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:
