Last night I finished Abigail Shrier‘s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. In an earlier post I reported that Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, reviewed the book on his Substack site, but the review largely neglected the book’s thesis in favor of reprising Lukianoff’s own ideas published earlier. But he did call Shrier’s book a “masterpiece.”
While I wouldn’t go quite that far—I reserve that word for books like Anna Karenina, the book is, in my view, superb, and should be read by every literate adult, whether or not you have children. For it offers not only guidelines for parenting, but also explains why young people in society (as well as adolescents, college students, and young adults) are showing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They are emotionally stuck at about age twelve. And that, says Shrier, is due to “bad therapy”: the rise of an American therapy culture in which every child is constantly assessed, supervised, and psychologized by parents, their schools, and doctors. (It is the schools and doctors, which include therapists, that have convinced parents that their children have psychological problems and need treatment.) The result is that we have one generation (I’d say two or more) that has grown up fragile, solipsistic, afraid to engage with the world, and socially inept.
In Lukianoff and Haidt’s earlier book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), the authors proposed their own explanation for why college students were fragile and ridden with anxiety, producing the current university culture of “safetyism”, in which students’ emotions are prioritized, ensuring that they never feel “unsafe”. This in turn gave rise to the campus culture we all know: woke, opposed to “hate speech” (i.e., offensive speech), and imbued with a DEI mentality that itself rests on a presumed hierarchy of oppression in which those seen as the most oppressed are the most coddled.
This is no doubt one of the inspirations for Shrier’s book, but, pinning the blame for student dysfunction on well-intentioned parents, Coddling doesn’t really explain why the parents have become that way. In contrast, Shrier’s book lays some blame on parents, but says that parents themselves been heavily influenced by others, namely school teachers and administrators, doctors, and therapists (amateur and professional), to believe that normal childhood behavior can often be seen as having some dysfunction that requires therapy. And that, in turn, gives rise to schools’ monitoring children’s emotions using “social-emotional learning methods” and to children being sent to therapists who, not knowing what to do, simply affix a diagnostic label to children and often medicate them. Once “diagnosed,” children carry that label with them for years, in effect becoming their disease. We thus have a generation replete with kids who believe they have fixable mental issues, and a generation of parents who reinforce this with “gentle parenting” that defers to the children at the same time robbing them of independence.
The other influence on Shrier’s new book is her first one, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a controversial work that attributed the rapid rise the desire of young women to change gender to “social contagion”. Shrier endorsed a new form of emotional dysfunction, “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), that, she said, was promoted by social media. And this led doctors, bent on “affirmative therapy” to affirm children’s desire (mostly young women) to change gender, leading first to hormone therapy via puberty blockers, and later to full transitioning with more hormones and, perhaps, surgery.
While Shrier’s first book had mixed reviews, with the bad ones coming largely from those sympathetic to gender activism, in the end I think she’ll be proven right. Her idea of ROGD, the most controversial part of the book, may not become a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM, but it’s clear that something happened in the last 15 years to boost the desire of young women to change gender. And I don’t think this is simply that society suddenly allowed those with gender dysphoria to go public. Rather, the possibility of social contagion, caused by the rapid rise of social media, must partly explain the desire to change gender. There’s no doubt that this has happened in some cases, for I’ve heard testimony to that effect. But regardless of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, Shrier was certainly correct that the rise of affirmative therapy has been damaging to young people. One need only look at the Cass Review, or the increasing recognition that affirmative therapy is bad therapy, to see that. Further a huge proportion (~80%) of gender-dysphoric adolescents who aren’t treated with that therapy will have their symptoms resolve, most of the children becoming gay (no surgery or meds required) or reverting to heterosexuality.
You can see how the idea of professionals influencing parents to think that their kids are ill has led naturally to the new book, which avoids gender issues in favor of describing how our “therapy culture” is ruining modern parenting. The book is heavily researched, and you’ll be horrified by examples of, for example, how schools have largely put aside their mission of teaching in favor of monitoring the emotional well being of kids. (Often the parents have no idea what’s actually going on in schools.) Likewise, Shrier interviews therapists of all stripes, showing that many of them simply pathologize kids, dispensing medications after only one or two visits. Even if only talk therapy is used, this can turn kids into solipsistic ruminators, constantly monitoring their own emotions. And that impedes their growing up.
