Tomorrow is Father’s Day (I count myself among dads since I’ve helped raise many ducklings), and in honor of the day, Bill Maher did a bit on Real Time about the decline of parenting. Here, despite his own dearth of offspring, he argues that dads today are “doing it wrong.” By that he means that child-raising has gone awry: parents seem to be overindulging their children in ways that don’t prepare them for the real world. One pet peeve is the new method of “gentle parenting” (e.g., do unto your children as you would want done unto you).

Here are four facts he gives (I’ve looked up the references):

From Robert Leahy in Psychology Today: “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s.”

This one creeps me out:

From the New York Post: “About one in five college graduates brought their parents with them to a job interview”.

That one is used to explain why employers aren’t hiring recent college grads.

From the National Institutes of Health:  “An estimated 49.5% of adolescents have a mental health disorder at some point in their lives.” This is the lifetime prevalence for children between 13 and 18.

And finally, from the NYT: “PTSD has surged among college students”.  From the article we see that it’s more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, and I presume the criteria used to assess the condition in the two years are the same:

Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.

The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.

Maher is a bit curmudgeonly here, especially for a non-parent, as he calls for more discipline and the setting of boundaries for children. He doesn’t want dads who were emotionally distant and beat their kids with a belt (that’s my own experience), but does want a “trad dad” who sets rules, givin as the reason “because I said so.” (Note, though, that back in the Fifties I had a leash like the kid who shows up at 7:45. That was because I was unruly in public places. But the fact that I was leashed like a dog still makes me squirm.)

Finally, Maher touts the misogynistic Andrew Tate as the totally inappropriate role model that young boys are seeking these days. I’ve never heard of Tate, but perhaps some readers have.

This isn’t as funny as the usual bits, and has a flavor of “get off my lawn,” but he might be right.  See below the video.

Remember this book? (Click on icon to go to the Amazon site.) I thought it was good, and offers an explanation for the fragility of young people today. It sold very well.

Now Jon Haidt, writing by himself, has a new one, and it’s sold like gangbusters, rising to the top of the NYT bestseller list. It’s about precisely what Maher’s talking about above, so before you dismiss Maher’s lucubrations, perhaps you should read the book.  I haven’t yet, but I bet it’s a bestseller because parents or would-be parents are buying it. And that probably means it contains stuff that rings true. If you’ve read it, weigh in below.