We Raised a Generation of Hikikomori: Gentle Parenting Failed Gen Alpha

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm delve into the shocking new statistics regarding youth mental health. They challenge the common belief that social media is to blame for the decline, suggesting that a lack of hardship, discipline, and boundaries plays a more significant role. With numerous anecdotes and studies, they discuss the impact of 'gentle parenting' and how these practices may be contributing to an increase in anxiety, depression, and school absenteeism among kids. The conversation spans various topics including the unintended consequences of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the rise of therapy dependence, and potential cultural shifts among Gen Z. They also explore historical parenting practices and the importance of religious communities in providing support to modern families.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today's episode is going to be an interesting topic, or we are going to be going over new statistics on just how bad mental health is for the youth of this coming generation. It is worse than even the previous statistics may have indicated.

What is likely causing it? I think a lot of people blame it on social media.

Simone Collins: Oh, the phones. I'm

Malcolm Collins: so done with

Simone Collins: that.

Malcolm Collins: Enough. The stats just don't agree with this. And even, it's not even an issue of the stats. I can look to my generation and look at who was the early adopters of intense social media usage.

Like myself and my friend group. And they actually had much higher mental health outcomes than the groups that were not using social media. So what we should not have seen is the individuals who were most using social media first with, , better mental health. than the individuals who abstain from it in the early days.

I think that this is downstream of something [00:01:00] entirely different, specifically the lack of hardship, discipline, and boundaries that we are giving to young people. And the stats we're going to go over that are, are shocking. To, just to give you an example of like two that we're going to go over, 78 percent of parents in 2024 are practicing gentle parenting.

That's 78 percent by one study, 74 percent by a different study. That is terrifying. If it's as bad as I suspect it is. Are you going to share that clip

Simone Collins: that you shared with me on WhatsApp last night? Cause that was terrifying.

Malcolm Collins: She could be the next president.

Yeah. I think some people may assume when they hear me telling stories about how, when I lightly discipline a child in public, like even scolding them, I get accosted by people. And in this video, I think I'm pretty vindicated. You can see that any sane person would think this kid needs to be disciplined. But when people try to just restrain the child, other people are threatening to call the cops on them.

And then in a different instance, yelling, you don't know [00:02:00] what she's been through

Speaker 7: To go. Ooh. Ooh.

Oh s**t. Don't y'all do that to a little girl. Y'all don't know what she's going through. Hey, ,

Speaker 2: Damn it, I hate you! You're ruining my life! Please Herbert, [00:03:00] remember our agreement! We have an agreement about how we behave in a store, Herbert! Give me

Speaker 5: stop. Have you ever tried beating his ass? The belt.

Speaker 6: Faithful! You must have lost your gut!

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. The little girl who's like storming the store and like, they want like my kids doing that.

And I like disciplined them and everyone's like, how could you?

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, that's the crazy thing is I feel like you have caught more open animosity and public criticism for punishing our Children's bad behavior. There was orders of magnitude lower than that, but still bad, still openly bad and annoying than that girl's parents.

We're getting in that moment in Walmart as she was literally throwing bottles of sparkling beverage onto the ground and having the glass shatter and having liquid go everywhere. This

Malcolm Collins: was, yeah, her parents were getting less of a public freakout than I get for not even, [00:04:00]

Simone Collins: yeah, not even, you know, just being like, no, we're leaving now.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, these parents want their kids to not experience anger at all. I'm realizing you have to end the cycle of abuse. How? Yeah, they were like in the cycle. And I was like, how, how is that gonna help the kids? I love it when they're like, you know, if you don't do this with your kids, they won't do it with theirs.

Do you really want them to act this way towards their kids? I was like, Yes, obviously, please go.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like do, do I think that an evolved emotion, anger is supposed to communicate to other people that kids are not supposed to see that, that that's going to like be, but let's go to what, what happened from this because it was a secondary phenomenon that layered on top of this, which created Hikikomoros.

And this secondary phenomenon was what happened during covid the completely unjust and horrifying school closures that individuals lost their jobs and careers campaigning against like the lady who was next in line to be CEO of Levi's And they [00:05:00] canned her because she said this is disproportionately hurting poor children.

By the way, all the stats say she was right. But She clearly

Simone Collins: was. Everyone knows she was right.

Malcolm Collins: Everyone knows she

Simone Collins: was

Malcolm Collins: right. The virus, the Cordyceps virus, the urban monoculture is horrifying. It does not care about the damage it causes. But I want to read some quotes from an article that I thought was really interesting called Ghost Children, The Pupils Who Never Came Back After Lockdown, and this is from The Spectator.

