Jennifer Breheny Wallace

So they could reach for really high things.

I could put out these two books because if I crashed and burned and they...

you know, weren't well received, I knew I mattered no matter what.

So it gave me the, you know, the foundation to reach for high goals.

I mean, I wish as both a parent of three kids and also just as a human on this earth, I wish I could say to you, it's all social media.

Just shut it down and we will go back to being a healthier society.

As you point out, what I say in the book is that social media certainly is a factor.

It is a magnifier and an accelerant of what we are seeing in the real world.

But it is not the root.

And I fear that particularly parents who put so much emphasis on social media as the root of their kids' problems, I fear they're going to take their eye off the ball and realize that this problem goes deeper.

and the crises and the 20-year-olds today who are really in crisis, I think of them as canaries in the coal mine.

They are calling out this sick culture that all of us are living in.

Parents, according to research out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Making Caring Common, parents are struggling at equal rates as their children.

We just aren't talking about it.

And what I know from decades worth of resilience research is that children's resilience rests on the resilience of the adults in their lives, their parents.

And our resilience rests on the depth and support of our relationships.

And I wonder when you were going through all the nastiness in the press,

If you found your resilience in your relationships, yes, we can fortify our sense of selves, we can believe in ourselves, but we are social beings and we crave that social proof from others that we matter.

Can I tell you a study that's one of my favorite studies of all time, which basically tells the scientific version of your story?

That researchers were looking at – they had individuals standing at the foot of the hill and asking them to –