This Is Why Parenting Is Hard Today - How To Raise Healthy Kids In The Modern World | Dr. Gabor Maté

What advice do you have for parents who are raising kids in this world today so that they can raise them to the best of their ability? It's very difficult to raise kids these days because we're not living in a way that human beings evolved. Like every animal evolves in a certain environment and context and it's suited to that environment and context. If you want to understand elephants, don't study them in a zoo. Study them out in a forest or where they live, you know. And human beings, we no longer live in the environments even close to it in which we evolved out there in nature in small groups connected to each other. Parenting kids used to be a group activity. It happened in the tribe, in the clan. Parents had lots of support. Kids spent their whole day around their parents. It wasn't goodbye in the morning, hello in the evening. And most of our time is spent away from each other. That never used to be the case. Not to millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years. Now we can't go back to that life, you know. Nor would anybody want to necessarily, but we have to understand what we've lost. So first of all, you have to understand a few things. The great Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, who died about a year ago, he said that the greatest gift a parent can give to their child is his or her own happiness. So take care of your emotional states because your kid is sensitive enough to be downloading your emotional states and making them their own. So if you're stressed, unhappy, depressed, anxious, addicted, believe me, your kid is going to absorb all that and make it about themselves, that there's something wrong with them. So take care of yourself. Live a life that you can live with. And if you get the first three years right, by the way, you got it made. So when your kids are really small, consciously make the first three years as stress-free and as clear of psychological dysfunction as possible. That means work on your traumas. Work on your relationship with your partner, your spouse. That's the first thing. Begin with pregnancy, by the way, number one. Number two, understand what the needs of children are. Needs of children are for unconditional loving acceptance in the context of a secure relationship where the child doesn't have to work to make the relationship work. The acceptance and the regard should be unconditional. Allow the child to have all their emotions. Whatever the emotions are, let the child have them, understand them. Don't force them to suppress their emotions. I'm not saying be permissive with behaviors. I'm saying don't force the child to suppress their emotions. Don't tell them not to be angry. Don't tell them to cheer up when they're sad. Validate the anger. Validate the sadness. These are essential brain circuits for such feelings. Nature gave them those for a reason. Allow the child to experience them. That way they can stay connected to themselves. Thirdly, there's a need for spontaneous free play out in nature. Get the hell away from these devices. Don't give a one-year-old an iPad or a cell phone. Get rid of the screens in your house when your kids are small. Have a screen in a locked room for yourself if you need one. But don't be phoning and texting and emailing around your kids because the message they get is the device is more important than they are. Don't go for a walk with them and texting and looking at your cell at the same time. Don't give the kids these devices. They've been documentably shown to interfere with the healthy development of brain circuits. This has been shown on brain scans. So if I was raising kids today, I wouldn't let them near a screen for years. On the other hand, I would encourage them to be outdoors. Be with them. Play in nature. Spontaneous creative play. So these are the essential needs of children. I talk about them in this book. They're difficult to provide in this culture because if you do any of this stuff, you'll be an outlier. Because all your friends and all your kids' friends, parents, will be on their cell phones all the time. So you have to make a decision not to buy into the false values of this, what I call this toxic culture. So that's some basic advice, you know. Easily said. Hard to achieve. But at least these are the goals that we need to be striving for. I wish I had known this stuff when my kids were small. That's some great tips and I'm sure the audience is going to appreciate that. How do you feel, like where's the line with coddling and tough love when it comes to kids? Because I hear a lot of people talk about now that kids should be able to experience some levels of stress as they get older and adversity so that they can develop healthy coping mechanisms for when they're adults. Like, what's your take on that? Well, first of all, there's no such thing as tough love. There's either tough or there's love. But there's no such thing as tough love. By tough love, they usually mean punishment and rejection, which is unhelpful. That's the first thing. Discipline. We want to teach our kids discipline. Yes, we do. We don't want to teach it to them. We want them to develop discipline. But let's look at that word discipline. What's a disciple? Well, who follows you, yeah? Why do Jesus' disciples follow him? Because he loved them and they loved