Because after lockdown happened, there was this presumption that, like, we open up again and everyone comes back. And it just didn't happen. Like a huge chunk of the population just didn't come back.

And we'll go over the stats on this. But here are some anecdotal quotes from what's going on in the school system right now, from the perspective of people was in it.

A school counselor told me that countless kids sent to him for help fall into two groups. Either they are so crippled by anxiety or depression that they cannot leave the house, or they are angry and bitter, out on the [00:06:00] streets and into crime and gangs. One 14 year old girl told me, I just sit in my room.

It's an awful feeling, like really scary and lonely. A 16 year old boy I met on street street ham street hoodie pulled up over his Afro said. I'm upset I lost so much learning. I'm stressed. I don't get the grades I need for college. In the last full school term, the autumn of 2019, shortly before the start of the pandemic, just 60, 202 pupils were defined as severely absent.

That is spending more time out of classrooms than in them. Since then, despite schools opening, this number has shot up. Now over 140, 000. It went from 60, 000 to 140, 000, more than doubling. Children are classified as severely absent, according to the analysis of official figures by the CSJ. That's a 134 percent the increase of closing down 140 schools.

Despite recent efforts, The [00:07:00] numbers are continuing to surge. Children are turning their backs on education at an alarming pace warms the CSJ and here I will put a graph on screen of the number of kids who aren't coming back to schools. What is interesting is that a lot of people want to blame this just on covid.

But if you actually were to graph this, you can see the logarithmic increase beginning in 2017 and really going up in 2019 long before covid.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The, , gentle parenting book. It came out in 2016. So just consider that alongside this graph.

Malcolm Collins: But it's not just the usual suspects ghost children also exist among the high achieving middle classes One teacher in a london suburb at an all girls school rated quote unquote outstanding by aust fed Told me the mental health issues among my girls.

It's a pandemic in itself A third of my pupils only turn up intermittently. This is at an expensive all girls private school A third of the students are only turning up intermittently 30 girls have actually gone missing.

Simone Collins: How can parents [00:08:00] tolerate this? I mean, it's one thing I get, like, if it's public school, and you're not really into it, and your kid's not thriving there.

We'll get to

Malcolm Collins: what the parents are saying

Simone Collins: in just

Malcolm Collins: a second. Before the pandemic, the school expected many of these girls to go to university and enjoy a career. But lockdown, the teacher said, totally derailed their plans. Their parents would say their characters have changed. They are a different person now.

The pandemic has diminished their life chances. And here I note again, you see this trend before the lockdown. I think this is more downstream of gentle parenting than just COVID. I think it's a cumulation of COVID and gentle parenting and the real mimetic viruses that are sweeping through this generation.

And I think parents just don't understand what it's like to have mental viruses that are this overwhelming, this fascist in the way they impose themselves. I mean, it used to be the kids were scared because they go to school that had like these Judeo Christian value systems that they felt they didn't measure up to or they felt judged them.

[00:09:00] And they saw this as a horror. The problem is is now they go to schools and those schools are controlled by like three extremely aggressive cults that are like sending your kids to a school controlled by Scientologists when we were kids. I don't know

Simone Collins: Scientologist kids. Seemed to go to really cool private schools.

I'm just saying there was that one Scientology school that looked like a castle and no, these

Malcolm Collins: places are pretty horrifying. But I, I, if you, if you look at the stats on them, the, the, the point that I'm making is that the urban monoculture is so much more totalitarian and fascist in how it implements its value system than the Christians ever were when they were the culturally dominant faction and the horror that the kids go through growing up in a country that really is a dystopian A fascist state run by a cult is horrifying, especially if they don't have support back home and they do not and and support what support looks like is austerity and discipline.

It's not I love you and I support whatever you're doing, and we'll get to why that causes a lot of these [00:10:00] problems.

No to anyone here who wants to be like, oh, but the studies show gentle parenting works. I would one ask you to just exercise common sense, and to point out the other video we made the scientists lied about spanking, which goes into the coverup of. A bunch of studies where they basically fake the data in the eighties by not doing matching results to make it look like , spanking was causing negative effects on children.

When we now know that it doesn't in the large mega studies that have been done recently. Like the paper in 2023. , parental punishment. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. So for anyone who's like, oh, look at the studies. I'm like, oh, look at common sense. .

If you were reward negative behavior with attention, you are going to get more negative behavior and hypertensive type kids to negative stimuli.

