Wendy Mogel

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts. on Expert, I'm Dan Rather, I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hello.

Old friend is back, one of our very first guests, first expert.

First expert ever.

First expert ever, Dr. Wendy Mogul, she's our favorite childhood psychologist.

She is, so much so that we did a whole show with her.

Yes, we have one season of it, Nurture vs. Nurture, and now we have the second season out. now that everyone should check out. Please go to Nurture vs. Nurture and subscribe.

and- She's a beast.

She's a beast. You're gonna be repeating tidbits that she drops upon us the whole episode.

Yeah, we've been doing it ever since we've recorded with her, and just a reminder, it's back-to-school time, so it's a really good time to jump into Nurture vs. Nurture.

Yes, and listen to all the problems that other parents are dealing with.

That you're probably dealing with, too.

Yes, absolutely, that you're undoubtedly dealing with. Please enjoy Dr. Wendy Mogul. He's an armchair experimenter.

Testing the sound.

Sounds lovely.

Sounds puckery to me.

Puckery? Does that mean- Pulpery, puckery?

The pops, the plosives, as you'd say.

Wait, is that a word?

Yeah.

Plosive? An abbreviated version of explosion? No. No, what is plosive?

Words that pop like that.

Oh my gosh, you guys are virtually linguists.

We are.

Well, Wendy is, 100% one.

Wendy, we had a really awesome linguist on recently. So we had Valerie Friedland on. We've had a couple of episodes recently where I was like, boy, I hope there's enough stuff here for a whole episode. Also, we had an owl expert on, and I thought, I hope this is interesting, and it turned out to be very interesting, luckily. But this linguist, who I was like, I don't know, how long can we talk about like and literally, and it was one of the best episodes of the year.

So both words and owls are really important right now. Ooh. Because, no, they are. Because we all have to be writers now, because so much of our communication is via text. And so our lexicon needs to be flexible, deep, rich, socially appropriate, more than ever, because it's also permanent.

I mean, we talked about this a little bit with the woman who spoke on birds. It's the opposite of going to a concert. It's very low level, relaxing, because she was saying one of her friends is an ER doc and then will come home and just bird watch.

because it brings her back down.

It's all pretty chaotic out there right now.

And I asked her if she had to sum up what bird people were, because my hunch was that they are people that are very, very sensitive to stimulation, that it can feel overwhelming quite easily. And then perhaps have a really high level of, I said it wrong in the interview, it turns out.

You say MA.

Okay, it's MOA.

Monoaminoxidase.

Thank you. That kind of creates brain activity. If you're low on it, you crave right stimulus. And if you have a ton of it, you can watch the grass grow. So they said.

I think there are two sides. So one is the Taylor Swift era's tour and the Barbie movie and the dad and company that we are so eager for collective effervescence and joy. together, loud noises, created community of shared interests, and then looking at one bird.

Okay, so I think it's worth mentioning, and probably in the intro I'll say this, but the fact that you are our very first experts on expert, I'm delighted by that.

Me too.

I hope in some weird way, that's a feather in your cap.

Oh, for sure.

Okay, good, because had it not gone well, we might've thought, well, we really don't know how to talk to experts and we should scrap this idea entirely, but we both loved you so much. And we're so taken with everything. you said that, of course. then we approached you about doing a show with us, which you then did, and we love and are so proud of how it turned out. And it's called Nurture vs.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. These parents that were on the show taught me so much. And they were such a pleasure to be with, because these are people that I would not have had in my practice. They wouldn't have found their way to me.

Well, let's just say you were set up here in Los Angeles and in a pretty nice area of Los Angeles. So there was probably a pretty consistent, at least socioeconomic bracket that your patients were coming to you from. Did you have any anxiety that you would maybe lack the skills to connect with people from such varied backgrounds?

Zero. I have given, I think, 600 lectures around the country and around the world. And the people I enjoy talking to the most, besides the parents who are great at the schools, at the conference, at the gatherings, is talking to the people who drive me around, getting a blow dry in a local salon and talking to the hairdressers, talking to people I meet on the street. And I talk to everyone compulsively because I have this manic curiosity about families.

That's where your questioning generally will take you when you're meeting strangers?

It will. I was in Texas not too long ago with a member of, what's the most competitive military branch?

Navy SEALs?

Black Hawks.

Yeah, Black Hawks. Oh no, that's not a thing. Hold on, I gotta pause over here.

I think it is a thing.

What? No. No, no, no. What is it?

Well, listen, you got Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. Marines are part of the Navy. Navy also has Navy SEALs. You have Special Forces.

Special Forces. There we go. That's what he was.

But they call Special Force Operations, sometimes Black Ops.

Oh, Ops. That's where we got that part.

Black Hawks. I think I must have always heard it as Black Hawks. And we were talking about birds, so who knows? Oh my God.

Bird.

It's hard to parse out why we said Black Hawks. Also, Robby Robb's NHL team, Chicago Black Hawks. Everyone got serviced by the Black Hawks blunder. All right, wow. Everyone won.

He told me how many times he had jumped out of planes that were way up high in the sky into enemy territory. And he told me about his voting practices. And my attitude is just curiosity. And I feel so honored and privileged to gain the trust of people who are so very different than this narrow population, you're exactly right, that I saw in my practice in Los Angeles. So wherever I am in the world, I just start talking to people and they tell me about their lives and their relationships and their children.

