When my son was 2 years old, he fell and chipped his tooth on a metal lizard at the zoo. There was blood everywhere, and we rushed to the dentist, who assured us everything looked fine. Thirty minutes later, my phone rang. A speck on my son’s X-ray now concerned her—it could be a tooth chip embedded in his mouth tissue. She urged me to go straight to the emergency room and put my son under general anesthesia so they could investigate. It was a Friday, around 4 p.m., and I was getting him an ice cream.
This phone call was a turning point for me as a parent. It was the first time, ever, that I listened to a medical professional giving me instructions for the benefit of my child and thought, That sounds crazy. I have a natural respect for authority, and I love doctors, but the idea of putting my tiny son under anesthesia during the Friday night shift because of a fleck on an X-ray felt, well, bananas. I said no, despite her repeated urgings, and told her we’d monitor for any symptoms of infection. There were none.
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I tell this story because the idea that when it comes to kids, we have gotten quicker to suggest interventions, and that as a culture, we have made even normal childhood challenges into a cause for concern, is the seed of truth that Abigail Shrier spins into her new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Shrier, educated at Columbia, Oxford, and Yale, is a former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and her previous book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, argued that the increase in the number of kids identifying as trans in the 2010s was partly due to “social contagion.” In Bad Therapy, Shrier ladles heavy helpings of anecdote over some scientific research to argue that therapists, school counselors, and the language of therapy that has influenced parenting in the past decade or so are, in her view, harming kids.
Shrier, no idiot, surely knows that several of her arguments—especially the ones about how we overreact to normal childhood setbacks, restricting kids from independence in the real world while giving them far too much digital autonomy—resonate with liberal parents too. But she has no real interest in engaging with those readers. Instead, this book becomes another entry in that vaunted American tradition of telling parents what they are doing wrong, delivered here in prose so biting it would make H.L. Mencken blush.
This idea that children need less therapy, not more, may feel surprising when we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis (and also, a therapist availability and affordability crisis). But Shrier argues we have made children helpless by overvalidating every fear and anxiety, noting that 1 in 6 U.S. children from the ages of 2 to 8 has a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. “Teens today so profoundly identify with these diagnoses, they display them in social media profiles, alongside a picture and family name,” Shrier writes. If young people view their bad feelings as pathological, one expert she interviews explains, they will be more likely to turn to drugs for relief.
The root of these problems, in Shrier’s telling, is a misguided attempt by today’s parents to throw off the authoritarian parenting styles of yore, an attempt fueled by Gen X’s embrace of therapy. “Successful parenting became a function with a single coefficient: our kids’ happiness at any given instant,” she writes. “An ideal childhood meant no pain, no discomfort, no fights, no failure—and absolutely no hint of ‘trauma.’ ” When this was not producing perfectly happy kids, Shrier argues, parents rushed back to the experts for testing, diagnosis, and medication.
Of the many claims in Bad Therapy, the idea that we are pathologizing normal childhood distress while limiting children’s opportunities to be independent and take risks is the one that truly lands, but it’s also hardly a revelation. These are ideas that, in a very different way, the clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel wrote about more than 20 years ago in her brilliant, durable parenting book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. This concept is everywhere! The Atlantic seems to run a think piece on it every other week. We all know our kids don’t have enough independence; we just don’t know what to do about it. Even if you want to let your child run free with the neighborhood kids, they’re all at soccer, and you always have to wonder which neighbors may be more likely to narc on you for negligence than lend a friendly eye.
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And while I agree with Shrier that the statistics on skyrocketing rates of diagnoses for kids are sobering and deserve a hard look, the idea that therapy is where it all went wrong is where things get a little slippery. It takes Shrier until Page 70 to acknowledge that the vast majority of American children are not, in fact, in therapy, in the “one-on-one, weekly-ish conversation with a professional” sense. They are, instead, receiving some elements of it through social-emotional learning curricula in schools.
For those of you not up to date on the parenting culture wars, social-emotional learning has become the latest flashpoint. The idea behind SEL curricula, which started gaining traction in the past decade, is to cultivate interpersonal skills and self-awareness in children to help them succeed in school and beyond. A recent report from the Yale School of Medicine shows evidence of SEL’s benefits, and personally, I’ve seen how it has helped my own kids learn healthy conflict resolution and how to apologize.
Critics of SEL, like Shrier, see it as yet another way we are teaching our children to overfocus on their emotions, promoting helplessness instead of resilience. Shrier reports on a Salt Lake City fifth grade classroom where the teacher’s morning prompt, “What is something that is making you really sad right now?,” led to a sort of group breakdown, with kids crying about their parents’ divorces. A teacher explains how she openly discusses with her students the pain of growing up with a drug-addicted mother, in order to model emotional vulnerability. At a California conference that Shrier attends, the facilitator encourages participants to share emotions like anxiety and fear with students before math class. “I began to wonder whether this wasn’t some sort of ploy by the Chinese Communist Party to obliterate American mathematical competence,” Shrier writes.
If Shrier tried to invent examples that sounded like a conservative fever dream of progressive educators run amok, she could not do better than these. I feel for the students put in these situations, and agree with Shrier that schools need to be very careful about emulating therapeutic techniques without the training and confidentiality you would find in a professional setting. Algebra does not need to start with a group kumbaya. No quibbles there.