Here or just look at like basic anecdotal evidence. So here is a piece that somebody wrote. , in the collegian. And I'll quote from it. When I nannied for millennial parents who raised their kids with quote unquote gentle parenting philosophy. I saw [00:11:00] disastrous results. This family was entirely based on communication.

This meant for every negative or positive emotion, one of the kids had, I would walk through it wisdom. I became the emotional regulator for three children under age eight, rather than administering consequences for bad behavior. I found myself trying to reason with a three-year-old having a tantrum after reminding him that throwing blocks at his sister was not kind.

Now to keep going, her school is not alone. Absence is now a feature of school life. Just under two million pupils, one in four of all school children are classified as persistently absent, i.

e. have an attendance rate of less than 90%. So one in our attending school, less than one out of 10 days um, double pre pandemic levels. The teacher explained that one single mother has had to give up her job to Concentrate full time on coaxing her daughter back into school despite the fact she is the breadwinner So it means real financial hardship.

Wait, so the mom who was the breadwinner of the family quit her [00:12:00] job I guess the dad's not in the picture it sounds like a dad or boyfriend is in the picture and the mom was supporting them to try to Because the male wasn't doing anything to try to force her kid back into school. Do and you'll you just force

Simone Collins: Why don't you drop them off and you're like good luck?

Malcolm Collins: Well, we'll talk about why the kids aren't doing this and what it's like to be around these kids because they they're really afraid Of any sort of like negative stimuli. Even though bullying rates have not increased bullying rates are still at around 20 percent and you know what we really need here is the clip from futurama.

Most, perhaps all, the blame rests with the parents. Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?

Malcolm Collins: Because I know this mom hasn't considered that if your home is not like, if my kid knows, oh yeah, I don't go home during the day because I'm going to get my butt whooped they'll understand the situation. They're like, ah, yeah, school is preferable.

Now that said, we actually plan to homeschool our kids and I am [00:13:00] concerned by how much my kid is enjoying school. Because

Simone Collins: we're never going to, force our kids into homeschool. They want to do kindergarten. They get to do kindergarten or they get to do public school or whatever. I

Malcolm Collins: always want public school to be the punishment by that.

What I mean is if they're falling behind in their homeschooling, it's public school, not a, I took you out of public school so I could homeschool you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and public school is not considered their education. It's considered an extracurricular. So, like, it's, it's like going to soccer camp. We wouldn't consider soccer camp your source of math education ever.

Just like, we wouldn't consider public school, your source of math or any education. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. All right. One girl told me her geography tutor had been really helpful, but that she had barely heard from the English staff at all. A boy described the impact of school indifference on his mood. The teachers didn't mark the work I had completed.

Not once, he says. With no feedback, this clever and competitive boy lost motivation. Confined to his room, he started to listen to rap [00:14:00] music, which fueled his frustration and rage. When school reopened, it was only the intervention of his parents and months of counseling. that turned him around. I was scared.

I had lost myself forever and become a different version of myself. They're just losing. They're losing hope. The viruses, the memetic viruses that are spreading that the cult is pushing on them thrive by breaking their connection to their families. But the families themselves aren't providing the environment that they need.

They're not providing the discipline they need. They're not because that's what's needed to relate to. to the harsh world we live in. These kids act like it's like the hardest time in history. And I'm like, go read about what it was like being a kid during like the yellow fever epidemic or like scarlet fever or like any of the past of the great depression in the United States.

You live an unimaginably cushy life. Your friends aren't like dying in their sleep. Most young people, they haven't even seen a dead body like, and that would have been normal before. And it is [00:15:00] horrifying to me. The cocoon has created a hypersensitivity around negative stimuli for these Children.

And it is really, and we'll go into this more, but, you know, we talk about all the times that, like, we go viral for punishing our kids to any extent and they're very light punishments that we've gone viral for, like, we do not, like, heavily punish our kids or anything like that, I think that that's, like, totally unnecessary, the pain should never be the point of a punishment, it should be The disapproval and a way to show that they did something wrong without necessarily emotionally escalating.

And this is unfortunately when I had to punish the kid when they're like, oh, you got angry at him. That was because I was afraid to hit the kid in front of other parents. Because I was like s**t i'm gonna so I have to get angry with him because emotional escalation was the only way to show Him he had messed up if it was at home.

I wouldn't have gotten angry at him. I just would have been like Bop. Okay, like, let's talk about this. Like, what did you do wrong? What are you not going to do in the future without emotionally escalating the situation that's forced you in that environment?

I [00:16:00] should note here. They're the big difference between kids and not all kids need corporal punishment to be the way that they are disciplined. However, all children do need some form of discipline. Something in their life that when they step over a boundary, isn't somebody calmly sitting down next to them and talking it through them.

But some sort of negative feedback, some sort of anger or,

Genuine disapproval and exclusion because if they don't. Learn how to deal with that. As a kid, they will not be able to deal with it in high school or in their adult lives. And they turn into these Hikikomori, which we're seeing an entire generation turn into. It is infinitely more abusive to your child to not ever expose them to negative stimuli, then even to expose them to fairly over the top negative stimuli.

I think, Simone, what you're missing here is as soon as a kid is allowed to hypersensitize to negative emotional stimuli, they can't be around [00:17:00] them at all. And so you can go home and say like, Hey, you know, two months of counseling to get him back to school. Hey, you know, you should go back to school.

You should, but if they're already hypersensitized to anyone disapproving of them, to anyone being angry at them, how are they going to survive in a school environment? Right? I

Simone Collins: think the more the way I see it in the way I've seen so many things like this and experienced it too, is. Everything is a muscle.

And so if you allow someone's social muscles, leaving the house muscles, dealing with adversity, muscles to atrophy, to the extent that our modern society and parenting norms allow them to atrophy, you're going to end up with severely kind of like those children, those feral children who grew up and never learned how to speak.

And then finally they get rescued and people try to give them language and they can't like, they never really develop language skills. I think that's happening. With some forms of resilience and inhibitory control now, I think we're seeing the, [00:18:00] the, the equivalent in terms of mental fortitude of different types and ability to focus and all these other things of feral children in a whole generation.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I think that parents when they're thinking about, like, what am I attempting to do? Like, when we look at parenting, I used to be like, everyone should parent in their own way. I am now no longer, like, no one should be gentle parenting. I just think it's a bad philosophy. I, I think that parenting without discipline, I is obviously going to be incredibly hurtful to the kids and your goal as a parent is to stoke the fire of the child's will as much as possible.

Their ambition there. And that's what these children don't have. The fire that lights their insides isn't there. Yeah, that, that is an interesting

Simone Collins: thing that accompanies the avoidance. And the fear is also this intense ennui, where ennui is not a good enough word. It's lying flat's better, you know, but that just zero drive or interest, [00:19:00] deep depression.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I wouldn't even say it's depression because depression rates are not that much higher. We'll get to this in a second. A lot of other mental health issues are, but depression is around 20%, which is what it was historically.

Nope. I was wrong about this depression rate. Shut up a ton the past 10 years. It's just that they were relatively stable until about the past 10 years. , this is specifically in young people.

oh, but what I'm

Simone Collins: insisting with depression here is just that, Lack of drive to do anything even get not

Malcolm Collins: real like clinical depression, but like, but it's it looks different than clinical depression It is on we as a better word for it as you said but the way I would word it best It's a lack of fire and in a recent episode We described the pronatalist movement as cucking society and I think that that's all our goals Not to cuck society in the way that people do.

Even sexually speaking, but I'd say, because as we pointed that episode, everyone was under 2. 1 kids is being cut by the people was over 2. 1 kids because functionally, you're contributing to a future. You're paying taxes to help raise genetic material. That's going to replace you intergenerationally speaking.

But [00:20:00] if you watch kaku chicks it's really like dramatic because they're much larger than even like the parents that are feeding them so like the kaku chicks, you know after they starve all the other little chicks in the nest They'll be like twice the size of the parent that is feeding them. And this is the way I feel that You as a pronatalist need to be raising your kids will to be it needs to be their soul their fire Inside of them.

They need to look like a little cuckoo chick when the the teacher is pathetically trying to feed them when the school system is pathetically attempting to discipline them in their weak weak way where they look weak and pathetic and tawdry next to this big burly will of a child

Speaker 11: Cuckoos are brood parasites that trick smaller birds into raising their chicks. In this video, a larger cuckoo chick is being fed by a smaller foster parent that mistakenly believes it's its own offspring.

Malcolm Collins: [00:21:00] because we have to replace them.

Their weakness leads to immorality. See our episode on weakness and immorality in Friedrich Nietzsche. Because that's what's downstream of allowing this to spread and metastasize. We have to replace them. And that is done through fostering your children's will, not through breaking it. And that's, this is another thing where I'm like, punish your kids, but do not punish them to break their will.

Punish them because you want them acting up in the type of way where they Frequently need to be punished. I think that this is a big difference between us and other parents where other parents punish their kids so that they eventually no longer have to punish them. Where I punish my kids so that I have a unique way of showing them where boundaries are so they can explore breaking boundaries more often while knowing very clearly when they have.

Now to go back to the article, young people moving on to sixth form college are particularly vulnerable. A [00:22:00] teacher in northeast of England says she has noticed the disappearance of a small number of 16 to 17 year olds from lessons. They enrolled in the sixth form in September, but I have never seen them.

She says, parents always give me the same reason for the children's absence. Their mental health is too fragile for them to attend class. Parents are at a loss and teachers are instructed by the authorities to not pursue an absence if it is for mental health reasons. We are told to just leave it be. You hope the services are there in the background, but we all know they aren't.

Speaker 8: Do you consider yourselves to be happy? I don't think I'm very happy. I always fall asleep to the sound of my own screams. Right. See, the reason that you are And then I always get woken up in the morning by the sound of my own screams. Do you think I'm unhappy?

Simone Collins: Oh, boy. Okay. Huh. That's, I did not expect that. No, no, it is

Malcolm Collins: bad. It is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. I'd actually [00:23:00] say, like, as I look more into the mental health stuff, and people would be like, oh, but don't you know the studies say that gentle parenting is good? And I'm like, yeah, and all the studies show that spanking was bad in the 80s, and then when we rerun them without bad fudge data, it turns out that the big meta studies on this, the most recent studies on this, are like, okay, actually, it was good.

Or or non effect and they're not controlling for genetic effects. So of course that means highly good. So the, the, the studies I just don't buy, like if you look at the basic psychology of this, of course, if you shield a child from negative stimuli, they're going to hypersensitize to it.

Simone Collins: Duh.

Malcolm Collins: Is that not what we're seeing?

What I hadn't realized is how big the number of parents were who were doing this, and that it really is explanatory of a lot of what's going on. More so than even the COVID lockdowns, because as you can see, the problem started before the COVID lockdowns. I'll correlate this with when genital parenting got popular as well.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: The, , gentle parenting book. It came out in 2016. So just consider that alongside this graph.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway meanwhile, the CSJ report makes it clear. [00:24:00] Oh, by the way, did you have anything you wanted to say about the, the fragile mental health of kids that they're talking about here?

Simone Collins: Just in contrast, having just finished Hannah's Children, that amazing print idolist book, I am thinking about the resilience and service done to kids who are in larger families because they simply, by existing with so many other siblings, are given responsibility, are given the opportunity to be selfless, are given challenges, are given, you know, First austerity in many cases that makes them resilient and makes them into much better people and all these descriptions in the interviews that take place in this book of teens are of people who absolutely have their moments where they're struggling with depression and go through tough moments because being a teen sucks and everyone goes through that.

I mean, most people do. You're going through a lot of hormonal fluctuations, but that New babies that they suddenly gets a care for and new responsibilities really just help them get over themselves [00:25:00] and it's so sad because it's what's also pointed out in this book. Is it a huge percentage of kids in developed countries, especially in the United States will never be exposed to an infant.

In their lifetime unless they have a kid themselves and, and at best has one sibling which is a very different dynamic. And I feel like I'm starting to realize that many of these issues that are seen now as. Do we go for normal, normal teens today are not, they're, they're more a product of teens growing up in very maladaptive environments that teens for the vast majority of human history have never experienced.

And that's scary.

Malcolm Collins: Meanwhile, as a CSJ report makes clear, the number of ghost children is set to multiply and will continue to do so for many years. So again, it's not just the pandemic that causes this, it's an increasing problem. This [00:26:00] is, they claim that this is due to the disastrous impact on lockdown on babies and young children who are now making their way through the education system.

As one primary school teacher said to me, it breaks my heart looking at the kids in my class. Either they are crippled by anxiety, or they're not. Or jumping off the walls. Basically, they are just not happy.

Simone Collins: Well, it means jumping off the walls, but he's jumping

Malcolm Collins: off the walls. That means you're doing a good job.

And that's, that's another,

Simone Collins: that's the classic issue of school now is, and why boys especially are suffering in school is teachers somehow think it's wrong that they can't sit down for hours. on end at desks. What on earth people?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I agree. This is about stoking their will. As we said, that's your job as a parent.

The head of one primary school explained to me, usually around half of pupils arrive at primary school, not ready to start lessons. After lockdown, this has jumped to more like 80%. Teachers are baffled to find four year olds barely able to say their name and still in nappies.

They are quick to blame the parents. No one [00:27:00] mentioned how the complete absence of statutory services over the pandemic took its toll. Lockdown all but halted early years provisions. Drop in baby and toddler groups stopped. Parks and playgrounds that were closed long after we knew the virus didn't spread outside again, like the mimetic virus worse than the real virus that it just delighted in totalitarian Lee of forcing these, these systems even more extraordinarily health visitors, a vital service.

And lifeline for new parents largely disappeared as did many GPs new mothers were riddled with anxiety Were their babies feeding properly gaining weight and the crushing fear for every new mother. Did their babies have a disability? They had no one to ask as one new mother said I feel very isolated and frightened.

This is my first child I don't know what normal is and I don't know where to find help parenting circle a charity which aims to improve children's school readiness points out that a five year old [00:28:00] who cannot play happily or speak properly is more likely to grow into a nine year old bully than a 13 year old with school attendance issues than a 15 year old who joins a gang and finally a 19 year old behind bars Unless serious remedial steps are taken to bring back the ghost children To stop their numbers growing, that will be their future.

It's a disaster for society and already. And I think basically what we're doing is we're raising a generation of Hikikomori's NEETs in the United States. There's already estimated to be 10 million. That means people who are not in employment education or training.

Simone Collins: Well, and I was just actually right before we hopped on this call talking with.

I won't, I won't name it, but a recruiter that we know who works in, in tech and startup in the UK, and he's talking about how talented grads in the UK, especially because that's like a talented grad coming from Oxford or Cambridge, like a top UK university is looking at a job that pays them. 30k a year.

They're just not taking the jobs. They're just not working because [00:29:00] there's no point. They can't buy a house on that salary. They can't do anything on that salary. So they're just not going to do it. And I think that's another problem that he said he was encountering in the job market when recruiting talent is that a lot of talent just doesn't want to work because Why that they're not going to be able to buy a house, you're not going to be able to buy a car.

They're not going to be able to start a family based on how people live lives now, because the way that our life is run per modern society's standards, which are completely out of whack are dysfunctional and to that point about parents being so isolated and really failing to thrive. I think this also highlights How the, the downfall of communities, especially religious communities that allow high fertility families to not just support each other, but mentor new young families.

Parents with no kids are causing knock on effects and societal downfall. You take away those communities and here now you have these isolated first time mothers who. They have no [00:30:00] idea how to do everything. Everything's so much harder when you are a parent of one child for the first time, the first time is always the hardest with everything, right?

Practice makes perfect. And so you have these parents who grew up isolated from other families who grew up with no guidance on what to do. So they think that everything's really hard because it is really hard for them. They don't have any more kids. And so they've made most of the sacrifices you have to make to become a parent and yet they get none of the rewards of, like, having a big family, none of the payback and nothing gets easier for them because they continue to not have that community to give some perspective and advice and support.

And I love that at the end of Hannah's children, the big piece of advice is. You have to bring back religious sovereignty. You have to allow religious communities to thrive and support each other. And you have to allow religious education to be executed without intervention and with support.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, absolutely.

And another thing you were talking about this morning that I'd love if you go into, before we go into more of the stats is how culture is changing among Gen Z because there is some [00:31:00] hope. You're saying that before the pandemic, that there was this culture of like in the dating scene.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Yeah. There's this, yeah, there's this Gen Z young lady writing on sub stack who was talking about dating culture. And I think a call her daddy 2018 at dating advice episode that was kind of foundational for Gen Z in terms of these are the tips. And it was like, Cheat or be cheated on and sugar daddies are okay.

And like, just basically go out, be unethical. Dating is war have sex. And then there was sort of this ethical reckoning where I think this is maybe around the pandemic or a little bit after 2018, where the culture did start to shift and people just wouldn't consider being so callous and so. Transactional anymore, even though maybe kind of, they still are, I think that was kind of the argument that you make.

Ultimately, I think

Malcolm Collins: the young generation, from what I've seen, is realizing The way their parents [00:32:00] are living isn't working. And this is what we're seeing. Yes. I think what you're also

Simone Collins: seeing is this in religiosity again.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. For the first time in American history, you are seeing an increase in conservative voting patterns.

What you are not seeing and what you're wrong. There is a rise in religiosity. This is a completely ephemeral phenomenon that people want to make up. Some religious communities notice some young people who formerly were not religious or not a religious families moving towards religiosity. The problem is, is this.

population is much smaller than the young people raised in religious families that are leaving. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. That's a fair point. The attrition is much larger than the people who are getting God now.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And so the people who are getting God, people are like, Oh, the, what you actually see in young people, what is actually exploding is an appreciation that some of the stuff thrown out as society secularized.