The field that you specialized in is a very, very unifying field. in that all, hmm, I can't say all, you can never say all, all the parents I've ever met have a nice baseline fear about their children, that they'll be healthy, that they'll be safe, that they'll turn out and find some kind of employment or get engaged in something they're passionate about. We all want the best for our kids. We probably want the best for our parents, brothers and sisters, I don't know.

Kind of the worst.

Yeah, you can root against them and for them simultaneously. But of all the topics you could bring up, I do think there's something quite unifying about parents. I know that when we go to the sand dunes with my family, everyone there's got a Trump flag or a let's go, Brandon, clearly, politically we're opposite. But I'm looking around and they got their little kids that are the same age as mine, I go, it took a lot of effort to get out here, you did that so that these little kids would have these memories. That's obviously much more important to me than all the other stuff.

This is what I talk to parents about all the time, making memories. And the way you make memories that get embedded in the amygdala and the hippocampus, so we're going for memory and emotion, is with movement, often outdoors, because it's all five senses in three dimensions. And Dax, I know you do this with the girls. Movement, nature, with parents, and the parents are having a good time too. This is a more and more scarce commodity.

Well, getting the kids just away from screens to begin with is hard enough. And the parents. And the parents, you're right.

I was talking to a family this week, so I still have a busy practice, but the same kind of people that I've always seen. And we were talking about the sound environment in the house. If kids hear parents talking in an urgent or frantic way on the phone as they move through the living space of the family, it's frustrating to the brain because we want to complete the gestalt. So hearing a whole conversation, both sides of it, is more satisfying than one side. And it's similar to parents looking at their phones because you don't know what they're looking at when they look at a screen.

Yeah, it's unsettling.

Well, if you're my kids, you come right over and look right at my phone while I'm looking at it.

So what happens when they do that?

I don't know. I guess I get that feeling of someone reading over my shoulder. That's something great for me to think about, is they are naturally curious, like what on earth has captivated my attention?

That is exactly right. So I now have two grandsons. Yes. And I don't think I realized this when I was raising my children, because you're just too busy and crazy and happy and miserable, and it's just a tangle of plans and lack of sleep. But with grandchildren, you see, they are primates.

Ooh. Are they identical?

They are fraternal. They are 11 months old, and one of them now loves to open and close the refrigerator door. Sure. And think about it. When we talk about all five senses, so it's not that easy.

Yeah.

And if they don't have it, that's when they get fussy and peckish and have a hard time. And it just got so clear to me watching them.

I had a very similar experience. We were on vacation, and it's us and another family. So we got four little girls. We get to the beach, and then we meet up with another family that Kristen's been friends with since college. And when they arrive, there are a shitload of boys, right?

Age range, please.

They're varying, probably from three years old till 10 years old. These boys arrived at the beach, and within six seconds, they found all this driftwood and lumber. And one kid was stabbing the ground and trying to build something. Then the other kids were carrying these logs. Again, not to reinforce any kind of gender stereotypes, but fucking A, it was right in front of my face.

What were they doing? Were they talking, the girls?

No, they're talking up a storm.

And what else were they doing?

They were also making some sand castles and digging some things. And Delta had some stuffies and toys involved. And yeah, they were like being social and communicating. And they were a group. And these little boys, like they had been given the orders, like go, find every piece of wood.

My heart is breaking for boys right now. And I think it's because I have these two. I have two daughters. And when I see these tiny little men, how enthusiastic they are about life. And male infants are more sensitive organisms than female infants.

There's definitely exceptions to all these.

Big exceptions. And we know more about that every day. And we are more respectful of it. The schools, not necessarily, but certainly evolved parents. But to apply the same standard to the boys who wanted to run around on the beach and gather all those sticks.

Yeah, they were invading the beach, the boys. I think that all the time. And again, you can only be so sympathetic to the patriarchy, I understand that. But I do feel like what we were designed to do versus the modern world we live in, for boys, particularly, is uniquely disjointed. I think all the skills that would have made us thrive as hunting and gathering humanoids, we're so far from that.

We have to be worried about them. They're half of our population.

Fewer and fewer, the older that moms are.

Yep.

You know about this from your incredible show. The likelihood of having girls and girls twins.

Oh, as you get older, you're more likely to have a female offspring?

Yes.

Oh, I didn't know that. While my friendship circle is inordinately female, the children in it, and the youngest couple in our group had two boys, Erica and Charlie. They were so young.

Yeah, I mean, Kristen was young.

She was 33..

That's the new young. Right, that for me feels young.

33 evolutionarily is like, you've already been having kids for 15 years.

Well, my friend just had a boy and she's my age.

Well, again, it's not like there's exceptions, right?

This is all anecdotal, what we're doing right now. The overall trend is more girls than when we develop standards of decorum, of academic performance, how you behave socially, how you behave in school, how you speak to your parents. And I add to this that there is no worse relationship than 15 year old girls and their mothers. That's the worst. That's a fact.

Okay.

And it gets much better. And it was good before that. And moms do tend to love their little sons because before they enter puberty, they're kind of the best boyfriend they ever had. They look a lot like the dad, but with more hair and no paunch, and they adore their mom. That's right.

Yeah, they gotta gather those sticks. Who else will gather them? They have to gather the sticks. Gotta get that gathered, yeah.

