Habits and Hustle
Episode 417: Dr. Leonard Sax: The Collapse of Parenting and the Rise of Childhood Anxiety and Depression
Tue, 21 Jan 2025
Are you concerned about the rising levels of anxiety and depression in today's youth? In this Habits and Hustle podcast episode, I dive deep into this pressing issue with renowned psychologist and author Dr. Leonard Sax. We discuss the growth of a "culture of disrespect," exacerbated by the pervasive influence of social media, and the importance of conscientious parenting - both loving and strict - to produce the best outcomes. We also dive into issues such as the over-prescription of ADHD medication, the misdiagnosis of normal childhood behaviors as pathological, and the role of permissive parenting in the childhood obesity epidemic. Dr. Leonard Sax MD PhD is a highly educated and experienced physician, psychologist, and author. He attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, earning a PhD in psychology and an MD. Dr. Sax ran a primary care medical practice in Maryland from 1990 to 2008, and since 2001, he has been visiting schools and speaking to parents about child and adolescent development. He has written four books on the subject, including the New York Times bestseller "The Collapse of Parenting," and has spoken in numerous countries and appeared on various media outlets. What We Discuss: (00:07) The Collapse of Parenting (13:04) Influences on Parenting Decisions (19:33) Parental Authority vs Discipline (25:52) Parenting in the Age of Normophobia (40:55) Prioritizing Self-Control Over GPA and Medication (48:31) The ADHD Medication Epidemic (01:02:12) Empowering Parents to Decide Family Meals …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: AquaTru: Get 20% off any purifier at aquatru.com with code HUSTLE Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Leonard Sax MD PhD: Website: https://www.leonardsax.com/ Book: The Collapse of Parenting
Chapter 1: What is the Collapse of Parenting?
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it. Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therasage. Their TriLight panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go.
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Chapter 2: How does social media influence parenting decisions?
Yeah.
Oh my God. Okay. What a, what a schmadre to get going here. Technology. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy. I live in LA and it's not, I mean, the fact that thank God I have power is amazing here today. So I'm happy to have you.
I actually have been looking very forward to having you on this podcast because I've been doing a lot of my own research, deep dive into how to build mental resiliency with children. I actually just did a TED Talk myself on... how the coddle culture I thought is part of the reason why kids' resilience has been a miss of this generation.
So when I saw your work and I read your book recently, before I even did the TED Talk, it was really interesting to me because even though it's the same outcome, By the way, the book is called The Collapse of Parenting. I highly recommend this book to anybody who is a parent.
But what I was saying is I found it very interesting because we are all very familiar with Jonathan Haidt's Anxious Generation. And what he says are the reasons for... the decline of what's happening in this next generation, helicopter parenting, social media, all the same things that were... Yours say the opposite.
And I found that to be super... Your whole thesis is that the collapse of this next generation is really because... of actually the culture of disrespect, the collapse of parents actually parenting, and something else called normophobia. And I really want to deep dive into this because I found it to be fascinating. And let's start.
So your background for people, like this guy can speak with authority because you have a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in psychology.
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Chapter 3: What is the culture of disrespect in children?
You also, well, you have your- Incidentally, that's the same program that John Haidt graduated from, is a curious point. We know many of the same people. And I want to emphasize, I have great regard for John Haidt, and he was kind enough to send me an advanced reading copy of his book before it came out.
And I think the book is very useful, but there's one key point that he doesn't mention anywhere in the book. And that is that this surge in anxiety and depression, that is quite rightly a focus of his concern, is not seen outside the English-speaking world. Kids in Greece, kids in Russia are just as likely to have smartphones as kids in England and the United States and Canada and Australia.
But there has been no rise in anxiety and depression among kids in Greece and kids in Russia. Now, I'm not holding up Russia as a role model by any means, but we have to ask, What's going on in the English speaking world that kids in the English speaking world are showing this enormous surge in anxiety and depression, but kids in Greece and Russia are not.
And that's the key point that John Haidt has not addressed. And that's the point that I'm trying to call attention to.
And what would you say, if you boil it down, is that key point?
