Dear Parents, You’re Right to Question This Stuff…
Weight loss drugs, the effects of lockdown, common-sense school policy response, and preparing moths for a world of flames.
Hello, good people! Last week, I mentioned a great podcast series which told the story of how millions of elementary students have been taught to read the wrong way. Many schools throughout the country have utilized a method for teaching reading that is not only inferior to traditional phonics, but which actively disrupts our kids’ ability to read well. Parents and their children are left to figure out how to undo the damage.
This week, another podcast has grabbed my attention. On her Honestly podcast, Bari Weiss hosted a debate about Ozempic, the diabetes treatment that has gone viral for its dramatic weight loss benefits. As practitioners begin to prescribe Ozempic for weight loss, it is poised to become the most profitable pharmaceutical drug in history. But is this a good thing? Or is it another cheap fix which will only exacerbate our disturbing health trends (eight of the ten leading causes of death are attributable to diet and lifestyle)? To answer that, three doctors weigh in, each with a starkly different opinion.
The whole thing is a must-listen for parents and conscientious citizens, but I want to highlight one particular quote that strikes at the issue I’d like to focus on today:
Weiss: When you step back and you do the sort of alien experiment (where aliens come to earth and view humanity through an unbiased lens)… it seems like a very strange reality that we’re living in where we medicate children by the tens of millions so they can spend all day in classes sitting still... And now, because they’re getting fat from sitting still, we’re going to inject them with a different medication because they’ve become so overweight. When did this become normal? Right? To make children dependent on drugs and big pharma forever seems like we’re living upside down.
We are. Weiss uses the alien experiment framing to make her point. In chapter 6 of Setting the Bar, I use fish and moths.
Flying to Our Own Demise (an excerpt from chapter 6)
I stared off the dock at the bait fish frantically circling an underwater light. As if choreographed, hundreds of them repeated the same counter-clockwise pattern over and over with no end in sight. Their whole lives, it seemed, would be nothing more than this circle. Brayden, my destruction-bent nine-year-old nephew threw a pebble at them. In perfect uniformity the entire collective darted right, before rapidly returning back into formation to resume their obsessive task.
“Why are they doing that?” Brayden wondered aloud.
“Because of the light.” my wife, Neely, responded.
“That’s stupid.” Brayden added.
Feeling the need, as usual, to shatter this simple moment with heavy life lessons, I interjected:
“It is just like humans and smartphones. These fish are driven by a biology that never could have expected a world of fluorescent, artificial underwater light. Like moths to the flame and humans to the infinite Instagram scroll, any other purpose has been overridden by a powerful, biological draw.”
“Oh. Well, I’m going inside,” says Brayden. Neely looks at me and shakes her head.
As ill-conceived as my message was for a third grader, it is a fundamental understanding for anyone concerned with living well in our bizarre modern world.
Our biology did not expect this world of incessant, hyper-normal stimuli, where the natural rewards that once helped us survive and thrive are now available in extreme, unnatural doses, often completely removed from the evolutionary benefits they once ensured. We need some sort of framework for mediating the complexities of modernity and our staggering technological advancements or we may spend our days as aimlessly as those bait fish.
Imagine that moths were somehow granted the same brain power that humans have and given access to the same scientific heritage and social structures. A super-intelligent moth civilization now populates the earth. But these moths are not prepared for the billions of artificial lights in industrialized societies. Wouldn’t it seem careless for these super-intelligent moths to ignore their inconvenient tendency to make kamikaze flights at fluorescent light bulbs? You’d expect their education system to devote a significant degree of attention to the dangers of flying towards light and how best to avoid this shocking demise.
Likewise, you’d expect our school systems to identify the primary threats to human flourishing and to work to offset them. The advance of technology has allowed for chemical combinations and constant sensory overload that our biology was not designed to handle. Our survival instincts tell us to gorge when we find high calorie food. We’re not built for a world of all-you-can-eat buffets and homes filled with cookies and dessert cereals—where you can sit inside in nearly every waking moment—where messenger notifications constantly beckon and algorithms always deliver the perfect video “up next.”