Why waste your time in that dumb conversation?

Talking's not gonna get these sticks gathered. Picking them up is what's gonna get them gathered.

That's right.

You gotta be quiet. You gotta not look at each other.

It's embarrassing to look at each other and there are so much more interesting things to look at. that are not the people right next to you. But then the boys are entering puberty younger as are the girls. One of the first signs of boys entering puberty is that their testicles get larger and parent doesn't notice that. Boys don't notice that.

There we go, yeah. Because it would be, if you said, I imagine how big are his testicles, they might freak out. No, no, no, no, no.

Don't go looking there, Mom.

Okay, so odor.

Yeah, I have friends with boys and the mom said, yeah, he's starting to smell. Like we have to figure out the odor. And she said, but he's too young.

And he's not. So. girls don't menstruate until two years after the first signs. And it's a body, odor, oily hair, a single pimple and mood swings and having difficulty falling asleep at night, separate from the whole blue light and screens. It's the circadian rhythm of adolescence because, going back to hunters and gatherers, they are meant to take the night.

Yeah, this world's not for them. It's a real mismatch.

That is so funny. Because we were just on a group vacation and there were two actual teens and they were up far past any of us. They were up late into the night and we were always like, the teens. And then, of course, they slept until like 11.. It was just so funny to see just the specific two doing that.

So I do most of my work with mom and dad together about the kids. And these are not people whose marriages are in trouble. And these are loving, devoted, intelligent parents and they're struggling.

The fact that they've come to therapy says a lot about how dedicated they are.

I ask them if the father and the child that they're concerned about have any things that they enjoy doing together without the rest of the family. It's really important. It's very important for girls in their future relationships. And it's important for the boys to feel important enough for his vaunted dad. So I don't care what they watch almost.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm so happy for them to share. And I never, ever liked the phrase guilty pleasures, because I want us to have lots of all sorts of pleasure. So it doesn't have to be educational or cultural, or bodybuilding or developing a lifetime sport. I'm so happy for father and child to be making vibrating mirror neurons together.

Oh, that's lovely. I had some questions in thinking about the fact that you've actually been doing this for 35 years now.

45..

45 years.

45 years.

Oh, you've seen some stuff and changes.

And that's exactly what I was curious about. Over these 45 years, would you say that kids are generally the same, or has this rapidly changing technological environment fundamentally changed children? And I have some different specific categories, but I guess, overall, have you noticed that? or do you think, no, kids are just kids still?

So a couple of things have changed. The culture has changed. We've already talked about how kids are entering puberty younger, which is a very significant change, because the kids are superficially very sophisticated, but they don't have as much life experience as kids did. Even when I started my practice, they don't have the opportunity to develop street smarts for two reasons. One is the false fears that parents have about crime and abduction.

Yes. I saw my mom like 45 minutes a day.

Exactly. And neither of you minded that.

It was a party.

Oh, that's so nice.

And my parents are scaredy cats and they still let us.

They didn't have a choice. They're both working, right?

Yeah, but even when they were there, like on the weekends and stuff, I would still go next door or go out in the neighborhood, and they're to me the most scared parents. And even they were just like, yeah, that's what you do. That's fine.

I got a text from a neighbor yesterday that said, just saw two blonde little girls wandering around the neighborhood. I assume they're yours and I'm delighted to see it. That was my childhood. But like, it's so rare that if you see it, you might think to text somebody about it. Oh, yeah.

Have you had Lenore Scanese on the show?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So her organization, Let Grow, is devoted to giving children the opportunity to have some freedom.

Free range kids?

Free range kids. It used to be called free range parenting. Now it's called Let Grow or free range kids. And she was voted the worst mother in New York many, many years ago.

And a lot of news cycles were talking about how terrible she was.

Loved it. She is an enlightened, courageous, important force in the culture. So the answer to your question is, we've gotten brainwashed about danger, one. And the other is the displacement of anxiety. So parents are older than they were when our parents had us.

Okay, that makes sense.

Because they are. And then he says, give them money if you can.

Really?

Be very, very nice and compassionate to them. Never say to them, when I was your age, I had already blah, blah, and blah. One place where you need to make boundaries and make rules is if they're 30 and they're living at home instead of scorn, or even if they're 25, college graduates, to say, if you're gonna have somebody sleep over, I don't wanna be going into the kitchen for coffee and there's a stranger there in the morning. So we need to come to an agreement about house rules.

Right, yeah. I'm not gonna love seeing some 25 year old dude in boxers in my kitchen.

Oh, right. Yeah. And you're totally entitled to that?

Yeah, yeah, it's not gonna be for me. I'm very pro-sex. I hope they're very happy and adventurous.

Where are they supposed to have it, Dex?

You know, in their car, like everyone else did, I guess. If I listed all the places, I would go.

Or like leave out the window, like they used to do, before dad and mom wake up and know. Exactly right.

But now, because of all the little cams everywhere, they leave out the window and there's a record of that. So your phone vibrates. It's the surveillance.

It's true.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

And there are two different aspects of it. One is what kids are exposed to. That fear can be slightly exaggerated that they're going to see things they can never unsee. Or this is an old one. I don't think people do this so much anymore.

Yes, this is the moral panic of, yes, yes. Or that they'll become anorexic. I think that's one of the big fears.

