How to be bored — and 4 more real-world skills you can give your kids



Recent research appears to confirm what many older people have been noticing for years: Younger generations are falling behind on cognitive skills. Measured IQs are dropping, and abilities like verbal fluency and nonverbal reasoning are declining as well.

If we’re going to reverse this decline in the young, parents and older adults are going to have to do what you might call “re-parenting.” We’re going to have to teach young people some basic skills.

Thank God for Mrs. McGonnigle. She sat with me during lunch for an entire week doing flash cards until I had my times tables burned into my brain.

These are skills that we largely seem to have absorbed by osmosis in our youths. For a number of reasons, these younger generations haven't.

Digital deprivation

It’s not that kids are being born with fewer “hard-wired” smarts than before; it’s not that raw intelligence at birth is declining. Instead, it looks environmental, and the biggest culprit appears to be the “the rapid integration of digital technology into education.”

Bioinformatics researcher Shibasis Rath does a good job of putting complicated studies into plain English in his article “Is Gen Z the first generation less intelligent than their parents?”

The research in both Europe and the U.S. finds that younger generations show noticeable declines in their ability to reason abstractly, to solve novel problems on their own, and to engage in numerical/mathematical reasoning.

As Rath writes:

A large analysis of nearly 400,000 American adults tested between 2006 and 2018 found declines in verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, and matrix reasoning — key markers of fluid intelligence, or the ability to solve novel problems. Spatial reasoning showed modest improvement, but overall composite scores fell, with the sharpest declines among young adults aged 18 to 22.

What does the research suggest is the biggest culprit? Anyone who has watched a smartphone generation struggle with basic tasks will not be surprised.

Those interested in digging into the data can read some pertinent studies here and also here. To summarize, research on intelligence, measured by IQ and other tests, used to find a consistent upward trend over time. This is called the “Flynn Effect.”

From the 1930s to about 2000, researchers found IQs and mental skills rising in each subsequent generation. But then it flattened out. Worse, though, the curve started to decline around 2010; this was just a few years after the introduction of the smartphone.

Many people remarked that giving young people phones that let them outsource their thinking to a machine would lead nowhere good. But the pushback was, and is, loud and boisterous. Those who made such warnings were called “Luddites” and “Boomers.”

Math muddle

Well, it did happen. Think about how you’ve noticed that younger people are confused about how to deal with cash at stores. If they key in the wrong amount, they don’t know how to make change. This means they can’t do the simple arithmetic in their heads that people my age (51) and thereabouts do automatically. They don’t even know how to do simple subtraction on paper, because schools teach “new math.”

If you want to go down a nightmare rabbit hole of what public school math instruction looks like, start here.

This problem with math is mirrored in the ways reading is taught today, like using the discredited “whole language” approach instead of phonics. The series “Sold a Story” tells the tale in a compelling way.

If you still don’t believe today’s young people are floundering and adrift without basic skills, check out this demonstration from a college classroom. Before you watch this short video, understand that it’s not from a bottom-tier community college. These are Duke University students who have no idea which direction is north and who struggle, and fail, to read a simple road map.

The professor in that video is fighting the good fight with humor as he tries to skill-up his college students with the kind of knowledge older generations had by third or fourth grade. But he can’t do it alone. Teachers can’t do it alone, because the problem doesn’t start at school — it starts at home.

Phoning it in

It starts with parental mistakes. Not malice, not abuse, just honest mistakes. This is hard for parents to hear. Heck, it’s hard in 2026 for anyone to hear that they made a mistake or made the wrong choice. But we have to face the truth if we’re going to do better by our kids.

The first and biggest mistake was giving children smartphones at all. And no, they don’t “need” them. If a child needs to be able to call his parents wherever he is, a flip phone will do that without the collateral damage of instant access to violence and pornography right in Johnny’s pocket.

But it’s not just the obscene and damaging internet content that’s the problem. It’s deeper. When Johnny has a GPS system, a calculator, an AI “write my email” program in his hands, he’s going to use them instead of his brain.

So what are we to do? It’s time to be “old-fashioned” again. Wise parents will put their youngsters back in time and take away the digital crutches that have stunted their growth.

1. How to be bored

Take that smartphone away. No child 16 or under should have a smartphone. If you’re not willing to do this, close this tab and stop reading, because you’ve already decided you’re not going to help your kid grow. Yes, other kids, and other parents, will point out to your kid that “you’re the only one who doesn’t have one.” This is an excellent opportunity to impart that timeless parental wisdom: "If every kid jumped off a bridge ..."