Well, I think there's more than one. I think there's multiple things that have happened over the last 20 years. One is the breaking of bonds across generations. And again, this is a point where we have good data. We don't have to guess. Kids in the United States hang out with other kids their own age. The bonds across generations have been broken. This is much less true in Greece.
It is much less true in Russia. And it's much less true outside the English-speaking world generally. I have good friends in Germany and in German-speaking Switzerland. And I can tell you that in Middle Europe and all throughout Central Europe, and I'm told also in Eastern Europe, kids hang out with grown-ups in their free time. This is not true in the United States.
Kids in the United States very seldom spend their free time hanging out with adults. They used to in living memory, but they no longer do. The great majority of American kids now hang out with other kids their own age, and actually not so much in person anymore, but online. And I think John Hyde is very right to be concerned about
And his colleague, Gene Twenge, who he collaborates with very closely on this. Gene Twenge, of course, has done the lion's share of the work documenting that American kids used to hang out with other kids in person 20 years ago, and they no longer do. Now they hang out online. And that's a real problem. And it's much less true outside the English-speaking world.
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Chapter 4: How do parental authority and discipline differ?
That's been that's been a big piece of why the kids are the way they are now.
So that's absolutely right. The impetus for the book comes from my own experience as a family doctor and what I'm seeing in the office. And I actually wrote about this for the Wall Street Journal. Mom brings her son into the office and mom is doing all the talking. Kid is looking at his smartphone, playing a video game actually on his phone.
And mom is telling me how her son has a tummy ache and he hasn't been feeling well. And the son just puts his phone down and very nonchalantly says, you don't know what the F you're talking about. And mom gives me this limp smile. That didn't happen 20 years ago. It would have been unthinkable for a 12-year-old boy to use the F word to his mother. But now it happens.
And where is that coming from? So here you have to go just beyond anecdotes and experiences in the office. A team at UCLA looked at the most popular TV shows targeting children and teens going back to 1967 and looking every 10 years from 1967 through 2017. And they quantified the shows on 16 different parameters. What are the shows teaching?
Looking at the most popular TV shows, like the Andy Griffith Show in 1967, or Happy Days in 1977, or Family Ties in 1987, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997. Those are very different shows, very different production values, but they found great consistency, 1967 through 1997.
All those shows they found are teaching kids the most important thing is to do the right thing, to tell the truth, even if it hurts, to be a good friend, even when that's not easy. Being famous, number 15 or number 16, throughout that entire interval. But then they found that between 1997 and 2007, American culture flipped upside down.
And suddenly being famous, winning, went from number 15 to number one. between 1997 and 2007, and doing the right thing, dropped from number one to number 13 in 10 years. American culture flipped upside down and it's gotten only worse since 2007. And what drove that change? The UCLA researchers asked, and the answer they gave is social media.
Social media, they believe, transformed American culture to suddenly what really mattered is likes and followers. Doing the right thing, that's going to get you voted off the island. Survivor and iCarly and American Idol were the three most popular shows in 2007 that they looked at. And on all three of those shows, winning and being famous and having lots of followers is what really matters.
So American culture did change and being famous is what's important. And another mom in my own practice asked me about her eight-year-old son. She said, he's become so defiant and so disrespectful and he talks back. And I don't know where he's getting this from because his father and I never talked like that. And I said, does he watch... at Disney, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.
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Chapter 5: What is normophobia and how does it affect children?
Well, I'm always uncomfortable with the word discipline because people think that the book is about discipline and it isn't. And, you know, parenting is easy when there's love and And there's a chapter in the book titled Joy, which is about finding the joy, doing fun things together with your kid.
Because if there's love, then parenting is easy because your kid wants to please you and they don't want to disappoint you. They don't want to let you down.
So what's the difference? What's the difference between parental authority and discipline? Can you kind of give a distinction?
okay so parental authority means that your kid cares what you think and that they look to you for guidance about what is important and that's fundamental that's essential. And this is where parents are confused. And this is my big concern. This is where the impetus for writing the new edition came from. Because 10 years ago, gentle parenting wasn't a thing.