The algorithmic motivation to steal your child's spirit, equilibrium, self-confidence, that part is true because there are no guardrails. And right now there's a lot of activity around this. The heads of the tech companies, the government, all kinds of organizations figuring out how we set in place rules of civil engagement, protection of children, because this wildly powerful tool is available to everyone and its main motivation is grabbing your eyeballs and making money from it.

And you're going to spend a couple hours a day on it. Everyone could have a doctorate degree by the time they graduated high school if they committed as much time to biology as they do, myself included.

And something that's hard to understand about dopamine is that it's desire. It's not satisfaction. There's a new New York Times game since Werdl called Connections, Connections Beta. Un-hear this, both of you.

Oh, really? Okay, oh boy.

Listen and then forget immediately.

It's so addictive. Oh God.

It's ecstasy.

So I wake up in the morning, no matter how bad I'm feeling. And when I wake up in the morning, sometimes I am not feeling good. By the end of the day, I would feel fine because all of us depressives have that rhythm through the day. It takes about three minutes. The ease of access, one click, there you are.

Yeah, I'm dying to know what the game is.

I'm dying to know.

Okay, the game is, there are 16 words and you have to make four categories. And I won't say which one it was, but I was once invited to be on the scientific advisory board of one of the dating apps. They said to me in trying to get me to sign on, we have the top neuroscientists in the country. And then I was talking to one of the founders of a video game company. And I said to him, do you design the games to be addictive?

Uh-huh, yeah.

And this is what parents are up against. Do the girls play games?

You know, we have a contradictory mixed bag of things they can do and not do, right? So there's no video games. There's no social media, obviously. They're only eight and 10, but they're allowed to watch a ton of TV. So that's contradictory, maybe.

And it doesn't have an algorithm. And it's not designed the way the games are, so that if you stop, you lose what you have gained. Oh, that's interesting. And that's a very specific difference, because the boys are always saying, mom, I can't stop now. I'm in the middle of a round or a battle, and it's designed that way.

They watch a lot of TV, if I'm being dead honest.

What do they watch?

A lot of these Disney sitcoms, but they also love documentaries. Like, as a family, we watch a ton of nature documentaries. We went crazy over Chimp Empire. Maybe Monica would actually be better at saying this, because you observe it and I'm stuck on the inside, but they do dangerous stuff. They ride dirt bikes.

What does she say about not wanting to?

She's scared in the house if we're not there, which has been its own ride for me.

It's not a little apartment deck.

Right, exactly. It's a scary house. I'd be scared to stay there by myself.

I was scared just to look at it, because I haven't been here in a year.

Well, a listener's gonna think I'm in like an 8,000 square foot house. It's a very beautiful house, but it's 4,000 square feet, just for the record. But that's not for her.

Not for her. I just want to say that that's a lovely way to think about it. It's not for her yet.

Yeah. So she shares a bedroom with Delta. They share a room. The sweetest conversation ever that happened. Delta was basically like, I want to move out.

She's ready at eight.

Of the room. She's eight. She's the younger sister. And she says, I want to move out. Because she is, I think, very independent.

Right, right, sure.

And be on her own. She has all these imaginative games. She can go into that world very easily. She plays with water babies, like I did, and all of those things. So she wanted to move out into the guest room and Lincoln was really not wanting that.

Oh yeah, that's what she said.

It was so sweet.

And the older child is more anxious, generally.

Oh, really? Okay.

Yes, especially oldest girls. Because they were the only child. So they didn't have a posse that provides you with some comfort and relief. And the parents were less experienced and- More nervous. More nervous, for sure.

Anytime. there were three boys in my town, the third was always the most fearless humans you ever saw, right? Yes, that's right. Really competing with two people way older than them. The whole thing with my 10-year-old's fear, the journey I went on was like, okay, I want her to be brave.

Why?

Because I hate feeling afraid. I don't want her to be afraid of the world. I took her on the subway to downtown. She's hyper-vigilant, right? So she's aware of everything that's going on.

Did you say those things, or you could tell that's what she was thinking?

I could tell she was scanning. And I said, are you nervous about all the homeless people that are down here? And she said, yeah. And I said, totally understood. I said, but you know, a silverback gorilla could come down the street and it's not getting through me to get to you.

You're introducing a silverback gorilla and the two of you wrestling, scaring her more.

I think I can just cut to the end, after wrestling this for like a year, thinking about how, if I had to say I was disappointed by one thing, it was how fearful she was. It wasn't what I wanted for her. She and I are really similar, and Delta and her mom are very, very similar. And what I ultimately came to was, I too was terrified and I didn't have anyone protecting me. That's right.

She has the option. She's not ashamed. Yes. And you can think of it as discernment.

As opposed to fear. And that's what I started realizing is I'm introducing shame to her, and I don't want her to be ashamed of it. She's just alert.

She's alert and alarmed. It's appropriate to her age. This is the purpose of literature. This is a purpose of some of the TV shows she watches to metabolize that, because if we were not fearful organisms, not one of us would be here. So the four of us are in this room because we won the Darwinian battle by being appropriately afraid, not reckless and not dumb.

They're coming to visit. Okay, sure, sure.

A different kind of creature and she's talking to her uncle and you're just interested.

You're right. I would be so interested. What's gonna happen?

It's scary in the subway. Yep. Not just for a kid. When I heard the story, I was like it would be crazy if she wasn't. We should be more worried if she's just like-.

