what do I mean by adulthood? I mean people who can be dependent on what I call load-bearing walls, people who can be dependent on by a spouse, by a child, by an employer to show up and be there for someone else. And the reason the subtitle of the book is Why the kids Aren’t Growing Up, I think the two things are really related. If you feel fragile, if you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t, that you’re just not up to it, that you need a mental health day off of work, what you’re also saying is, “I’m too sick to grow up.” And the problem with that is that the actual cure to most adolescent angst is growing up. It’s the cure.
Albert Mohler:
Well, and it also is a part of being an adolescent. I mean, the ancient Greeks understood this. I mean, if there were no trauma, there would be no men or women. That’s kind of how you find out who you are.
Abigail Shrier:
Absolutely. And facing those fears… look, one of the great tragedies of the rising generation is they’ve lost the sense that growing up is an adventure. That life is an adventure, and it’s scary. It’s scary to go to your first job and be yelled at by your boss because you’re incompetent. And let me tell you, we all start out a little incompetent. That’s how we get competent. And it’s true for being a new mother is scary and getting married is—all these things involve risk and also are the greatest reward. And those things are intimately connected.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, this is just anecdotal, but it applies along these lines. I was meeting with some pretty prominent business executives and I asked them, I said, what do you do with hiring? And very few of them are now doing the hiring, but they once had that responsibility, and it’s of course distributed through their companies. And they said, well, number one, a horrifying number of 22 year olds don’t even look you in the face when you ask a direct question. He said, I’d like to tell you that you can make this objective, but it’s not. But if there’s a young man who comes in or a young woman depending upon the circumstance and the person locks on the eyes and in a friendly normal way, answers questions and can connect the dots, I mean regardless of the GPA and all the rest, these guys basically said, that’s what we’re looking for. And we don’t know how to put a job description out there, but honestly, that’s what we’re looking for.
Abigail Shrier:
And unfortunately, that’s a failure of parenting. And its failure of parenting because I believe because parents have been made so insecure by these so-called experts that they know what they’re doing and they’re so afraid of traumatizing a child by saying, “try again.” Look him in the eye, shake his hand firmly. Or “that’s wrong.” Kids need to hear it. And here’s the thing, they can hear it. They’re going to be fine. Someone has to teach them these things. And it’s so funny, I was listening to one of these parenting experts about emotion. One of the things today is you can never correct any emotion is considered valid from a child. You never tell a child that their emotion is unreasonable or wrong. All feelings are supposed to be, well, that might be true for an adult, meaning an adult may want to go to a therapist and have just a space, a non-judgmental space to talk about whatever feeling without feeling bad or shame. But with a child, they actually don’t know. Their feelings have to be a little bit educated, meaning they have to be told, “listen, I know you’re upset because you wanted mac and cheese and you got chicken nuggets, but we don’t feel… rage is not the response. You can feel disappointed but not rage. We save that for other things.”
Albert Mohler:
And a lot of this is just, it isn’t even fodder for therapy. So let me tell one of myself. A lot of what I do is to get up in front of a lot of people and have to talk. And one of the problems is that things happen. And so I was in a setting not long ago, and boy, I was really excited to get up and speak about what I was going to get to speak about to these people. But something distressing was brought to my attention just a couple minutes before I had to get up and speak. I want to say this in a word of great appreciation because I’m not a young person, but a younger man came up to me who works with me and is just very kind. And he said, “these folks are excited to hear where he at today.”
And I snapped out of it. And anyway, he said, “are you happy?” And I said, “yes.” He said, “look, happy.” And that was just excellent advice. That’s just exactly what I needed to hear. And I thought that was a younger man speaking to me. That was just a real gift. But that’s what my dad would have said if he had seen me in that situation. And I received that as a word for that younger man as an incredible gift and an act of real affirmation. And by the way, just incredibly good advice. But these days, that kind of thing is considered corrective in the wrong way. It’s corrective in the right way.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. Focusing on others. The audience waiting to hear from you turns out to be great. Actually, the psychological research shows it’s great advice, and we’re telling kids the opposite. No, stop everything and tell me about your bad feelings. Are you okay? We don’t have to… If you want, we can talk to your teacher and postpone the math test or give you double time. You’re feeling nervous. And what they do is they accommodate every bad feeling and the bad feeling grows. And kids never learn to surmount those bad feelings. And the sad thing is they’re built for it. They’re built to face down obstacles and overcome them. And if we don’t tell them that they can, if we communicate in so many ways that they can’t, they may never know it.
