Why CEO Killer Snapped, Dangers of "Gentle" Parenting, and Rise of "Normophobia," with Dr. Leonard Sax and Candice DeLong | Ep. 962
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show and happy Wednesday. We are learning new and disturbing details about the accused healthcare CEO killer as his manifesto and other chilling writings become public. This comes amid more bizarre displays of praise for this guy, Luigi Mangione, from those who are positioning him as some kind of Robin Hood figure. I'm over it. I'm really over it.

that psychosis by some faction of the American populace. Just, you know what? Like Dr. Leonard Sachs is here in just a few minutes. I mean, this is the parenting expert. He's an MD. He's a PhD. He has spent his life studying longitudinal long-term studies of children and actually practicing with children. And he actually knows a thing or two about psychology. And one of his main takeaways is have dinner with your children.

have family dinners in a perfect world, seven nights a week, but as many nights as you can, even if it's short of seven, someone needed to do that in the families of the people who are now praising this guy as a Robin Hood figure. You're an idiot. By the way, um, heard this from our pals over on the editors, the, the guy, uh,

The, the, the Brian Thompson who was murdered, the CEO who was murdered comes from no privilege. His dad was totally self-made. I think he was a farmer and, and this guy, Brian Thompson was totally self-made, pulled himself up, got himself to the top of the insurance world.

The killer accused is from enormous privilege, tons of dough, the family owned country clubs, radio stations, health facilities, went to some Tony Boy's school for 40 grand a year, valedictorian, UPenn, Ivy League, all the advantages, all the breaks. And yet he's supposed to be the Robin Hood. He's the one we're supposed to be rooting for. Screw you. It

don't have the time. My mom always used to say, I cannot respond to irrational behavior rationally. And that is how I feel when I look at these morons trying to talk about this guy like he's some sort of our hero, this Luigi dude. All right, so Dr. Leonard Sachs is going to be on in one second. But first, we want to get into some of the psychology of this guy and how on earth this could possibly happen.

Like, how could this have gone down by a guy with that kind of pedigree who'd

turns into a killer if what the police say is correct. And for that, we bring on Candace DeLong. She's a former FBI criminal profiler. She worked on cases like the Unabomber, the Tylenol murders. We spoke to her on episode 466 about the Idaho murders. So you may be familiar with Candace's work. When they first recruited her over at the FBI, she was a head nurse over at Northwestern University. And then she went on to work, as I said, on some of the most

prominent cases in America. She's hosted the award-winning podcast Killer Psyche with Candace DeLong.

Right.

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Join the millions of others who are already benefiting from these powerful bite-sized lessons. Go to PragerU.com slash challenges and sign up for free today. Candice, welcome back to the show. So let's just start with that. How does a guy with that kind of a background, with all the advantages, who was a valedictorian of his high school class just 10 years ago in 16, not even 10 years ago in 16,

who goes on to complete a bachelor's and a master's at the University of Pennsylvania, not exactly an easy school, wind up becoming this much of what looks like a psycho killer in just a few years? Well, Megan, a lot of mental disorders, mental illnesses emerge, right?

in the late teens, early to mid 20s. Now, I'm not diagnosing him. I'm simply saying that is a fact about mental illnesses. And it's certainly a good question. Looking at this young man's meteoric rise to success athletically, culturally, socially, academically,

And then just throw it all away and appear in behavior that is a head scratcher, became a murderer. I think we probably will find something. What does it look like to you? Like schizophrenia? Because you tell me if it lets, like if you're having a psychotic break and I know, and we've seen this with young men in particular who are guilty of mass shootings, um,

seems to happen between 19 years old and the mid-20s. But like, are those people generally like this guy, Luigi, where you're fine for all the years prior to that? You know, there's no hint that this is going to happen to you. Yes, that can happen. Now, I'm not saying this guy is psychotic. Clinical term means out of touch with reality, doesn't perceive things as they are, possibly hearing voices.

We don't know that about him, but the answer to your question is yes.

I'm aware of a number of cases, both in my life growing up and then as a psychiatric nurse, caring for people, young people who went away to college. And the expression is came home in a basket. And what happened was mental illness, serious, usually schizophrenia or sometimes bipolar disorder emerged where there's that bridge from puberty to adulthood.

That's dark. I mean, could that happen to anybody? Because what I'm looking at with this guy is, well, we don't know much about his family, but there's a lot of references to like mushrooms or drugs on his social media. And we did have on Dr. Roland Griffith, who was the guy who really founded, not really, who did find, found the clinic for psilocybin and

for these sort of MDNA treatments for people who are depressed at Johns Hopkins. But one of the main things he said, Candace, was you don't do those drugs recreationally or outside of a setting in which a prior family history of psychosis or schizophrenia can be detected. He said, because if we see anything like that in the questionnaire we give our potential participants, they're bounced.

because it can trigger a psychotic break from which you may not return. I have seen that. As a psychiatric nurse, I saw it. And when my son was in high school,

Decades ago, a friend of his did some kind of designer drug, psychedelic drug, became a schizophrenic thought disorder, and it did not have a happy ending. These are very serious drugs. And if somebody has a history, they may not even know they have a history of mental illness of some kind, it can open the floodgates.

Are you surprised to hear all these friends coming out and saying, totally nice guy, absolutely didn't see any, and recently, you know, the college friend saying, absolutely no hint of this. And the most they seem to be able to come up with is, well, he had this terrible back injury, though so far no one is claiming he was denied insurance or anything like that, but like he had some terrible back injury.

Right, exactly. I'm not surprised that his friends from college, which was a while ago, are saying, gee, we didn't see this coming. He's totally normal. Because when many of these mental illnesses we're talking about emerge, it happens in a matter of weeks. And I haven't seen anyone being interviewed that said they had interacted with him in the last six months. Nope.

No. And would it be typical? Do you think, I mean, are you surprised to learn he went kind of underground or went radio silent with respect to family and friends over these past six months to the point where his mother filed a missing persons report for him in San Francisco in November, believing that that's where he was, though we don't know where he was at the time. The most recent report was he was in Hawaii for a period.

Well, no, I'm not surprised. A couple of things came to my mind about that radio silence with family and friends. One is that, yes, possibly a mental illness was emerging. But moreover, now that we know what he did last week, he had decided to do it to kill someone, to kill this person. And he did not want to interact with anyone.

for like, could be right out of it. Yeah. What do you make of, I mean, you're as about as expert as they come in the Unabomber. He seemed to admire him quite a bit and they had some, uh, group like a book club that they were forming and,

And it was this guy and two others. And this is the first book he wanted them to read. And apparently they all found it so disturbing, like his manifesto, that the book club disjoined. It fell apart before they made it through the end of Ted Kaczynski's writings. But this Luigi fellow really found him inspiring. I almost lost my mind reading Ted Kaczynski's manifesto.

It's rambling. It is at times almost incoherent. So that doesn't surprise me that that his colleagues who probably were of sound mind, what the heck is this? But it also doesn't surprise me that.

This young man that we are talking about became an admirer of Kaczynski. What did Kaczynski do? He killed people that he thought were harming society, or at least he attempted to. The truth is, when Kaczynski put a bomb down and walked away or mailed a bomb, he had no idea who was going to be hurt or killed by it. And he didn't really care.

That is different than what we are seeing here with Mangione. He was being led into the courthouse yesterday to be charged in connection with this alleged crime. And.

seem to be trying to wriggle out of the physical control of the police officers to be heard. It's kind of difficult to understand what he's saying, but my read of it is, and we'll play it, but I'll just give it to you in advance. It's completely, we don't know what, it's completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. It's lived experience. Listen here.

Okay, so that was for his extradition hearing. They're trying to bring him back to New York where his lawyer is fighting it to keep him in Pennsylvania for a few more weeks. I mean, I think the game is delay, delay, delay when you have a criminal defendant with this much evidence against him. What do you make of that? When I saw that, of course, I watched it very carefully.

And one of the things that I noticed was when he was in the police vehicle, there is no indication. I couldn't see that he was causing a stir, that he was combative, yelling, screaming, kicking, anything like that in the vehicle. He gets out, he looks around, he spots the camera, and then he goes on his rant. Now, um,

There was a time I worked at a county emergency psychiatric facility, and most patients that were brought in were in the back of a police car, and they were screaming and yelling. There's actually a cage wall to protect, it looks like a cage, to protect the police officers in front. He wasn't doing that. He was cool, calm, and collected until he knew the cameras were rolling.

Okay. So it's performative to some extent. Um, we've got, I mean, his lawyer says I've seen no evidence that he's the killer. Okay. We've all seen overwhelming evidence. If one 10th of what the news is reporting that it was all over this guy, he, other than, I mean, he basically had a t-shirt that read, I'm the killer of CEO, Brian Thompson. He had his manifesto on him. He had the gun on him. He had the bullets on him.

He now the latest reporting is that his fingerprints, uh, they do match fingerprints found at the scene of the murder. And, um, uh, in the notebook that's on him, this is how one of the ways in which we know other than his book club that he had a fondness for the Unabomber because they are reporting at CNN that his notebook included a list of to do's and tasks that he needed to complete to facilitate a killing of

as well as notes justifying those plans. And in one passage in the notebook, he concludes that using a bomb against his intended victim could kill innocents, but that shooting would be much more targeted, musing what could be better than, quote, to kill the CEO at his own bean counting conference, which indeed is.

is what happened. Um, try to help us understand here, Candace, because if you read his alleged manifesto and the police haven't yet released it, but, um, there is a report online, CBS claims, uh, that they've seen it. Ken Klippenstein claiming he's seen it and has posted it. Um, it goes on to say some of what we already read to our audience yesterday to the feds. I'll keep it short because I respect what you do for the country. Um,

To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial, some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, I don't know what that means, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and to-do lists that illuminate the gist of it.

My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering. So probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife or traumas, but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. He rips on the healthcare system and how large United was and

And how life expectancy in America is not what he hoped it would be. And then he goes on to say something interesting. Obviously, the problem is more complex, but I don't have the space. And frankly, I don't pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. He says many people have illuminated the corruption, the greed. And then he writes, evidently, I am the first to face this with such brutal honesty.

So as somebody who, you know, does this kind of profiling, Candace, what he's saying, I don't really understand it that well. There are a lot of people who get it better than I do, but I understand I'm the one, the first one to sort of be brave enough, he's saying, to do what needs to be done here, to face it with brutal honesty. And he's confessing to the feds. Let me save you the time. I did it and I did it alone. What is all that if it proves to be real? And so far it looks like it may be. Tell you.

