Abigail Shrier has a new book out, and it’s doing quite well despite the vitriol she received for her first book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. I read the latter one, and thought it was quite good—not nearly as inflammatory as the gender activists deemed it. But of course the topic—that social media was contributing to a desire of young women to identify as men, a
“rapid-onset” change that was unnecessary and generally harmful—was tailor-made to anger gender activists. Remember this tweet by ACLU LAWYER Chase Strangio about that book?
An ACLU lawyer advocating censorship! What has the world come to? Well, Strangio, a biological woman who identifies as male, deleted that tweet, but the Internet is forever.
Now Shrier has a somewhat related book, in that it’s about children’s psychological difficulties, but this one isn’t directly related to gender. Click on the icon to go to the Amazon link.
I haven’t yet read it, but have ordered it by interlibrary loan (I can no longer buy books because I have no space on my shelves), and will report my take forthwith. But Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE and coauthor of two books (one a blockbuster bestseller), has reviewed Shrier’s new book on his website, The Eternally Radical Idea. He pronounces Bad Therapy a “masterpiece,” which is high praise. But he also takes up about 70% the review listing the varieties of opprobrium that Shrier will meet. Click to read Lukianoff’s review; I’ll just give a couple of excerpts:
First, Lukianoff’s assessment and brief summary. Bolding is mine:
“Bad Therapy” is simply a masterpiece — easily the most important book of the year. Unfortunately, it most desperately needs to be read by the very people who are likely most hostile to Shrier’s work. The book focuses on the harms of the therapeutic approach to raising our children and how the generation treated with the most psychological therapy and psychiatric drugs has become the most miserable, anxious, and disempowered generation on record. (“Disempowered,” by the way, was the original title of the book I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, which became “The Coddling of The American Mind.”)
Shrier comes to many of the same conclusions that Haidt and I came to in “Coddling,” which I’d sum up like this: As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions. It’s a kind of reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve talked about this problem for the last decade, beginning with Haidt’s and my original 2015 article for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and most recently with my piece, “What’s behind the campus mental health crisis?” for UnHerd.
Shrier’s book also focuses on how parenting in the K-12 environment is informed by an ideology that completely undermines students’ sense of an internalized locus of control. Indeed, if you really want to make someone despondent, just persuade them that all important decisions are out of their hands and that they are essentially powerless in their own lives.
Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.
What I’ve been emphasizing more recently is that, in many cases, teaching people these cognitive distortions was largely done in the name of motivating them towards some positive social action. This is a terrible strategy, of course, because depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Depression and anxiety more often result in fatalism and despair than an attitude capable of bringing about positive social change, so it’s a weird way to build a movement.
Here are the three conclusions from Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling and influential book:
1.) We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)
2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)
3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)
So what’s the difference between Shrier’s book and the earlier one? I’m sure they are quite different, but Lukianoff says very little about this issue. In fact, he says nothing about what Shrier add’s to the Haidt and Lukianoff book:
But Shrier’s book goes far beyond what Haidt and I did in “Coddling,” and that is why every single parent and K-12 teacher must read it. Despite being steeped in this stuff for the better part of two decades, I still learned a great deal from it — including that the research behind the health harms of growing up with “adverse childhood experiences” is far weaker than I understood it to be.
The book is gorgeously written, thoughtful, compassionate, and has gobs of both research and common sense. It also features some of my favorite experts, including my friend Camilo Ortiz, a professor and clinical psychologist who specializes in CBT. Other friends who make an appearance include Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Rob Henderson, Richard J. McNally, Paul Bloom, and Peter Gray.
And that first paragraph is all you’ll get. The review and assessment of the book takes up only a third of Lukianoff’s piece. Now I don’t mind someone using a review as a platform to launch their own ideas into the ether (H. L. Mencken was famous for that), but Lukianoff uses the book as a way to list all the potential criticisms that Shrier’s book will face, criticisms that he outlined in another book with Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There is a Solution. The review leaves me, at least, not knowing what Shrier’s book is really about.
The criticisms that Lukianoff says that Shrier will face fall into three categories: “The Obstacle Course” (“rhetorical doges and logical fallacies” like strawmanning and misrepresenting the book’s arguments); “The Minefield” (dissing the book by attacking the author, a tactic with which we’re quite familiar), and “The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” (raising guilt by association, labeling people as bad because of their politics, and so on). If you read Shrier’s earlier book, you’ll see all of these tactics were indeed used to dismiss it. It turns out that Shrier had a good point, as we now know as European countries dismantle their use of “affirmative treatment” and puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric youth, most of whom would come out as gay (and not lose body parts nor get sterilized) if they were treated less “affirmatively” and they deep-sixed the hormones for adolescents. But now that Shrier has been labeled a Bad Person and guilty of Ideological Wrongthink, that label can be used to discredit everything she writes in the future.
At any rate, and despite the digressions by Lukianoff that are aimed at pushing his own platform, this is certainly a book worth investigating. I haven’t read any other reviews, but just found on on Slate that is quite critical. We shall see if the author of that one, Anna Nordberg, engages in the bad-faith criticisms described by Lukianoff. (Nordberg does have expertise in the area of parenting and child psychology.)
Thank you – indeed, a gripping book – clarity of thought and expression, unintimidated.
I’ve got Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” on hold at our online library. I’m 567th in line and the estimated wait time is 10 weeks! Oy. The good news, however, is that people are reading the books on this important subject!