They shouldn't have thrown out, but when it's not happening, is it moving back towards traditional religious practices? And I have seen this [00:33:00] across the young people. I know they adopt religious practices that are much closer to ours like the ones who are actually thriving. There's like these small communities of like ortho bros and like, Like new catholics and stuff like that But they're not as big as the people raised to strict Catholic and Orthodox families who are leaving.

And they also do not seem to be finding partners or having kids. Which is really interesting. Whereas the people who are doing it more like you and I are doing it, which is like new religious ideas continuing to evolve and fortify religious practices to work in a new era. Pretty much all the ones I know, a lot of them are really young, but they're like getting married.

They have long term partners. They've made this s**t work. And that's been really surprising to me how effective they have been. And I think it's because they are approaching a lot of these things functionally. It's like I need to become a better person and adopt these religious [00:34:00] systems for the end of finding a partner, raising the next generation, continuing human civilization.

Whereas in this other community, it's more like a cargo cult where they think a cargo cult mixed with a religion, which is even worse. If they do all of the religious menstruations, then ministrations, ministrations,

Simone Collins: then

Malcolm Collins: they will be given a partner and kids and a good life. And that's not the way it works.

And so because they have this, it's their very faith that everything is going to work out that is destroying their lives. And it's, it's, it's sad to see, but yeah so if we want to talk about the rise of genital parenting two studies here one showed that 78 percent of parents in are adopting gentle parenting techniques.

This is a parenting style where you do not punish your kids, where you do not give them negative stimulation. Another shows 74%. So we're looking at like three of four millennial parents is doing gentle parenting. That means that they are trying [00:35:00] to raise children the way this study defined it without intimidation or punishment.

Horrifyingly mentally scarring to a child. And then another was talking about TikTok videos that have the hashtag gentle parenting have amassed a staggering 2. 5 billion views. And one thing I really want to emphasize here is this is the coward's way out. It is the easy solution. I love it how like people act when they see me punish my kid.

They're like, oh, he must have lost control or something, even though it's clear from even our own channel that we talked about bopping kids. We talked about the context in which we bought our kids. We talked about you know, how we do it.

We showed video of it, like way before any of these viral things happen, whether it was a guardian or, you know, me being in public recently or and. It's clear that like this is something we thought through to protect our kids. No parent wants to punish their child. No parent wants to punish their child.

That's the easy thing. Sitting down and trying to talk things through with your kids. [00:36:00] That's the easy thing. The hard thing is setting boundaries for them and boundaries that do not lessen their exuberance for life. When you sit down and you talk it through you, you know, Really lower the willingness of the kid to push boundaries in the future because you're making it look like they emotionally hurt you by It's, it's like, consider it this way.

Okay, so there's two scenarios, right? A kid does something he's not supposed to do, bop, go back to your desk, ignore it. He goes, Oh, I did something I wasn't supposed to do. I won't do that again.

Simone Collins: And they know that

Malcolm Collins: too. I mean, it's going to that point. It's not happening immediately afterwards. It's not like a, yeah.

You go down and you take that kid aside and you have this long conversation with him about how what he did is wrong. You're like really emotionally

Simone Collins: f*****g up that kid. No, you're rewarding the kid. Okay. If you, if a kid's acting up and then you take them aside and you get down on their level and you make eye contact with them and you [00:37:00] tell them about, Hey, how are you feeling?

Why did you do that? What are you doing? You're giving them one on one attention. That's a reward. You just rewarded your kid for having a freakout at the grocery store. What are they gonna do? They're gonna have more freakouts at the grocery store. Like I can't emphasize how stupid of an approach it is.

It's so bad.

Malcolm Collins: It's so bad. Oh my God. I need to pair the grocery store video with the boondocks episode.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Yes. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: 42 percent of teens now experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. This is from the center of disease control and prevention. And the closer you are to the urban monoculture, the worse all this is One in five LGBT teenagers attempted unaliving themselves in 2022.

And that's according to the Trevor project. That's bad. That's really bad. The problem was, oh, I forgot. It was even higher among the trans community, one in seven teenagers will experience a mental disorder by who [00:38:00] now three and five teenage girls reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks.

This is from the New York times three or five. So more than half of teen girls.

Simone Collins: Well, I

Malcolm Collins: don't know. That's

Simone Collins: Par for the question. Youth mental

Malcolm Collins: health hospitalizations have increased 124% from 2016 to 2022. I

Simone Collins: feel like that's criminalization also, like, you know, you, you call your doctor, you call anyone who's a professional now.