He wants attention for what he did. He's certainly getting it. This is the biggest story I've seen in a long time. This way eclipses the Idaho murders. He, to me, what you just read seems a bit disjointed, but what he's saying is,

parasites, it needed to be done, sorry if anyone was hurt, and he takes it upon himself. He is the avenging angel as he sees it. Yet in his notes I see fragment, fragmentation, wandering thoughts,

which all would support that he is, this whole thing has to do with the mental decompensation going on. And last question quickly, does that mean insane as a legal matter?

Well, as insane, of course, legally means the individual did not understand, did not know at the time they committed an act that it was wrong. And that's hard for people to understand. But if an individual has voices in their head telling them to do it.

to kill someone in order to save the rest of America, that is a very serious mental, they really thought what they were doing was right. And they belong in a mental facility, not a prison. So- Like John Hinckley. Exactly, exactly. Well, we may say that defense offered depending on where the facts go. I think we will. Candace, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Megan.

happy to do so. So interesting, right? It's so interesting. I mean, this guy was methodical. He, he, he used a lot of planning, you know, the escape plan and so on. It was far from perfect. Uh, so all of that will be used by the prosecution to say he knew exactly what he was doing, but legally insane is a different standard. And, you know, John Hinckley went to a mental facility instead of a jail because he

He did it for Jodie Foster. He didn't realize what he was doing was, was wrong. I mean, this can work depending on what the facts are. And we'll see so far, his lawyer isn't saying we're going to cop to an insanity plea or anything like that. He's suggesting we have the wrong guy, which is laughable. Okay. Now we're joined by Dr. Leonard Sacks. Dr. Sacks is a psychologist. He's a family physician and MD and a New York times bestselling author. Uh, he, by the way,

is one of the few people in the world, I think, to have completed his education at MIT at age 19. That's the level of brilliance we're talking about here. We had Dr. Sachs on in January of last year for a wide-ranging discussion on parenting, the trans contagion, and more. It's a must-listen. It was episode 474. He recently revised and updated his incredible bestselling book, The Collapse of Parenting, How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grownups. And he said,

and it is even more necessary today. Dr. Sachs, welcome back to the show. I want to get into all things about the update, but can I get your thoughts to kick it off on this accused killer in connection with the murder of Brian Thompson and what you glean from the facts that we just outlaid with Candace? Yes, absolutely. I think it's such an illuminating story, and I've seen this

so much in my own practice as a family doctor now for more than 30 years. So many boys want to be heroes. They want to be seen as heroes. They want to see themselves as heroes in their own eyes. You know, I spoke some years ago at a conference on juvenile justice, statewide conference in New Mexico. And the topic was boys adrift, the title of one of my books. And after my presentation, I,

They had a panel of four experts from across the state. And one was Judge John Romero, who's the chief of the juvenile judges in Albuquerque. And he said when he first began doing this work as a juvenile judge in Albuquerque, he was puzzled because all these teenage boys, teenagers,

you know, good men with great potential being accused of these horrible, violent crimes. And he would take them into his chambers and say, why are you doing this? Don't you understand? You're going to go to jail for decades. Why are you throwing your life away? And he told us it took him a long time to understand.

These boys want to be heroes. And the school doesn't understand that. But the gang understands it. The gang says, here's a gun. Go and shoot the rival gang leader. And if you succeed, you're a hero. If you get killed trying, you're a hero. If you get thrown in jail, you're a hero. If you chicken out, you're a wuss.

And then he looked right at us and he said, most of you, you're not from the barrio. And you're thinking, oh, I'm doing great. My son's not going to be in the juvenile justice system. He said, but your son is no different.

The difference between your son and the boys I see, your son is staying at home in his bedroom playing his video games. The difference between your son and the boys in my chambers is your son is playing with pretend guns in his video game, but it's the same dynamic, playing with pretend guns, being a pretend hero in his Call of Duty and his Grand Theft Auto. In both cases, though, your son...

has left the real world in his fantasy world, wanting to be a hero in his own mind. And I, and that's the same thing that's going on here. We have failed as a society to capture these boys, to give them better models, better ways to become a hero, to be a hero in the right way. And, and again, that's going back to my book, boys adrift, where I, where I talk about good romance men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who,

who gave his life for the right cause. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor, had a comfortable job preaching in New Jersey in 1938 and left that job and went back to Nazi Germany

put his life in jail, in jeopardy, and joined the conspiracy to take the life of Adolf Hitler and was caught and was executed in concentration camp. That's a good man. That's a role model. We're failing at the job of inspiring boys to be the right kind of hero. So how do you figure out

Whether it's that kind of a problem where he is sane and has not suffered a psychotic break, but just is under this delusion that he needs to be a hero somehow. And he's got to do it. He's the only one brave enough to do it versus, oh no, it's, it's basically a school shooter with a different purpose. He's had a break. It happens often around this age and you know, he's lost it. He's, he's no longer of sane mind. Okay.

I've written about school shooters, and that's a different process in place. There's always been a small minority of boys who take pleasure in killing, take pleasure in inflicting pain. And I wrote an article about this for a magazine called First Things. I called it the unspeakable pleasure. And that's a minority of boys. That's rare, but it happens. And again, that's not insanity.

That's a variation on human nature. It's always been with us. But again, we need to know how to capture these boys. We have the game of football.

Hey, there's always been boys who enjoy inflicting pain in pain. Have them play the line. And I was doing this talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and and it happened that my host used to play the line for University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I called out to him and I said, do you have any comments about that? And he said, a good hit is better than sex. Right.

healthy cultures know how to capture boys and channel those instincts into healthy channels. Um,

It's not insanity. The insanity plea in that case is a cop-out. Okay, there are people who truly have psychotic disorders, and they hear voices telling them that this person is a lion who's going to eat them and they have to shoot them. That's not what's going on here. That's not what's going on with Luigi Mangione, and that's not what's going on with school shooters. Some inventive lawyers try to make that case. It's unpersuasive.

We're not talking here about psychotic disorders and schizophrenics. We're talking about here about boys who have evil impulses. There's nothing new about this. This is as old as Genesis chapter 4. Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it. Genesis chapter 4.

What would you guess, and this is a total guess because we don't know much about his family, but you are a parenting expert and an actual MD, and you've been doing this kind of work for decades now. I'm just gonna guess, Dr. Sachs, that the Mangione family probably didn't have the dinners around the table together seven nights a week. That's just a stab in the dark. You know, I have learned the hard way. It's very hard to speculate about what went on under the roof at home.

We do know, we all know, that he graduated from a secular high school, a school with no religious affiliation.

And the culture has changed. You know, 30 years ago, American popular culture taught right and wrong. We know this. This is not a guess. We have scholars who have looked at American popular culture. The most popular TV shows, 1967, 77, 87, 97, were shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Family Ties, Happy Days, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Researchers have looked at these shows and they found that they consistently taught that the most important thing is to do the right thing

to tell the truth right through 1997. But by 2007, they found American culture had flipped upside down. And the most important thing in the shows that teenagers were watching in 2007 was not to do the right thing. It was to win. In shows like American Idol and Survivor, the most important thing is to win. Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island.

So American popular culture, beginning in the early 2000s, was no longer about doing the right thing. It's about winning and becoming famous. So American culture is now a post-Christian culture. It's no longer a culture in which doing the right thing is taught. And so, you know, 30 years ago, it wasn't so important to go to a school that taught Judaism or Christianity. Now it is. You know, I attended public schools in Ohio K-12.

But today, I think it's more important that you enroll your kid in a school that has a firm moral foundation. And I can tell you many horror stories about public schools that don't and independent schools that don't. And what we do know about Luigi Mangione is that he went to a secular independent school, the Gilman School, which has no religious affiliation. And

Now I am speculating, but you go to a secular independent school, they're not teaching the Ten Commandments, they're not teaching do unto others as you have them do unto you, and boys are adrift. If you don't have that firm foundation,

What do you where do you find your right? You pen, which is so adrift that its president was forced out last year for not being able to say that it's wrong to chant things like, well, basically death to Israel, death to the Jews. Yes. You know, she's going to have to really think it over and figure out whether that's allowed on campus.

Boys are adrift and they're looking for what does it mean to be a man? And you go online and what do you find? You find Andrew Tate. And that's really scary.

Yes. Very scary. So this, okay. There's so much to go over, but I asked, um, my followers on X today, knowing that you were going to come on, whether they had anything they wanted me to ask you. And, uh, I'll get to some of those questions throughout the course of the two hours. But one of the questions was, and it came up over and over, and I thought this is actually a really good one. Let me see if I can find the way they put it, but how, how

How do we help our children in today's day and age with AI, with tech everywhere, with video games and iPhones, how to find purpose, how to find their purpose? I was like, oh my gosh, that's a big one. It's a, sorry to dump that big one on you so soon in our interview, but you know, to your point, how do you? So you have to prioritize the family and I, you cannot find your child's meaning of life

But you can prioritize that connection. And one of the challenges for kids is that they are looking for life meaning in all the wrong places. They're looking at Instagram and TikTok and Charlie D'Amelio.

who is this hugely popular person on TikTok. And, you know, one in three 12-year-olds now says that their goal in life is to be the next Charlie, to be a TikTok influencer. And that's not a good goal. It's not a good goal because it's not going to happen.

And I have met with so many girls who are frustrated because they put all this effort into a TikTok video and it fizzles. They don't understand the numbers. They don't understand that there's 10 million other girls out there who are posting videos and it's not going to happen. And if your meaning of life is on how many clicks you get on your video, you're going to be frustrated. You're going to be disappointed.

You need to find your meaning of life in who you are, not in how many likes you get or how many views or how many followers you have. And so that begins with the family. So you prioritize the family. You have family dinners. You fight for dinners at home. And again, many parents are confused and they're driving their kids around to play dates or they're driving their kids to travel team soccer or computer coding class.

Cancel the computer coding class. Prioritize family time at home. Prioritize the parent-child relationship. And then the rest will follow once you have the strong family relationship.

That's so key that I think in today's day and age, many parents are very worried about is junior getting asked on enough play dates or to go hang with his or her friends enough. Is my kid, the kid that's sitting at home with me and my spouse too much? You know, are they popular? Are they out there with friends, which is what is considered quote normal. And to those parents, you say,

I would say I would come back to the central key point that I try to make in the new edition of my book, The Collapse of Parenting, which is that central paradox of American parenting right now, which is that parents are spending more time and more money on their kids than parents have ever done before.

but the results are worse than they have ever been. American kids are more likely to be anxious and depressed than they have ever been. They are in worse shape physically than they have ever been. They are less fit than they have ever been. They are heavier than they have ever been. So bluntly, American parents are doing it all wrong because American parents are really confused. They've got the priorities all mixed up. They think that it's really important for kids to have friends who are their own age. It's not that important. It is not that important. We know this.