him. Kids, if we love them, they will follow us. They'll be our disciples. We don't have to force them into anything. It's the quality of the relationship and how gentle we are with them. Now, as to coddling kids, let them experience the stresses of life. Believe me, they will. That's how life is. We don't have to add extra stress to their lives by punishing them. They're going to have disappointments. Their friends will not want to play with them one day. Their cat will die. They may break a leg. They will lose a beloved object. Mom or dad may get sick. Their best friend may move away to a different town. These are the inevitable stresses of life. We don't have to impose stresses on kids. What we have to do is to help them cope with the stresses that naturally arise. That's not cuddling. When a kid has grief because their best friend moved away, you hold them and you say, that's really sad. That makes you feel sad, doesn't it? You don't buy them a toy to make them feel better. You let them have their sadness, but you support them in that sadness. Parents who cuddle their kids, try and protect them, try and bribe them, they're not helping their kids. But neither are parents helping their kids who punish their kids or who force their kids to suppress their natural emotions. Some great points. And I think what you said is spot on. You don't want to try to fix their problem. You want to support them through the problem so they can get used to having support and asking for support when they're going through hard times. The last question I want to ask as we kind of bring things somewhat full circle is I think a lot of the problems that we create for ourselves, whether it's using substances to numb pain, whether it's escaping by staying on our phones too long or being in the wrong relationships or whatever the case is, it's because we're afraid of being with ourselves and we're afraid of being ourselves and we're disconnected from who we are and we're lost. What are some ways that if somebody is listening to this and they feel like they're afraid of being themselves or feeling disconnected from their true self, how can they get back to that level of authenticity? Well, first of all, if I'm afraid to be with myself, there's a good reason for it. It's because when I was going through difficult stuff as an infant or a small child, I was left totally alone. And for the child, those states of fear or emotional pain are unbearable. Therefore, we fear being with ourselves. We always try and distract ourselves somehow, whatever that is, music or a book or some restless activity or television or talking to people, you know. But that fear of being with ourselves, that's a sign of trauma. So first of all, don't make yourself wrong for it. But understand that that too is a source in your life. And try to understand your story, why you might have developed that fear of yourself. And realize, and this takes meditation, it takes work, it takes body work, whatever it takes, that you're not that child anymore. That when you get triggered, if you learn what that's all about, you'll learn that you can actually handle that emotion. So it's okay for my wife to say no and I might say, okay, I'm disappointed. But I don't have to put myself and her through a big stressful drama because I'm still telling myself that I'm an abandoned infant, you know. So we need to strive to get into the present moment as much as possible. That may take spiritual work, that may take body work, that may take therapy, but it can be done. It might take connecting with nature, which is always present, but it can be done. I have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast whose kids or they have a loved one who is suffering from addiction right now. What is the most valuable thing that they could know when it comes to loving with somebody who's struggling with addiction? So I know we've been talking about my new book, The Myth of Normal, but for those people that are struggling with addiction in their lives, I also recommend my previous book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Ghost Encounters with Addiction. And there I engage with the very question you just asked. So my advice is to parents is that there's three things you can do with a loved one who's addicted. Two of them are sane. One of them is insane. What I don't believe is in tough love. There's either love or there's tough, but love is not tough and tough is not love. So there's three approaches. And I've had so many parents tell me that they're so regret their so-called tough love approaches, but that's the only thing they knew because that's what the experts told them. So there's three approaches parents you can take towards a child who's caught in the throes of addiction. Two of them are sane. As I said, one is insane. It's totally sane. First of all, you have to recognize something. The child's addiction is not an isolated phenomenon. The child's addiction is a manifestation of familial trauma. That child is simply the canary in the mine. They're the sensitive one who's manifesting all the suffering and multi-generational trauma, multi-generational trauma in your family. It's nobody's fault. As a parent, I passed my trauma onto my kids. I'm not saying that proudly, but I'm also not saying with full of shame anymore. It's just what happened because I didn't know any better. I did my best. You did your best. But if we're