For Gen X kids, boredom was the training ground of childhood — the quiet stretch of time that forced you to invent games, pick up a book, wander outside, or simply learn how to be alone with your own thoughts.

2. How to read a map

Buy your child a map of your city, and then expand to an atlas of your state. Sit down and show your kid how to read the map’s instructions (the legend that explains symbols), and plot out the route from your house to your kid’s school. Then have your child plot a route from his school to whatever his favorite destination in town might be. This has to be done by hand, writing down steps by hand, on real paper. Yes, it matters. No, typing doesn’t form the same neural connections. Then keep going to more complicated routes.

3. How to memorize math facts with flash cards

Does your daughter struggle with math? Does she have a hard time with arithmetic? It’s time for flash cards.

In third grade, I was the only kid in class who struggled to memorize his multiplication tables. Thank God for Mrs. McGonnigle. She sat with me during lunch for an entire week doing flash cards until I had my times tables burned into my brain. This kind of rote memorization is the nonnegotiable, must-have building block for moving on to long division, algebra, and more.

4. How to get places without a chauffeur

This one’s easy, and it will save you time: Stop driving your kid to school and everywhere else he wants to go. If school is a mile away, he can walk. I did, and most of you reading did too.

No, it’s not true that it’s “mostly too dangerous in these modern times.” That’s only true in some areas, but even parents in safe neighborhoods have fallen prey to hysteria; they won’t even let their kids ride bikes until sunset. Reverse that.

5. How to cook

Teach them basic cooking.

Not by directing them to a website with GPS-style “turn-by-turn” steps and directions — by showing them and getting them to put their hands on the mixing bowl and the stove along with you. You don’t need detailed recipes to teach basic cooking like pasta, grilled sandwiches, meat loaf, and other home staples.

Gen Z thinks DoorDash is “how food happens.” Teaching them kitchen skills will give them better physical health, it will save them money, and it will show them how much more affordable (and tasty) food can be. If you need a reference cookbook, I recommend the "Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook" (a 1980s version if you can find it). The book explains basic techniques in food preparation that make sense and all fit together.

RELATED: Cooking is easy; it's our modern anxiety that makes it hard

The Print Collector/Getty Images

Parents: I know it’s not easy. You’re swimming against a huge cultural and commercial tide that wants to swallow your kids’ minds and money. Tech companies don’t want to improve your kids’ quality of life — they want them dumbed down and dependent, and they’re doing a very fine job. Only you can stop this.

It will be lonely for a lot of you. Other parents will think you’re that kooky, crunchy mom or the too-strict dad. All your kids’ friends will poke fun if your daughter doesn’t have an iPhone. Yes, I’m afraid those things will happen.

But so what? You can handle this. Yes, you can. You know you can, because you know that you did when you were growing up.

You can turn this into a lesson for your children too. Model good responses for them. Be confident in how you let silly jabs roll off your back. Explain that there’s value and confidence in knowing how to help yourself. Yeah, your kids will roll their eyes a few times. But in 10 or 15 years, they’ll say, “Thanks, Mom and Dad.”

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'Bugonia' and Hollywood's most post-Christian Academy Awards yet



Last night’s Academy Awards brought the usual mix of celebration, surprises, and disappointment.

It also offered a revealing glimpse into how modern storytelling wrestles with the problem of human evil. Again and again, our stories invent new creators and judges — aliens, scientists, political systems — while avoiding the possibility that the answer might be the one Christianity has proposed all along.

Interestingly, the film’s bleak ending inadvertently highlights the beauty of the alternative.

We see this pattern clearly in this year’s Best Picture winner, "One Battle After Another." In that film, humanity’s problems are framed largely as political ones: injustice embedded in systems that must be overcome through struggle here on earth.

The problem of evil

The year’s other nominees approach the same problem from different angles. "Frankenstein" warns about the dangers of human beings assuming the role of creator, while "Sinners" treats Christianity itself as a corrupting force rather than a remedy for human brokenness. The stories differ in tone and message, but they circle the same question: Why does humanity repeatedly descend into violence, cruelty, and exploitation?

And then there's "Bugonia," Yorgos Lanthimos' ambitious science-fiction drama. Although the film failed to take home Best Picture or any of the four Oscars for which it was nominated, its unsettling message reveals much about our post-Christian frame of mind.