If this is why are kids “aren’t growing up,” then what is the cure? Shrier advocates a form of old-fashioned parenting, curiously combining authoritative parenting that, at the same time, allows kids a lot more independence. Instead of parents engaging in intensive discussion with kids who disagree with them, they should simply set up sensible rules for kids to follow (giving them chores, encouraging them to get jobs, and so on), and make the kids adhere to those rules. Shrier’s view is that children really want parental authority (this is why our universities are in loco parentis), and if they don’t get it then they don’t grow up (perhaps this is why one-parent familites produce dysfunctional kids more often.) She makes a strong case for severely limiting kids’ access to “devices” and social media, including banning the use of cellphones during the school day.
At the same time, kids need less safety and more independence. When I was a kid, when I got home from elementary school I hopped on my bike and rode off to see my friends. We had no parental supervision at these times. No longer! This kind of freedom and independence is now seen as parental neglect, and can even be illegal. Yet the lack of parental monitoring, and the need of kids to interact with only their peers, free from adult supervision, is essential, says Shrier, for learning how to negotiate life and with its inevitable burden of sporadic unhappiness and disagreement with others.
I am not a parent, and can vouch only for how much I enjoyed my own freedom as a kid (and yes, I had chores and rules, too). But Shrier makes a convincing case that the “therapization” of kids is proceeding apace, and that schools are largely to blame (they are ofteb the gateway to professional therapy). In other countries like Japan and India, for instance, kids are sent off to school or to the store on their own at ages as young as five. And kids treated that way grow up fine. American parents who feel deficient will find considerable solace in this book, as well as finding their own freedom from emotional distress around parenting as well as from obligations to constantly monitor their kids.
As I said, I don’t have kids, but I do recommend the book to parents as a palliative to the many volumes on “gentle parenting”. And, as I said, everyone should read it, really, because it explains what’s happening not only with this generation, but with the one before it: the high-ability but overemotional kids who now write for the New York Times and are the future “progressives” in Congress.
I have but two plaints about Bad Therapy, and they are absolutely trivial. First, Shrier made the decision to use the jargon of the new generation of kids to spice up her writing. The writing is generally engaging and excellent (one of the best features of the book), but sometimes the jargon is grating (I don’t have the book before me, so can’t give an example). Second, Shrier, who is Jewish, keeps religion out of the discussion, but it slips in at the very end when she claims that hearing her young son’s first piano recital was the moment in her life when she felt “closest to God”, and avers that the sound of her three children’s first cries after birth could be explained only by a miracle (I’m pretty sure she means a divine miracle here). But who except for a petulant atheist would beef about this stuff?
Child psychologists or schoolteachers may kvetch about this book, but its thesis, documented with over 40 pages of notes and references, makes considerable sense. Get this book and read it.
(Image below links to Amazon site):
Here’s Shrier talking about the malign influence of schools on kids’ well-being:
Agree with all of this. The effects of the therapy culture are everywhere. For example, the growth of the university administrative culture can be partly blamed on what Shrier describes happening to school-aged kids and their families. By the time these kids get to university, they have huge needs for more psychological counselling, extra academic advising, and disability accommodation. Over the last 10 years the unit at my university with the largest proportional growth in both staff and usage is our disability office (extra time on tests, note takers, etc.). Fittingly its name was also changed a few years ago from the straightforward “Centre for Students with Disabilities” to the gentler “Centre for Accessible Learning.”
That’s was beautiful, Jerry. Our copy arrived in the mail this week. Looking forward to reading it.
Thanks!
Thanks for this angle. I think this book, and others mentioned here, strength derives from its focus – a picking of battles.
And I encourage readers to ask :
WTF is Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)?
(Shrier refers to it as Social-Emotional “Meddling”)
You will not be disappointed.
I had preordered this book and wasn’t disappointed. It is indeed excellent.
I’m hoping it will find an audience among readers unaware that it was written by a “notorious transphobe.” Shrier does briefly touch on trans issues (as Jerry notes, there’s an obvious connection between a child having a fragile, self-absorbed mental state looking for “validity” and their identifying out of their sex) but this book stands on its own.
I wonder how the generation of young people who are the subject of the book will receive the message when they become parents; will they recognize themselves in the text, or be offended and prove the book’s thesis?
I’m a long time reader, both your blog, your books and love your talks on youtube (I know you can’t stand to hear yourself speak, but I quite like it).
I always react to poorly to “kids these days” kind of stories. The therapy culture this is targeted to really doesn’t line up with my experience raising my own kids (grown now) nor those of my family, friends and larger community.