The problem is how Shrier generalizes, spinning her interviews into an attack on the very idea of teaching kids emotional literacy. She has talked to many parents and educators, sure, but that cannot be scaled to the population level. While it’s clear SEL has gone off in the rails in some classrooms, it can also have a lot of benefits, especially for boys, who often suffer in a culture that tells them the only way they can express emotion is through anger. (Psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson wrote about this back in 1999, in their beautiful book on parenting boys, Raising Cain.) But for Shrier, it can’t be that there is a problem with how SEL is being taught in some schools—it’s that every school has become an outpatient mental health clinic, and every advocate of social-emotional learning believes that children should swap their stories of trauma before recess.
Shrier runs the idea of therapy through this same distortion field. For instance, following a completely reasonable paragraph about how kids toss a lot of worries at their parents just to see what bounces back, she hits us with this doozy: “Parents who follow the therapists’ direction and embrace their children’s despair breathe life into the monster under the bed.”
Really? I cannot imagine any psychologist or therapist worth their salt who would tell parents to do such a thing. In her essential book The Emotional Lives of Teenagers—a sort of counterfactual to Shrier’s cri de coeur that therapy is harming our kids—the clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says just the opposite. Be a steadying presence for your kids, she advises. If you react like their failed test is an 11 and not a 3, you’re telling them that their kid-sized problem is now an adult-sized problem, and that is scary.
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As in any profession, there are bad therapists. And there is some evidence, reported last year, that large-scale mental health treatments rolled out for Australian schoolchildren and conducted on a blanket basis made teens worse, though such broadly applied programs have never been duplicated in the U.S. But my biggest issue with Bad Therapy is that it feels as if Shrier is using a hackneyed idea of therapy as a straw man, often lumping psychologists, educators, wellness experts, parenting gurus, and paraprofessionals together. Distinctions matter. Although the idea that therapists or psychologists would tell parents to embrace their children’s despair feels nuts, I readily believe that a cottage industry of wellness and parenting influencers, using the pseudo language of therapy, just might. Sometimes it feels as if Bad Therapy is less about the actual things trained and licensed therapists are saying to their patients, and more about a vibe.
Shrier reserves her most scalding contempt, however, for so-called gentle parenting and its acolytes, the well-meaning moms and dads who have been snookered into surrendering their authority, never telling their children no. Instead of the crisp directness of “knock it off,” Shrier explains, gentle parenting promotes a feelings-centered approach, replacing punishment with “Why don’t we try taking a few breaths together now, Harper?”
The use of “Harper” is code here, of course, meant to invoke the type of namby-pamby elitist parent living in a coastal city who would name their kid that. Just in case we weren’t sure whom Shrier is referring to, she specifies: “If someone wanted to kill all human desire to reproduce—to achieve, at last, this thing environmentalists call “population control”—steering readers to the Slate Parenting Facebook group might be a promising way to start,” she writes. (I’ll admit that—reading this book with a review for Slate in mind—I did not see that one coming!)
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Shrier goes on. The Slate Facebook group “provides a worthy terrarium in which to observe highly educated, progressive, therapist-directed parents as they air dilemmas and seek advice from their equally flummoxed counterparts.” Although these parents have read every book and listened to every podcast, nothing works. Because they can’t bring themselves to punish their children or say no, the kids become more and more wild and out of control. “I have never interviewed the man who bought a Siberian-Bengal tiger and tried to raise him in a Harlem apartment,” Shrier writes. (Sidebar: As a native New Yorker, I remember that story well; it also involved an alligator.) “But the parents of Slate often sound like I imagine he must have felt: lowering raw chickens on a pole through an open window so as not to displease the feral creature he’d long since lost the ability to control.”
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Whew. Shrier gets so worked up over these progressive parents that her prose becomes incandescently, almost gleefully vicious. What leaves a bitter aftertaste, though, is that these parents, like everyone else, are trying their best, and they are probably already familiar with many of the arguments Shrier’s making. Yes, the commenter asking a mom if she has “tried a weighted blanket” to calm her child after they’ve hit her in the face is kind of annoying. But while some parents can be rigid in their embrace of mindful parenting, most are just muddling along, trying to do better than the combo of emotional aloofness and yelling that many Gen Xers were raised with. And the fact that gentle parenting is hard to get right is well known! Jessica Winter broke this jar open with her nuanced take on the concept in the New Yorker two years ago, and the mainstream centrist-liberal press aimed at Slate Parenting Facebook-type readers has been turning a critical eye on it since then.
But rather than engage in good faith with people on the “other side” who have their own doubts and questions about how to raise kids, Shrier prefers parody, viewing liberal parenting through a fun house mirror as if she were describing robots awaiting the next ideological order from Dear Leader. It’s incredibly frustrating, and it also speaks to the current parenting moment, where every issue carries a political charge. But I get it. I had to admit, reading this book, that I felt a little discomfort when Shrier and I agreed, given that her politics definitely lean redder than mine. We can all fall into this trap.
But I fear this is a climate where children lose. Because even with our differences, Shrier and I and everybody else I know want the same thing, which is to raise capable, confident humans who are able to go out into the world and thrive. There is no political philosophy that maps perfectly onto the right way to raise a child. The sooner we figure that out, the better.
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