The film proposes a provocative premise: Humanity was seeded on Earth by extraterrestrial beings known as Andromedans. But when humanity fails to live up to their expectations — ravaging the planet, waging war, exploiting one another — the aliens decide to erase the experiment and reboot the world.

Spoiler alert: They succeed.

Failed experiment

In the film’s closing act, the Andromedans judge humanity irredeemable. Our history of violence, greed, and environmental destruction becomes the evidence against us. Like scientists abandoning a failed experiment, they extinguish the human race in order to start again.

The premise is morally haunting because it contains a kernel of truth. Humanity has indeed fallen short of what we know to be right. Our history is filled with wars, cruelty, and exploitation of both people and planet. Watching the film, you can almost understand why an external observer might conclude that humanity is incapable of redemption.

But the film’s central idea contains a deeper philosophical problem that it never addresses.

In "Bugonia," aliens replace God.

Persistent theory

Instead of an eternal Creator, we are told that advanced beings from another star system planted life on Earth. Humanity, in other words, is merely the product of a cosmic experiment. The idea echoes the pseudoscientific theories popularized decades ago by Swiss author Erich von Däniken, most famously in his 1968 best-seller "Chariots of the Gods?" He argued that ancient monuments and religious traditions were evidence that extraterrestrials had visited Earth and influenced — or even created — human civilization.

Despite the popularity of those claims, they have been widely rejected by scientists and historians as speculative at best and misleading at worst. Yet the underlying idea persists in popular culture, resurfacing in films, television shows, and speculative fiction like "Bugonia."

The problem is that such explanations never truly answer the deepest question. They merely move it one step back: If the Andromedans created humanity, who created them?

The difficulty with theories that attempt to explain existence without God is that they ultimately arrive at an illogical conclusion — that somehow the material universe emerged from nothing. Matter, life, and consciousness simply appeared. The universe, in effect, would have to create itself.

Every effect requires a cause. Every creation requires a creator. If alien life exists somewhere in the universe — and it very well may — those beings would still be part of the created order. They, too, would owe their existence to something greater and eternal.

A different story

"Bugonia" imagines alien overseers who judge humanity and wipe the slate clean when the experiment fails. But the story humanity actually lives in is far different.

According to Scripture, there was indeed a moment when God chose to “reset” the world. In the story of Noah, humanity had become so violent and corrupt that God sent a flood and preserved only Noah and his family to begin again. Humanity was, in a sense, rebooted.

But even after the flood, humanity fell short again. We continued to quarrel, exploit, and destroy. The human story remained one of brokenness mixed with moments of grace.

The difference between the God of Scripture and the Andromedans of "Bugonia" is not power. It is mercy.

The aliens in the film conclude that humanity’s failures justify annihilation. God reached a radically different conclusion. Rather than abandon His creation, He entered into it.

The eternal God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world — not to condemn humanity but to redeem it. Where the Andromedans choose extermination, God chooses sacrifice.

This is the heart of the Christian story. Humanity fails again and again. Yet instead of discarding us as a failed experiment, God offers forgiveness and transformation.

RELATED: What Shia LaBeouf's public struggle shows us about Christian redemption

MEGA/GC Images via Getty Images

Quiet revolution

Even then, the story does not become one of instant perfection. People who follow Christ still struggle. They still fall short. The difference is not that believers suddenly become flawless, but that they now have a path toward redemption.

One of the most profound summaries of that path comes from John the Baptist, who famously said of Christ: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Those few words describe the quiet revolution at the heart of Christianity. The transformation of humanity does not come from our own power or moral superiority. It comes from learning humility — placing God at the center rather than ourselves.

And that humility has consequences. A world shaped by self-interest breeds the very problems "Bugonia" highlights — violence, greed, environmental destruction, and exploitation. A world shaped by love of neighbor and reverence for a Creator begins to look very different.

Radical vision

Interestingly, the film’s bleak ending inadvertently highlights the beauty of the alternative.

In "Bugonia," humanity is judged solely by its failures. There is no grace, no redemption, no possibility that flawed beings might grow into something better.

The Christian story, by contrast, insists that redemption is the point of the whole drama. God promised after the flood that He would not destroy the world again in such a way. The ultimate reset came not through annihilation but through Christ — through renewal.

