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