In a conversational interview, Lewis Howes and Dr. Gabor Maté explore how modern parenting practices and societal structures contribute to childhood trauma and later mental and physical illness. Maté argues that a child's natural expression of anger is healthy, and punitive measures like time‑outs force children to choose between authentic emotion and attachment, leading to emotional suppression. This suppression, he explains, is a core mechanism behind depression and many illnesses. He contrasts Western punitive approaches with Indigenous child‑rearing, which emphasizes constant proximity and nourishment rather than discipline. The discussion expands to societal stressors: prenatal stress, early return to work for mothers, the breakdown of extended‑family support, and the cultural narrative of selfishness. Maté links parental stress to measurable physiological effects in children, such as elevated cortisol, and connects these stressors to rising rates of ADHD, depression, suicide, and addiction among youth. The conversation underscores an evolutionary perspective that humans are wired for connection and self‑regulation, which can only develop when environmental conditions meet those innate needs.
Chapters
I grew up in a household that was very stressful and chaotic and there wasn't stability.
So did my kids, by the way. Right.
And you're like the guy.
Right, But I wasn't the guy then.
You weren't the guy then.
Yeah.
So your kids had to, had some traumas that they had to face because of you and their parents.
It's not even a matter of skills learning, it's deeper than that because you don't have to teach any one day old baby how to express their emotions, do you? No. If they're sad, lonely, do you hear about it? If they're hungry or uncomfortable, do you hear about it? Of course you do. There's nothing to teach. There's a very famous Canadian psychologist, I don't know if he's been on your program, but he, he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. Interesting. In other words, anger in a two year old is not normal and we have to socialize it rather than. No. Interesting. Now there's nothing more natural than an angry 2 year old.
There's nothing more natural than an angry child.
They get frustrated, you know, they want a cookie, they get a cookie before.
They don't get what they want.
They want a cookie. You know, they want a cookie before dinner. And if you're a good parent, you're not going to give them a cookie before dinner. Right.
So when does you teach or when does someone learn how to not express anger? Every 10 minutes though.
Well, here's the point. If that 2 year old then starts screaming or throwing a tantrum, getting angry. If you say time out and you're not going to be with them now, you're presenting the child with a tragic dilemma. I can have my authentic emotion or I can have my relationship with my parent on whom my life depends. So I can be authentic or I can be attached in relationship, but I can't have both. Interesting.
Because if I'm not authentic or if I'm, if I'm authentic, then I'm going to be alone.
Exactly.
I'm going to be on timeout or whatever.
And to the child the timeout is.
Life threatening because you might be alone forever, right?
Yeah. This child doesn't know that, you see? Yeah. So basically you're threatening the child, threatening the child with depriving them of the greatest need, which is the connection with you, your love. Yeah, the love. Yeah.
No, but isn't there a point though? If you're a 21 year old man now and you're you know, screaming every 10 minutes because you don't get the cookie.
But that's not the answer, right? The answer is, answer is when they're screaming to pick them up, you're angry at daddy, aren't you? You really wish you had that cookie. Yeah. Oh, I get it. You know, and then the child relaxes and the anger moves through them. And you know what they learn? That anger is just something that moves through you. You can let go of it. If you don't see the child, don't accept the child emotion. They're gonna have to repress it, they'll.
Have to stuff it.
What's another word for stuffing? It's pushing down.
Trap it.
Yeah, pushing down. What's another word for pushing down? Depressing. Where does depression come from? It's not this disease. Depression comes from having had to push down your emotions. Literally you had to push down your emotions. In other words, why did you have to push down your emotions to stay connected to your parents? In other words, it was a coping mechanism. And what I'm saying is that a lot of illness, whether of the mind or the body or both, comes from coping mechanisms. There are normal coping mechanisms in response to an abnormal situation. It's not normal for a child to be banished from the presence of the parent. If you look at indigenous people, they carry their kids everywhere. The kids are always with their parents. And the, the pilgrims, when they arrived in North America, they're very upset with how the natives reared their children. You know why? Because the indigenous people did not hit their kids.
They didn't hit their kids.
They didn't hit their kids. And the Christians couldn't understand this, why.
They didn't, you know, beat, create obedience with them.
Right? Yeah, yeah.
So what do they do?
They nourish them. And when you nourish a child, see, nature has got a natural agenda, is that you should grow up to be a self regulated adult in connection with yourself and with other people. That's nature's agenda. It's like nature is an agenda for an acorn to become an oak tree. But an acorn doesn't spontaneously become an oak tree. It has to have the right conditions. So it's not a question of teaching the oak tree, the acorn to be an oak tree. Just give it the nourishment and the sunlight and the earth and irrigation that it needs. Its nature is to become an oak tree. The nature of human beings is to become self regulated, socially responsible creatures. That's how we evolved. Given the right conditions, that will Happen. So it's not a question of teaching all these things. Yeah, this is some teaching, but mostly it's the question of meeting children's needs, giving them the right conditions and then they will develop self regulation. They learn it because you're self legged. So they're watching you.