Albert Mohler:
One of the mischievous words in the theological vocabulary in the 20th century is the word demythologizing. But I want to take it out of that context and say to you, you are an expert demythologize. And so, I want to tell you one of the myths that you puncture, and I’m not sure how intentionally you do this, but you do it very effectively, is the myth that everything was going great until Covid. And Covid has produced all these problems in American children and adolescents. And I mean, you refute that as comprehensively as can be done.
Abigail Shrier:
Thank you. I mean, the mental health of adolescents has been in precipitous decline in this country since the 1950s, and there’s such a temptation to hook that on anything from Covid, which the lockdowns were definitely bad for kids, but the suicide rates immediately before Covid were startling and the worst we’d ever seen. Or the smartphone smartphones are terrible. And let me just tell you, there’s no question. I think they do a lot of harm. And I wrote my last book about a social contagion spread through the smartphone, so I’m not unaware of it, but the problem is we’ve given kids unhealthy lives and then we pour in mental resources expecting it to fix everything. And the reason they’re so unhealthy, yes, smartphones are playing a role, but they’re also missing the other good stuff like independence, like community, like parents with authority, which turns out to be essential, which means parents say to the kid, “I’m in charge”, which doesn’t mean I don’t love you and care what you think and all that, but I’m ultimately, I’m your parent. I know best I’m in charge. Those things that parents are unwilling to do or say today. And then when you assert your authority, you can trust a child with independence. But right now, we’re doing the opposite. We’re never asserting our authority and then we’re surveilling them at all times. We don’t trust them and they’re never learning what they can do.
Albert Mohler:
Just over the course of the last few weeks, especially with all the nonsense going on in elite college and university campuses, I’ve kind of tracked the pattern of so many people in the mainstream media saying, this is the class of covid. I mean, they were denied high school graduation. Now many of them are being denied their collegiate or university graduation. This is going to traumatize them for life. And I was thinking, I just look at human history and it’s hard for me to believe people are going to say, “I would’ve had a much better job and a much better life except I missed a three-hour commencement at Columbia.”:
Abigail Shrier:
Right, exactly. It’s ridiculous. Look, in some sense, I gesture to this a book. Now I can’t say I fully predicted it. I certainly was as surprised as everyone, but here’s what I said. We have a more radical young generation, and I say that in the book, why? And this is what I said, because parents were unwilling to assert their authority to pass on their own values. And they sent these kids off, fragile kids, who feel like empty vessels, off to college. And so any radical who asserts their authority with your child can just pour in their own values. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing young people chanting for things that are abhorrent to their own parents. And this is too bad, and I hate to say this, but I think parents as Americans, we didn’t do a very good job passing on our values to our children in a strong way.
Albert Mohler:
I love books. I’ve got a lot of them. Organizing them is a tremendous challenge. I can only organize some of them out of the thousands by saying, these are special authors. They deserve all their books to be together. Midge Decter’s, one of them. And I love the fact that you cite her book Liberal Parents, Radical Children, because that’s a generation ago, but like with Philip Rieff and Christopher Lash, it’s as relevant—I mean—that’s Columbia, New York, 2024.
Abigail Shrier:
Yeah, absolutely. And she writes about it so brilliantly, but she basically said, when you put your children up on a pedestal, when you don’t assert your authority, which doesn’t mean that you have to be unloving or cold, but when you do those things, when you abjure your own authority with them, when you are constantly catering to them and their feelings, you’re setting them up for somebody else to play daddy to them. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing young people desperate, really attracted to the authoritarian movements of radicals. And yes, she absolutely identified the same phenomenon.
