In Friday’s “New Rules” segment on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the host slammed “gentle parenting,” calling for more discipline with children. He opened the segment with a nod to Father’s Day, stating, “If you really want to give your father something he’ll treasure forever, give him permission to be a dad like dads used to be.”
While Maher admitted that he’s not a parent himself, he responded to the critique by saying, “Yeah, I don’t give blowjobs either, but I can tell when someone is doing it wrong.”
The host complained about lax parenting, which he sees when being in the vicinity of parents and kids in public.
“I see parents in stores, kowtowing to brats like they’re congressmen graveling before Trump,” Maher said in another comparison.
He added that there has been concern about parents overindulging children as long as he’s been doing a show, which dates back to the early 1990s, but lamented that even after discussing “trophy syndrome,” “helicopter parenting” and “bulldozer parenting,” “it hasn’t gotten better.”
“Now we have Gentle Parenting — or as it used to be known, ‘negotiating with terrorists,’” Maher said.
The annoyed host harrumphed that gentle parenting advocates argue that you shouldn’t do something to a child that you wouldn’t like if it was done to you. Maher disagreed.
“Because they’re a child,” he said, to applause from his likeminded audience. “Would I like it if someone stripped me naked and plopped me down in a tub of water? No, but with a kid, that’s just bath time.”
“I keep hearing how parenting is so hard these days. Yeah, because you’re making it hard,” Maher said. He then compared “gentle parenting” to “a Taco Bell breakfast.”
“The reason it feels wrong is because it is,” Maher said to laughter and applause. “And it’s ruining lives on both sides of the equation.”
While he said that parents are turning themselves into “a butler to a 5-year-old,” the results aren’t creating happier kids. He noted statistics showing the average high schooler has the same level of anxiety as a psychiatric patient from the early 1950s.
“Our kids are crippled with anxiety because they haven’t been properly prepared for a world that doesn’t revolve around them,” Maher said, following that by noting how 10% of college students say they have PTSD.
“You’re not supposed to get PTSD in college, you’re supposed to get an STD,” Maher quipped.
He then asserted that the problem is “the adults, who forgot that, to a child, discipline is love, and kids need structure and authority.”
Maher argued that young people need to hear the word “no” and learn how much of life is about waiting, delivering a riff that received ongoing laughter and applause as the crowd identified with his point.
“A lot of life is waiting, yeah,” Maher began. “Waiting for your boss to recognize your worth. Waiting for love to bloom. Waiting for your career to take off. Waiting for your partner to be finished in the bathroom. Waiting for your porn to download, for your vape to charge, for the drugs to kick in. For your eyebrows to grow back after you do something stupid on drugs.”
“It’s vital you learn as a kid how much of life is going to be waiting,” Maher concluded.
He went on to praise the need for boundaries as he came back to the idea of a “trad dad” making a comeback.
“Not all the way back to the 1950s psychopath who never said he loved you and hit you with a belt,” Maher explained, “but just back to the dad who believes that ‘because I said so’ is a perfectly legitimate answer to any question a child may have.”
“Trad dads don’t negotiate,” Maher said, before running down some classic dad catchphrases. “They say, ‘You will apologize to your mother.’ ‘Don’t make me turn this car around.’ ‘Some things just happen because life is unfair.’ ‘Clean your room,’ ‘be quiet,’ ‘the adults are talking’ and ‘it’s not all about you.’”
“Mostly, a trad dad knows he’s your parent, not your friend,” Maher emphasized. “He’s simply a guy who understands the job: to raise an adult who can survive in the wild.”
Maher pointed to the Japanese TV show “Old Enough,” which features parents sending tiny toddlers out to do errands all on their own.
“Sometimes the kids cry and sometimes they come home with the wrong stuff, but that’s OK. That’s how you learn,” Maher said.
“Meanwhile, in this country, parents strap leashes to their kids like they’re escorting a serial killer on ‘Con Air,’” the host quipped.
“But what happens, what always happens when uber-liberal bulls–t goes too far, is it produces a far more damaging counter-reaction,” Maher added. “In the absence of traditional fathers, teenage boys these days are turning to meathead misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate.”
He went on to analyze Tate’s popularity among teen boys.
“Andrew Tate is a man who answers the question, ‘What if Axe Body Spray could talk?’” Maher said. “He’s so anti-woman, I don’t think he even has a mother. I think he was born when lightning struck a jug of protein powder. And now he’s your teenage son’s favorite thinker.”
Maher further noted that Tate is also a big fan of Donald Trump.
“So this Father’s Day, let’s give dear old Dad the gift of being dear old Dad,” Maher said as he finished the segment. “And also, shut up, he’s trying to watch the game.”
You can watch the full New Rules segment from “Real Time With Bill Maher,” above.