You're not reactive and explosive.
You know, you realize, oh, I'm angry, okay, I'm angry. But you're not screaming at the kid, you know. So in a right environment these traits spontaneously evolve or develop in a human being. So our society is always about how do we teach these skills and no skills. Well, teaching is important, but more important is the child's spontaneous growth given the right environment. And what I'm saying about this toxic culture, we don't give our kids the right environment.
Yeah, I mean you hear the number the statistic that 50% of marriages turn into divorce these days. And also probably I think when I had Esther Perel on I was like, how many of the 50% that are married are actually happy? It's a very small percentage too.
So I've had a marriage that we had a lot of unhappiness. We've married 53 years now. 53, yeah, we're very happy together now. You are, but we took a lot of work, a lot of commitment. But here's what I want to say. There's two ways you can tell if a marriage is unhappy. One is you can ask the parents. The other is you can measure the cortisol level of the children.
Oh wow.
Because the parents stresses affect the physiology of the child.
Oh man, my cortisol must have been off the charts. But I was all of us children.
Yeah, it probably would have been. And so in this society, and this is not the fault of individual parents, like it begins in the uterus actually already stresses on the pregnant woman will affect the physiology of the child. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. No, in this society so many pregnant women are so stressed. In the States particularly, I'm talking about.
More emotional stress because there's physical stress of like the body's expanding and growing and aches and pains. But the emotional stress, I mean the.
Emotional stress of having to the nervous system on the job or being in a difficult relationship. In one of the chapters in the book I talk about, it begins with the diary of my wife who was writing it when she was pregnant with one of our children about how unhappy she was. And she's talking to the infant saying please don't take this stress personally. And she wrote that and I quoted it in the method normal. And she knew what I didn't know. And she wasn't happy because of our relationship.
She was unhappy because of the relationship.
She was unhappy because of what was going on in her relationship with me. Being a workaholic doctor, Not.
Not being there, not being available emotionally or.
Exactly, exactly. And even blaming her, you know, for how I was feeling. Wow. So she's talking to this infant inside her. And that's how I opened one of the chapters. So already in the uterus, these stresses starts happening. A lot of evidence for that scientifically. Brain scans, blood work, all kinds of stuff. Then there's labor, which in our society is very often mechanical and emotionally very difficult. And in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. Now, that infant is meant to be with the mother for at least nine months. I would say years, but at least nine months. That infant is abandoned at two weeks. That's how they experience it.
Oh, man.
Even if they're looked after by someone else but the mother, the infant needs the mother's body.
Yeah, that was. My mom was working pretty. Probably pretty fast after each one of us were born. You know, had to go back to work and.
Yeah, yeah. And I'm not blaming the women. Right. They have no choice. Yes, I'm saying. But this society puts those stresses on women, it then doesn't support them through the pregnancy. Then it puts a lot. And not only that, we didn't grow up in individual, isolated nuclear families, did we? We evolved in small band hunter gatherer groups where people supported each other, where children were with adults all day, where adults collaborated. They had to. Otherwise they wouldn't have survived. Right. So that's where our nature actually evolved. So when you get to society, which tells you that people are by nature selfish and aggressive and competitive, which isolates mothers in separate homes where the community is more and more. You know, there's lots of work done by sociologists and others in the States about how communities are breaking down. There was that book Bowling Alone, some years ago, 20 years ago now, about the breakdown of community. So that people are not getting support and that means they're stressed and the.
Mothers are doing it all on their own.
Exactly right.
And they're also expecting the husband to, you know, work and also be at home, as opposed to reaching out to peers or family or friends.
Exactly. So it's a very unnatural culture. And no wonder so many kids are getting diagnosed. And with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder or depression, you know, there's article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago, also in the New York Times, I think about the rising rate of childhood and adolescent suicides in the U.S. it's mysterious. It's not mysterious. These kids are no longer having their developmental needs met. They feel alone and desperate and scared.
And then drug use is on the rise and addiction, and that's right.
So there's nothing mysterious about it. If you look at the cultural setting, it's only mysterious if we think we're dealing with isolated mental health issues or isolated physiological issues. Don't mean see the connections. Nothing mysterious. The things that are considered normal in society are not normal from the point of view of human life and human needs. The addictions that people develop are actually normal responses to an abnormal situation.
