Liberals need to ask some hard questions about why conservative kids are happier--and a lot less 'trans'
Conservative children have higher levels of happiness, joy in life, and enjoy greater mental health than kids in liberal families, according to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It wasn’t always so, his research found; prior to 2012 there were minimal political differences. After 2012, depression and anxiety digressed politically; liberal kids’ mental health sank, most markedly for teenage girls and young women, with boys not far behind. While many theorized they were depressed about the state of the world, Haidt notes that Barack Obama was President and had enacted liberal-friendly laws like gay marriage.
The author of the bestselling book The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Leonard Sax, notes the role political leanings play in the ‘gentle parenting’ style that many left-of-center parents have adopted. In the last ten years, he says, permissive parents are almost always on the left and they push back against advice regarding children’s needs for structure and boundaries. The best form of parenting, Sax argues, backed by many other researchers, is that which is both strict and loving and denies that’s a particularly conservative slant. It’s a practice that works on both sides of the political spectrum; only strict, or only loving, isn’t good for children. He encourages moving away from the ‘Children Rule’ model. He quotes a NY Times writer who predicts the next generation can “anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the over validation and under correction native to gentle parenting.”
Haidt has drawn a direct line between the decline in liberal kids’ mental health issues and the rise of social media which began around 2012. His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness extrapolates on this.
What it barely mentions, though, is perhaps the most mystifying phenomenon to arise from the Social Media Revolution: The rise of ‘trans kids’, in which a generation of children became convinced of a seemingly ludicrous idea no prior generation had entertained before: That they were ‘born in the wrong body’.
The desire to be the opposite sex has manifested itself in many ways over the course of human history, but never before had anyone thought that children could ‘know’ who they really were at a very early age and need to medically transition. It seems a uniquely progressive position; conservatives largely don’t support this and you don’t find too many ‘trans children’ in conservative families.
I’ve covered what I call the progressive ‘Project 2012’, the already-underway and highly successful effort to remake America ideologically in a ‘woke’, social justice image, in contrast to the far right’s outlined ‘Project 2025’, downloadable for free. What has been overlooked is a subset contribution to this bizarre ‘trans kid’ phenomenon that’s received little attention so far: The role of permissive, progressive parenting.
It’s in progressive families where young girls and women suffer the highest rates of mental distress, with liberal males not far behind, and both notably higher than conservative kids of either sex. Although females have always suffered especially from depression and anxiety, more so than males, and that’s regardless of political persuasion.
Liberalism is not a mental disease as some allege, and life isn’t necessarily hunky-dory for kids in conservative families, either. Every parent brings their own quirky craziness and emotional issues to the family, not to mention biases and prejudices. Try growing up gay and conservative Christian.
But it’s arguable that some liberal families, in an effort to raise tolerant, inclusive, independent kids, have allowed their unformed children too much freedom, and are afraid to exercise any sort of authority. Nor to think critically about what they hear at school, particularly after the rise of the gender-switching hucksters. The result is a growing number of of young people detransitioning, and parents grappling with the lifelong problems their formerly healthy children now face.
A hard look at progressive parenting
Children are treated by many progressive parents as mini-adults even as they’re sheltered and coddled and denied freedom. Haidt points to, as a major contributor to current Gen Z mental distress, the end of childhood filled with mostly unsupervised play, which is how the rest of us grew up before the rise of helicopter parents. ‘Mini-adults’, whose opinions must always be addressed and respected, in which children are asked to do things rather than told with no backtalk, is in contrast to the way my brother and I, and most kids we knew, were raised—regardless of familial political affiliation—little people with feelings, wants, desires, and certain rights, but not adults with the ability to make all our own decisions. We were, after all, still children.
Not a single one of us grew up in families which would have taken seriously, “I’d rather be a boy/girl.” Likely the most liberal parents would have said, “Fine, you can get a sex change when you’re an adult.”
For progressive parents today who aren’t at all happy about the kiddie transgender craze, and don’t believe their child was born in the wrong body, but dare not speak up, they’re often powerless against the authoritarian indoctrination of children in public education.
Some self- and group-analysis is in order for these parents, along with—and some are not going to like hearing this—maybe examining how conservative parents raise their own kids, particularly those who are concerned their kids might go 'trans'.
The genderwoo claptrap starts in school. So questions progressive parents need to ask are: How are conservative parents counteracting it? Are they sending their kids to private and charter schools? What do they say when their kid comes home and says they want to go on puberty blockers, or their pronouns are some weird collection of phonemes?
Conservative parents won’t have all the answers--having come from the United States, I can testify how many people raised in political and religious conservative families created distance upon adulthood, if not necessarily estrangement. If progressive parents may be dunned for over-permissiveness, plenty of conservative families lean towards authoritarianism, which isn’t easy to grow up with, either. But not all conservative families are as authoritarian as some might imagine. Just as not all liberal families are ultra, well, anarchic.