And say, Hey, my kids, you know. Why could frown? They'll be like, well, you better send them to the emergency room because there's so much fear around liability, which bothers me. So I feel like part of this is an institutional issue, but I hear you. This is bad.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, but the liability issue is like society is constantly blackmailing us.

Oh, yes

Simone Collins: And in fobbing things off to Yeah, they don't they're like,

Malcolm Collins: oh a kid's not coming to school. Well, I guess that's like it's like well I mean, obviously you need to be doing things different and they're like, I don't know like that's not like Talk about this too much, man. I'm [00:39:00] sure something will work out for them.

No, it won't. The cuckoos are eating all the food and that's the next generation's leaders. It is, it

Simone Collins: is.

Malcolm Collins: Or at least the leaders of the communities that are going to replace this portion of humanity.

55 percent of Gen Z and Millennials have been to therapy with over one in four planning to stay in it forever.

Over one in four Gen Z or Millennials plan to stay in therapy for the rest of their lives.

Simone Collins: We can't say it's not a cult anymore. We cannot say it's not a cult.

Excuse me, are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love and Yeah, this is it

Simone Collins: Therapy works when you stop. You know, when you stop therapy and you get out, that means it worked. And if people plan on staying in it for life, that means that your therapist is like,

Malcolm Collins: That means they built dependency or you're treating it like a religion or some sort of religious.

Is the holy guide to living pure, this will help explain. First, [00:40:00] Laughter. Her name's Lorraine, too? We're all Lorraine, and you will be Todd. A name chosen especially for you oh. You're not

An oppressed minority. you're a cult!

Malcolm Collins: No, it is.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess again, it is meant in our, in the urban monoculture. It is the thing that takes a place of religion. And that's honestly, when you, if you were to take recordings, and I hear this all the time about people talking about how important it is that your partner sees a therapist or that you see a therapist regularly.

If you just replace that and was like, you know, Seek goes to church on Sunday and believes in God and, you know, let's God, you know, lead their life choices. It would suddenly make sense. You know, like you really need really, you got to get your house in order, you know, go to church, you know, have, have a moral system in place.

And what has replaced that [00:41:00] is. therapy, which is, well, what's

Malcolm Collins: funny is it doesn't work as well. If you look at the statistics, it doesn't work rates and people seeing therapists versus the depression rates of people who go to church or the unaligning oneself rates, we will be like, Oh, it's correlation. You don't get to claim it's correlation when one in four millennials plan sustain it forever.

And 55 percent are going like, that's not a correlational issue. That's the therapy is causing the problem.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. But also I just, I can't get over. This realization that anxiety and, and depression and fear, they really are things that fill the void that opens up when your life is not full of things that matter.

And that includes, like, just disasters, you know, when, when, when the world is burning down, there's a war suddenly your depression and anxiety. There's no, there's literally no room for them, even when things are like, you know, especially when things are [00:42:00] disastrous, but also when you have, when you are full with work and meaningful stuff, and there's literally no room for anything else.

Again, there's no room for fear and anxiety and depression and malaise. And well, that's where religion religion doesn't fix this stuff. That's wrong. Religion. makes no room for the void that is filled by the bad stuff.

Malcolm Collins: I agree. And the next time Simone, somebody in a public context, like they did at hereticon pushes back against you disciplining your kids.

You need to point out to them that you not disciplining children is killing children. Not disciplining kids kills kids. Kids need discipline. Now here is, and I think that's good against a lot of what people assume is they're like, Oh, this new generation doesn't know how to use screens. They're like freaking out about it.

75 percent of Gen Z actively monitor their screen time. 75 percent monitor. What does it mean to

Simone Collins: actively monitor

Malcolm Collins: your screen? Like screen time tracking apps. Like how [00:43:00] much they're using different programs. You know, like the program.

Simone Collins: I don't use that. I know someone who uses it.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, well, these programs exist to allow you to track how much you're using different things.

People have used them for a long time, and 75 percent of Gen Z is using them. Gen Z is not out of control of screen time. It is not screen time that's causing this. Again, I can tell you, as somebody I definitely growing up middle school, high school spent probably six to seven hours a day in front of a screen when I wasn't at school.

Like the idea and I didn't have all of these, these issues, the idea, and I was on all of the chat room. I was on the worst of the chat rooms. I was on chat rooms before chat rooms had moderators. I was on chat rooms.

Simone Collins: Don't you remember? Oh my