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Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z's mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not stopped the trend. What has gone wrong with our youth? In Bad Therapy , bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn't the kids — it's the mental health experts. Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied, but that is not what's happening. Instead, children experiencing the normal pangs of adolescence and their anxious parents are seeking answers from therapists, who are only too happy to explore what might be wrong — and to make money doing so. No industry seems to turn away from the possibility of exponential growth, and our mental health industry is no exception. It asks children, again and How do you feel? Are you sure? By treating the well, it is making them sick, feeding normal kids with normal problems into the mental healthcare pipeline. It is minting patients faster than it can cure them. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with doctors, parents, therapists and young people, Shrier enumerates the dangerous side effects of unnecessary or poorly executed mental health care. With clear eyes and compassion, she examines ways worried parents who think they must indulge their child's every feeling make matters worse, and she offers liberating advice for raising emotionally resilient and independent children. Packed with relatable stories, devastating insights, and common-sense conclusions, Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone concerned about protecting the next generation.
350 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 27, 2024
About the author
Abigail Shrier
4 books473 followersAbigail Shrier is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. She holds an A.B. from Columbia College, where she received the Euretta J. Kellett Fellowship; a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She is a journalist.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 533 reviews
March 4, 2024
The overall argument in this book is that we’re pathologizing children too much and saying they have mental health issues rather than just letting them have a normal childhood. Abigail tells a quick story at the beginning of the book about how she took her son into the ER or an urgent care for stomach pain, which turned out to be dehydration. But before they left, the nurse asked the son some mental health questions (like have you thought about harming yourself).
I have a lot to say about this book because not only am I a father, but I’m the son of an alcoholic mom. I had an extremely traumatic childhood, and I became a drug addict and alcoholic myself. My addiction almost killed me when my son was 3, but fortunately, I was able to get sober in 2012 and have been sober ever since.
Shrier most likely wouldn’t say anything about my mental health issues, my addiction or my ACEs score. In fact (and this is important) she starts the book with a quick disclaimer explaining that she understands some children have severe mental health issues that require therapy and/or medication. She says this book is not about them.
I’m going to say quite a few positive things about this book, so don’t worry. But I do want to start out by saying I think that she put this “disclaimer” at the start of the book to give her an easy out when confronted about real world scenarios where a child clearly needs help.
I’ll start with what I think was good about the book. Later, I may critique some of these “good” things because they’re also bad.
First off, I agree that I think that we’re overdiagnosing our children in many scenarios. Later in the book, Abigail Shrier references Randolph Nesse who wrote the incredible book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Not only are emotions part of the human experience, but so are certain mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Another great book on this topic is Saving Normal by Allen Frances. I was actually fortunate enough to interview both Nesse and Francis on my old podcast.
ADHD and other mental illnesses are very real, but sometimes we throw potentially addictive medications at a child who is simply acting out because they’re being neglected at home or just being a child.
Abigail also brings more nuance than I was expecting to the conversation about Adverse Childhood Experience scores (ACEs). The ACEs questionnaire is very vague, and while many kids will meet some criteria for it, they are nowhere close to the same risk as severely traumatized children. For example, one question asks if a parent ever hit, beat, kicked, or physically hurt you. Two children may answer “yes”, but a child who is spanked technically meets that criteria but is not in the same boat as a child who is legitimately beaten by an alcoholic parent.
The last good thing about this book is she calls out that quack Bessel van der Kolk who is world famous for his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score. I’m not even a clinician, but I knew the book was filled with a ton of bad science. That book is a joke to any therapist who understands the science of trauma and how many times the book has been debunked, so I’m glad Shrier called it out.
That’s about where my compliments end. What pains me about books like this is there’s so much good information mixed with the bad. The average reader won’t know how to separate the two.
The first thing that’s apparent about this book is that Shrier cherry-picks the absolute worst of the worst to make her point. She quotes interviews or tells anecdotes about parents and schools who let their kids do whatever they want.
The second thing that’s apparent from anyone who comes from the lower class (like me) is that Shrier tries to convince the reader that it’s a widespread problem. It’s not. This is clearly isolated to wealthy and upper middle-class families. I’d estimate the top 10% at most.
At one point, she talks about how public schools have psychologists on staff along with teams of therapists, social workers, and counselors. If I had a drink, I’d spit it out laughing. I live in Las Vegas. My son goes to a public school in a middle class area. I asked my son how many mental health professionals they have at school, and he said none. He said the most they have is the suicide text line printed on the back of their school IDs.