Neither type is perfect, but conservatives have a helluva lot fewer trans kids, who concomitantly report higher levels of happiness. It’s possible, as one essay points out, that liberals simply tend more toward depression than conservatives. It may not be easy to be gay, atheist, or insufficiently patriotic in a conservative family, but at least parents aren't ruining their children’s bodies with puberty prevention and cross-sex hormones, with zero knowledge as to how it will affect their fertility, sexual pleasure or lifetime happiness.
Progressive parents must think more critically than many are. Sex transitioning offers children a temporary and false fix for their perfectly normal adolescent turmoil, which they’ve not been taught adequately to handle. Cheerfully counseled by garish social media influencers, children are led to believe that whatever fears, anxieties, and concerns they have, the answer is quite simple: You were born in the wrong body! Transition now, and all will be well!
Except it’s not. As The Anxious Generation notes, social media is one of the primary, perhaps the primary reason liberal young people are experiencing a steep rise in mental distress.
Liberal girls, he notes, spent more time in person with friends than conservative girls until the early 2000s, but after social media, that dropped below conservative children’s time. Liberal kids spend more time than conservative kids on social media, the negative mental health detriments of which are described quite thoroughly in Haidt’s book.
Haidt advocates parents limit their children’s phone time to maybe an hour or two a day, but not on how to give them the backbone to do it. That would be a whole ‘nother book!
Disempowering messages
Social media, he notes, teaches a loss of locus of control—which describes a ‘malleable personality trait’ in which those with the locus “feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them.” Sixty years of research, Haidt notes, shows that those with internal locus of control are happier and achieve more.
The lie kids receive from influencer purveyors of ‘woke’ ideology, which pervades social media, is that the world is divided between good and bad people, the ‘marginalized’ are helpless and can’t do anything about it, white supremacy and patriarchy and transphobic TERFs and blah blah blah. It removes, in other words, the locus of control from children (and adults) who consume such messages.
Haidt notes Tumblr’s pioneering work in disempowering a generation of kids, described in the powerful Free Press podcast series, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which I highly recommend. Megan Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling over the course of six podcasts. Rowling watched from the beginning as her superfan base evolved with ‘streaks of cruelty’ and ‘exclusion’ present from the beginning, and how, as other experts pointed out, exploded with Tumblr’s popularity in the early 2010s. It’s within Tumblr where the nascent ‘woke’ ideas of fragility, victimhood, language, and harm ‘evolved and mixed’. It’s where the youth trans movement was essentially born, with endlessly-generated labels applied to permutations of feelings and mere personality quirks, and a growing self-invented notion that its adherents were endlessly persecuted.
And here we are today, because progressive parents seemingly don’t pay as much attention to where their kids are spending their time online.
The ‘trans kids’ phenomenon is a direct result of the explosion of social media, not some weird modern evolutionary aberration.
I will elaborate on that one glaring gap in Haidt’s book—the near-complete omission of the youth trans movement. It gets, literally, a brief mention on page 165 of the hardcover edition. Haidt is mystifyingly uncritical, noting, in an entire book on the impacts of social media on youth life, that social media trends ‘may’ be related in part to kiddie sex changes. He faintly parrots the woke party line, noting that ‘gender dysphoria’ has ‘long existed’ around the world, and that estimates of it may be lower because they were based on people who sought gender-reassignment surgery, which he calls ‘a vast understatement of the underlying population,’ harkening to the early movement responses to the question of where all the gender-confused kids suddenly came from: “Maybe many people always felt this way but they didn’t know what to do about it!”
I have an urge to feed him a cracker.
Haidt pays lip service to the idea that kids might just be ‘coming out’ in an era where the social stigma was less, and doesn’t address the political angle at all. I commented on one of his articles recently pointing his blindness out, seemingly ignorant of the horrendously toxic effects the social media-driven trans movement has had on clearly emotionally disturbed children and their families. I don’t know if he saw it but I’m fairly certain his assistant did.
Family as the enemy
The trans cult is every bit as powerful as the religious cults of the olden days—their heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There are forces at work today greater than the parental ability to resist, and children are taught to cut off their ‘toxic’ parents for daring to challenge or question in the slightest, however respectfully. In fact, ‘estranging’ from one’s parents has become the new ‘cool’ thing to do for many children and young people of privilege, who seek the slightest excuse to blow off their parents, go off on their own, and whine about how bad they think they had it.
As a writer at The Distance magazine notes, “Gender ideology treats the family as the enemy and enlists the state to enforce its edicts over families.”
Liberals, far more than conservatives, have brought this on themselves by clasping the mental health-destroying disempowerment messages to their bosom.
Perhaps what progressive parents face with a kid with alternative pronouns, dodgy new friends and a cheerleader teacher, is not an overhaul of their parenting skills, but a course correction, with help from right of center, non-overly-authoritarian conservative parents, rebuking the false notion that children are ‘little adults’ or that putting your foot down and uttering the forbidden word ‘No’ makes one Mommy or Daddy Dearest.
Conservative parents who believe more in strictness than loving could learn a few things too. Remember: It’s a balance, strictness and living, and it’s not a woke-style either-or choice.
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