Well, like Delta's plopping down the lap of-.

Someone on the subway?

Oh yeah, she don't give a fuck. She'll just get in the mix with anybody.

That scares me more, because I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's some stuff to be aware of.

Yeah, these little lies I tell myself along the way is like, well, no, I'm giving her tools to combat this fear, right? I'm pointing out how safe the world really is.

But only if you're there. That's not even a real tool. You're not always gonna be there.

Yeah, and I'm trying to talk her out of how she feels about it ultimately, which I don't want to do. And it's funny because I don't do that on other topics. I do think I have a good habit of when she is having a problem and she tells me about it, my very first hunch is not to try to give her a game plan out of it. I just immediately start trying to remember a time when I was her age and I felt that way. And all I say is like, oh my gosh, me too.

And you're also projecting. So you imagine her, a fearful woman, a victim, a martyr, a person without boundaries or a self. It's always surprising to parents to see that if you're very relaxed about the fear, but curious and just, as you said before, respectful of it, that's what helps to dissipate it. It's a meta emotion. It's fear about the fear.

That solves everything.

Me about this, was it a silverback gorilla ball, was it? I'm never gonna be scared on the subway again and I may become a conductor or I may commit my own crimes on the subway.

And how about how egotistical it is for me to think, well, how could she not feel so safe? All of a sudden? it was about my ability to protect them and her being fearful of somehow that I'm not capable of protecting her.

And it's sweet. You definitely don't wanna beat yourself up about it, because this is big daddy, love, and this is your little girl and you want her to feel confident. But it's just like the way. we want the boys to be as sturdy, vigilant, self-controlled students as the girls. We want the girls to be these wildly valiant, glass ceiling and obstacle breakers at every turn, and they're just fragile little animals finding their way.

Another one of these little subcategories I thought of in the last 45 years is, what do you think about the increased labeling of children with things from the DSM that are giving kids an explanation by way of a condition we give them? And I guess my hunch and fear is that in any moment of confusion or anxiety, or loneliness, or feeling excluded, any of the many, many normal trials, we're all looking for an explanation. Why are we excluded? Why are we lonely? Why do we feel this way?

The DSM has grown, because I've been in this game for so long, from a slender little volume to an encyclopedia.

And more and more people I'm bumping into are like, yeah, I was wrongly diagnosed as bipolar. It turns out I'm attachment disorder. And then I think, well, be open to a third or fourth diagnosis down the road. Have we paid a price for these labels, do you think?

It's sort of like social media in that it works both ways. In social media, kids who don't feel they have a tribe or affinity with the people that they're living with because they're different in their interests or their style or their longings, can find a group to identify with that will support them. And it's similar to the diagnosis. So when I started out, we had about three diagnoses that we used. Pervasive developmental disorder, NOS.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. Based on what the parent is saying.

Yeah, I remember one particular case of a girl and she was a really good artist. She did these very dark drawings. I mean, now she would be an anime queen. Right. But it made them nervous.

Oh, that's lovely.

And his wife and their daughter, is an Olympic athlete.

Oh, my God.

And they are just the coolest people. So he was my first supervisor. And I went to him and I said, Al, here's what the seven-year-old is saying. Do we need to hospitalize him? This is really how we thought then.

Yeah. We hope so.

So we knew very little. And now we have gone in the other direction.

It swung.

So we are diagnosing normal childhood as pathology and we are treating it and depriving children of the opportunity to learn how to manage feelings, to learn how to study, to learn how to apply themselves. The good path is taking all this enlightenment about the brain. We didn't have fMRIs. We didn't know what the working brain looked like at all. So it was speculation and ignorance.

I mean, it's so hard to empathize with, but they're fearful.

And they're fearful because they think that every grade on every quiz or test is a prediction of that child's whole future.

Back to what you were saying about labeling. That helps in some ways, because it makes you understand what the feelings are. If you have anxiety, but you don't know it's anxiety, it causes more anxiety. And there's something helpful to having a label too. I mean, even for me, when they finally were just like, do you have anxiety?

That helped you right-size all those fears.

Yes, it was like, oh, that's what is happening. There's a thing happening. I'm not going crazy. It was helpful to me.

Many parents find out that they have attention deficit disorder when their child is diagnosed.

Right.

So I did psychological testing for years and I would tell parents that their child had this problem and the mom was frequently elbowing the dad. Yeah. Because the description was-.

The dad. I am very compassionate to parents who have a kid that's dealing with something that they themselves haven't dealt with. So by my expert analysis, I think Lincoln, the oldest, also has dyslexia or some version of that. I compare her overall intelligence, or what I think that to be, versus what she's doing at a reading level. And there's a big discrepancy there.

Lincoln recognizes, and you do, that you can make your way very far in life with all kinds of complicated strengths and challenges.

Let's just say that we have interviewed probably a dozen billionaires. at this point. I can't say one of these billionaires was someone that was neurotypical.

Absolutely not.

Yeah.

Not that that's the goal billionaire, but I'd say more often in here, it trends to not neurotypical for the people we interview.