For all its imaginative power, "Bugonia" ultimately imagines a universe governed by distant creators who abandon their creation when it disappoints them.

The Christian vision offers something far more radical: a Creator who loves His creation enough to save it.

‘String Cheese’: Why an ‘American Idol’ audition is making millions of moms cry



These days, it feels like war is everywhere I turn. Culture wars on social media. Actual war on the news. Spiritual war invisibly raging all around. War inside me. Even the piling dishes and the toys that never stay tidy can feel like a kind of war.

But every now and then, a sunbeam pierces the thundercloud and silences the cacophony for a brief moment, allowing me to breathe and recenter. Sometimes it’s a timely sermon, other times a gentle breeze and birdsong. Coffee with a dear friend can do the trick.

'String Cheese' ministers to my weary soul by reminding me that what I call trials are actually gifts.

But this week, it was “American Idol” contestant Hannah Harper’s song “String Cheese.”

The name is silly; the lyrics are anything but. Right from the start — “I warm my morning coffee up for the third time” — I was smiling, nodding along in quiet recognition. Then the line, “Babies crying, it's pure chaos, but I don't miss a beat,” hit, and my eyes filled. Tears streamed until the final note.

And I’m certainly not the only one reaching for the tissue box. Harper’s anthem about the realities of motherhood has touched the hearts of millions in the six weeks since it went viral.

On February 2, the 25-year-old Missouri mother of three — dressed in a homemade patchwork mid-length dress, her strawberry curls pinned atop her head — proved her talent for both singing and song-writing when she auditioned for the 24th “American Idol” contest by performing her original song.

It was an unsurprising unanimous yes from judges Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, and Lionel Richie — and seemingly from America herself. “String Cheese” has racked up millions of views (and tears), peaked at No. 14 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart, and has already become one of the most viewed Idol audition moments in the show’s history.

Suffering through the storm

It’s not like there’s a shortage of music that tugs on our heartstrings, so what about Harper’s country-style ballad is resonating with so many Americans?

I think there are two main reasons.

The first is that there’s something for nearly every woman in this song.

For the new mom under the black cloud of postpartum depression, whose motherhood feels more like a curse than a blessing, “String Cheese” offers the kind of encouragement only empathy can provide. Harper vulnerably confessed in her audition that the song was inspired by her struggles with postpartum depression.

“My youngest is 1, and shortly after he was born, I had postpartum depression, and so I was sitting on my couch ... I was just having a pity party, praying that the Lord would calm my spirit. ... I got up off the couch, and I quit throwing a pity party ... so I wrote this song,” she told the judges.

“Some days I wanna cry, run away and hide / But I worry about their every need,” goes one verse.

Any mother who’s been in the throes of PPD knows this feeling in her bones. The sleep deprivation, the hormonal landslide that occurs after birth, the endless needs, ceaseless crying, and lack of time to meet your own basic needs start to amount to something truly terrifying.

Suddenly, the walls begin to close in, and your biological self-defense mechanisms start screaming at you to flee. But something even stronger — a deep, primitive force that almost scares you — compels you to stay even as you wither. The mere thought of your child’s needs being met by anyone other than you is enough to keep you rooted to his or her side.

So you stay, and you suffer until the storm eventually passes.

RELATED: The viral country anthem that has girlboss Twitter melting down and trad women cheering

Astrida Valigorsky/WireImage | Getty Images

When 'touched out' turns existential

The song also offers a beautiful perspective to the overwhelmed mother, just trying to make it through another day of nonstop demands, tantrums, obligations, and messes.

“When I'm overwhelmed and touched out

They come climbin' up on the couch

Sayin', 'Mama, can you open my string cheese?'"

Sometimes a simple snack request when you’re just trying to catch your breath is the drop in the bucket that tips the scale. For me, it’s seeing tiny, sticky fingerprints on a surface I just cleaned. Every mom has that thing that takes her from typical stress levels to existential crisis.

It’s tempting sometimes to fantasize about the days when life will be easier, quieter, and cleaner, but Harper sends mothers to their knees with this reminder:

“One day I’ll be alone with a hot fresh cup of joe,

Wishing that someone would just drop by.

And I’ll sit and reminisce on times that I sure miss

Scattered toys and a baby on my hip.

I thought finding peace in the quiet’s what I wanted,

But I’d do anything to go back to being needed.”