I have a good friend who is a high school teacher in a low-income part of town. These are the kids that don’t have much hope for the future. These are the kids who can barely afford school supplies. These are the kids taking care of their younger siblings because their parents are working multiple jobs. These are the kids dealing with violence and addiction in their homes and can barely do their school work because of everything else happening in their lives.
My friend would kill to have mental health professionals at her public school, but they’re non-existent. Yet Shrier would have the reader believe that talking about your feelings all day in class is the norm around the country.
What drives me nuts about these books is they contradict themselves and want things both ways.
For example, Shrier references Jonathan Haidt and discusses how our kids have more mental health issues like depression than ever before due to smartphones. Meanwhile, the entire book is about how most kids don’t have these issues. Well, which one is it?
During her discussion of all the mental health professionals in these schools, she talks about how kids aren’t punished the right way. They’re just given in-school suspensions and a talk with a in-school counselor. She tells the stories of the violence in some of these schools and how some kid bashed another kid’s head into a locker and almost took out the kid’s eye.
Let me ask you an honest question. Would you honestly tell me that you think a kid who is that violent is mentally healthy?! Of course not.
The thing that really rubs me the wrong way about this book is that Shrier completely neglects the reality that there are bad parents out there. Many people don’t like when I say it, but I blame parents for everything. If your kid sucks, that’s on you. Yet Shrier expects parents to take care of all of the mental health needs of the children and not the schools. Clearly, that hasn’t been working too well.
She also completely neglects how overcrowded schools are and how parents expect the schools to do everything. Not only do most parents expect schools to do everything, each individual parent wants the school to have their specific parenting style.
The other thing that Shrier completely neglects is the reality of mental health statistics in the United States. This book is all about the non-existent mental health issues of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The entire book is a finger-wagging, “Back in my day, I’d get spanked and told to walk it off.” Shrier is 7 years older than me, so she’s Gen X and is talking about millennial parents.
Well, I have some bad news: Gen X and millennials aren’t doing so hot.
In their phenomenal book Deaths of Despair, Angus Deaton and Anne Case explain why we have an epidemic of people dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related causes. According to the most recent CDC data the primary ages for suicide are 25-44. After that is ages 65 and older.
If you’re wondering the primary age groups for overdose deaths, Shrier swings and misses on that one as well. The most recent data shows the highest rate of overdoses is for people between the ages of 35-44, next is 45-54 (Shrier’s age range), and then 25-34.
And you’re trying to tell me that previous parents did it the right way by never focusing on mental health? It’s laughable to even consider that.
Not only are these people dying from suicide and addiction, but these are the parents Shrier thinks will do just fine handling the mental health of their children rather than schools.
Shrier paints this rosy picture of how great she and her generation were parented, and it’s laughable. Now that I’m getting toward the end of this review, I dislike the book even more because it’s just such a slap in the face of the reality of what’s going on in our country.
Yes, maybe in Abigail Shrier’s wealthy world of privilege these kids are doing fine and are being given too much mental health care. Maybe those kids don’t need those resources, so how about you send some to the areas that actually need it.
But again, Shrier wrote this book as though the anecdotes in this book are the norm when it’s far from it. What really annoys me about this book is right-wing, lower-income people are going to read this book and completely agree with her that “liberals are soft”. Meanwhile, their children are dying around them from heroin and fentanyl overdoses or tweaking all over town on meth. All while thinking, “Yep. These kids don’t need no help.”
I’m done with my review. This book is annoying and potentially harmful and dangerous. There’s some good in this book, but it’s garbage for about 70-90% of the country.
I have a lot to say about this book because not only am I a father, but I’m the son of an alcoholic mom. I had an extremely traumatic childhood, and I became a drug addict and alcoholic myself. My addiction almost killed me when my son was 3, but fortunately, I was able to get sober in 2012 and have been sober ever since.
Shrier most likely wouldn’t say anything about my mental health issues, my addiction or my ACEs score. In fact (and this is important) she starts the book with a quick disclaimer explaining that she understands some children have severe mental health issues that require therapy and/or medication. She says this book is not about them.
I’m going to say quite a few positive things about this book, so don’t worry. But I do want to start out by saying I think that she put this “disclaimer” at the start of the book to give her an easy out when confronted about real world scenarios where a child clearly needs help.
I’ll start with what I think was good about the book. Later, I may critique some of these “good” things because they’re also bad.