Albert Mohler:
And in that book, she also makes a point which you make implicitly, sometimes explicitly in your book, and that is that if you tell kids they’re the center of the universe, they’re going to believe you. And they show up on the college campus, and they believe that, and this is something I’ve seen just in the last few weeks. They believe that their political and moral assertions are beyond question because after all, they’re the ones making them.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. I mean, look, this may not be, there’s so much that’s different about what’s going on campus today. One thing, I went to Columbia, and let me tell you something, however much people hated the administration, they didn’t turn on each other, they weren’t against the other students. And they certainly, if they handcuff themselves to the library or had hunger strikes, which they periodically did, they certainly didn’t say, “no, there shouldn’t be any consequences for my behavior”, that we never said. So it really is something different, this childlike radicalism that wants to be, have no consequences and get everything. And I mean, the fact that they are issuing demands to their university after their behavior, it sort of tells you everything you need to know. These are people who took over, young people who took over buildings of the university and now they have demands.
Albert Mohler:
Very well put. I want to turn to something else here, and it’s tied to this. So, if you talk to the president of a major university or college and you say, talk with a faculty member, the faculty member is going to say, there are too many administrators. There are too many people who are all over the campus and their administrative role, director of this, director of that. And that’s very legitimate criticism. But there’s one problem with it, and that is that when you go to the higher education establishment, much of that’s been forced on the university by this therapeutic mindset, in which case, students evidently have to have in one university it’s one to four, sometimes one to three, ratio of helping administrators… something’s gone horribly wrong. I want to say, again, not on this campus, but writ large, you have a Columbia—It’s in a cultural context where people assume they’re not competent if they don’t have all these helpers.
Abigail Shrier:
Helpers. That’s right. We’ve insisted that healthy children jump into wheelchairs and then, look, lo and behold, their muscles are atrophy. That I think is what we’ve done as a culture. Now, I’ll tell you one story, and I’ll tell you this because this is why I think the message of the book is important, not just for people who are secular, but also religious people as well. I think there’s something broader that’s gone wrong in the culture. I was contacted after my last book by a child psychologist, and she told me she’s a very religious Christian, and she told me I was doing the Lord’s work, and she really appreciated it, and she would love to talk to me. I said, I happen to be writing my next book on an issue of adolescent mental health. I’d love to interview you about it. She said, sure. We sent an appointment and I spoke to the woman and the first thing she said to me was, but just so you know, I can’t do this on the record because my daughter will cut me off if she finds out I talk to you.
And I said, wait a second. You said I was doing the Lord’s work. She said, I know I believe that, but my daughter will never speak to me again. I said, well, how old is your daughter? Oh, she’s an adult. She’s I guess 24, 25, and she’s a therapist, but she’ll be so angry with me. Now, I don’t want to beat up on this woman, but this woman was a good lady. I have every reason to believe she was a good woman. She was also a parenting coach in part of her practice. She’s not only a child psychologist, but a parenting coach. There’s a problem in America when we don’t see anything wrong with having raised children, good people, raising children who…
Albert Mohler:
Who Blackmails…
Abigail Shrier:
Right! That is a tragedy. That’s not someone who should be coaching other parents. That’s someone who said, wow, I failed to raise a good person, because a good person doesn’t cut off their parents because they disagree about the journalists that person chose to talk to. That, I think, has got at the heart of what we are not passing on our values. We don’t realize as parents, our number one job is to raise good people with our values.
Albert Mohler:
You take this on, and so, you have to be one of the most well-known alumni of Columbia University. I don’t expect you to be the next commencement speaker. You have made yourself a nuisance on this kind of thing. And I say that with great appreciation because I think there are too few people who are taking these things on honestly. But you also do so in a way that’s very, very documented, credible, and for that matter, I detect a lot of kindness in your book. You care about the people. You’re not just trying to sell books because you could have written this book differently just as a Jeremiah, but I can hope that parents who might be seduced by the therapeutic temptations and might be very seduced by all kinds of bad ideas about raising children will find help in your book. And I think that’s at least part of why you wrote it. I am assuming so.