carrying trauma, our best includes the transmission of trauma to our kids so that your child's addiction is a manifestation not just of some pathology inside the child, but of a whole family dynamic. So are you willing to look at the whole family? Are you willing to use the child's addiction as a wake-up call for the whole family to engage in examining what happened to all of us here? The child happens to be the sensitive one, but they didn't cause it. It didn't start with them. So a sane approach is to say, I'll come back to this in a moment, but a sane approach is to say, we get it. Right now, your addiction is your attempt to deal with pain in your life, and you seem not to be able to do without it. We get it. We're not going to argue with you. We're not going to try and change you. We wish it was different for you, but we'll love you and accept you no matter what happens for you. And we're going to be there for you. We're not going to put up with being lied to. We're not going to put up with being stolen from, but we're going to love you, and we're going to be in your lives. And we're not going to try and change you because we realize that then change can only come from within yourself. That's a sane approach. Another equally valid approach is to say, sweetheart, we're not going to blame you for your addiction. We know that right now, this is what you feel you must do, but it's too painful for us. We can't be around it. We don't know how to handle it. So when you are willing to get some help and so on, please let us know. We'll be there for you. But right now, we just can't handle it. Not because of us, you, because we're not strong enough to handle it. That's honest. You say so lovingly, not with an attempt to manipulate the child, but just that's your truth. That's totally sane. What both approaches have in common is we're not going to try and change you. The third approach is we're going to be in your life and we're going to keep cajoling you and inducing you and threatening you and begging you to change. That's insane making. All you're going to do is get more resistance and you're going to make yourself crazy. So either, so both levels, either be with the person and accept them for who they are or accept them for who they are, but not be with them if you can't stand it. Whatever you do, don't put pressure on them to change because whenever there's pressure, there's going to be pushback. Now, interventions. Here's the intervention that I believe in. By the way, in the book, I quote this friend of mine, he's a psychiatrist and he's an American Lakota background. His name is Luis Mel Madrona and Luis says that in the Lakota tradition, in the Lakota Sioux tradition, when somebody got sick, the community gathered around them and they said, thank you, your illness manifests some dysfunction in the whole community. They're just showing us some imbalance in our whole community. So your healing is our healing. That's the kind of intervention I believe in. So the intervention that I believe in is, you've got this addiction. Thank you. The pain that you're trying to soothe is not just your pain, it's the pain of the whole multigenerational family and we're going to try and heal that pain and we invite you to join us. And if you're not ready to join us, that's okay. We're still going to do the work for ourselves. But we'd love it if you did join us in that work. That kind of intervention I believe in. But not just his words, but his actions. In other words, that the family uses the addiction in one individual as a wake-up call to deal with the multigenerational trauma in the whole family. That's a beautiful intervention. So that's my answer to those parents. And believe me, I know how difficult it is to have adult children who are struggling with issues, addiction or otherwise, but for a parent, there's no greater heartache. You have to resist the temptation to try and fix the kid so that you can feel better. That was phenomenal. And so well said, so well articulated. And I think people, parents listening to this are going to get so much value, not only in those last few minutes, but people are going to love this conversation. We went deep on so many things and I think people are going to want to read your new book. So if you could just share with the listeners, where's the best place for them to find the book? And what's the one thing you're most excited about with regards to it? Well, The Myth of Normal summarizes everything I've learned in decades of medical practice, also as a healer and also as a person very much engaged in my own healing, which is an ongoing process. It'll be published in 25 languages. It'll be published in the States, in the UK, in Canada where I live. You should be able to get it anywhere. I have a certain bias that people purchase books from local booksellers where those are available. They're endangered species. But of course, it's also available for pre-ordering online at the big online booksellers. I don't know what to name them. The publication date is September the 13th. So it's available in the immediate future or whenever you broadcast this particular episode, it should be available by the time people hear this particular conversation. And you can get it everywhere. The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And by the way, I wrote the book with my son and that itself was a way of working out our mutual trauma.