I don't know if it was ever determined to be true or not, that Einstein had a hole in his brain, and after he died, they found it. What this is making me think about in relation to boys is when parents come to me and they say, we're really worried he's going to become a serial killer. He doesn't think about other people, he's not kind to us, and we think it's just going to go really dark and scary. And invariably, and these are also the people who get into my office, so they're colorful in the way they talk, and their sons are unlikely to become serial killers, they might. But I say, what do the teachers say about him?

Oh, sure, sure.

And then I say, okay, okay, how about his grandparents? How does he treat his grandparents? And they say, he's lovely with his grandparents, but they give him money. So we think he's like a manipulative narcissist. And then I say, okay, how about little kids?

Is nurturing little things.

Opportunity for the expression of tenderness and trust that adults would give them in taking care of little kids.

Wendy, I can't wait for you to watch Chimp Empire. Okay. Because the alphas are terrible. You hate them. Everyone's peacefully eating some fruit and these alphas come by and they have these displays of aggression to reinforce that they're in charge.

How did they do the displays?

They grab logs, they hit people, they grab people, they throw them, I'm calling the chimps people, but yes, they're wreaking havoc. They're running through going, I'm indomitable and I'm in charge and you hate them. But as the show evolves and you realize the pressure that they have, well, there's two other males that are waiting to kill this one so they can be alpha. They're fighting this other troop over territory and that guy in the show, Jackson, he's first one in, man. He is up against three every single time.

Lonely at the top.

It's so sad.

Isolated, keeping up your persona and your image, and this care, nurturing, grooming, it is hardwired into us so hard. And apparently chimpanzees.

Yeah.

Okay, what happens if the parents say, he's tough in school and he hits other kids, and my parents also find him difficult. What if the answers are, no, he's difficult.

He killed a cat last week. Let's go all the way, Monica.

No, no, because I want to make it realistic, because I actually know a situation like this currently.

How old is that child?

I want to say six-ish. I don't know this child well.

Did the problem start with the school complaining to the parents?

No, I don't think so.

But the school is complaining to the parents.

I don't know enough. I know there's been observations made that are worrisome about this little boy, and not just this little boy. with parents but with other kids, seemingly very little empathy, very aggressive and the grandparents have concerns as well. But I don't know about the school.

So that's the first question I always ask of parents, because I basically want kids to be good in school and bad at home.

Yeah, ding, ding, ding.

Those were healthy kids.

That was me.

Were you so bad at home?

Oh, I was so mean to my parents.

Yeah, it's so perfect. at school. Mine was flipped. I was torturous to teachers and so sweet to my mom. So interesting.

Your situation was very specific, though, and your relationship, and you're a very special mom. But with a conventional nuclear family template, when kids are respectful and follow the rules at school, which is exhausting and boring and frustrating. so they come home and they let it out. When the little child in the parent responds back to that with frustration or anger or fear of the future, that's what reinforces it. Something is going on with this little boy where, if he is behaving well at home, he's overtired, he doesn't get to run around in free play enough outside, or the parents are afraid to step in and teach family citizenship and etiquette.

Sure, well, they're on top. Feels good.

That's exactly right. They're on top and they rule it. And then the parents are kind of puzzled and angry about why they're not following really ordinary rules. So I work with families with really big kids who don't dress themselves, who are in diapers for a really long time, who don't clear the table after they eat because they know how to say, by the time they're 10, four magic words, they just say, oh, mother, I would do that. I would clear the table or even put the dishes in the dishwasher.

Yeah, yep. A test?

Is it in one of the STEM disciplines?

Yeah.

And just go upstairs to your room and I will bring you your dinner on a tray and I'll make you some flashcards. Do you prefer Ariel or Verdana for the fun? Yeah. We worship at that altar instead of, I wish I had like a cooler, more modern word for it, but it's mannerliness towards each other.

Yeah. Oh man, that is so true. Since we interviewed you five and a half years ago, there was this great Johns Hopkins study that came out. I believe it was Johns Hopkins. They had problem children and they were giving the kids therapy.

Almost always. And certainly in my practice, because parents know who they're coming to. So I'm the one who beats up parents and laughs at them and laughs with them. And the kids are generally pretty fine. However, it gets back to what we were talking about, the DSM, because sometimes it is the kid.

So it'd probably be irresponsible for you to guess, unless you had an actual study to quote, but what percentage of the time do you think there is an actual pathology that needs a medical intervention? and all of this? I can't say. Yeah. Well, let's just go back to the parents that had a fear that their kid was a sociopath.

And he's gonna be famous if he's a serial killer. There'll be true crime podcasts and TV shows and limited series.

You've got a franchise on your hands.

But to be fair to those parents, I mean, when something really bad happens in the world, when there's a school shooting, you do look at the person and think, how did the parents not see this? Or how did no one intervene earlier on? There's blame and guilt that gets sent up the chain.

But even that, the school shooting, which is the most horrific and terrible thing possible, there are 60 million kids in the US and two of them a year shoot somebody. It's horrific, but we do have to keep the scale of it in our minds when we're fearful of it.

It's very hard to do that as a parent, because your child, in your imagination and their safety. And again, this is biological. This is instinct to protect your child exactly the way you want it to say, I will keep you safe.

Here I am, six foot three.

The incidence is very, very low. And the fear threshold, just because we are protective humans, and then the constant newsfeed. It is so amplified and it's so old fashioned now. If it bleeds, it leads. But to lead now in our attention economy, it has to be really scary.

Oh, my God.

That it's just wild. But it's brilliant the way it can capture imagination.