First off, I agree that I think that we’re overdiagnosing our children in many scenarios. Later in the book, Abigail Shrier references Randolph Nesse who wrote the incredible book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Not only are emotions part of the human experience, but so are certain mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Another great book on this topic is Saving Normal by Allen Frances. I was actually fortunate enough to interview both Nesse and Francis on my old podcast.
ADHD and other mental illnesses are very real, but sometimes we throw potentially addictive medications at a child who is simply acting out because they’re being neglected at home or just being a child.
Abigail also brings more nuance than I was expecting to the conversation about Adverse Childhood Experience scores (ACEs). The ACEs questionnaire is very vague, and while many kids will meet some criteria for it, they are nowhere close to the same risk as severely traumatized children. For example, one question asks if a parent ever hit, beat, kicked, or physically hurt you. Two children may answer “yes”, but a child who is spanked technically meets that criteria but is not in the same boat as a child who is legitimately beaten by an alcoholic parent.
The last good thing about this book is she calls out that quack Bessel van der Kolk who is world famous for his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score. I’m not even a clinician, but I knew the book was filled with a ton of bad science. That book is a joke to any therapist who understands the science of trauma and how many times the book has been debunked, so I’m glad Shrier called it out.
That’s about where my compliments end. What pains me about books like this is there’s so much good information mixed with the bad. The average reader won’t know how to separate the two.
The first thing that’s apparent about this book is that Shrier cherry-picks the absolute worst of the worst to make her point. She quotes interviews or tells anecdotes about parents and schools who let their kids do whatever they want.
The second thing that’s apparent from anyone who comes from the lower class (like me) is that Shrier tries to convince the reader that it’s a widespread problem. It’s not. This is clearly isolated to wealthy and upper middle-class families. I’d estimate the top 10% at most.
At one point, she talks about how public schools have psychologists on staff along with teams of therapists, social workers, and counselors. If I had a drink, I’d spit it out laughing. I live in Las Vegas. My son goes to a public school in a middle class area. I asked my son how many mental health professionals they have at school, and he said none. He said the most they have is the suicide text line printed on the back of their school IDs.
I have a good friend who is a high school teacher in a low-income part of town. These are the kids that don’t have much hope for the future. These are the kids who can barely afford school supplies. These are the kids taking care of their younger siblings because their parents are working multiple jobs. These are the kids dealing with violence and addiction in their homes and can barely do their school work because of everything else happening in their lives.
My friend would kill to have mental health professionals at her public school, but they’re non-existent. Yet Shrier would have the reader believe that talking about your feelings all day in class is the norm around the country.
What drives me nuts about these books is they contradict themselves and want things both ways.
For example, Shrier references Jonathan Haidt and discusses how our kids have more mental health issues like depression than ever before due to smartphones. Meanwhile, the entire book is about how most kids don’t have these issues. Well, which one is it?
During her discussion of all the mental health professionals in these schools, she talks about how kids aren’t punished the right way. They’re just given in-school suspensions and a talk with a in-school counselor. She tells the stories of the violence in some of these schools and how some kid bashed another kid’s head into a locker and almost took out the kid’s eye.
Let me ask you an honest question. Would you honestly tell me that you think a kid who is that violent is mentally healthy?! Of course not.
The thing that really rubs me the wrong way about this book is that Shrier completely neglects the reality that there are bad parents out there. Many people don’t like when I say it, but I blame parents for everything. If your kid sucks, that’s on you. Yet Shrier expects parents to take care of all of the mental health needs of the children and not the schools. Clearly, that hasn’t been working too well.
She also completely neglects how overcrowded schools are and how parents expect the schools to do everything. Not only do most parents expect schools to do everything, each individual parent wants the school to have their specific parenting style.
The other thing that Shrier completely neglects is the reality of mental health statistics in the United States. This book is all about the non-existent mental health issues of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The entire book is a finger-wagging, “Back in my day, I’d get spanked and told to walk it off.” Shrier is 7 years older than me, so she’s Gen X and is talking about millennial parents.
Well, I have some bad news: Gen X and millennials aren’t doing so hot.
In their phenomenal book Deaths of Despair, Angus Deaton and Anne Case explain why we have an epidemic of people dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related causes. According to the most recent CDC data the primary ages for suicide are 25-44. After that is ages 65 and older.
If you’re wondering the primary age groups for overdose deaths, Shrier swings and misses on that one as well. The most recent data shows the highest rate of overdoses is for people between the ages of 35-44, next is 45-54 (Shrier’s age range), and then 25-34.
And you’re trying to tell me that previous parents did it the right way by never focusing on mental health? It’s laughable to even consider that.
Not only are these people dying from suicide and addiction, but these are the parents Shrier thinks will do just fine handling the mental health of their children rather than schools.
Shrier paints this rosy picture of how great she and her generation were parented, and it’s laughable. Now that I’m getting toward the end of this review, I dislike the book even more because it’s just such a slap in the face of the reality of what’s going on in our country.
Yes, maybe in Abigail Shrier’s wealthy world of privilege these kids are doing fine and are being given too much mental health care. Maybe those kids don’t need those resources, so how about you send some to the areas that actually need it.
But again, Shrier wrote this book as though the anecdotes in this book are the norm when it’s far from it. What really annoys me about this book is right-wing, lower-income people are going to read this book and completely agree with her that “liberals are soft”. Meanwhile, their children are dying around them from heroin and fentanyl overdoses or tweaking all over town on meth. All while thinking, “Yep. These kids don’t need no help.”
I’m done with my review. This book is annoying and potentially harmful and dangerous. There’s some good in this book, but it’s garbage for about 70-90% of the country.
March 12, 2024
HATED this book.
It screams of generalized opinions, shitty research, far-right nationalism, and ableist anecdotes to confirm her bias toward therapy and therapists. Of course, it paints the picture that the "far left agenda" is creating sick/coddled/mentally unwell kids and that the only solution is for parents to step in and blame teachers/therapists/doctors/anyone with a degree and a modicum of professional training...for making and keeping kids sick for their own sick benefit.
Yikes. Gross.
It screams of generalized opinions, shitty research, far-right nationalism, and ableist anecdotes to confirm her bias toward therapy and therapists. Of course, it paints the picture that the "far left agenda" is creating sick/coddled/mentally unwell kids and that the only solution is for parents to step in and blame teachers/therapists/doctors/anyone with a degree and a modicum of professional training...for making and keeping kids sick for their own sick benefit.
Yikes. Gross.
Read
March 27, 2024You can read a lot of other reviews and ratings, and make up your own mind about how needed this conversation is and how successful Shrier is or isn't at carrying it on. But if you want to know what that healthier world she's describing looks like, read Dandelion Wine, read Swallows and Amazons, read Brave Irene, The Saturdays, Peter Rabbit, The Sign on Rosie's Door, Meet the Malones, Best Friends for Frances, Understood Betsy, Farmer Boy. Even Peanuts cartoons, if you want. And think about what we've given up, given away.
February 28, 2024
I very rarely read non-fiction as you can tell from my bookshelf! But I couldn’t put this book down—I devoured it in 1 day. Abigail brings a totally fresh perspective to a problem that anyone with teenagers can attest to—a generation of kids who aren’t launching. I really appreciated the combination of thorough research and human stories that Abigail wove together to create this book. Don’t hesitate—read this book asap!
March 20, 2024
Ok I have to preface my review with the caveat that I didn't realize who the author was before picking up this book and that I was very predisposed to agree with her given my habit of being critical and suspicious of psychology and psychiatry as industries thanks to both my personal and professional experiences. Even with that in mind it was an underwhelming read, to put it politely.
I have several pages of notes detailing minor issues I had with this book which I am far too lazy to organize in a proper review and this book is, frankly, not worth the effort since it's both lazy and disingenuous.
Shrier puts research (which she always bring up free of actual citations) on the same standing as anecdotes which often sound entirely made up in their excess. Even when I agreed with her (after all a lot of her takes validate certain aspects of my parenting style which I now have to question) I had to cringe at how poorly supported her opinions were. The few times she provides sources to support her assertions they range from dubious (why would The New Yorker be your source regarding the prevalence of teen suicide?) and questionable (let's not talk about considering Peterson as a valid source) to passable but uncited.
She seems to have a strange fixation on Israel and inserting the fact that someone is Jewish in the conversation even when seemingly irrelevant.
Even when she comes close to recognizing that hyper-individualism and the lack of community are a big part of why both parents and children seem to be so miserable, she remains determined to ignore what incentivizes these situations and why individualized action are unlikely to solve them. She also appears to be entirely oblivious to the many ways in which she affirms one thing and its opposite whenever convenient for her arguments.
Ultimately my conclusion regarding this book, in a move that will surprise exactly no one who knows me, is: Citation needed!
I have several pages of notes detailing minor issues I had with this book which I am far too lazy to organize in a proper review and this book is, frankly, not worth the effort since it's both lazy and disingenuous.