Whether or not your five-year-old or your 10-year-old has a lot of other friends their own age is not important. It's not. It's not a predictor of good health. It's not a predictor of happiness. What predicts health and happiness for your five-year-old, for your 10-year-old? The parent-child relationship is the most important thing. It is. We know this. The data is there.

So your first priority should not be driving your kid around to play dates. Your first priority should be building the parent-child relationship. So one of my presentations for parents of young kids is titled, Cancel the Play Date, Make a Family Date Instead. On that Saturday, those precious hours on a Saturday when you actually have some time, don't drive your kid to a play date.

Do something fun with your kid. Go somewhere with your kid, just you and your kid, not driving them to a play date, but doing something fun with your kid because the quality of the parent-child relationship is the most important predictor of your kid's health and happiness. So focus on that. Don't drive your kid to a play date.

What does it change when they get to be teenagers? Okay. This is where, again, a lot of parents are confused. They expect their teenager to push them away and they think that's fine. And they assume that the parent-child relationship is less important for teenagers and it's not. It's more important.

And again, parents are like, oh, you know, well, I really believe in privacy. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to monitor what my kid is doing online. Huge mistake, huge mistake. We've got girls who are sending selfies to boys that they don't even know. And the parent is not aware of this. And it has life-changing bad consequences for girls. You've got to

Put parental monitoring software on your teenager's phone and say, look, this app is going to see every photograph you take before you even do anything with it. And if there's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my phone. And if you do anything inappropriate, you're going to lose your device indefinitely. So one of the stories I share, 12-year-old girl.

had a 14-year-old boyfriend. He asked her to send him some photos, nothing obscene, just wanted to see her take off her school uniform, blouse, and kilt to reveal bra and panties. Of course, she knew her parents would not allow this. So she goes into her bedroom, closes the door, locks the door,

and does as he acts and sends the photographs using Snapchat. Now, Snapchat claims you can send a photo using a five-second self-destruct, and after the recipient has seen the photo for five seconds, it will vanish. And if they try to save the photo using a screenshot, you, the sender, will be notified. Snapchat is lying. It knows that there's dozens of free apps out there that will save the photo, and the sender will not be notified. The boy, of course, had installed one of these apps,

And he saved all the photos. School administrators later determined that he didn't intend for anyone else to see the photos, but he was at a party and he set his phone down to grab some chips and talk to some friends. Another boy came along that lock screen had not engaged, found the phone, went to the gallery, found the photos, forwarded each of the girls' photos to his own phone.

each of the photos on his own Instagram. Within three days, everybody at the school had seen them. Boys, this girl didn't even know we're coming up to her and say, hey, Emily, how about you do a striptease for us? This girl had a total meltdown. She'd never had any problems before. She'd been invited to a three-day ski weekend before.

And the girl, the birthday girl whose parents were hosting the ski weekend, the birthday girl called this girl and said, you know, I hate to make this phone call, but my mom is totally freaking out because all the other moms are freaking out. And they're all saying that they won't let their daughter come if you're going to be there because they all think you're now some kind of bad influence. So I have to uninvite you. I'm really sorry. I have to uninvite you.

Girl totally melted down, refusing to go to school, saying her life was over, that the photos would always be out there, which is totally true, incidentally. The school administrators made this boy take them down. But by that time, 20 other boys had picked up the photos and reposted them. I'm told they're still out there. Started cutting herself with razor blades, saying she wanted to die.

The parents took her to the doctor. Doctor diagnosed depression, prescribed Lexapro, 10 milligrams and arranged for urgent psychotherapy. That accomplished nothing. So you now have a 12-year-old girl with depression not responding to medication or psychotherapy. Who's at fault? The girl? Her boyfriend? The other boy? Uh-uh. The parents are to blame. Look,

This is a very grown up device. With this device, I can take a photo and send a photo. And once I send that photo, I have no control over what happens to it or who sees it. If you're going to put a device like this in the hands of a child, then you are responsible for every photo they take and everyone who sees it. You must install parental monitoring software if you're going to give a device to a child under 18. And explain to your kid.

The app is going to see every photo you take as soon as you take it. If it's anything inappropriate, it's going to pop up on my photo. You're going to lose the device indefinitely. And parents will push back. Parents will say, look, I believe in privacy. I don't want to see my kid's photo. She don't want to see my photo. If she don't want me to see her photos, I'm fine with that. I don't want to see her photo. She don't want to see my photo. And I say to that parent, look, privacy is great. You want to share a photo privately? Here's what you do. You print it out on a piece of photo paper.

And then you take it over your friend's house and show it to them, and then you shred it. That's privacy. There is no such thing as privacy when you share a photo with a phone. And you know who didn't get the memo? Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest men, shared photos with his girlfriend, and they were leaked. And you know who else didn't get the memo? General David Petraeus. Same story a few years earlier. Had all of his passwords and his two-factor authentication, thought it could not be hacked. Anything can be hacked.

The moral of the story of Jeff Bezos and David Petraeus, don't share any photo with a device unless you're prepared for grandma to see it in the newspaper. And you don't share that by preaching that. You communicate that by saying, I've installed an app on your phone. Do not share a photo. Do not take a photo unless you're prepared for everybody to see it.

And again, American parents will push back and they'll say, oh, come on, my daughter's just going to Google, how do I get around parental controls on that nanny? Well, I've actually spoken with employees at NetNanny, and they told me that they have colleagues whose full-time job is to Google the phrase, how do I get around parental controls on that nanny? And if they find that some kid has found a hole, they patch it, usually within hours, and the app will update.

you have to install parental monitoring software. You explain to your kids- Is NetNanny the software that you're saying parents can use to monitor the kids? It's one of many apps. I'm not endorsing any one app. Ethics and Public Policy Center has a wonderful online guide to the different parental monitoring apps.

That's Ryan Anderson's group, Ethics and Public Policy Center. They've got a good online resource that reviews all the different rental monitoring apps. But yeah, NetNanny is one, Bark, Circle, there's a bunch of them. I don't endorse any one app. They're all very similar. They all give you a dashboard on your phone. They all light up if they see anything inappropriate.

But you got to use one of these. You got to install one of these on your kid's phone and explain. What about, Dr. Sachs, the question of privacy? You know, you'll hear parents say, well, I need my child to trust me. And if she doesn't trust me, she's not going to tell me anything. So if she knows I'm sneaking around on her phone or I'm sneaking in her room to read her diary, it's going to blow up to the relationship to where I'm no longer a resource for her.

Well, you know, there's good things and bad things about the American Academy of Pediatrics. But in this domain of this question of how you balance that question of trust versus the dangers of social media and smartphones, I think the American Academy of Pediatrics in this domain has done

some very useful work. They hired all the leading experts who spent two years reviewing all the research. And the experts said, look, this is a new world and a new domain of immense risk and toxicity. And for girls, the risk is huge. And once those photos are out there, they will never go away. You Google this girl's name, you're still going to find those photos today. It will always be out there.

And these girls don't understand the risks. And you have to balance those risks. And the experts said in the official guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics,

Quote, there should be no expectation of privacy when a child or teenager under 18 is online. No expectation of privacy. That's the official guideline of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A device with Internet access should be in a public space like the kitchen or living room. The American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a very left of center organization, as we may get to later. Sure is.

They are saying – On the trans insanity in particular. Yes, trans insanity. But in this domain, they said a kid should not even have their device in their bedroom. It should be in a kitchen or living room because there should be no expectation of privacy when a kid is online. There's so much bad stuff out there that they should expect to have the parent. Let me ask you this though.

And they know how you feel. They know how I feel about social media use and children, but like John Rich, a great singer, music superstar. He actually wrote in on, on my ex account. And his question was, I don't have the exact wording in front of me. Hold on. It was, um, what age is okay for social media, right? With understanding the reality that at some point your child is going to figure out what Snapchat or Tik TOK or these apps are.

Absolutely. At what point would you introduce it to them? Do you want it to happen while you're there and they're still in the home with you and you can talk about it or do you wait until they go off to college? What do you think? So my brand, if you like, is evidence-based. When I make a recommendation, I'm always going to show you a study or a series of studies. Long-term, longitudinal studies. Longitudinal cohort studies. You got it.

So Jean Twenge is one of our nation's leading researchers. And back in 2019, she and her colleague Keith Campbell did a huge study, 220,000 adolescents. And on the X axis is the time spent on social media. And on the Y axis is the likelihood of becoming anxious or depressed. And there is no rise in that trend line until you get past 30 minutes a day. So 2019, 2020, 2021, I was telling parents up to 30 minutes a day on social media is fine.

Um, but that study was published in 2019 based on research gathered in 2018. That's before TikTok. TikTok changed everything. So researchers who study social media talk about basically three generations of social media. So Facebook is first generation. Facebook is about connecting you to people, you know, or you used to know, you know, on Facebook, you can connect with your first grade classmate, whatever.

Instagram is second generation. So you not only connect with people you know, you can connect with celebrities. TikTok is third generation. It's totally different. So you go on TikTok and TikTok begins by saying, I'm not interested in who you know. I'm interested in what you like to watch. Tell me what kind of videos you like to watch. Okay.

Let me show you some videos. And then the algorithm is watching you. And the algorithm is crazy good. And it starts customizing what it's showing you. And after an hour, you're seeing things you didn't even know were out there. And it's so common to find teenagers say, whoa, TikTok knew I was gay before I did. TikTok knew I was trans before I did.

And then in 2021, researchers reached out to TikTok and said, you know, the algorithm is really dangerous. It's dragging kids, especially girls, down in this rabbit hole that's valorizing anorexia and self-harm. You've got to change the algorithm. And TikTok responded and said, okay, we'll change the algorithm. And then last year, the researchers said, you didn't make it better. You made it worse. It's getting worse.

And so I reached out to Jean Twenge and I said, look, look at the more recent studies. There is no safe point anymore that it's shifted left. The danger doesn't begin at 30 minutes anymore. It begins at zero time. And Jean Twenge responded. She sent me back an email saying the research now supports a total ban on social media for decades.

all teens, for all children up below 18 years of age. And that is where I am now. The newer research in the era of TikTok, no social media for any kids. We can argue about whether it's 16 or whether it's 18, but the research now strongly supports no social media for any kid in the English speaking world.

under 16 or 18 years of age. And that's, I mentioned the English speaking world because there's an interesting factoid here. You know, everyone's been talking about this rise in anxiety and depression that has occurred in the last 15 years. And, and John Haidt and Gene Twenge and others have talked about how, oh, it's all because of the smartphones and the social media. But one thing that John Haidt and Gene Twenge haven't talked about much is that look at Greece, look at Russia.