Abigail Shrier:
Absolutely. I write for parents. Parents are one demographic I really believe in. They absolutely—whether whatever they’re doing—they almost always put their children. They really are trying their best for their kids and they’re trying to raise the next generation of Americans.
Albert Mohler:
And it’s beautiful to see them with their children.
Abigail Shrier:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
Just absolutely alive, absolutely human, just joy. And I want to say that’s God’s creation in its glory evident.
Abigail Shrier:
Absolutely. And I’ll tell you something, I also believe that left to their own devices, they would do a good job. And I think that Americans have done a great job raising great people for generations, and I think we’ve got a real problem. And you see that on the campuses where raising kids who are so lost and feel so fragile that they’re not able to, it’s almost hard to imagine them raising the next generation. So we need to fix that. We really do, and we need to go back. I do think this is something we know how to do in this country is raise good kids and we need to get back to doing it.
Albert Mohler:
I’m so glad you raised that issue because in your book, you raise an interesting question and that is the United States an outlier in this? Even among nations that we would consider having parallel cultures, a great deal cultural sympathy. Are we an outlier in this respect?
Abigail Shrier:
Across the west, there’s no question that mental health of adolescence has been in decline, but I think we’re outliers in a few respects. Ours is the worst in terms of adolescent mental health. It’s the worst in terms of anxiety, depression, and I think there are a few reasons. One, we cut children off from community, from family, from extended family, from people who really love them. We don’t think it matters. “Oh, grandma had that service. She offered, well, I’ll just hire someone.” We don’t realize there’s a tradeoff there. We don’t feel the loss. So I think that’s one thing. Second, and a number of actually immigrants, but also academic psychologists from other countries pointed this out to me. We are the only society that doesn’t think our job is to pass our values onto our children. And you hear this all the time when you talk to parents, you ask them, my last book was about the gender craze and about all these young girls thinking they were transgender. And I asked them, well, have you told your daughter? I always ask, have you told your daughter what you believe about whether she’s a girl or a boy? And they say, well, they don’t… very often, I would hear parents say, “I don’t want to push that on her. I don’t want to push my views on my child.” That’s something that’s really shocking and alien to most other cultures. They take it for granted that their job is to push their values and their worldview on their children. That’s the point to make sure our values survive.
Albert Mohler:
Even Scandinavian nations do a much better job, and they’re considered to be the essence of modern enlightened globalism. But you know what? They really are unapologetic in seeking to perpetuate their culture and their ideals and their own children.
Abigail Shrier:
And honestly, we all should be, I mean, you don’t want your child to be a relativist about your values. And yet I hear from parents time and again, they would say to me in the gender context, well, I don’t want to push it. And I would say to them every time, well, your child’s teacher’s going to have no trouble pushing her view, so don’t you think you should push yours?
Albert Mohler:
Well, that leads me to the urgent question I want to ask you, and that is, when you look at the schools and when you document how this has been institutionalized, is there any mode of recovery there? What would you say to parents in that situation? Where does this go?
Abigail Shrier:
It’s a great question. So, let me just say, I look across America, I see lots of problems, but of how the young generation is being raised and how they’re developing is, to me, the one that’s the easiest to fix. And the reason is it actually doesn’t take any money. It doesn’t take any resources. It really just takes the will of the parents to do what’s best for their kids and assert their own authority in the home and their own values. So, I think a lot can be combated even with the schools, by parents who say, no, my child will not be going to that lesson. My child does not need to sit around thinking about her pain before her math exam. That is not helpful. And I have to tell you something, bands of people ask me all the time, “well, if you’re not going to do this social emotional learning or this feelings focused in the middle of the classroom, what would be better for kids than that?” And my answer is always the same. Anything, paint the gym, play basketball, have a dance troupe. Anything that directs them outward, they could literally pick up trash around the school and it would be better than a session sitting around and talking about their pain.
Albert Mohler:
And they would actually feel better even about themselves.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
It’s an accomplishment; doing something.
