A couple of points in background:

• If you’re talking to someone, and you stare over at something in the distance, or at the ceiling without saying anything about it, they will eventually look over to see what you’re looking at.
• If you reward, not just bad behavior, but counterproductive and self-destructive behavior, you’ll get more of it. It creates a “perverse incentive”.
• If you have a child, you know this. You may have learned some of it too late – indeed (spoiler) many parents today are – but eventually…
• If you don’t have kids – like a growing share of our nation’s teachers, psychologists, and child-policy wonks – you might know it. Or think you know it.
• Social contagions exist.

We’ll come back to each of those.

I could probably quote half of this interview in this post. It’s Ben Shapiro interviewing Abigail Shrier about what’s wrong with kids today:

It’s a well-spent hour, although you can’t speed Shapiro up, since he already sounds like he’s talking at double speed.

We’ll come back to that.

I detest generational politics; the Miillennial / Zeeper taste for blaming “boomers” for their problems is both an evasion and ancient (I keenly felt I was in direct competition with Baby Boomers too, when I was in college, uh, twenty years ago). I might be early Gen-X. Or I might be from “Generation Jones“, the kids who don’t remember the Beatles and, let’s be honest, didn’t spend a lot of time obsessing over their generation – just learned that one last week. Or I might still hold the notion of generational “identity” and politics in sneering contempt.

But just because you detest something doesn’t mean it isn’t coming for you.

The memes are everywhere: Gen-Xers bragging about how they drank from firehoses, stayed out until dark, rode bikes without helmets, and are just plain tougher than the Millennials and Zeeps that followed with their helicopter parents and gluten allergies.

And there may be something to that. Not about the generations themselves, but about how they were raised, and how their feelings were treated.

I’ve joked with my kids, and other younger people, that some of my teachers were World War 2 veterans. My high school chemistry teacher had been a Navy dive bomber pilot, who was fond of telling us that his radioman and tail gunner, whom he trusted with his life, was maybe a year or two older than us, and that he wouldn’t trust us to get the donuts from the bakery.

More on point? “Feelings” weren’t the coin of the realm. If you hadn’t learned the meaning of the word “no” at home, a teacher would set you firmly straight, then and there; some of the men at the tip of a big wooden paddle if it were serious enough – as opposed to medevacing you to a therapist, writing up a special ed plan, and pumping you full of ritalin.

You didn’t get a pass for feeling, or being, bullied. You dealt with them – by hitting back, telling them off, or learning to ignore them (I did a little of all three).

And if you felt, in your adolescent anomie, like you were really, I dunno, Napoleon Bonaparte, you were not hustled to a (let’s come up with a name) personality dysphoria clinic and pumped full of drugs to make you shorter, Corsican and a military genius. You were told “No. You are Jonny Schmidt, and always will be. Now do your homework”.

Sometime in the past forty years, that changed. The emphasis on parenting focused less on community, “normalcy”, and coping. Parenting (and teaching, and child psychology) became therapeutic pastimes, focusing on validation, feelings and perceptions (and, paradoxically, teaching the skills that parents taught Xers/Jonesers and before because a discipline in psychology, “Cognitive Therapy”, that actually works and charges a ton of money);

Anyway – just as people will look at the ceiling when you stare upward, kids who are constantly asked about whether they’re depressed, or suicidal, or suffering “Trauma” from some hurt in their past, or feeling like they’re the wrong gender, are going to start thinking they’re depressed, suicidal or bound by trauma, or the wrong gender. Or at least utterly unable to deal with adverse feelings and events productively (without the help of a cognitive therapist, anyway).

Which leads to a generation of people who not only have a tough time dealing with life, but with each other. Meaning no couples, no kids, no future.

And as it turns out, this is all borne out by research.

Give the interview a listen.