You have not seen that rise in anxiety and depression in Greece and in Russia. Even though kids in Greece and Russia are just as likely to have smartphones, just as likely to have social media, they're not showing the rise in anxiety and depression. Well, what's different? Okay, I've made the argument that American popular culture

has become toxic in a way that that's not true in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has changed in a way that it didn't change in Greece and Russia. American popular culture has become post-Christian in a way that has not... I'm not crowding up Russia as a role model by any means, but American popular culture is a post-Christian culture. It's a toxic culture of envy and disrespect.

in a way that maybe is not true in Greece and Russia. And I think that's important because just locking down the smartphones is not enough. We also have to offer our kids a healthier culture.

Yes, this is so good to hear. I mean, I feel like we've all experienced this in our day-to-day lives with the weird competitive strain amongst some kids where they're not rooting for their friends. If one friend gets a home run, instead of cheering him on, the other teammate is like, put me in, I need to get a home run. It's like, what? This is a weird strain that we're seeing in kids.

today's kids too often. And that makes perfect sense. And yeah, I mean, I think I've said this many times about the Russians. I've been over there a few times and they're actually a very loving people who think wonderful things about the American people. Our leaders have had obvious conflicts and, you know, we know what's happened in Ukraine, but it's not to demonize the Russian people. If you went and spent time over there, it's still a Christian nation. They still have some fundamental beliefs that we could all get behind. It's

it's our country that's lost its mind culturally. And whenever you say that, they think you're some sort of a Russiophile, but that's not what I'm saying. It's not what Tucker has been saying. Anyway, I know it's not what Dr. Sacks is saying. There's so much more to go over. There's tons of questions coming in. By the way, our audience can email me with questions for Dr. Sacks. You can still get on board. It's megan at megankelly.com. You can do it right now. And we'll pick back up with him in just two minutes. Don't go away. Looking for the perfect gift or maybe just a treat for yourself?

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So I actually begin the new edition with something that happened in the office just as I was writing the new edition. So mom brings her daughter in and she's sick. The six-year-old girl, mom explains her daughter has a fever and a sore throat. So after mom explains what's going on, I say, okay, time for me 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, longtime slogan of the abortion rights community, more recently adopted by activists opposed to COVID vaccines.

Mom is using that slogan to defend her daughter's refusal to allow me, the doctor, to look in her daughter's throat. So that's an extreme example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting. Parents who think it's actually virtuous to let kids decide. That's an extreme example, and that's rare.

Let me give you a much more common, much more common example of what I mean by the collapse of parenting. So boys not paying attention in school, 13-year-old boy not paying attention in school, totally not paying attention. Off the chart on what's called the Connor scales, which is the teacher's rating, this kid's not paying attention in any class. Parents take him to the child psychiatrist. Child psychiatrist says, well, attention deficit disorder, let's try Vyvanse. Vyvanse medication, tremendously helpful. Boy's now doing great.

but he's jittery, totally lost appetite, palpitations. Parents see this article I wrote for time magazine about the dangers of these medications. They bring them to me for a second opinion. And I do a more careful sleep study. I asked the boy, I say, excuse me. I do a more careful sleep history. I asked the boy, uh, do you have a video game console in your bedroom? He said, of course, doesn't everybody? I said, were you playing video games last night? He said, of course, wasn't everybody. What did you finish? Um,

Oh, like 1.30, 2. And mom's like, 1.30? You were playing video games 1.30? What were you playing? Oh, RDR2. Excellent game. All right. So I say to mom, you got to get the video game console out of his bedroom. No video game, no video games. And you got to limit how much time he's spending playing video games. You know, max 30 minutes a night on school nights and no video games after nine o'clock at night and no video game console in the bedroom. And mom says,

I couldn't take the video game console out of his bedroom. He'd totally freak out. This is a parent who is unwilling to limit how much time her son is spending playing video games. She is uncomfortable exercising her authority. That is very common. And that is also what I mean by the collapse of parenting. Parents who are uncomfortable exercising their authority. And as a result, this kid is

is not paying attention in class. He doesn't have attention deficit disorder. He's sleep deprived. Sleep deprivation perfectly mimics attention deficit disorder of the inattentive variety. Vyvanse was immensely helpful. What's Vyvanse? What's Adderall? They're amphetamines. They're speed. They compensate for the sleep deprivation. But the appropriate remedy for sleep deprivation is sleep, not scheduled to amphetamines.

And the psychiatrist failed to do a careful sleep history. And this is happening all the time. And I see this a lot as a family doctor, these kids who are being medicated because the parents are not doing their job. That's happening a lot.

How about the drive for good grades? Because I had one parent write in saying, how hard should I push my teenager in today's day and age with kids suffering from anxiety? If my kid is like, I'm striving for Bs.

Do I just say, good for you, honey, you know, do what you think is right? Or do I say, well, why not A's? You know, maybe, maybe you don't have to play two and a half hours of basketball. Maybe you could take one of those hours and go for an A, but parents are almost afraid to do that now because, you know, our kids are all so stressed out.

Well, when I speak to parents, I do a lot of presentations for parents. And this is okay. I don't want to come across the wrong way. The book is not a rant against bad parents. The objective of the book is to empower the parents to exercise their authority, to encourage that parent to do the right thing, to do what you know you should do. That's what I'm trying to do there.

So you asked about grades. So when I speak to parents, either individually or in groups, I will often say, I'll mention the longitudinal cohort study, which is a study where you follow kids from childhood through adolescence, all the way to 32, 40, 50 years of age. What characteristic of a child best predicts good outcomes at 30, 40, 50 years of age? Is it the grades that they got? No, it's not.

It's character. It's honesty. It's self-control. So it follows from that, that our top priority as parents is not top grades. It's honesty and self-control. So good grades are great. There's nothing wrong with that. But character and self-control and honesty are more important. And you know, as a family doctor, I've seen a big change. 20 years ago,

Parents were more likely to say, I'd rather you get a C on the test honestly than cheat and get an A. And that's the right thing to say. Today, I hear parents who say, hey, you want to get into top university? You've got to have amazing grades. And there has been a rise in cheating over the last 20 years, which I document. So you've got to be very cautious about emphasizing good grades because a lot of kids are getting the wrong message. And there has been a rise in cheating among American kids over the last 20 years.

That was one of the things that the Menendez parents allegedly told their kids before they killed them. You've got to get straight A's. You have to win, period. It doesn't matter how you do it. You can cheat. You can steal. Fine. What's important is to win. Just don't get caught. And it was kind of a fascinating thing and didn't end well.

We're losing that moral compass. Being a good person and doing the right thing, even if it hurts, is more important than winning, more important than getting a good mark. Again, that was the lesson of The Andy Griffith Show a long, long time ago. It was the lesson of happy days and family ties. It used to be the lesson that kids would get from American television. It's not the lesson they get anymore.

But it's a lesson that you as the parent have to teach. But how do you teach drive? Okay. How do you teach motivation? This is a real problem. And there's a lot more going on than cultural factors are part of it. And some of this is gender specific. So let's talk about boys. Testosterone levels have dropped significantly.

a lot in the last 50 years and even in the last 20 years. And, uh, that's a major focus of my book, boys adrift. And a lot of this is due to endocrine disruptors and turns out that boys depend on testosterone for drive girls don't. Um, and, um, so yeah, I think that is part of the story. And, you know, when I first started looking into this years ago, it sounded kind of weird and, uh,

But there is actually very good research. And I actually wrote a paper for the National Institutes of Health published in their scholarly journal on this topic about how plastic bottles, the kind that people drink bottled water out of, actually contain endocrine disruptors like diethylhexyl phthalate that lower testosterone levels. So your son shouldn't be drinking water out of a plastic bottle. You should pour tap water into a steel canteen. And that's what you want to be drinking your water out of.

Don't microwave in plastic. It doesn't cost anything to follow these guidelines. And it fixes the testosterone levels. So, yeah, there's different factors that affect. That's why I wrote a book called Boys, called Boys Adrift, and a book for girls called Girls on the Edge, because the factors are different. And another book called Why Gender Matters.

Yes. Whoa. You've really done your homework. I appreciate that. I read that when it came out, Dr. Sachs. And I remember finding it so fascinating. And when the trans insanity exploded, I was like, this is the one guy I want to talk to. Because he wrote before all this nonsense that there are two different sexes. They are very, very different and it matters. And now we're told, no, it's completely interchangeable.

Yeah. Well, and there's been a lot of change there. The first edition of Why Gender Matters had half a paragraph on transgender. And then the publisher Penguin Random House asked me to write a new edition, which I devote a lot of time to transgender because now it's a thing. Yeah. But I know you've been making the point, you make the point here too, that

They're the male brain and the female brain are very, very different. And that parents must understand that. Yes. And even the trans activists should be honest about this. Like if you want to parade around trying to look like a woman, that's your choice. But don't try to tell me that because you feel like a woman, even though you're a man, you're not a woman.

You just are because this, all the studies showed that your brain is different. You are, yes, your body's different, but your brain is different. And you make the point in this book that parents need to understand that too, because you, and you look at your child, your boy child, and you interpret his behavior one way because you have an older sister to that boy who at this stage was doing things very, very differently, maybe at a rapid, you know, pace compared to the boy. And you're making no allowances for, um,

Why gender matters. Yes. So absolutely. So, uh, in my book, why gender matters, I remind parents that girls develop faster than boys. So if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your son to your daughter. And again, from my own practice, um,

parent of a 18 month old boy said, you know, when my daughter was 18 months old, I could bounce her on my knee and I'd say, Google Gaga. And she'd say, Google Gaga. And I'd say, E-E-O-O. And she'd say, E-E-O-O. And we could do that for like 20 minutes. We just crack each other up. We'd have so much fun just making nonsense syllables. And I tried that with my son and somebody who was riding their bike past the front door. And he went and looked at that. And then the house made a noise and he went and looked at that. He's very distractible.

And I Googled that and it said it could be a sign of autism. It could be a sign of autism. What do you think? Could it be a sign of autism? I said, well, could be, but it could also be a sign of boy. But I could not reassure her. And she insisted on a formal evaluation. So I said, all right, treatment learning centers in Rockville, they're very good at play-based assessment for toddlers. I shouldn't have done that. That was a big mistake on my part.

She went there and she came back in tears. She said they're very concerned. They said his vocabulary is below average compared to the average 18-month-old. The average 18-month-old should have a vocabulary of 65 words. They estimate he only has a vocabulary of 40 words. Well, actually, research shows the average 18-month-old girl has a vocabulary of 90 words. Average 18-month-old boy has a vocabulary of 40 words.