Abigail Shrier:
And all the research actually shows that school counselors aren’t necessarily out looking for it. The best ones are, and I talked to some wonderful ones, but in general, unfortunately, they’re just taking these protocols and applying them and the protocols sitting around thinking about your kids, about your feelings. It’s what you would do with American children, not if you wanted to make them strong, but if you wanted to break them down.
Albert Mohler:
To what extent should parents be concerned that these things are going on? Even subversively to their role as parents in the family
Abigail Shrier:
Really concerned. You don’t want school counselors and teachers passing judgment on your parenting. Having classes where they discuss scenarios that tee up criticism of parents, but also the mental health surveys. These are put out by the CDC, they’re in every school and in the name of mental health, they’re putting before kids’ suggestions that are ghastly. Here are some: “are you thinking about suicide? How often, and here are some common methods.” Okay. They paint a world that’s so dark for children. They constantly… this drumbeat of suicide, bringing it to children’s attention, and often valorizing the people who are in distress. It’s everything you would do if you wanted to induce mental illness or distress in children.
Albert Mohler:
Your first book was Irreversible Damage, and it gained a lot of attention, and I think you were very instrumental in exposing the moral scandal of what’s going on in the name of gender ideology. This book is just really important. So, I hope you won’t mind if I ask you, what comes next?
Abigail Shrier:
I’m not sure yet, but I probably will return to related to the Rising Generation, because I am raising three kids and it’s a subject that interests me.
Albert Mohler:
I want to tell you one final thing about reading your book. So, I am a father and a grandfather that really changes the way I read things, and so there were many parts of your book, I just thought, this is just sweet and good and healthy. I appreciate the fact that in the right way, your own experience as a mother with loving your children becomes a part of the book. The second thing is, I appreciated the end notes, and I often, most people don’t read them. I never miss them. And so, I love the fact that there were some researchers who quite frankly, you would’ve dealt with honestly—who I evidently Googled—and decided they weren’t going to talk with you. One in particular, I think you said this, all of a sudden just cut things off after having agreed to have a conversation. And I don’t remember which one. It’s not an important dimension, but I think the most amazing thing is that authors and researchers like you are actually looking for a conversation on this. There are a lot of people in this therapeutic community who want no conversation about the very meaning of the profession they represent.
Abigail Shrier:
That’s right. It’s a shame because the best child psychologists and therapists I talk to, they’re aware of the risks, and very often they even had waivers. They had their parents, their patients sign. Why? Because they wanted their patients to be aware of the risks. They didn’t want to harm them, and they wanted to make sure they’re doing a good job. I mean, that’s what a person with integrity does. But instead, among some practitioners and therapists, you’re hear a lot of chatter about, “well, she really paints with a broad brush and she’s really hurting. She’s being unfair to our profession.” That’s just not a commendable response. The response should be, “gosh, I want to look at these practices and make sure I’m not doing them.” It shouldn’t be to wall them off.
Albert Mohler:
That’s so well said. And I want to say, just as a matter of something I think is kind of morally necessary at this point, I was impressed with how many therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, were willing to enter into a really good conversation with you and speak honestly, because I had not seen that in the literature before, so I am actually thankful for that on both sides.
Abigail Shrier:
They were wonderful. Honestly, the number of psychological researchers who were happy to discuss the risks of therapy and talk about the practices going on were wonderful. I couldn’t have written the book without them, but also they changed my opinion on lots of things. There were a lot… You write a book proposal, you have a certain idea of what’s going on, and in my experience, I always change, the book that I actually write is different from the proposal because I learned a lot in the process, and that was true here too.
Albert Mohler:
Abigail Shrier, I want to tell you, I’m thankful for both of your books and in particular for bad therapy, why the kids aren’t growing up, and I can just tell you in advance that when your next book comes out, I’m going to want to talk to you about it.
Abigail Shrier:
You got it. I really appreciate it. Really. It was an honor to speak to you, and I really appreciate sharing your time with me.
Albert Mohler:
Well, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Many thanks to my guest, Abigail Shrier for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab “Thinking in Public.” For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking.