How to Protect Children from the American Culture

Lecture Notes Summary

How to Protect Children from the American Culture

Dr. Leonard Sax

5/4/14

MCA Santa Clara, CA

The collapse of the American Community

• In the past 50 years, there was a major change in the American culture.
• Girls used to be connected with women who were not their mothers, through sewing circles, church groups, bowling leagues, informal gatherings - and these were organized by area so these were women in your neighborhood.
• Boys used to be connected with men who were not their fathers, through bowling leagues, union halls, Elks, Moose, working on cars. Found that the bowling team had 70 year old, 53, 24, 17, and 12 year old all on the same team.
• Now kids are going bowling, but with kids their own age, and boys and girls together - no connection to adults at all. 
• So we used to have a community of men mentoring and teaching boys and a community of women mentoring and teaching girls, but we don’t any longer.
• Bonds between generations have been severed.
• We used to take this transition to adulthood very seriously and we no longer do. The result is the decline and disintegration of masculinity among men. 
• Boys are not born knowing what it means to be a man. 
• Becoming a man is not something that automatically happens, it is something you have to make happen.
• I asked a group of boys - what does it mean to be a gentleman? No one knew the answer. Today the boys are clueless. 
• Boys do not naturally know how to be a gentleman, they have to be taught, and they need a community of men to teach them.

The collapse of the American Culture

• The culture that used to teach good values and behavior to kids is gone completely. 
• We used to talk about how to be a man, how to be a woman. Now the society is filling in what the child needs to know about being a man and woman.
• Video games teach a boy that a man has to race a car at 100mph. Meaning, a man is one who takes insane risks in their lives and risks the lives of others. 
• The TV, music, and movies used to send a clear message of what is expected of a man, woman. 
• In 1960-2000, the lead characters in a show showed that being a good member of the community, importance of family, being liked by friends, being trustworthy, honest, reliable and kind were what mattered most to them. This was the American popular culture of that time and it was healthy to be a part of this culture.
• Between 2000 and 2010 there was a sudden and large shift.
• Now it’s about being FAMOUS. This didn’t matter in the previous shows like Andy Griffith, Cosby Show - didn’t show up at all.
• For example the American Idol show is the #1 show - and this show teaches that the most important thing is winning and being famous. Being kind, honest, or trustworthy doesn’t matter.
• The longest running comedy - The Simpsons: The father is a lazy bum, the son is an idiot, the wife is sometimes clever sometimes not. The only one that is good is the daughter. No longer a message that ‘Father knows best’.
• The culture of today is Eminem, Simon Cowell who didn’t go to school, Justin Bieber. A BIG decline in 50 years. 
• They are no longer receiving the correct guidance from the community or from the culture.
• The new normal is having a lot of porn on your device and knowing how to play video games well. This is the new cool. 
• American culture is giving bad role models for girls - Fox, Jolie, Barrymore, Lohan, Gaga - these women are all cutters. 1 in 5 girls in any neighborhood are using razor blades or broken glass to cut themselves. 

What can you do? 

• Disconnect your child from the toxic culture
• Reconnect your children to you
• Reconnect your children to a healthy alternative culture
• Turn off the game devices
• Limit their use of the phone
• If you have another culture that is not American, strengthen that connection.
• Speak a language other than English at home. Study showed that this protects child and gives them a degree of insulation. Almost any culture in the world is better than American.
• Have the courage to not be an American parent.
• Find the right men to be the community of men for your child. A 20 year old might not know anything about being a man.
• Restore bonds across the generations

How to bridge the generations

• Eat dinner with your kids
• No devices allowed at the table
• Turn off screens during dinner
• Benefits of family dinner: A study studied mental health vs family dinners per week. The children who had 0 family dinners a week had the highest internal and external problems. The children who had 7 dinners a week with their family had the lowest. 
• So every meal matters.
• By 2005, it is down to 1/3 of teenagers eating at home with their parents.
• Introduce your son to your friends.
• Choose vacations that bridge generations: that means outdoors.
• Make sure you choose a place that has no internet.
• Prioritize connections with adults who share your views.

The shift from parents to peers

• Parents have to matter more than same age friends.
• In 1961, a study asked children, if their parents didn’t approve of them joining a club, they would not join. Now, if all their friends wanted them to join a club, they wouldn’t even ask their parents. 
• Kids used to care more about what their parents thought than what their friends thought.

The role of TV and media

• Disrespect to parents is coming from TV
• Even in Disney shows, the parents are either idiots or incompetent or absent all together. That’s how media displays family life.
• In the Main networks, the parents are either malicious, violent, dangerous, or absent. 
• It is rare to find a show with married parents who are intelligent and kind. 
• The kind of TV shows the kids watch greatly affect the children.
• Parental involvement does not protect kids.
• Watching it with the kid does not protect him. It doesn’t eliminate the harm of the program.
• The TV is becoming a super peer. The TV counts much more than a friend.
• They believe what they see on TV. TV has more authority than you do.
• You have to turn the TV off.
• Insist that you will not allow the child to be with other kids unless there is an adult with them supervising. And make sure to keep checking on them.
• You have to have the courage to say - I will look at everything on your device and I will limit what you can watch.
• Focus on content, not time. Even 20 minutes of network TV is very harmful. They will think that what they are watching is what is normal. 
• Realize that your kids won’t be popular. Being popular now means being disrespectful to adults, dressing immodestly, lying, cheating, doing sexual behavior. 
• Your job description is not to get them to love you, but to be honest and kind.

The biggest danger: online porn

• I want parents to be on guard. 
• Porn has become a defining feature of masculinity for American boys.
• I asked a group of 14 year old boys in the US - how many of you have porn on your device. Almost all the hands go up. 
• This is the new normal, the new cool.
• They lose the motivation to seek a real relationship, because the porn is more exciting. They will just want to be by themselves. They will not know how to have a good relationship. 