So let's consider that statement. The average 18 month old child has a vocabulary of 65 words. Okay. 90 plus 40 is 130. 135 divided by two is 65. The average 18 month old child has a vocabulary of 65 words. That's a true statement, but it's completely meaningless because a child is either a boy or a girl. You've got to compare boys to boys and girls to girls. There's nothing wrong with this boy.

And he's perfectly fine. And this was years ago. He's gone on to be totally fine. He does not have autism. He's not on the spectrum. So yeah, if you have an older daughter, younger son, don't compare your son to your daughter. Compare boys to boys and girls to girls. Let's talk about autism for a second because it's, of course, very much in the news and with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. up for potential HHS chief executive.

He's been saying, you know, is it environmental? There's so many toxins around us from the microplastics, which you just mentioned to, uh, the pollutants in our air, in our soil and so on, on our food.

He thinks it's too much toxic overload. You have a different possibility that we should be considering for the explosion in autism over the past decade or so. Yes. And there is an explosion. So the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, one of our nation's leading scholarly journals, just a few weeks ago published a study, looked at the diagnosis of autism in this country in 2011 and

compared with 2022 and found in those 11 years between 2011 and 2022, the diagnosis for autism for children five to eight years of age tripled. Why? Well, the authors of the study didn't suggest why, but the mainstream, the official explanation is improved awareness and screening. Okay. I'm not buying that. I'm not buying it because I'm a family doctor and I'm seeing firsthand what's going on. And I can tell you,

Okay, autism is a spectrum. At one end, we've got this severely impaired kid who is not talking, not verbal, profoundly impaired, and there has been a rise there. And at that severe end, you know, I might actually agree with RFK Jr. that there's toxins in the environment and something bad is happening there. That's not the kid I'm talking about. What's going on at the other end? The kid who is functioning, the kid who is...

in school, but he's now being labeled as being on the spectrum. Okay, here's something that I actually know something about because I'm seeing this. Let's think about this eight-year-old boy who's defined, who's disrespectful, who spits, who bites. Twenty years ago, the teacher would have said to the parents, "Look, this is totally unacceptable. Your son is rude." When the teacher says to the parents, "Your son is rude," the burden of responsibility is on the parents.

They have to step up. They have to teach their son, okay, you need to behave differently or else. But today, same boy, same behavior. The teacher is much more likely to say something like, your son seems to have a deficit in social awareness skills. Have you thought of having him evaluated? And he goes and he gets evaluated. And sure enough, he gets labeled as being on the spectrum.

Well, you know what? He's not on the spectrum. He's a rude, disrespectful boy immersed in this culture. Yes, he's, he's because the culture has changed. And, and the first chapter of the new edition of my book, the collapse of parenting is titled the culture of disrespect in my own practice. A mom of an eight-year-old boy said, can you explain to me what's going on with our son? And

His father and I never talked this way. And he thinks it's funny to be disrespectful and talk back. And I said to mom, I said, do you guys have the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.? And she said, of course. I said, lock it down. Turn off. Do not allow Disney, Disney Jr., Nickelodeon, Nick Jr. Don't allow it. And it stopped.

Disney and Nickelodeon, they are teaching kids that it's cute, that it's funny to be disrespectful, to talk. Back in, mom called me three weeks later and she said, it's not. These shows are teaching kids that it's cute and funny to be disrespectful and to talk back. And the culture has become a culture of disrespect.

And it's not just Disney and Disney Junior. You know, Lin-Manuel Miranda had this huge song, Old Town Road, 12 weeks, 12 consecutive weeks, at number one, the most popular song in the United States. And he sings, can't nobody tell me nothing. You can't tell me nothing. You know, Bill Maher earlier this year had a huge bestseller with his book. And he observes in his book, young people are beautiful, but stupid.

Old people are ugly, but more likely to be wise. So he continues, any successful culture will teach the young people to respect the old people so that they can learn. So the beautiful young people can learn from the wise old people. You can't tell me nothing. Can nobody tell me nothing.

This new culture of disrespect where American popular culture from the Disney Channel to the most popular songs to TikTok and Instagram breaks bonds across generations. You can't tell me nothing. If you can't tell me nothing, why go to school? Why go to church?

The new American culture of disrespect breaks bonds across generations. And the result is kids in their bedroom looking at screens who want nothing to do with their parents, nothing to do with church. And the result is kids who are adrift. And this is a major factor driving this growing generation of kids who are adrift and looking for meaning.

Hmm. All right. This is a, in our own family, it's a hard line. If, if the talk towards myself or my husband gets disrespectful, they will get punished and they know it, you know, we're not, they're usually very good kids. They don't, we don't have a ton of opportunity to punish them, but you know, that's smart talk back to the parent. That's extremely disrespectful. We will punish them for that. But for this very reason, there have to be like societal boundaries within which we play. And if you're a child, you're speaking to an adult,

all the more so. This reminded me, just asked my team to pull it over, of a bit James Carville did after the election. You know, the Bill Clinton aide who helped get him elected. And, you know, he's a Southerner. He's a Louisiana boy through and through. And he's not woke. He's a leftist Democrat, but he is not a woke guy.

And he had he went on a rant about young people within the campaign, the Democratic Party, who think they know everything because someone hasn't set those guardrails for them on understanding respect and respect for one's elders and that one doesn't know everything, especially as a young person. It's a great bet. We haven't had a chance to play it for the audience. Here it is. The vice president was thinking about going on Joe Rogan show.

And a lot of the younger progressive staffers pitched a hissy fit. Supposedly, the campaign said that that wasn't a term of fact, but they did. When you put a campaign together and you hire young people to do work, let me tell you exactly what you tell these people, what I would tell them. Not only am I not interested in your fucking opinion, I'm not even going to call you by your name.

You're 23 years old. I don't really give a shit what you think. If I were running a 2028 campaign and I had some little snot-nosed 23-year-old saying, I'm going to resign if you don't do this, not only would I fire that motherfucker on the spot, I would find out who hired him and fire that person on the spot. That's amazing. What do you make of it, Dr. Sacks?

Well, he speaks very emphatically. But indeed, I do think that we need young people to respect their elders. And the anthropologists would agree with Bomar. Every successful culture teaches young people to respect their elders. And we used to do that, too.

As recently as 20, 30 years ago, American culture was a culture of respect. And the most popular TV shows like The Andy Griffith Show in the 1960s, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s. Little House on the Prairie. Yes, were shows that taught, that had those strong connections across generations. We have lost that.

And, you know, you and I cannot change Hollywood, but we can create a culture of respect in our own home. And again, that's what I'm trying to do in my book, The Collapse of Parenting. We can't change Hollywood, but we can. I'm trying to encourage parents to.

and give parents some guidance. How do you do that in your own home? You've got to create that culture of respect within your own home. And you've got to be confident, asserting authority in your own home. It's not about discipline. It's about creating those bonds of love and respect across the generations. This is reminding me too of

The way we speak to our children today or the way we're told we should speak to them today is just so vastly different from how my parents spoke to me when I was growing up and just a couple generations ago, the way it was. You could make the case against the way parents like mine, my mom, Linda, who I adore,

you know, lines like stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about. Okay. That may have been a little far on the spectrum, but today we've gone so far around the bend that we have lost our authority. And we're, I don't know what kind of psychobabble these young parents are listening to, but it's encapsulated in this bit that was going around Instagram recently. This is like a, a prepared bit between what looks like a mom and daughter acting, but it captures it perfectly. Watch.

Be careful. We don't say be careful anymore. Instead say, what's your plan here? I don't even know my plan. Do you know your plan? Don't. Stop. Hit your sister. Don't say stop. Say gentle. Gentle what? Gentle hands. Gentle hands? Everything. Gentle everything. I am so proud of you. You're not supposed to tell kids you're proud of them anymore. I know.

That's putting the focus on you. What? I'm so proud. Don't say that. Should I say it instead? You should be so proud. I am so proud. No, it's back on you again. Hey, hurry up. We gotta go. Don't rush. We're fine. Don't rush. We're fine. I thought we were in a hurry. If you rush children, it makes them anxious. Don't worry. You always rushed us, and I'm anxious. I never rushed you. We were always late. Exactly. And I was anxious because we were always late. Am I supposed to say that?

Gentle. This way. Good job. Good choice. Thank you. No. Say good choice. Watch out. Do you feel safe here? I don't feel safe about any of this shit.

Watch out. Do you feel safe here? I'm sure you've seen a lot of this too. Yeah. So that's a riff on gentle parenting, which I talk about in the new edition, which really wasn't a thing 10 years ago, but it certainly is now. Gentle parenting means letting kids decide. Gentle parenting means that good parenting means letting kids decide. And gentle parenting is profoundly harmful.

And again, in the new edition, I present a lot of evidence that that is so. Because the kids often are mistaken about

And, you know, what is childhood for? I mean, literally, a four-year-old child has barely begun. A four-year-old horse is a mature adult. And a horse is a bigger animal than a human. So it can't just be about biological maturity because a horse, as I said, is a bigger animal. And a horse is fully mature by four years of age. A human is developing, is immature for more years than most animals live. Why?

Why does it take so long? We don't have to guess. We have scholars like Dr. Melvin Conner at Emory who spent his entire career, decades, studying this question, published this huge tome, 800 pages, Oxford University Press, titled The Evolution of Childhood, Comparing Development in Our Species with Development in Other Species. And the answer he gives, the reason it takes so many years, is that it takes many years for parents to teach the child right and wrong.

And so I cite a column by a longtime columnist for the New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan, who wrote a column about enlightened parenting in which she asserts, and I'm quoting that, she says that enlightened parenting means, and I quote, setting your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong. And if in so doing your child becomes a stranger to you, then so be it. That may seem enlightened to some,

But it's not enlightened. It's a dereliction of duty. If you set your child free to discover for themselves their own right and wrong, and they have a device with internet access, what they will discover is Drake and Bruno Mars and Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B and transgenderism and mainstream pornography. Your job is to teach your child right and wrong, to inscribe your law on the hearts of your child. That's Deuteronomy 6. That's your job as a parent.

Don't set your child loose to discover for themselves their own right and wrong. That's a dereliction of duty. Don't listen to the New York Times. Don't listen to National Public Radio. Do your job as a parent. That's the message I'm trying to communicate in my book, The Collapse of Parenting. It's reminding me at our school, at our son's school, it's an all boys school. They understand that

students will make bad decisions and they'll do stupid things sometimes. But the thing that will really get you expelled quickly is if you get called in to the head of school's office and you lie about what you did, like he's not calling you in there unless he's got you dead to rights. About half the time they've got cameras in the school. So he's already seen what you've done. And if you lie, you're out. He's pretty hardcore about that. If you own up to it,

and confessed you were a numbskull, you know, you did something really stupid and you're sorry, you will live to fight another day. But it's a, to your point, it's about the value system. Like honesty is a, it's just a deal breaker. You can't, we can't have anything, can't have character if we don't have that fundamental basic honesty. Can I ask you something else? When another audience member asks, how do I know at what age I can start talking to my kids more as adults, you know,

being honest with them about my own thought process and why I'm not going to allow them to do this thing that they want to do or about the problems as I see it in the family, outside, whatever. Like, how does one know what level of dialogue to have with one's kid?

I think it really varies from one child to the next. And as a rule, girls mature faster than boys do. Girls reach full maturity and brain development by about 22 years of age. Boys don't reach maturity and brain development until 30 years of age. So that explains a lot if you think about it. And when in doubt, wait. I find a lot of parents that I think are confiding too early in

And I know a boy who was very insecure because his mom was confiding, a single mom was confiding in her son about how they were broke. And he took that literally. And he thought that they literally didn't have money for food.

and he was very insecure until he graduated and went off to, to, uh, college and realized that they actually were not that broke. Um, and, and, um,

And again, parents and sometimes single parents are a little bit more prone to this because they don't have an adult confidant. And they sometimes I've observed as a family doctor, they confide in their kids because they don't have a partner to confide in. And they're confiding in their 12 year old when maybe they shouldn't be. And as a result, that 12 year old is insecure, more insecure than they have to be. So.

When in doubt, keep it to yourself is one general rule I've learned.

I seem to remember you being a big proponent of chores and responsibilities for kids. Does that extend to, I had one audience member ask about, to what extent is it appropriate for me to ask the older kids to help me with the younger kids? Because the older kids have responsibilities of their own and they have grades they have to keep up and they have sports they have to make. And like, is it a dereliction of your parental duty to fold in the older ones to help with the younger ones? Or is that a good thing?

No. So there's a whole chapter in the new edition titled humility.

which I call the most un-American of virtues. You know, Justin Bieber had a big hit a few years back where he's saying, "I'm gonna light up the sky like lightning and this world will belong to me." Being proud and standing tall and this world will belong to me. Those are very American characteristics. But we now have all these studies where researchers find that the kid with the highest self-esteem at 15 years of age

is that individual who's most likely to be resentful and frustrated 10 years down the road. Because if I'm so amazing at 15, how come I'm working for a low wage in a cubicle at 25 years of age? Actually, one of the best predictors of happiness and contentment at 15 years of age is humility.

Being humble. And yes, absolutely. And you'll find that research in my book, The Collapse of Parenting. Being humble, being grateful, powerfully and accurately predicts happiness and contentment.

how do you teach humility? And again, parents are confused. They don't get this at all. When I speak to parents about the virtue of humility during question and answer, a mother said, I don't want to teach my daughter to be humble. That's ridiculous. I wanted to have my daughter to have a high self-esteem. So when that big job opportunity comes along, she'll go for it. I want to teach my daughter to be humble. That's ridiculous. I said, mom, with all due respect,

You're confused. You're confusing being humble with being timid. Those are not the same thing. They're very nearly opposites. And the virtue you want for your daughter in the situation you're describing, when a big job opportunity comes along, the virtue you want for your daughter is not high self-esteem. The virtue you want for your daughter in that situation is courage. Courage means courage.

you know your inadequacies, your failures, your shortcomings, and you find the strength to move forward anyhow. There is no courage without fear. High self-esteem is not the virtue that you're looking for. High self-esteem leads to frustration and resentment. And I can tell you this firsthand. I had a girl in my own practice

who at age 15 had very high self-esteem. She wrote a short story and her English teacher wrote on it, A+++, you have a spark of the divine fire. And she went on to write several novels, couldn't get an agent, couldn't get a publisher. And at 23 years of age, she is seething with resentment and frustration and envy. Why did that girl get her novel published? I can't even get an agent. I can't get a publisher.

High self-esteem leads to frustration and envy. So you want to teach humility. Yes, you do. How do you teach humility? The right kind of humility begins with chores.

It begins with chores. And again, many parents don't get this. Many parents don't get this. And they're like, okay, I want my daughter to get good grades, you know, and we have the resources. We can hire a housekeeper. My daughter's job is school. Her job is school. So we can hire a housekeeper to do the chores. Many parents have said this to me. And the unintended, the message they're sending to their daughter is you're too important to make your bed. Don't do that. Don't send that message. Don't send that message.

chores is a great way to teach humility. And throughout the book, I follow the Phillips family family I've known now for 30 years. And it's an amazing story of an amazing family, um, Bill and Janet Phillips and their, and their four sons. Um, and I've been in touch with this family now for 30 years. Um,

And it's an affluent family, a big home in a mansion in Potomac, Maryland. And they had the money. They could have hired landscapers, but they didn't. They insisted that their four sons do all the chores. And I asked Janet, why did you do that? And she said, yeah, we could have hired landscapers, but I wanted them to learn the meaning of work, the value of work.

And, and I quoted from, from her words in, in the book, uh, that, yeah, even if you have the money, you need to teach your kid to do this. And her son, Andrew, really one of the most amazing athletes I ever knew have ever known in my 30 years as a family doctor was a, um, uh, recruited by Stanford, um, uh, played on the Stanford football team alongside Andrew Luck. But, um,

He was playing at the Maryland program after 10th grade in high school. And the coach there had just said what a great football player was and how he wanted to recruit and play at Maryland. And his father said, oh, Andrew, I didn't tell you. You're going to be working on one of my boats this summer. He owned a fishing business, scraping guts off the deck.

And Andrew was so upset. He wanted to do all this fun stuff this summer. And instead he's scraping dead fish off of a salmon fishing boat next to this guy who's just been released from prison, a convicted felon, drug dealer, Mexican, who's talking about coming to Jesus in the state penitentiary.

But Andrew said, you know, I learned something working alongside this drug dealer who's come to Jesus, something I would never have learned at the upscale camp, learning about the value of hard work, learning humility. Humility, the most un-American of virtues. You need to teach your kid humility. Humility leads to contentment and happiness.

They'll use the kids, use the olders to take care of the youngers and use them around the house and use them on everything. I think it feels very foreign to think of a parent, you know, if your child is like, I really think I'm going to do something great in this world. Like to be like, now my mother would have said,

You might, and you might not. We really haven't seen any signs that you'll do that yet, but you know, good luck. That's truly, that's how my mom raised me. But I feel like I couldn't say that to my child. I don't know what I think I'd probably say. Yes, you will, sweetheart. I don't, what, how would you handle expressions of, from a child of, you know, hope about their own future like that? Like I, I see myself as destined for something wonderful. I don't, whatever, however you want to phrase it.

I would encourage my child to have their loves properly ordered. It was a phrase going back to St. Augustine. To love God first. Make sure you want the right things for the right reasons. So if my daughter, for example, wanted to be an actress, why do you want to be an actress? You want to be an actress because you're inspired by the challenge of trying to become someone else and to be

get inside that person's head and persuade the audience that you are that person. That's great. That is great. And I totally support that and endorse that. If you want to be an actress because you want to be rich and famous, that's the wrong reason. Why do you want this? What are you in this for? Know yourself, know your motivation, want the right things for the right reasons. You got to dig down deeply, know who you are and be headed in the right direction for the right reason. Got to know yourself.

Hmm. So good. I've been thinking about my mom a lot lately. She just came for a visit. She's hilarious. And, uh, there was this meme going around on, on Instagram that read as follows. I'm going to botch it a little bit. It was something to the effect of the hardest thing about being a mom or a parent is you, you are raising the one thing you can't live without to be able to live without you.

And of course I was like, Oh my God, it's true. This is heartbreaking. You know, instant lump in the throat and in tears welling. And I'm sentimental like that. And my mom actually was in for a visit and my daughter was in a play. So we went and, uh, I showed it to my mom who's 83 now and she laughed. I didn't talk to her.

It's like, Linda, it's just, she's tough. And she raised me in a tough way, but it worked out, you know? And I think about all this stuff. Like I never was told I had to get straight A's. I didn't get straight A's. No one ever hassled me over it. I was never told I was special. It's all the opposite stuff that now I've sort of been making fun of for the past 20 years. But you know what, doc? Maybe, maybe my mom was onto something. I don't know.

Yeah, it reminds me of my own mom, the late Dr. Janet Sachs, pediatrician. And I was the youngest of three boys. And I remember when we were at a friend's house and one of the other moms said, oh, Jackie, your youngest is going to be leaving soon to go to college. And she said very coolly, she said, well, they do grow up, you know.

that this is what's supposed to happen. But again, a lot of parents are confused about this. And again, in my own practice, I,

My husband and wife were planning a ski vacation and they wanted their 13 year old to come with them. And she said, well, you know, I'm not that big on skiing. How about if I just stay at Arden's house, you and dad go away and I'll stay at Arden's house. And mom was very proud of this. And she was boasting to me that her daughter did not go on the ski vacation. And I said, uh-uh, that's not good.

you should have insisted that she come with you. At age 13, your daughter's primary attachment should be to you, the parents. And again, parents are confused. At age 13, the primary attachment should still be to the parents. When that attachment breaks too soon and her primary attachment is to her 13-year-old friend, that's too soon.

Because her primary attachment at that age should still be to her parents. When it breaks too soon... What age is not too soon? 18. 18. At 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, the primary attachment should still be to the parents. And we've got so much research now showing that when it breaks too soon...

At 23 years of age now, that girl is still now going to be texting her parents and saying, I don't know what to do. What should I do, mom? And we've got so many of these stories now. And not just stories. We've got data. We've got this explosion of kids in their 20s and even 30s who are now living with their parents. There are more 30-year-olds living with their parents than has ever been the case in American history. It's a weird demographic reversal.

of failure to launch, of young people who now are unable to live independently because the acorn broke open too early, is the analogy I use in the new edition of The Collapse of Parenting.

These kids broke out on their own at 12 years of age and hung out with their primary attachment was their 12-year-old peers at 12, 13, 14, 16 years of age. And now at 25 years of age, they don't know how to live independently. They did not develop- Let me just ask you this. So I got to take a break, but I want to ask you this question when I come back. So how did any of us who were raised in the 70s or before-

survive because most of us had parents who totally ignored us and they were not the primary person really in our lives. We were kind of alone and independent and latchkey, but we wound up okay. Oh, that's a tease more with Dr. Sacks right after this four years of crushing interest rates, runaway inflation and reckless government spending. And who is paying the price? You are you, you know, that you might have bills stacking up. You might have debt collectors on your back. You might barely be able to keep food on the table.