And it's so old. We had a witchcraft expert on, what would we call that guy down in Texas? Yeah, he was saying the QAnon storyline is identical to the Salem witch trials.

Oh, exactly.

That it's all the exact same thing. It's always they abduct children, but no one's missing children, but no one really cares about that, right? So where are the parents of these abducted children? None of them are on the news. They're just not reporting these abductions.

When so many systems feel unstable, the distress over that fragility of a strong social infrastructure gets displaced onto the boogeyman. And the boogeyman is the fantasized abductor of children. I love your point about where are those parents? Why aren't they speaking up?

Yeah, we do this conspiracy show thing and there's like mole children. There's like 10,000 people under. I'm like, where are the 20,000 parents who are missing children that didn't report it? Okay, now, this one I just wanna throw at you because I recently heard it and I had a strong opinion about it. Two sets of friends whose teenage children started dating.

Each other.

Then there was a breakup, as happens in high school. And then the breaker upper was posting pictures of their new boyfriend or girlfriend on social media.

Was it boyfriend or girlfriend? Do you know?

I think it was the girl who dumped the boy. I do too.

No, you can already tell.

I do too. Oh, wow.

They also initiate more of the divorces.

Oh, interesting.

Interesting. By a lot. Continue.

By a lot, oh my God. So then the parents of the boy who's grieving and sad and staring at the social media of the ex-girlfriend, those parents go to the other parents and say, you gotta tell her to take down those pictures. Bryce will call him, he's suffering.

How old are the people?

These are 16 year olds.

Oh, take down.

Also, the boy she's dating is a really bad boy, Bryce says. I heard this and I was like, are they going to do this through college and adulthood?

They are.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

So all the colleges now have someone in a role. They have other euphemistic names for them, but the real role is Dean of Parents. First of all, they were deeply involved in the college application process.

Probably did all of it.

Very often, a student was applying to Kenyon and the mother changed the spelling to K-E-N-Y-A-N. On the essay, your love letter to the dean of the school about why you want to go there. And it's K-E-N-Y-O-N, it's the name of the school.

Okay, I wouldn't know.

You messed it up.

I could tell you didn't. Yeah, I didn't know which one. She messed it up. She spelled it like the country Kenya, the people who live in the country Kenya.

Oh, my God.

And then they come and they get together, sometimes with the roommate's mom, about how to decorate the room. They help to choose courses, to choose majors. And again, these are loving, devoted, nervous parents. Very well-intentioned. So the dean of parents at the colleges has to feed calls, and mostly their emails, that the parent expects to be responded to within hours.

That they wrote on three glasses of wine at 11 p.m.

So I was talking to a mom. recently, is not a patient of mine, a friend, wrote a letter to the school upset about the way another child had treated her daughter.

At college?

No, this is a five-year-old.

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

She wrote a letter to the school saying you're really not handling this well. And then she asked her brother, who's a big tech guy, to pass it through GPT to make sure the tone was respectful enough.

Oh, my God.

So he did that for her, and the tone was much better, and she accidentally sent the first one.

Oh, okay.

But the reason I'm telling this story is it has everything baked into it. The involvement, the sense of terrible urgency. We have 16-year-olds here, and the 16-year-old boys have much greater heartache than the girls. And it goes right back to the beach and to your friends' sex. Because the girls have each other to process it with, to just work it through.

A boy admitting he's hurting to a friend is so rare.

Right, and the girlfriends say he wasn't good enough for you anyway.

They support you.

And they actually love you more than you ever loved a boy. I mean, you have the biological crush on a boy, but the deep alliance. There's a word I'm going to use on the podcast this season. Okay. Which is Laotung, I believe it's Chinese, and it means old sames.

Yeah, I know, I love that.

And it's about old Chinese women who are closer to each other than any two sisters or any husband and wife have ever been.

They're like soulmates, sisters?

Old sames, yes, exactly.

I love it.

So these 16-year-old girls, they have their old sames already, and the boy has nobody but shame and embarrassed about his heartache. Who's he going to tell?

To be dumped is to be emasculated. It all funnels back into, yeah, you couldn't handle your woman.

And it's all public. You weren't virile enough to control her. She's dating this bad boy, and every girl likes to date a bad boy. Sorry, the other parents who are saying you better stop her from dating him. They're fun, and they're cute, and they're sexy, and it's not gonna last, most likely, but better to have a little opportunity to do that before you marry him.

Yeah, let's get wild, look.

And then you have to divorce him,

because that's what women do, they divorce him.

Those billionaires, probably. Yeah.

I'm not in that situation, so I can't really judge it, because I have yet to see heartbreak on my daughter's faces, but that is my expectation. I have no illusion that you can go on this ride through planet Earth and not have your heart broken and then learn from it and adjust and make different choices. You could potentially just rob your kid of ever figuring anything out, and they're maybe doomed to repeat everything. If you're just kind of cleaning up the mess behind them, I don't know exactly how they'd redirect.

It's also, it's not gonna fix it. She broke up with him. That doesn't change the heartache.

You can't make her like him. That's. the only solution to his pain, is for her to like him, and you're not gonna be able to accomplish that.

You can't control that.

What was the TV show that was so good, and I'm not gonna think of it, but there's a meme that emerged from it, and the meme was the sentence, what is grief but love, persevering? WandaVision. Thank you, Ronald. WandaVision. WandaVision, Wanda said it.