I have read plenty of news pieces, especially on Fox, the lament the corruption of our generations, talk about namby-pamby parents, and how this is ruining our upcoming generations… but you can read Aristotle to get the same “kids these days” dissatisfaction, or I figure it’s just another lie on Fox news.
I read you because of your dedication to facts and the truth – so I imagine there is good science or solid facts behind many of your assertions above (links are always helpful). Perhaps I just live in some magical bubble where all the families I know (spread out across the US and Canada) grow up going to parks, riding buses, playing with friends, all on their own and unsupervised – and have the same problems with hand held devices as our own parents had with the “boob tube”. They all struggled through adolescence like we did, some of them trying on new genders and sexuality – which we all supported whether they switched back (some did) or the change stuck (some have, to date).
I dunno, just like watching the occasional reality show, the description of parenting by therapy seems so outside of my experience that I sometimes feel as if it’s being hyped to generate clicks in our attention based economy.
Anyway – if it’s broadly true, it makes me feel lucky for my bubble.
As always – thank you for the work you put into the blog.
Cheers
“And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
-Robert Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
👍
“But who except for a petulant atheist would beef about this stuff?”
Amen.
The larger significant story in Shrier’s assertions is the mis-placed confidence we place in third party experts. When we replace our own common sense with that of experts, things tend to go downhill. Here’s what I mean:
Why do we listen to educators when academic achievement is stratified and on the decline?
Why do we complain about the high cost of healthcare, when none of us can determine how much a routine physical should costs…or why the price of a prescription widely varies based on one’s insurance…or non insurance?
And when we turn the to therapists and counselors for parental advice, why are we surprised when our children become fragile? Rarely do I come across people who tell me they’ve become stronger and more resilient thanks to their therapist.
+1
I am one of those. Around age 40 my life got turned upside down and I didn’t cope at all well. I got help, and was lucky to have found an excellent counsellor who definitely helped me get my life turned right-side up, even better than before. YMMV.
“Why do we complain about the high cost of healthcare, when none of us can determine how much a routine physical should costs…or why the price of a prescription widely varies based on one’s insurance…or non insurance?”
Because the realistic price of healthcare can be estimated and even common people can compare it to other countries with similar economic situation. The US healthcare is the least cost-effective in the entire developed world, hands down. (That is a feat, because healthcare is a pile of problems everywhere.)
And about the argument itself, let’s turn this around: despite everything being (often much more) expensive that in other similar rich countries, you think that the cost of healthcare is not unreasonably high, even thought you say you cannot determine the cost and question whether others can do. Why? Because the corporations that have vested interest in the high prices say that it is a honest cost-based price? That is exactly the same way of thinking you caution against on the education front. You do not believe to the crooks of the education business, but believe to the crooks of the healthcare business. Why?
Despite the many positive reviews here, I shall for now remain partly skeptical about this, especially in regards to the broad sweeping terms used to describe widespread dysfunction among children. This is in large part because I am around many young people of all ages, and I just don’t see the issue despite looking out for it. I live in a very friendly and cohesive neighborhood where kids are regularly out to ride their bikes and visit each others’ houses. The ‘hood has a few block parties each year so the adults can socialize (and imbibe), and the kiddos can run around and play in great excitement. I see no disfunction. No sharing of tips about therapists or anything like that. Of course I would not know if there are several children holed up in their house, so partly skeptical I am.
And how do we know that a recorded increase is not a matter of increased detection and willingness to be open about social problems that were always there? In my day, kids with high anxiety were not counted or heard. They were more likely rebuked. There was a lot of stress growing up in my day, and seldom were these stresses met with sympathetic ears.
All that is not to say that I haven’t noticed an increase in social anxiety, and have come to suspect that the increase is real. At least more than I remember from years ago. I teach at a college, and there I can expect that each semester I will have one or two students with social anxiety issues such that they have a hard time giving talks, or meeting with me, or even coming to class. I do believe there are more of these sorts than I’d seen from 10-15 years ago, and my colleagues and I often mention this to each other. But I would not say this is a general problem among students. It is just here and there. As to generalizing the cause of that increase, I can’t say. If over-parenting is somehow the cause, then that seems to dismiss the factors like having real trauma (which some students have shared with me), or being home-schooled during Covid times at a critical developmental point. Over-parenting has nothing to do with the effects from these sources.
I do fervently agree that having young people spend so much time on social media or on gaming consoles cannot be helpful. So that does contribute to why I am partly skeptical about this stuff right now.
As I recall, throughout the book Shrier sincerely and respectfully considers the reasonable possibility that the over-therap-ized youngsters are outliers and her concerns are part of the honored tradition of complaining about the younger generation — and counters that with statistics. Her books make use of anecdotes, but from what I can tell the research seems to be there.
I raised my kids in a small town back in the 80’s and remember parenting social rules starting to change a bit even there and then. Several women in my friends group told me they’d NEVER let their children walk the 6 blocks to school the way I let mine: they could be abducted. Later, one of them started a campaign to get Harry Potter books out of the elementary and middle schools because children would too easily be traumatized by Voldemort going after the title character. This was in reference to the early books in the series. A surprising number of other mothers nodded sympathetically, drawing boundaries: the Sensitive Mommy Protecting Kids Better Than YOU Do Wars were on.
We still see kids out on their own, but fewer of them. And almost never for Trick or Treat.
“social media or on gaming consoles”
Or as I call it,
The Land of Make-Believe
I, too, am skeptical of the “one-size-fits-all” description of kids and what they need. Sometimes, a kid might need it all, in layers, another might need none of it. There is so much variability in human personalities, and also in environments, that what is really needed is flexibility (and some creativity). But that requires thinking.
As an example, every time I hear about “safe” spaces, it is in the context of why it should ALWAYS be safe, or NEVER be safe. To me, a safe space is a refuge, to be accessed when needed, to recharge, to refresh, and to leave behind when the next foray into the world and its challenges is appropriate. To never have that available would be horrible; to turn it into a cocoon in which to always reside would be a waste of talent, not to mention mind-numbingly boring. Why is that “safe space” always described in absolute terms?
Some kids need more structure, some less, some need structure and freedom according to their situation and their developmental level. ALL kids need to be seen as people who grow and change and have different strengths and challenges.
The best outcomes I have seen are because the parents are flexible and responsive to the real kids in front of them.
L
My experiences are partly like Mark’s and partly very different. My kids are zoomers who grew up in a good neighbourhood with freedom to go or do what they wanted. Their struggles aren’t really different from those of the kids of my older friends who grew up in the 90s, or what I remember from growing up in the 70s. But among the ~200 people in my apartment building are a fistful of trans or genderqueer kids (whatever that means), and twice that many who are not in regular school and instead attend school online or in private academies that can provide counselling and address the kids’ anxiety, depression, mood disorders, learning disabilities, and socialization problems. It’s a shockingly large proportion who really aren’t ok, and many more than my GenX friends and I can remember from our childhoods. Shrier may be wrong about where that increase comes from but I don’t think she’s wrong that it exists. My colleagues and I can easily detect the leading edge of this cohort of the anxious-and-over-analyzed among the grad students at our university. The undergraduate programs and our services for students with learning disabilities are overwhelmed with them. And not to say we lack empathy (there but for the grace of dog go I). But it clearly is a real thing.
Few people have one me over so completely, with arguments from both of her books, than A.S. I ignore her slight religiosity.
With the trans book she articulated a dynamic which many like Jessie Singal (sp) and others (Lippman et al) had noticed a little earlier. She put it on the page more effectively.
Japanese kids do indeed have more independence in the physical world, a consequence of a less crime filled society but moreso the PERCEPTION of a less crime filled society. Both can be true. There are downsides to Japanese parenting, however, and the social strictures of their civilization, conformity, etc. might not work here. All considered though, they’ve created an enviable high trust society which – as a younger man I found – is excellent to live in.
I don’t have any kids and boy am I happy about that – it seems like an intolerable emotional liability. I’ll stick to puppers! 🙂
Great review though, thx.
D.A.
NYC
BIG YES! I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time. Having raised a successful millennial who is about to make me a grandmother, I will be forwarding your review to him. Like you, I was raised with rules, expectations and the freedom to come and go. Now every kid is so closely monitored that young adults I work with seem terrified of the doing or saying of almost anything, which goes against the creed of this aging hippie. I shock them. Which is funny.
Children are the main and most vulnerable victims of drug-pushing overzealous psychiatrists. But I believe that adults are poorly served too. There is a huge rush to diagnosis inflation. We are all survivers of trauma. We are depressed when we’re sad and perhaps pathologically euphoric when we’re happy. Every bad mood is a symptom of borderline personality disorder. Every introvert is “on the spectrum”. We all need therapy and, of course, drugs.
I don’t get it. I am descended from psychological tough ancestors who needed no drugs to cope with the poverty and rigors and privations of their very hard lives. We spoiled modern people with our modern comforts and abundance should be the happiest and most psychologically healthy generation that ever lived. But look at us. It doesn’t make sense.
Yes M.Cole, absolutely.
And it is tempting to frame it as a “Big Pharma Drugging Us” type deal when I see that as a symptom, a consequence of a larger problem. That problem is a cultural shift towards therapy culture and the rise of victimhood culture which has been ascendent on campuses (which train the therapists) for awhile.
Now those students who bought this nonsense are coming our practice and spread bad ideas.
Some have attributed this to a “feminization” of workplace culture and medicine – which might be true – but not all that relevant. If we’re going off the rails and reducing our children like this, infantilizing them and making them fragile a bigger fix is in order. I don’t know what that fix is.
D.A.
NYC
I dislike describing the weakness of mordern people as due to “feminization”. I respect femaleness and I believe my ancient female ancestors were every bit as psychologically tough, though perhaps in different ways, as my male ancestors. It is said that females have more of an instinct to “nurture” than males. Perhaps so. But my great great … great grandma would have understood the difference between nurturing and coddling. The problem is the modern attitude that everybody is psychologically damaged, and mentally fragile and needs to be coddled. Nurturing is great. Coddling is not.
+1
The teachers told me my son was hyperactive in primary school. A doctor prescribed Ritalin, which made a tremendous difference. He took until he was a teenager. He’s fine now.
I don’t think it’s always wrong to prescribe these drugs.
You forget that our distant ancestors did not expect children to sit in a classroom for hours every day.
I am very glad that things worked out well for your son. I did not say that prescribing drugs is always wrong, but that there is a lot of over diagnosis and overprescription. You see this in the distributions of ADHD dignoses. I read a paper discussing rates of ADHD in various school districts in Connecticut. They found that ethically, culturally, economically identitical school districts had hugely variable rates. It is mathematically impossible for such disparities to occur by chance. Obviously one school district has counselers who were more conservative in their judgement and slower to quickly diagnose kids at the first hint of a possible problem while the other district had overdiagnosers eager to get the kids on ritalin.
As for your remark that our ancestors didn’t expect children to sit in a classroom, the cure for that is proper recess periods. When I was a schoolkid in the 70s, adults understood that kids needed breaks so they could get up and run around or even just walk around. Also there were more serious gym classes. Nowadays, compared to past decades, there are fewer and shorter recess periods. At some schools, the kids don’t even go outside. Recess just means the kids get a break from the lessons, but they continue sitting at their desks. Obviously that is terrible for both the mental and physical health of children.
I also have strong opinions that the modern diet filled with overdoses of fructose, ultraprocessed seed oils, and other garbage is just terrible for kids as well as adults. In the 1950s, fatty liver disease in children was so rare, most pediatricians never encountered a case. Now it is depressingly common even in toddlers. Extreme obesity in kids used to be rare, now common. Clearly the food environment has changed. I say breakfast should be eggs and toast (or something else metabolically useful), it should not be fruit loops, or cocoa puffs, or sugar frosted flakes. Lunch should be meat or fish or chicken with vegetables and a piece of fruit, it should not be microwaved frozen pizza or those godawful ultraprocessed “lunchables”. If modern diet so obviously makes kids fat and unfit, why should we doubt that it is bad for their mental health? The brain is, after all, part of the body. It needs the right biochemical fuel to function properly.
That’s a good point about recess. Even when kids get recess, the nature of it has changed so much. I’m not saying my recesses as a child were a model to follow, but as I recall the kids all just piled into the yard and did whatever they felt like. We organized games of four square, dug in the dirt and built sand castles, rode on skateboards, threw water at each other, climbed on and sometimes fell from the monkey bars, and occasionally got into fights.
The school sometimes organized great games of Red Rover involving the entire school, and we played dodge ball or tug of war. I still remember those games 40 years later. It was great fun.
PE class was serious work with a lot of running, which I didn’t like but which was probably good for me.
At my kids’ school, there are no great games of Red Rover. Definitely no tug of war, and they’d think you were crazy if you proposed dodge ball. The PE teacher actually tells the kids not to run during PE because they might hurt themselves. “Just walk fast”, she says. Recess, unfortunately, is just 25 minutes of using the playground equipment, which has no monkey bars or unsafe things.
Dear me! I didn’t know things had become that bad. I had read that some of what was formerly standard playground equipment had been removed. I never understood that. I did not recall any playground injuries but I suppose there were a few.
But even running is a no-no? Insanity.
Not sure what to think. My mother went to work when I was about 10 and my sister 6. It was a small town in BC. We did fine unsupervised after school. (Early 1960s)
With my kids my son was more immature than I remembered myself and I used after school baby sitters until he was 12 and my daughter 10 (she was much more mature). My son is fine now.
I don’t think it was the era: it was just the way they were.
I’m not involved much with my grandkids (they live in different cities) but from what I hear they’re doing fine so far.
I’m not sure about the thesis of the book.
I’d suggest reading it. If you don’t want to pay for it, do what I did and request it from the local library (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it, for every library needs it).
Good point.
I had a similar childhood, going out after school unsupervised, and back in time for dinner. I was also lucky in that there was a lot of green space in my neighbourhood, as well as a pond/river, so plenty of interesting animals to catch and take home to show mum.
My ex and I had some disagreements about parenting our kids. At one point I was living in an apartment directly across the road from a large shopping mall. The kids had a friend over for a sleepover on the weekend, and the next day I gave them some money to run over to the mall and get themselves some treats. My ex was furious that I let them go on their own (they were between 8 and 10 years old) because “they could have been kidnapped!”, despite my arguing that in our area stranger abduction was incredibly rare (I checked the stats). However at times I think she has a mild Munchausen-by-Proxy Syndrome, and wants there to be something wrong with the kids so that she gets more attention.
I think it’s interesting that most people’s reaction is to relate their personal narratives.
Anecdotes are not data.
I have not read the book, but our host’s review makes it sound like it’s based on data. Your personal contrary story is not an argument against it.
Thomas Reid
Adam Ferguson
James Beattie
Dugald Stewart
Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophers that developed the idea of an “innate ability to perceive common ideas and that this process is inherent in and interdependent with judgement. Common sense, therefore, is the foundation of philosophical inquiry.”
This was a reaction / counter to e.g. David Hume.
Source :
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_common_sense_realism
The therapists are now that same generation too. Rather than providing coaching to be more resilient and teaching how to guide your own journey through life, they are reinforcing the need for more therapy and reinforcing weakness.
I see this in my own daughter’s experience. What used to be a strongly self-sufficient and confident young woman is now a scared girl who has to be sheltered from ideas she deems as “violent and dangerous”. She surfs social media all day, to the consternation of her 3 kids, and only sees pro-Palestine, pro-trans rights, anti-Trump, anti-American, pro- speech censorship, and pro-Kamala content. She threatened to keep the kids from us after I chuckled at a joke her husband made about quitting work and opening a Chinese takeout joint (he’s 3rd gen Chinese) – she said it was racist of me to laugh, and that her therapist agrees.
She has lately been pushing her 3 kids into non-traditional gender roles so they can explore their sexuality, on the advice of her therapist, who believes that boys should dress as girls occasionally to see if they better fit with a more feminine gender role. Her son told me he wants to breast feed his baby someday. He’s 7.
She told us her therapist advised against seeing us on a regular basis as we are toxic due to our heterodox views. She’s really sorry but she has to protect herself and her children. Her husband doesn’t agree, but he won’t disagree. She also plans to get her kids into therapy soon so they can learn as she has.
We brought up our concerns to her regarding her therapist’s effect on her well-being, and we were called white supremacist colonizers who need to atone for our thought crimes. Literally. Now we avoid any confrontation to see the grandkids.
Note: this is a woman who at one time was given kudos by her HS debate coach for being able to argue either side of a debate because she was so good at fully understanding the opposite position. That person is gone.
I attended therapy for a short time after a personal tragedy 20+ years ago. I went to a few sessions, and in those sessions I learned how to become more resilient by seeing the good in others, finding meaning in life and work, and recognizing that we all suffer in our own ways. I became more confident and more understanding of others. I don’t see this in the therapy our daughter is going through at all – it seems to be quite the opposite.
This is terrifying, but consistent with other stories that I’ve heard. I’m so sorry for you.
Now yours is a personal narrative that fits what Shrier is talking about.
Apparently society has changed a lot recently (long after my kids grew up).
Thanks for your story.
That is truly frightening, and I can only imagine that it’s very painful as a parent to “lose” your child in such a way. I worry what my own daughters will be taught by this society.