That's kind of a new term that has evolved over the last 10 years. But now a lot of parents are really into this gentle parenting. And gentle parenting, you know, there's lots of different definitions and lots of different gurus out there. But one thing they have in common is that gentle parenting means letting kids decide. Well, letting kids decide is actually a really bad idea.
And how do we know this? The fundamental question is, what is childhood for? What is childhood for? That's not a trivial question. And the answer is not obvious. A four-year-old horse is a mature adult. The Kentucky Derby is raced with three-year-olds. And a horse is a bigger animal than a human.
So the answer cannot be it's about biological maturation because a horse is a bigger animal than a human and it only takes four years for a horse to become fully mature. So the answer cannot be that it's about becoming biologically mature because it only takes a horse four years. Humans are children or adolescents for more years than most animals live. Why? Why does it take so long?
We don't have to wonder. We have scholars like Dr. Melvin Connor at Emory who's devoted his entire career to addressing this question and comparing development in our species with development in other species like other primates. And he wrote this 800-page tome, The Evolution of Childhood, comparing development in our species with development in other species. And the answer the scholars give
is that development in our species takes as many years as it does because it takes many years for the parents to teach the child right and wrong. That's your job. And I say that in the book, and then the next paragraph says, I quote a column from the New York Times.
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Chapter 6: Why are affluent kids more anxious and depressed?
She was the first scholar, she was then at Columbia, who found that, you know what, that finding that was so robust in the United States in the early and mid-20th century seems to have flipped. It is now the case that kids from affluent communities are actually more likely to be anxious and depressed than kids from low-income communities.
And other scholars pounced on this and replicated it, and it turned out to be a pretty robust finding. And other scholars coined the term affluenza to describe this finding that affluent kids are now more likely to be anxious and depressed than low-income kids. But then more recently, she went back and did a more granular look at the data. And she found that it isn't actually income per se.
Chapter 7: How can parents empower their children through healthier parenting?
It's what kind of school the kid is attending. Kids who are attending high-performing schools are the kids who are at greatest risk. So a kid from a low-income household who gets a scholarship to go to a high-achieving school is at risk, whereas a kid from an affluent home who's going to a school that's not high-achieving is not at risk. Well, this is weird.
Attending a high achieving school, a school that boasts that all of our kids go to Ivy League schools or Stanford or MIT or whatever, attending such a school greatly increases the risk of being anxious and depressed. Yeah, it does actually. Why is that? Well, Sunil Luthar asserts that the mechanism is social comparison. That when kids are comparing themselves to other kids,
they become anxious and depressed. So the worst thing you can do with your kid is to say, whoa, look at Melissa. She was accepted to Stanford and Princeton and she started her own nonprofit and she got a five on the AP Physics exam. Wow, you got to try and be like Melissa. That's the worst thing you can tell your child. You don't want to be comparing your kid to others. That's not a good strategy.
You want your kid to focus on being the best that she can be. But comparing your kid to other kids is a major risk factor for anxiety and depression. That's what we learned from the work of Sunil Luthar and other scholars.
How about success, overall success? Because people go to these schools because they think their feet are schooled, right?
So indeed, in my book, The Collapse of Parenting, I ask the reader, what predicts success at 12 years of age or 15 years of age or at 18 years of age? Is it your grade point average? Is it how popular you are? Is it emotional stability? Is it self-control? One of those predicts health, wealth, and happiness 20 years later, but only one of those. The other three do not.
It's self-control and other measures of conscientiousness like honesty. Grade point average doesn't. And a lot of parents actually are aware of that. And I know this because when I do the presentations, that's the first question I ask. And nobody raises their hand for grade point average.
They all have heard that grade point average does not predict health, wealth, and happiness 20 years down the road. They know that in their heads, but they don't know it in their hearts. Because I can tell you as a family doctor, when that ninth grader starts getting B's and C's, they're bringing the kid into the office. And they're saying, what do you think? Should we start Adderall, Vyvanse?
You know, what's going on? You know, ADD? You know, what's going on? They act as if grade point average is the most important thing. But the evidence is clear. Conscientiousness, meaning honesty and self-control, Strongly predict health, wealth, and happiness 20, 30 years down the road. Grade point average and popularity and emotional stability do not.
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