For the mom struggling to keep her head above the rising tide, “String Cheese” is not only the promise that she won’t drown but that the water isn’t as deep as she thinks. In fact, there will come a day, and soon, when she will long for the feeling of waves lapping at her chin.

Saved from waste

And finally, this tearful anthem is for the woman who is afraid of motherhood. Maybe she feels she doesn’t have the resources — financial, time, emotional, or otherwise — to be a good mom. Maybe she’s bought the feminist lie that motherhood is an unwelcome burden, a barrier to her personal ambitions and dreams, or simply more effort than it’s worth.

Two short lines are the timely message this startlingly large population of women need to hear:

“I never knew this is what my 20s would look like,

But they saved me before I had the chance to waste my life.”

The moment when a mother first looks in her baby’s face, something remarkable happens: All the things she once fretted over — time, money, preparedness, even happiness — lose their power, and a life without that child becomes unthinkable. The career, the travel bucket list, the free time, the clean house, the bank account, the mental stability all take their rightful place behind the tiny, wriggling creature in her arms. She knows that to have everything she ever dreamed of — but not the child — would be exactly as Harper says: a waste of life.

With the exception of the gospel, this is the most important message young women in America need to hear today.

Three women

I think “String Cheese” hits me so deeply because I am all three of these women. I’ve been the new adult in my early 20s, terrified of motherhood, barely capable of caring for myself, unsure that a swanky downtown loft and a cool-girl job that allowed me to travel wasn’t the better path. I’ve been the newly married woman in my mid-20s, wondering how on earth we’d afford a baby.

I’ve been the new mom, crushed by the reality of caring for a newborn who didn’t sleep, nurse, or stop crying for months and months and months (and then some more months).

Today, I am the mom who is just trying to make it through another day of work, meeting the emotional and physical needs of an almost 2-year-old who never stops moving (and still doesn’t sleep that great), housekeeping, and the ceaseless task of keeping tummies full.

“String Cheese” ministers to my weary soul by reminding me that what I call trials are actually gifts.

But it does something else for me too. It pulls my gaze in the right direction: down. Down to the blue eyes and the chocolate-smudged mouth that says “mama” 800 times a day.

And that’s the second reason this song is striking such a chord with so many Americans right now — women and men alike. Every day we watch the world grow more dystopian, as wars rage overseas, political divides deepen at home, and AI swallows entire industries whole. We fret over our children's futures, yet in that very worry, we often overlook one of their most basic needs: our full attunement. This song adjusts our posture in the most simple but profound of ways.

Win or lose, Hannah Harper is already an American idol. In one simple song, she has reminded us that the most profound victories aren't won on distant battlefields or in viral debates. They’re won right here in the ordinary, messy, sacred trenches of the home, where a child's small request for string cheese is really a divine invitation to love fiercely, stay present, and choose joy amid the storms.

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Wake-Up Call for a Sleeping Giant

China is engaged in the largest military buildup in modern history. It has both Washington and world domination in its sights. To prevent the cataclysm of great power war, the United States must revamp its industrial base and once again prioritize manufacturing.

The post Wake-Up Call for a Sleeping Giant appeared first on .

Profiles in Terror

For those who need reminding, the late 1970s were a truly awful stretch for the United States of America: from stagflation at home to the Soviet Union and friends on the march in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America, to the Khomeini revolution in Iran. David Frum's account of the period, How We Got Here, should be required reading for anyone under 40 now complaining that Ronald Reagan's conservatism didn't amount to a hill of beans in staving off national disaster. We were, as they say, thisclose.

The post Profiles in Terror appeared first on .

Naughty by Nature?

It is hard to read any article or book about what ails children today without encountering a discussion of "ACEs," or "adverse childhood experiences." Doctors, teachers, therapists, and pundits now regularly talk about ACEs—which include parental divorce, alcoholism, poverty, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, death of a parent, etc.—with what sounds like the same kind of biological certainty as, say, blood pressure or cholesterol levels. We can just add these factors up and then spit out a "score," which will then tell us the likelihood that you will become a functional adult. If your score is too high, we can take a "trauma-informed" approach to fixing you. In his new book, The Nature of Nurture, child psychologist and UC Davis professor Jay Belsky acknowledges that these experiences have an impact on adulthood. But he offers a different way of understanding the connection. He wants us to consider the possibility that while the development of these victimized children may be different from what we consider to be good or normal, nothing has gone "awry" in their trajectory from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary theory suggests that individuals are driven to behave in certain ways not just to promote their own survival but to ensure the survival of their genes.

