"תום קרסטינג: "הורים צריכים באמת להתחיל לתפקד באמת כהורים

The Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. says one of the root causes of mental health issues is a lack of community and a spiritual crisis. Let's take a look at what he had to say about it. Listen. We're not just in a health crisis, but we're in a spiritual crisis. There's a purposelessness in their lives and no sense of usefulness or effectiveness or connectedness to their communities. And that drives also the chronic disease epidemic and the epidemics we're seeing of depression, of suicide, of alcoholism, of drug addiction. Tom, what's your take on what's behind the growing mental health crisis among today's youth? Well, to Kennedy's point, I agree. That's part of it for sure. If you look at stats back in 1930s, 1940s, 90% of millennials believed in God, where nowadays about a third believe in God. So something has changed there. Ronald Reagan once said, once we forget that we're a nation under God, we're a nation God under. So not even from a religious context, when I hear the word God, I think of light, right? And like darkness, like the word darkness, darkness isn't even real. It's just the absence of light. So there's no light shining in front of somebody who opens up the doors for darkness, also known as evil. But a lot of the stuff I've written about in my books and I lecture about all over the place is screen time. So when you look at the shifts in our society and these kinds of events, yes, school shootings have been going on, but just the increase in anxiety, the skyrocketing mental health epidemic among kids is consistent with when smartphones came out in 2012. You're talking about solutions here, saying that the human connection is really a critical cornerstone piece of improvement in this area. So how would you think that we could make a better space for community, encourage community family relationships and sort of turn people away from this spiritual drought that we're seeing? Yeah, I think what we need to do is like, you know, you hear all these movements about anti-gun, anti this and that, you know, and like Mother Teresa once said, you know, invite me to an anti-war rally, I will never attend, invite me to a peace rally and I'll be there. So it's sort of like we, I think the big megaphone that needs to be out there is that we need to start getting families. Parents need to really start, you know, I'm a parent, but they need to start parenting up. We need to start really building these relationships with our kids. They can't just be sitting in their bedroom on chat GPT, we don't even know what they're doing. We can't just be sitting there doing our own thing when our kids are doing their thing. I think that's got to be the broad message that's got to be driven into the psyches of every human being right now and I think we can turn things around if we do that. That opens up the doors for spirituality as well.