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Better than we were a couple months ago anyway. But it's when we let our guard down that bad things could happen. This is why you always want to prepare for emergencies, no matter how good and comfortable life gets. And for that, there is My Patriot Supply. They have emergency food kits, solar power generators, and water treatment systems. And right now, you can get their four-week emergency food kit for $50 off.

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I'm Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love.

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Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. So doc, what do you make of that? So those of us who grew up in the seventies, pretty much without parents who turned out fine. Absolutely. It was a much healthier culture. We're talking about the culture of the Andy Griffith show, happy days, family ties, family

And again, this is not a guess, this is not nostalgia. And I talk about this in the book and I talk about how the culture has changed and the culture of the last 15 years has become a much more toxic culture, a culture of envy and disrespect. And this is why the burden on parents now is much greater because now they have to do much more.

They have to do things that your parents never had to do. They have to provide a culture, which your parents didn't have to do. Your parents didn't have to be there for that. But now parents today have to do so much more. They have not only to provide a culture, they have to

block out all the toxicity and harm of the bad toxic culture of the Disney channel and of TikTok and Instagram. And they have to provide a good, healthy culture. And they don't even know it. Many parents are not even aware of

of all the bad things that the culture is doing. So again, the mission of the book, the objective of the book is to wake parents up, to make them aware that look, your TV is an agent of this really bad culture. And you don't have to turn off the TV, but block out the Disney channel. You know, home and garden television, that's okay. The history channel is okay, but not the Disney channel.

And your laptop is fine. You can watch the Megyn Kelly show, but not YouTube. YouTube is spreading a lot of really bad stuff. If you're going to watch YouTube, make sure you're there. You can watch the Megyn Kelly show, but not Andrew Tate, for goodness sake. Oh, my gosh. So warning parents to block out the bad stuff, to all the things that you've got to know now as a parent, because American culture has changed.

That's why it's so important. We have two minutes left with the SiriusXM audience. We're going to continue this over on podcast and youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. But in the two minutes we have left, one of our audience members wrote in, how do I deprogram a kid from the woke mind virus without losing them?

you know, in our family, we've done a pre-inoculation against it, but a lot of parents got swept, their kids got swept into this, you know, when they didn't even know to inoculate them. So what's the answer to that one? I've got a chapter in the book for that parent and the chapter is titled Enjoy. And actually the new chapter is titled Joy, J-O-Y. And basically I would say, uh,

Take a do a vacation. Just you and your kid, you and your family together, go someplace fun and do something fun with your kid. And they may be kicking and screaming. And I describe a father and son where exactly that happened. And the son didn't want to go and was kicking and screaming, didn't want to go.

That has actually worked. That is the one thing that has actually worked. Just doing fun things together with your kid, not lecturing them, just doing fun things with your kid is the, is the natural God-given way to reconnect with your child. Wow. That's excellent. The more it's back to your core message, more time with you, more time around the dinner table, more time with your values and bonding with you and reestablishing that close relationship. And I know we talked about last time,

Don't vacation with your children's friends. No, they cannot bring a friend on the vacay. That's right. Those are for families to reconnect with one another because those relationships are so critical to your child's wellness for reasons like this.

So speaking of the woke mind virus, part of what it does is teaches children to prioritize identity over everything with skin color or some alleged weird sexual proclivity or some alleged gender spectrum nonsense. Uh, but it also leans in to any

weakness, illness, alleged mental defect. You know, I was saying not long ago that

It's so in today's day and age, your kid cannot get into a good college by writing. I came from a loving family where I was raised with great values and two present loving parents who were there for me to, to set boundaries. You've got to say you've got some, some phobia, some issue. And there's a chapter in the book called what is it's about normophobia, normophobia. So can you explain that? Yes, absolutely. So, um,

15 years ago, I wrote a book called Girls on the Edge. And the girls I interviewed back then wanted to be effortlessly perfect. That was the thing back in 2009.

And then more recently, the publisher asked me to write an updated version. And I found that girls today don't want to be effortlessly perfect. That's boring. That's lame. That's basic white bitch. And who wants to be that? And the words that kids use on social media that they teach others to use kind of reinforce that. Are you gender conforming?

Or are you gender non-conforming? Well, who wants to be conforming? Are you neurodivergent or are you neurotypical? Who wants to be typical? That's boring. Divergent. Who wants to be typical and conforming? You want to be divergent and non-conforming.

And so Mary Harrington has coined this term, normophobia. Kids don't want to be normal. And this is a growing issue. It's not true of all kids, but it's true of a growing number of kids. They don't want to be normal.

It's not cool to be normal. You got to have, and this is really something that is spread on American social media, on TikTok and Instagram. You got to talk about how you are anxious, how you're depressed or how you're struggling with your gender identity or how you're wrestling with being trans or, or, or you're non-binary or whatever. You know, 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis wrote this book for kids, The Magician's Nephew, and,

And he said that the problem about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. And substitute stupider for anxious or depressed. The trouble with trying to make yourself more anxious or more depressed than you really are is that you very often succeed.

The whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy is that a big part of being anxious and depressed is that you're making yourself anxious and depressed. And as a psychologist and a family doctor, I can tell you a lot of these kids are making themselves anxious and depressed. They're talking themselves into being anxious and depressed. And again, we mentioned earlier that why is this not being seen in Greece and Russia? Well, I don't.

speak Greek or Russian, but I talk with people who do. And I can tell you, this is not a thing in Greece and Russia. Greek and Russian kids don't see anything cool about talking themselves into being anxious and depressed. This is a uniquely American English speaking world weirdness. I just came from Canada where this is definitely a thing as well. Um,

And American parents need to understand how toxic and how weird this is. We need to teach our kids there's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed. And we need to disconnect our kids from the toxic culture that is spreading this, which is very much part of this woke mind virus thing. There's nothing cool about being anxious or depressed or lesbian or gay or bisexual or non-binary or trans person.

It is good to be healthy. It is good to be straight. There's nothing wrong with that. And again, you need to create a culture in your own home where it is fine to be normal. It's interesting.

One of the, like a related offshoot of this problem is the nonstop desire to discuss one's problems in the school setting. Abigail Schreier wrote a book about this recently, Bad Therapy. But more and more, the schools, I will say, especially the girls' schools, want the kids to discuss trauma.

trauma? Has anything bad ever happened to you? What did that feel like? Has anyone suffered a loss or a death in the family? What did that feel like? And then they're supposed to go off and do math. What do you make of this leaning into discussing your trauma in the school setting by some school psychologist who may or may not have any sort of abilities to do that kind of thing with a kid?

Yeah, so-called trauma-informed therapy, I think, does not have a place in a public school setting. And I don't mean a

I mean, in a setting where there's a bunch of kids around, the classroom should not be group therapy. The objective in the classroom, the first objective should be to teach the content, not to conduct informal group therapy with untrained therapists. So on that point, I agree with Abigail Scharer.

Hmm. Let's talk about, uh, and we, forgive me, we covered this last time. I don't remember, but you know, my kids are getting into their teens now, so this is not yet relevant, but I'm sure will be relevant in the next five, seven years. Um, drinking, right? Like,

I don't know. I'm sure you'd see signs on your child. If you're an attentive parent, at some point you would see signs. Once your child starts drinking, drinking socially, if they start drinking socially, um, especially when they get more up into like senior year college, you're not going to be able to control what happens to college, but yeah,

How do you see that? Because let me tell you, in my mom's circles, there are all sorts of opinions on like, you're not going to stop it. Like walk them through, like don't have more than one. Don't have a mixed drink, you know, set some guardrails for them. Or there's moms who are like, absolutely not. Don't, you know, it should be shamed. Talk to them about the dangers of it. Slippery slope, all that. Or moms who are like, eh, you know,

We host parties and we actually let them have a couple of drinks. We just make sure nobody's driving. So your thoughts on that issue? Well, I don't think that kids should be drinking. I think the dangers are clear. I'm actually more concerned as a family doctor with vaping. I see vaping is more popular than drinking right now. And it is spreading. I think kids need to be aware of the dangers.

But it's really more of a issue of what's popular. And if all the other kids are doing it, it's really hard for kids not to, if everyone else in their group is doing it. So you need to be aware of what all the kids are doing. Again, I talk about in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, the Phillips family, Mr. Phillips had a breathalyzer.

And he would insist on if the boys were popular. And so kids would come to their home from other parties. And if a kid was appeared intoxicated, he would insist that the kid blow into the breathalyzer. And if the kid was drunk, he would insist that the parents come in and pick up the kid and drive and drive them home. And that very quickly became known.

And everyone would say, well, you know, the crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer. And that, yeah. And that had interesting consequences because people would say, well, you know, the crazy Phillips dad, he's got the breathalyzer. And that would give other kids an excuse not to drink.

Because they would say, well, I'm going to the Phillips place, so I can't drink. You want to give kids an excuse not to drink. So by all means, buy a breathalyzer and have it at the home. And that will give your kid an excuse not to drink.

Uh, uh, so your kid can say, well, my, I cannot drink because my dad's got a breathalyzer. He's going to be, he's going to insist on testing me when I get home. Think about excuses. You can give your kid, you want to be the evil parent. You want your kid to be able to say, I can't do that because my evil parents will do X. My, my dad will make me blow in the breathalyzer. Breathalyzers are cheap. Give your kid an opportunity to blame you for doing the right thing.

All right. And how about sexual activity? So I believe that sexual activity is intended for a married couple. And I believe that we want to teach that to our kids. And I, again, describe Marlo Phillips, a true story using her real name in the book. Her parents had that same belief and they were strict about

They would not allow her to be alone with a boy throughout her high school years. And she was like, that is so ridiculous. My best friend, she was alone with her boyfriend the entire weekend. Her parents were away. She was alone with her boyfriend the entire weekend. And I'm not allowed to be with a boyfriend with a boy for, this is child abuse. I'm going to call Child Protective Services. And her mom said, all right, here's the phone. She said, I'm going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way you guys are abusing me.

And then she went away to college. She went to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. And she told me at the beginning of her second year, she had an epiphany.

She suddenly realized I'm the only girl here who's not going to have to be in therapy for the rest of my life because of the way my parents treated me. She said, all these other girls here, they're coming to me. They're saying, do you think this picture I'm putting on Instagram, do you think it's too skanky or maybe not skanky enough? Do you think I'm giving oral sex to too many guys or maybe not enough guys? And she wants to grab these girls and say, have you no dignity?

"Have you no self-concept that all you care about is what the other guys think?" And she realized, "My parents raised me right, that I have dignity, that I have self-concept, that my self-concept does not depend on what the boys think of me." And yeah, it's a toxic culture for girls out there that's all about what the boys think of how you look and getting down on your knees and giving oral sex to other guys.

