The Battle for Our Children’s Attention: How We Can Make Them Resilient In the Face of Society’s Negative Influences And Why We Need To Honor Gender Differences with Dr. Shefali

Dhru Purohit (0:00)

Dr. Shefali, welcome back to the podcast. Two new books, so excited. Raising Conscious Daughters, Raising Conscious Sons. I'm super pumped. I hope everybody in the audience, whether you want to be a parent one day, whether you're a grandparent, we have to understand something important from my perspective, and I'd love to start off here.

There's a battle going on right now.

And whether we realize it or not, as parents, as grandparents, as parents-to-be, we are on that battlefield. And the stakes are high. Could you describe the lay of the land as kind of like the benevolent general sitting on top of the mountain? What's going on in this battlefield? Who are the players that are there? And what's at stake?

Shefali Tsabary (0:42)

Yeah. And I hate calling our current reality a battlefield, right? But it is in many ways, and we need to be prepared. And the battlefield really is an algorithmic abduction of childhood. And with that comes our children's attention, our children's attachment, trust, and really a hijacking of their innocence, their sense of safety, belonging. And that's what's coming at our children, not only from technology, but from parents also being abducted. So a child gets their sense of self, inner coherence, well-being, a view of the world. Is the world a hostile place or is it a safe place? From its relationship with its earliest caregivers. Let's call them parents, right?

In yesteryear, it was the village, but now it's the parent. So I hate to put all the responsibility on the parent, but it is the parent in the modern nuclear family. So the child is looking to the parent to be validated, to get a sense of my feelings are worthy. They are right, and I want to be attuned to and soothe so that I can develop that inner strength on my own one day. If the child looks to the parent and the parent is distracted, the parent is anxious, the parent is dysregulated, then the child fails to get that consistent, coherent, external validation from which the child will develop an internal validation. When that constant nurturing is ruptured, fractured, disorganized, disconnected, that attachment system fails to provide the child with inner connection, and that's where dysfunction breeds itself.

You know in your own world, you see it all around you. We can't even wait at a train stop or a train station without checking our phones and constantly getting dopamine after dopamine. So the way I like to phrase it is that our girls are going through a crisis of selfhood and very unique pressures on her to be better, to be perfect, to be all things to all people. And boys are going through a crisis of masculinity, where they are being directionally challenged, meaning they are so overstimulated by dopamine that they don't know how to channel their sexuality, their testosterone, and they are imploding.

And girls internalize over anxious, over ruminate, over think, over ponder, over doubt. And boys are becoming numb and they don't have a place to put all their physical energy. Boys are physical primarily, girls are more emotional. And I don't mean to be reductive. You can have a very physical girl and a very emotional boy. But if I was to be very plain about it, each one's neurochemistry, the girls and the boys, are being uniquely threatened by technology. And technology understands brain chemistry better than we parents do. And that's why I chose to write books by sex, not to be reductive again, but to teach parents that we need to nurture each one's neurochemistry in a very particular way and understand our children's vulnerabilities in a very particular way. Otherwise, the algorithm will attack them and predate upon them, and we won't know how to help them.

Dhru Purohit (4:37)

What I'm hearing from you is that there is a real-time experiment, for the first time in human history, where we're no longer living in these tight-knit villages, which had its cons as well, too. But there was a lot of bonuses that were there.

There's a real-time experiment that's happening right now, not just on kids. It's easy to look at technology and say, it's technology's fault, it's just the kids, but it's also happening on adults as well, too.

Shefali Tsabary (5:03)

Yes.

Dhru Purohit (5:03)

That's the part that if we're going to be part of this conversation and learn and step into our power as conscious parents, we have to understand that we are also being manipulated, and we're putting that manipulation on our kids as well. Is that what I'm hearing from you?

Shefali Tsabary (5:17)

Yes. When I began teaching conscious parenting with my first book, The Conscious Parent, in 2010, back then I was teaching parents that in order to raise healthy children, we as parents need to raise our own inner children. If we don't heal ourselves and heal the belief systems that traumatize us or that create dysfunction in our minds and lives, we won't be able to raise healthy children.