The aggravating part is that we can see the influence of her therapist, who event monitors her Insta and FB posts, encouraging her to post shots of the kids in non-traditional gender attire. Of course they live in a bubble of friends and elementary school staff who also provide positive reinforcement.
There’s a Japanese TV series called “Old Enough” about little two- to four-year-old kids who are sent out on errands — often rather complicated errands — by their parents. Sometimes they run into hitches, but generally they succeed. Of course, one may wonder whether they’re in any real danger, as they’re being followed around by a camera crew. Still, it speaks to the Japanese view of what children can and should do.
I believe Shrier refers to that series in her book.
Thank you very much for the review! I already own her first book and I just ordered the new one from a big German book vendor.
An odd yet somehow funnily ironic thing was that their online shop listed Orwell’s 1984 among the books that people bought who bought Shrier’s book.
The social contagion about transgenderism with young teens is, to me, not so different than the “fashion top model shaped body” craze that existed in my days. The problem is that *emotions* have now taken the lead in how to adress those problems : being trans is Mt. Everest levels of importance in the emotional scale. Having a healthy discussion about the subject is minefielding, because merely bringing it up sometimes sets off the emotional defensiveness the very moment you start the conversation…
Shrier and Haidt have both hit upon the fact that kids need rules (if you don’t set boundaries, they will push until they find where they are), and responsibilities that come with a degree of independence. “Free-range kids.” During my forty years as a GP, I had many chances to give parenting advice, and it usually boiled down to this:
1. You are your child’s parent, not their friend.
2. You should give them what they need, not what they want.
Some people misunderstand this as suggesting you should be a stern authoritarian, but I don’t mean that. If you see parenting as a popularity contest, and you always try to be popular with your kids, you will end up making poor choices. Sometimes “No” is the correct answer, and you will have to bear the temporary hatred of your child. This is difficult, and kids, especially if they have learned that enough whining will get them what they want can be persistent. But if you mean “no” and stick to it, your children will, one day, thank you for it and bring up their own kids the same way. If you just give in for the sake of a quiet life, you will raise monsters, who will similarly mess up their own kids. Sometimes you will need to punish behaviour that is dangerous to the child or to others. It must be immediate, consistent and impersonal. When it’s done, it’s forgotten. For small children the time-outs of the “1-2-3 Magic” system are excellent as long as applied correctly. Do that and you won’t need it when they are older.
I spend about 9 hours per week sitting in elementary school classrooms, and the things you describe all ring true to me (although I admit confirmation bias may be at play).
The parents who defer to their children for everything have the worst-behaved and least-prepared children. One mother removes her daughter from every class that has homework because her daughter “doesn’t like homework”. Is it any wonder she can hardly write? Another lets her son rampage around the class tearing up papers and breaking pencils, and when he yells to her “I hate that teacher!” she only says “I know… it’s okay…” Well, it’s not okay, and if that teacher has a flaw it’s only that she too is too tolerant – never stopping the boy’s rampages. (Sadly, the only threat that gets the boy in line is to be taken to “see the doctor”, which he seems genuinely afraid of. I don’t what kind of doctor that is, but what that boy needs is not a doctor; he needs a father.) At the same time, teachers classify boys’ natural behaviors as “unsafe” and “disruptive”. Boys will be allowed to throw a temper tantrum, but they won’t be allowed to roughhouse. That seems exactly backwards to me.
So much of it comes down to the cult of “safety”. Safety is good, but so is measured risk-taking and progressive growth. My wife would let the kids do anything as long as they stay inside and stay safe. But if she had her way, the kids would never have learned to ride a bike or swim. (The kids hated learning, because they were afraid, but now they love it.)
Having hung around with many different parents and their children, it seems clear to me that this is just part of human sexual dimorphism. Women have a strong focus on safety and emotional comfort; men are much more tolerant of risk – at least moderate risks like disappointment and scraped knees. These are complementary. Mothers routinely do things that fathers have a hard time with, like providing sustained care and attention over long periods. But fathers are needed to do the things that women seem to have a hard time with: setting boundaries, enforcing rules, and creating environments for progressive risk-taking and growth. I believe we need more men in education to balance the natural tendencies of the women. And frankly, I think boys would be best educated by men, for the most part.
(There is a cultural aspect, of course. Men these days can be rather risk-averse, and the old country schoolmarms of yesteryear probably did a good job.)