The post Naughty by Nature? appeared first on .

Chosen to Make America’s Toys

The People of the Book, it turns out, are also the people of the Teddy Bear, Barbie, and Batman.

The post Chosen to Make America’s Toys appeared first on .

'LATE' HATE: Even Hollywood is sick of Colbert's endless pity party



Quentin Tarantino is going way out of his comfort zone with his next project.

No grind-house gore, 1970s-style banter, or even bare feet. Tarantino’s new project is a play, not a movie. “The Popinjay Cavalier,” to open in London’s West End next year, is an 1830s-set comic farce.

'We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.'

It sounds like a twee Wes Anderson project, but it’s merely the Oscar winner stretching his creative wings for a new kind of story, all the while stalling on what his 10th and final film will be.

Here’s guessing Rosanna Arquette won’t be invited to opening night …

Crock lobster

Should late-night TV shows go the “legal notes” route? We’ve already seen “The View” adopt that survival strategy after one too many Fake News stories.

Colbert and Co. are often just as bad, and this week, they’re even worse. The usual late-night suspects ripped into Team Trump for spending way too much on surf and turf. The phony narrative ignored historical precedent. The U.S. military routinely treats soldiers to great grub to thank them for putting their lives on the line.

To hear folks like Seth Meyers tell it, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is eating large 24/7 with a greasy lobster bib around his Fox News neck.

Here’s Kimmel pushing the false narrative to its illogical conclusion:

Again, just in September, [Hegseth] spent $2 million of taxpayer money on Alaskan king crab. He spent $6.9 million on lobster tail. $140,000 on doughnuts. $124,000 on ice cream machines. $26,000 on sushi preparation tables. And $15.1 million on ribeye steak. What is this, "My 600-Pound Defense Department"?

Stop it, you’re killing us!

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Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images

Too 'Late'

When you’ve lost Variety, it’s not a good sign.

Legacy outlets like the Hollywood Reporter and Variety routinely carry late-night TV hosts’ water. They regurgitate their tepid punch lines while protecting them against serial fact-checks.

But Variety did something unexpected this week. The rag mocked Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” for becoming a never-ending ego trip in his final weeks on the air.

The show’s focus on its own host’s misfortune has become outsized and a bit dramatic, especially because so many other institutions are in crisis: With everything else going on in the world, we have to go through a months-long celebration of life for a comedian whose job is coming to an end?

The site’s readers were not happy with the column. The Facebook comments section uniformly raged against the op-ed. We could have warned them. Never expect things to go smoothly when you peek your head outside the progressive bubble …

Gay abandon

Margaret Cho can’t get her talking points straight.

The lesbian comic savaged you-know-who while accepting an award from the website Queerty.

“It’s a f**king nightmare, we’re in a f**king war, they want to draft people for this incontinent child molester who doesn’t even know what he wants out of anything. It’s just insane.”

She also said the trans community faces a genocide under President Trump. A few beats later, she changed her tone so violently that a few in the crowd may have suffered whiplash.

“So what we have to do as gay adults, if you’re a gay adult, you have to stand up and be proud. Throw your shoulders back and look happy all the time. Because trans kids will see you, gay kids will see you, and they will see you and they will say, ‘Hey, that person made it. They’re happy. Maybe I can grow up to be like them, maybe I can be like that happy person.’”

Right. Because nobody sounds happier than Margaret Cho …

The Docter is in

My, have things changed at the Mouse House.

Disney animators saw themselves as the tip of the woke spear not long ago. Animators injected sexual themes into kiddie fare, purportedly to change young hearts and minds. Or, as one infamous Disney employee described it, the company’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”

A few mega-flops later, Disney is singing a different tune. Screaming it, to be precise. The company stripped a trans character from its Pixar TV series “Win or Lose.” Recent sequels like “Inside Out 2” and “Moana 2” delivered joyous fun without the woke lectures.

Now, veteran Pixar director Pete Docter is delivering the smackdown on those demanding that Disney sexualize its content. Docter previously helmed “Monsters, Inc.” and “Up,” among notable Pixar projects, and he explained to the Wall Street Journal why the company removed gay themes from its 2025 dud release, “Elio.”

“We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” he said.

Here’s betting some Disney employees might need some after hearing that quote.