Dr. Leonard Sacks is one of the leading voices on childhood and parenting in North America. He has been for two decades plus. He's a physician, psychologist, author of the well-received and

really best-selling, I think, we'll call him books, Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift, and

Girls on the Edge. The Collapse of Parenting, another book, first appeared in 2016, and we have now

a revised and updated edition, which speaks the importance of the topic, I think, and makes it

worthy of discussion today. Welcome, Dr. Sacks. Thanks for having me back.

We jump right into the book on our show.

First, the question, though, why you embarked on a new edition of this book with added material and a lot of updated evidence?

The book was out there.

Why did we need eight years later, I guess, another edition?

Absolutely.

So the collapse of parenting, the motivation for writing the book, which I was really writing

10 years ago back in 2014, was based on my experience as a family doctor, observing the transfer of authority from parents to kids.

Basically, if you think about it, every civilization is based on the foundation of parental authority.

In order for civilization to work, parents have to teach kids what kids need to know.

But as a family doctor, I have observed that parents now let kids decide what's for supper,

when to go to bed, what TV shows to watch, whether to have a phone in the bedroom.

And that was really not true 30 years ago when I was a young doctor, but by roughly 2010, it was increasingly true.

And that motivated me to write the first edition of the book, which came out in December 2015.

But over the last 10 years, it's gotten a lot worse.

And the book now opens with an astonishing example that happened about a year ago now.

So mom brings her daughter into the office.

Sick child, six-year-old girl, obviously sick.

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