How to make your relationship with your child matter more than same age peers

• The younger the child, the easier it is. 
• Many are arranging playdates - no that’s not really appropriate. 
• What’s more important is that your 5 year old values spending time with you and other adults that you know and trust.
• You need to prioritize your relationship with your child.
• Peers offer no guidance or support.
• In college, a boy kept texting his mom because he had no clue how to do things on their own. Peers don’t teach these kinds of things.
• Parents have abdicated their authority to their children.
• The culture used to teach kids right from wrong but no longer does. So you have to teach them. You need to teach kids not to cheat because it’s wrong. Tell them you would rather they get a C honestly than an A by cheating.
• 20% of girls are cutting themselves. Non-suicidal cutting NSSI - where girls cut themselves usually on the upper inner thigh where they don’t think parents will see it. Why? Because they are so anxious.
• Anxiety has become very common, almost normal.
• This is because of valuing their image in front of their pees rather than the opinion of the parents. 
• They are anxious that their friendship might suddenly end in one night from any small thing - then she will tell her friends, then all the girls will hate her. Cutting relieves the anxiety and helps them relax - they feel up. It is similar to a drug addiction, because cutting releases opiates. It is just an addictive thing that relieves their anxiety, they are not trying to commit suicide.

The role of electronic devices

• Kids get less sleep. They are staying up late playing games or watching videos or photoshopping pictures for instagram, etc on their devices like phone, tablet, computer, tv.... 
• Then their grades start going down. So the mother takes the child to the doctor and says he is not paying attention in school. So the doctor starts adderall and the child starts doing better. That’s because adderal is like the drug speed - it compensates for sleep deprivation. It is a powerful stimulation - like drinking 4 cups of coffee. But the problem is stimulants have many health risks. 
• Only in the US, the psychiatrist can diagnose anyone with anything. The schools need the funding and they pressure the doctors.
• Recommendations: 40 minutes of video games a day on school days, 1 hour on weekends. 
• However, if the child is addicted, then they cannot play video games at all. Addiction is when the child can’t stop, stays up all night, and when you turn it off they become violent.
• Kids should not be allowed to buy or play M rated games, they are very violent and teach bad morals like killing police officers and women.
• Study show that kids who play M rated games become more hostile, more selfish, more violent, and dishonest.
• On the other hand, studies also show that video games do not help kids in any way, not in sports or in developing perseverance.
• A boy was very good in playing a football video game and he went to try out for the football team - he couldn’t even run to the end of the field he was so out of shape. So even though some games are not violent, they are still not useful. 
• After the US brought invested in bringing technology and internet into the classroom, the US schools rank has gone down drastically while other countries like Poland have increased their rank without making any investment in technology - but by hiring more teachers. Education is between the teacher and the student, it is not about screens.
• For the internet, the recommendation is no unsupervised use of the internet. You can install net nanny and net nanny mobile. With these, you can turn the internet off on their devices in the night or any time you want.
• For the cell phone, the recommendation is no smartphone until age 13. Install Net Nanny Mobile or MyMobileWatchdog. 
• No Iphones for any age. Because it does not have a monitoring software that cannot be disabled by the child.
• There is more to life than playing a video game.
• Playing video games changes a kids’ values.
• They start to value achievement in video games above achievement in the world.
• When two boys are playing cops and robbers in the playground, they are creating the scenario using their imagination - it’s a creative experience. But when they play a violent game on the computer - the child is just going through the motions, no creativity is used.
• Real world experience is better than sitting in front of the screen.
• There is so much to do outdoors, sports, talking to a friend, sleeping.
• When they get skilled at video games, they get less skilled in other things, like talking to people.
• Give your kids a chance to develop a wide range of interests and know how to talk to people. 
• The younger they are, and they get into a bad habit - the odds of quitting is very low. 
• A boy’s brain doesn’t reach maturity until 30 years of age - so a 13 year old does not have good judgement, you know better than they do. Parents need to be very firm.
• There was a mom who wouldn’t let her son play video games. He was always complaining to his mom about it. Then when he graduated he turned 18, went to college and got a job - he told her he was going to buy games and play them. Then later he called his mom and told her he sold the games. He saw how the other boys in his college were addicted to the games and he saw how it was a huge waste of time. 

What predicts success at age 30

• There was a study done about what predicts success at age 30. They followed a group of children until they reached 30. 
• success was defined as healthy, not addicted to drugs or alcohol, had a good income, and good life satisfaction.
• They found that it wasn’t the amount of education that predicted success. And it wasn’t if the child went to Harvard or Stanford.
• It was VIRTUE. 
• If the child was honest when they were 12 - they ended up being more successful than a child who went to Stanford but was not honest at age 12.
• Why? Because people who have good character and behavior are the ones who will be hired and promoted in their jobs. 
• When kids are virtuous when they are young, they are more likely to be virtuous when they are older.
• A study was done on what predicts spirituality in women and staying in a community of faith - overwhelmingly the father. Kids are looking to their father to see how important faith is. If the father doesn’t go - the kids won’t go when they are older.

About Leonard Sax MD PhD 
Dr. Sax is the founder and executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. His first book, Why Gender Matters: what parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences was published in hardcover by Doubleday (2005) and in an expanded softcover edition by Random House (2006). His second book, Boys Adrift: The five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys, was published by Basic Books in 2007; an expanded softcover edition was published in 2009. His third book, Girls on the Edge: the four factors driving the new crisis for girls, was published by Basic Books in 2010; the updated and revised softcover edition of Girls on the Edge was published in July 2011. 

website: 

http://www.leonardsax.com