No, listen, let's just talk about Wobby Wobb for one second.

Oh, I could talk about Wobby Wobb forever. Isn't he spectacular? I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for him, and you know that.

He is so spectacular. He is like, I always say, in all these CIA movies, where there's like people inside the house, and there's a genius like in earshot that's figuring everything. No, no, go left here. No, there's a tunnel right there. That's Wobby.

So it's WandaVision, Wanda said it, and then it became a meme, and people started riffing on it, which is like, what is kimchi, but cabbage persevering? Really, really funny ones. The reason I bring it up is that there is no grief without love. There's no heartbreak without the ecstasy of a crush. What a drug that is.

We have a new season of Nurture vs. Nurture. What happened this season that was exciting for you?

Life season one, such a privilege.

It's a good group.

It's so diverse. So for each of the families, I got to find a word that's not translatable into English, that recognizing that our experiences are global, but that in other cultures, they have words to describe some of the painful or embarrassing or confusing things that happen to us, and in other cultures, they have a word for it, and everybody knows it. So that was so much fun. The creativity of that, of meeting these families, having a session with them, and then I had a big dictionary of words and finding the match and then describing in the outro the reason I picked that word and sort of summarizing what we had learned from the family. because that's really the way I felt, that every family taught us something profound.

Do you ever hear one laid out for you where you get a little panic, like, oof, I would do this segment on. Ellen called, I think, Ask Dr. Dax, and it was definitely fly by the seat of your pants, and these people would ask kind of relationship advice from the audience, and I loved it, but there was always this moment like mid-question, I'd start thinking like, whoo, do I have an answer for this? Was there anyone this season that you thought, oh man, this is a tough one, or do I have an answer for that? Or not?

Monica protected me from that, so if it happened, I don't remember it happening, and 45 years does give you a store of perspectives. When it does happen to me sometimes is when I'm giving a talk, and somebody says something from the audience. that is way out there, and you two do this too. Sure, at live shows.

We fielded a couple doozies.

Yeah, so the crowd work is, really. you have to be on your feet.

High wire act.

It's so exhilarating. Oh, yeah.

It's such a great drug, it's the best.

So do you work your way through it, or do you have to say, I don't know?

I'm such a know-it-all.

Yeah, sure.

Monica, you love this season?

Yeah, it's super fun. We have a lot of interesting post-pandemic-y conversations, which obviously affected all kids. There's some intense episodes.

Tell me about one, Monica.

Well, we have a single dad. That one is very heartbreaking, but hopeful, and what's fun about these episodes is they go all over the place. Even if they come in with a problem, it ends up being about something completely different, or we go in a much different direction with it. It's just lovely, and I don't have kids, and it's great. It was fun for me to edit.

Okay, great. So Tuesday, August 15th, the second season of Nurture vs. Nurture returns. I hope everyone checks it out. Most importantly, I would want everyone to know that there's so much levity, and it's so fun.

since you told us this,

but you wandered into the attic one day to talk about Nurture vs. Nurture season one, and we were right in the middle of some kind of disagreement or argument.

Oh, I remember that.

And you said to us, you guys are in the Beatles. Do not break up the Beatles. And I don't know why that cut through everything for both of us, but it was the most wonderful thing to hear.

It was very helpful.

We both feel so lucky, and we shan't ever want to leave the Beatles. Yeah. So we wanna thank you for that publicly. That was very helpful.

I don't remember saying that. I'm so happy I did.

You know, I've been working with my therapist on this concept that he says big S self and little S self. I don't know if you've ever heard that.

I haven't. What does the S stand for? Oh, self.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the S in self.

Got it, yeah.

So there's like little S self and there's big S self. And I have a very tenuous connection with spirituality or anything bigger than us. And I wrestle with it, it doesn't come easy for me. And big S self is a calling to think of you as some force of value that has some kind of celestial destination or some kind of importance that transcends all the minutia of all this, right? And so I will say this about kids.

The other part of the S or the other definition is spirit. And we get stuck thinking about big spirit as God.

Right, that's my hangup.

And some really old fashioned definition of God. And one of the cosmic impacts of plant medicine. now, and all the various serious research that's being done about it, a basic underlying concept is we are all knit and tied together. The trees to the other trees, the gorillas to the other gorillas, the gorillas to us. and the children's voices, their laughter, their silly songs, the pitter patter of their feet.

Yeah, yeah. I doubt there's a parent that hasn't had the thought that they're absolutely perfect. They come out absolutely perfect. And you can't see that in yourself, or I can't see that in myself. But to be able to just witness it is like a little bridge to thinking you're of value and you exist.

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

All right, be well. Bye.

How do we feel today? Today's a big day, even though, okay. I mean, I think we have to break the fourth wall today.

We do. Okay.

Because we're back wide as of today.

We're back wide as of two days, three days. Yeah. As of Monday.

As of Monday. Yeah.

Also on Monday, I wore a crazy outfit.

You did wear a crazy outfit and again, we're talking about your outfit on a fact check. that we're not supposed to do, but it's very cute.

Too much?

No, I like it.

Really? I mean, it's a huge swing. Yeah, but you can pull it off. It's because I have, I had such success with the jumpsuits.

Yeah, so now you're in your jumpsuit, era.