The Parent’s Predicament
As parents, we want to be able to trust that doctors will give us the best health advice and that we can send our kids to school and they’ll be taught the best way to read. We want to be able to trust that our government will give us sound nutritional advice and that our schools will not actively promote eating habits that come with destructive long term effects. We’d like to trust that our schools will teach our students what they need for their futures and that they will promote an environment where students can focus. As parents, we want to presume that what is normal is normal, or at least not that bad.
Unfortunately, far too often, doing what is normal virtually guarantees that our children will develop extremely destructive patterns. Which leads me to another fascinating piece of media that I came across last week…
This from the amazing psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt. The title, alone, captures the main point:
The New CDC Report Shows that Covid Added Little to Teen Mental Health Trends.
Covid has been a convenient scapegoat, but we should remember that all of this was well under way long before the March 2020 lockdowns.
In the January prior to our Covid lockdowns, I gave a talk to the faculty at my high school about the causes of our current mental health decline and the necessary solutions. By that point, we were years into what many had called a mental health epidemic. Every teacher had noticed it, but schools weren’t really doing anything about it. Then Covid came and we forgot that the state of mental health was already horrible.
Since March of 2020, we’ve tended to just blame everything that is going wrong on Covid—declining mental health, the teacher exodus, the brokenness of our education system, increased political polarity, etc. Covid might have exacerbated these issues, but it didn’t cause them.
So, what is the point of all of this?
First, I want to awaken more people to these realities so that we can demand better environments and create better environments. The CDC just released a large survey of teenagers from last year where they found that:
“In 2021 30% of females seriously considered attempting suicide—up nearly 60% from a decade ago and 57% felt persistently sad or hopeless—double that of boys.”
Meanwhile, safely pacified by their video games, boys continue to fall further behind their female peers in school while, also, seeing increases in major depressive episodes. And everyone is getting less physically healthy—which is to say, more likely to live limited, uncomfortable lives, saddled with preventable lifestyle related disease.
Given these realities, it seems like it would be totally un-radical for a school to say:
We are not serving ultra-processed foods here.
We are capping sugar in our cafeterias.
We are getting rid of soda and candy vending machines.
Every student will get PE every day.
We are banning smartphones throughout the school day.
We recommend that parents don’t give their children a smartphone until high-school (stick with flip phones before then).
We recommend that parents do not allow their children social media until high-school (which is in line with the bill that Senator Hawley is trying to pass).
I don’t know why every school wouldn’t look at the data and feel compelled to create such an environment. Spread the word!
My second point…
In many ways, it has never been harder to parent well. Too many talk themselves out of their intuition that something is very wrong. They try to convince themselves that they “turned out okay” so their kids will. They look at the world and feel overwhelmed, and so they just go with the flow. Another quote from the debate on Ozempic to give you an idea where going with the flow takes you:
Weiss: I want to step back and look at where we are as a culture. We’re living in a country in which one in six Americans take some kind of psychiatric drug—mostly anti-depressants, 25% of university students use adderal… 70% of Americans take at least one prescription medication, and now we’re giving them another drug for another problem that a lot of Americans are facing. I guess I want to ask, are we facing a fundamental change in how human beings in wealthy western countries live? Are we entering an era… where we can afford, because of prescription drugs, to eat badly, exercise rarely, stare at our phones all day… and then pump ourselves full of drugs that big pharma gets rich off of? Is that the future that we are tumbling towards, or perhaps already in?...
Dr. Vinay Prisad: To me, what you’re talking about is a dystopia. I mean, it is a hellscape where our lives are so ruined by what we think of as the conveniences of modernity that we have to medicate for all the side-effects of the convenience we’ve imposed in our lives. To me, it is a bleak hellscape that you describe.
The last thing I want to do is to leave you discouraged. For all its ills, this could be the best time ever to be alive. But only if you are willing to think differently. Your kids need you to think differently. They need to learn to think differently. Things aren’t getting any less complex.
Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to give a number of presentations to schools and parents about our environmental pitfalls and how to overcome them. I’ve made the slideshows for those presentations, as well as many other helpful resources, available to you at my website. I hope these help. Please let me know if there are more specific challenges you’d like me to address.
You can’t make everything perfect and you don’t need to start by trying to change the world, but you can do a lot better than what is normal. What is normal is not normal. What is normal leads to this.
Thank you very much for reading and sharing with anyone who you think would find value from this!
Have a great week! Carry the Fire!
Shane