And yes, the best parent is both strict and loving. And the mainstream culture right now is about girls getting down there on their knees and giving oral sex to boys they barely know. You don't want that for your daughter. And you have to make that very clear. So you talk about it explicitly and encourage her to make these different choices. You insist on it. Yeah.

You have to, the best parent is both strict and loving and American parents are confused. They think you have to choose between being strict or loving, but the best parent is both strict and loving. A follow-up on the normophobia discussion a minute ago, because we talked on our last episode about the trans stuff and children and so much has happened and

I mean, a week is like a year on that front these days. The Supreme Court just heard a big case on it and so on. But we've seen a few things in the news lately that have been pretty disturbing, and I'd love to get your take. In the wake of that Supreme Court case, CNN decided to bring on a bunch of children who CNN says are allegedly trans, believing that they are, in quote, the wrong body and are actually the opposite sex of the one they are. In some cases with their parents,

to talk about just how awful

the fact that their necessary medication is being debated by the U S Supreme court. What was at issue in that case for those not aware is the some odd half of the United States have passed laws banning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children, for chill, for minors. And because it's been found by objective studies and places like the UK and elsewhere, that they actually are potentially very dangerous for children and they can sterilize you and

remove all sexual function and pleasure for the rest of your life. And how can a 10 year old consent to any of that? So CNN puts on this panel and they have this 10 year old child who I believe is a boy who's posing as a girl, uh, named, I don't know the kid's name, but the, the boy posing as the girl is trying to express their fear of

over this country and what's happening now. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this clip. It's, is it Sat 5, Kelly? Let's play it. What concerns have you had about speaking out? That I'm going to be like murdered. Like one day I'm going to be walking down the street and somebody's going to come up and like shoot me or something. That's a really scary thing to be worrying about at 10 years old.

Yeah, that should not be a worry. Michelle, what's going through your mind as you hear your daughter say this? It's hard to hear her say that. And she asked me three questions after she heard who won the election. Are we going to have to move? Are they going to take me away from you? And am I not going to be able to get my medicine? It's just, it's frightening. Your thoughts?

Well, I'm very troubled because so much of this is an artifact of modern medicine. Recall that synthetic hormones were not a thing until really 80 years ago.

This entire transgender movement is a creation of modern medicine. It was not with us before the 20th century. Let's be straight. Lesbian gay has always been with us. It's mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

Transgender is not a thing. Despite claims made by the transgender movement, the notion that there have always been boys who insist they're girls and girls who insist they're boys is really a very modern development. It's a creation of modern medicine. Those medicines that that child talked about didn't exist a century ago, didn't exist a thousand years ago, could not have been obtained.

100 years ago. And to what extent is this a real biological phenomenon? To what extent is this transgender movement created by the cultural movement and the politics? You know what? We don't actually have to guess. Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Stanford Medical School did a study of 1,500

young adults, 20 to 35 years of age, and looked at their brain activity. These are young people, men and women, 20 to 35 years of age, and they are awake and they're in an MRI scan. And you're looking at their brain activity. Now, all human brains have a fingerprint, a neural fingerprint that is more unique to you than your own fingerprint on your finger.

That's been known for many years. And the researchers wanted to know, does a man's fingerprint differ from a woman's fingerprint? And the image that they obtained, the graph that they showed is really astonishing, because

And there it is. So the women are- For the listening audience, it shows in the top left quadrant a bunch of red dots, in the bottom right quadrant a bunch of blue dots, and there's zero overlap. The blue is male. Yes, there's no overlap. So the women are up in one corner, and the men are all down in the other corner, and there's no overlap. And the difference between the men and the women is larger than the variation among the men and the women.

And what this graph is showing very clearly is that whatever is going on in the brain, in a man's brain at rest is different from what's going on in a woman's brain at rest. There were 1,500 individuals. Now in a survey conducted earlier this year, more than 3% of American high school kids said that they were trans. Well, 3% of Americans,

1,500 would be 45. We ought to find 45 people in the middle or crossing over, but we found zero. Zero. And more from this study. Okay, so the researchers found... So what does that tell us? It is telling us that these kids are confused. An ex-

X, an XY male. That child in that video we just saw is an XY male. Every cell in that individual's body is XY male. They may take female hormones. They may be castrated, but they are still an XY male. And

In my book, Why Gender Matters, I show that boys see differently, they hear differently, they smell differently than girls do. And that will not change. Now, that doesn't mean that all boys are one way and all girls are another way. There's great variation among boys and there's great variation among girls. And we should celebrate and acknowledge those variations. But male and female are biological realities. They are not social constructs.

And pretending that that is not so and castrating boys and giving them female hormones is not going to be in that boy's best interest. That is what this research is showing us. Possibly there may be rare exceptions. We can debate that case.

But the comprehensive review coming out of the United Kingdom by Dr. Cass and her colleagues strongly suggests that in the great majority of cases, in the great majority of cases, pre-pubertal kids should not be transitioning to the other sex.

But I want to finish that Stanford study because they also found with these very high resolution functional MRI scans and the sophisticated analysis that they were doing, they found that they could analyze the brains of the men and they could predict with high accuracy cognitive function, including intelligence.

for the men. But those rules that they came up with to predict intelligence in men were of zero value in predicting intelligence in women. Conversely, they came up with rules that could predict with high accuracy cognitive function, including intelligence in women. But those rules that predicted intelligence in women were of zero value in predicting intelligence in men.

These findings tell us that whatever it is that determines intelligence in the brains of a man, in the brain of a man, does not predict intelligence in brains of women. Whatever it is that determines intelligence in the brain of a woman determines

does not predict intelligence and brain of a man. Now, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, if you subscribe to the New York Times, if you listen to every program on national public radio, you heard no mention of this study conducted by the Stanford Medical School and published in one of our most prestigious scholarly journals. If you subscribe to my free newsletter, you would have heard about it. But our mainstream media, our mainstream media never mentioned it.

So go to my website, LeonardSachs.com and sign up for my free newsletter.

is listening to the mother who's crying over the child's potential loss of access to these pills. And the child reaches up to comfort the mother. The child like touches the mother from down below, which is a reversal, right? Of the way this is a 10 year old kid. It's supposed to be. And I, you know, all I can think of is this, this meme, Charlie Kirk sent it out. I'm sure he may not have been the first, but it was, if,

if you're, if your child, if you think you're trans, you have a mental illness. If your child thinks he or she is trans, it's the mother who has the mental illness. It's the parents who have like, and I cannot help but notice over and over and over again, you see parents who are weirdly almost needy of this thing. Like they won't, you write about this in the book. They won't

say that they're having a boy when the ultrasound shows the kid has XY chromosomes, you know, the baby, they're going to wait for the kid to tell them what they are. And then that leads me to one other video I wanted to show you because we showed it on the show or we haven't yet, but it's disturbing. I can't remember whether we did or not, frankly, but anyway, it's a dad and I normally wouldn't, I don't, I don't bring parents and children, you know, onto the show or show their videos on

ever, if they haven't put something out intentionally, right? Like if they want us to be talking about it, then I think it's fair game. And that's what this dad wants. He's, uh, in the UK, his name is Jonathan Jolie, J O L Y. And he has a boy who he's now raising as a girl named Edie. They have almost 4 million followers on Tik TOK and

And all this dad does is update us with his boy looking more and more like a girl at a very young age. And it's a very almost sexualized looking exchange. And what they're doing to quote Edie is very reminiscent to me of what like JonBenet Ramsey looked like a sexualized child with the hair and the makeup. But I'm not an expert. Let me show you what I'm talking about.

Hey guys! So Edie wants to do a summer holiday morning routine and get ready with me and show you guys what her skincare is and her room is and how she creates her outfit and all that cool. So that is the skincare element of the video complete. What's next, Edie?

I think I'm going to do my hair next. How do you get your hair so wonderful? Maybe not in the morning because it doesn't look that wonderful. And there are other videos of the parents putting a lot of makeup on Edie. Very sort of sexy makeup, heavy eyeliner, wet lip gloss. I find it very disturbing. Doc, what do you make of this? Okay, that's just creepy. Okay.

That's really creepy. And that's extremely creepy. And, you know, we could speculate regarding that father's psychopathology and why he is doing that. And I don't want to speculate, but...

I think we need to focus on the child. You made reference to the new chapter in the new edition of The Collapse of Parenting. I was talking with a parent in Orange County, California, and she'd been trying to get pregnant for three years. And she and her husband finally did get pregnant. She was very excited. She was telling everyone at the school, including people she barely knew. And she told a fellow teacher at the school, she said, guess what? We're having a boy.

And her colleague said, don't you think you should let the baby decide?

And that is indeed a thing that her colleague reprimanded her, that the colleague thought you should wait and not assign a sex because there are indeed many Americans now who think that sex is assigned at birth and you should wait until the child is three or four years of age and then let the child decide, give the child a gender neutral name at birth and then let the child choose whether

And if the child was assigned male at birth, but they decide that they are female, then you should raise the child as a girl, which leads down the road to castration and opposite sex hormones, etc. And I felt this was necessary to introduce a new chapter that wasn't in the original version 10 years ago.

the new chapter titled "Dabies" because this is really harmful and it is psychotic. It is utterly detached from reality and sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is recognized at birth because indeed you are born male or female.

And those differences that the Stanford University group recognized in adults are present in the baby prior to birth. We have other studies of women in the third trimester where they've done high resolution MRI scans of the baby still in its mother's womb. And they find the same differences in the cognitivity of the male brain compared with the female brain.

Because Genesis 127, in the image of God, he created him male and female. He created them. It doesn't say black and white he created them. It doesn't say Asian and Hispanic he created them. Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic are indeed man-made categories. But male and female are of God. You are, in fact, born.

male or female. There is a rare category called intersex, about two in 10,000 individuals are indeed born both male and female. That's a rare pathology on the same order of magnitude as Siamese twins. But for 99.98% of individuals, you are either male or female. And that's the way we are born and made. Mm-hmm.

I'm hopefully the U S Supreme court. We'll see it that way as well. And we'll issue a sensible ruling from what we saw. I predict they will. Dr. Sacks. So great talking to you. Love, love, love. When you come on, please come back soon. Thanks again for inviting me.

And don't forget the name of the book is The Collapse of Parenting, the revised edition. You can get it right now and do so. Don't let it sell out from all the listeners who are now rushing to read more about Dr. Sachs' longitudinal cohort studies that separate fact from fiction and feelings.

And this is an area that's sorely in need of that. Hope it was helpful to you. It certainly was to me. Okay. Want to tell you that tomorrow we've got the fellas from the Ruthless program back on the show. Always fun when they swing by. We'll see you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.