Abigail Shrier: The Parent-Therapy Trap [The Knowledge Project Ep. #194]

Shane Parrish: I was thinking about how to start this conversation and I think we should actually start with the inverse [of what we’d typically do]. Instead of talking about how to raise strong, healthy, capable children who are independent, let’s ask, How would we raise them to be as mentally unstable as possible?

Abigail Shrier: That’s something I looked at. I’m a journalist. I interviewed a lot of experts—people who are familiar with the psychological research. Not the people who hold themselves out as mental health experts guiding everyone, but the people who are actually conducting and familiar with the psychological research. And if we wanted to make kids dysregulated, here’s what we would do. We would obsess over their emotions. We would ask them constantly how they were feeling about things. We would ask them to pay attention to their feelings, so therefore broadcast that their feelings were an important and reliable guide to how they were doing in life. We would treat them as very special and unique and isolated from everyone else, unique in the world. Never give them a sense that their actions had an effect on others, so therefore they had no responsibility to others to be a good citizen, whether that’s on an airplane or in a classroom, but constantly talk about them as unique.