On a parallel subject, I, too, have no room for physical books. But I love online books. It only took a short while to get used to reading them on my iPad—which is the size of a book page—and I absolutely love the fact that one can highlight words or phrases and instantly get definitions, or maps, or pictures, or descriptions of what you’ve highlighted online. I now have a very large collection of online books that take up zero space. And, the wait time is seconds! I’m always first in line and never 567th.
Agree. Ebooks are great! They’re cheaper too.
“As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions.”
I know that anecdotes aren’t data, but as a counterpoint to the above, allow me to offer my lived experience (heh) as the mother of a nine-year-old boy.
This is only my n = 1 experience, and I believe the author has evidence of this being a widespread problem, but: I do not recognize myself in this description. At all. I am exactly the kind of parent you would expect to be guilty of coddling and catastrophizing – I’m well-off, liberal, I have a PhD, work in academia, and live in California.
And yet. My son is super smart and adorable and has many wonderful traits, but one of his negative traits is a tendency to drama. When he comes to me and says, “Mommy, this is TERRIBLE,” I have literally NEVER said to him, “Why yes, Son, this is absolutely terrible, and you should wallow in it and let it become a permanent stain on your soul.” Nine times out of ten, the “terrible” thing is just a garden variety annoyance, and I tell him so. I say variations of “Calm down, kid, it’s going to be ok” to him on the regular. I’ve told him that emotions are just a form of energy and that you don’t have to let them control you. I practice a bit of meditation with him every morning, to teach him to just sit with his thoughts and feelings and not react (or overreact) to them.
Again, n = 1, I just wanted to point out that this isn’t a universal phenomenon.
Full disclosure, I am a childless (and catless) septuagenarian male, but my sister is a grandmother twice over. She often tells me stories of her oldest grandson, who is 3. From what she tells me, he, too, is a very bright child who is prone to dramatic pronouncements.
I wonder if this tendency toward drama is a part of being that age? Maybe it’s because, in a way, your world is still kind of small, so everything in it can seem so big.
You sound like a terrific mom. Keep up the good work!
Thank you 🙂
Second that.
I don’t she’s saying it’s universal.
But I’m not sure since I haven’t read the book. The review above says little about it. None of the Amazon reviews say much either although it’s highly rated.
My kids were born in the 70s. I did have some problems with my son. The school said he was hyperactive. A doctor put him on Ritalin, which worked miraculously.
He’s OK now (as is my daughter, who was less of a problem). They each have two kids themselves now.
Recently I substitute taught in 5th grade. Front office intelligence operatives contacted me via encrypted sub-space communication and indicated that a parent would be delivering pizza to celebrate a student’s birthday and asked when and where the cache of carbohydrate-protein nutrient complex should be delivered. Once I quickly recovered from contemplating this (pain-in-the-neck)^2, I opted for the pizza to be delivered just before we went outside to recess just prior to lunch (as experience hath shown that delivering it to the cafeteria guarantees general and pervasive FOMO chaos and likely administrator opprobrium).
Once outside, I opened the four pizza boxes. They were all pepperoni pizzas. A student (not the birthday student) exclaimed in a dismayed, quasi-histrionic, pearl-clutching tone, “I don’t like pepperoni!” I was dumbfounded and at a loss for words. Later when I recovered, it occurred to me that I could have told him, “Take the pepperoni off.” Or “Did the birthday student and her mother need to first check in with you regarding approved pizza toppings?” (Or “Did you need a trigger warning? Do you need a safe space and a coloring book?”)
?
He doesn’t like pepperoni.
All the pizzas were pepperoni.
His displeasure seems reasonable to me.
What if he were a 5th-grade vegetarian? Still dumfounded?
(Full disclosure: I cannot abide mushrooms, nor olives.)
Pepperoni is not my top choice either.
His being offended by pepperoni apparently was not complete until he made a pronouncement to the universe about it, as if being so offended constituted an argument (credit Hitch) for dictating what another’s choice of pizza toppings should be.
I get it. The performance of solipsism.
FWIW, I read Nordberg’s review. Nothing about it struck me as bad faith. Nordberg acknowledges several points of agreement and mentions other experts whose writings support Shrier’s contentions.
Her main criticisms are about Shrier’s choice of language, which Nordberg says can be “incandescently, almost gleefully vicious” toward liberal parents, and what Nordberg sees as Shrier’s tendency to generalize about parenting and therapy practices.
Here’s an archived copy of an excerpt that appeared in the WSJ.
https://archive.ph/YA8pE
Interlibrary loan is the way.
I enjoyed the book, and also enjoyed handing it to my wife to read. She’s a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and describes herself as a bit of a dinosaur. She felt the book was somewhat unfair to therapists (at least, those she works with—not supposed to say ‘supervises’ any more) who are aware of the pitfalls that Shrier describes. It’s possible that therapists here are trained rather differently to those in the US. She agreed that the way schools treat all children as described as being fragile and unstable as unhelpful. That’s the dinosaur speaking there: she strongly believes in exposure, experience and consequences as being necessary parts of growing up if you intend to produce sensible and resilient young adults.
I don’t know whether Shrier’s book mentions this, but the campus admin bloat of recent years includes a cadre whose function is the administration of fragility and anxiety. At my old institution, these educrats constantly broadcast a therapeutic version of “well-being”, without themselves being therapists. Their degrees are typically in something called “Educational Leadership”. Such Educational Leaders are appointed to one or another new office every year, it seems.
Their specialty, needless to say, is related to the arcane educational/therapeutic issues of D, E, and I.