Shrier puts research (which she always bring up free of actual citations) on the same standing as anecdotes which often sound entirely made up in their excess. Even when I agreed with her (after all a lot of her takes validate certain aspects of my parenting style which I now have to question) I had to cringe at how poorly supported her opinions were. The few times she provides sources to support her assertions they range from dubious (why would The New Yorker be your source regarding the prevalence of teen suicide?) and questionable (let's not talk about considering Peterson as a valid source) to passable but uncited.
She seems to have a strange fixation on Israel and inserting the fact that someone is Jewish in the conversation even when seemingly irrelevant.
Even when she comes close to recognizing that hyper-individualism and the lack of community are a big part of why both parents and children seem to be so miserable, she remains determined to ignore what incentivizes these situations and why individualized action are unlikely to solve them. She also appears to be entirely oblivious to the many ways in which she affirms one thing and its opposite whenever convenient for her arguments.
Ultimately my conclusion regarding this book, in a move that will surprise exactly no one who knows me, is: Citation needed!
April 9, 2024
Quick overview :
Pt 1 : Healers Can Harm
Ch 1 : Iatrogensis (an entire book could be written here, not just on mental health but every aspect of public health, physical and emotional)
Ch 2 : A crisis in the era of therapy
Particularly struck by how many of the top professionals say xyz is a bad idea, but then people with a weekend certificate are running all over implementing these horrible plans.
Ch 3 : Bad Therapy (had either 10 or 11 "Rules" need a poster with these).
Pt 2 : therapy goes airborne, sprinkling therapeutic language into the vernacular, watering down the meaning of mental health and diagnosis.
Ch 4 : social-emotional meddling, the darkside of social emotional learning and why it is total rubbish, bad for adults, terrible for kids. Plus, the removal of ethical guardrails in schools and the blurring of lines between therapists and teachers.
Ch 5 : The schools are full of shadows, giving students fidget toys will lean they fidget less and pay attention less because they are playing with toys instead of listening... duh.
Ch 6 : Trauma Kings, victim points, and the idea that trauma is incurable. Searching for trauma where there is none. Treating real trauma counterproductivly, having non-qualified experts doing stupid things because they are unqualified and ignorant.
Ch 7: Hunting Fishing Mining, Mental Health Survey Mischief; suggest selling problems
Ch 8: Full of Empathy and Mean as Hell
Ch 9: The Road Paved by Gentle Parents: gentle parenting ruining children's lives by setting zero boundaries, setting low low low expectations, encouraging narcissistic thinking.
Ch 10: Spare the Rod, Drug the Child
Pt 3 : Maybe there's nothing wrong with our kids. Rolling back seudo therapy from schools and pulling that babble out of our parenting practices. Letting kids be kids
Ch 11: This will be our final session, how therapy should not be endless, there should be a plan to venture out solo, having resolved the problem (whatever that is) or learned to live with it on your own.
Ch 12: Spoons Out, take your spoon out of your coffee before you drink it to avoid stabbing yourself in the face.
This book is another phenomenal piece by Mrs. Shrier, I preodered the very first day it could be ordered and have been impatiently waiting. Binged the whole thing today, and I will have to take a slower read through over the weekend. My audiobook was about 30 minutes a chapter, I now have the paper copy on its way (highlighting those 11?12? Rules is at the very top of my to-do list)
AND I am now hoping to see a book on iatrogenic medicine from Mrs. Shrier.
On a personal note, I am just past the gentle parenting wave and have seen how abysmally that stragaty has worked out for those around me, who really (with best intentions) thought it would EVENTUALLY pan out. As someone with tiny people of my own, I have done my best to take my grandmas, my mome, my MILs advice and mix it with intuition.
I also went to a horrible "life affirming" therapist for 2 or 3 sessions a few years back. After realizing that therapy was making everything worse, internally in my mind and externally in my relationships and behavior. I abandoned that course and muddled through that rough patch with my friends and my sister. I was asked to ruminate and record negatives endlessly in detail to then "unpick" them. Looking back, I can totally see why it didn't work and can't imagine what that woman thought she would accomplish by having me ignore any positive around me.
But as Mrs. Shrier points out therapy for adults is different than for kids, particularly vulnerable kids. It felt as bad as breaking up with someone telling that therapist I was cutting ties and that I thought her approach wasn't right for me. There is no way I could have done that as a child.
Pt 1 : Healers Can Harm
Ch 1 : Iatrogensis (an entire book could be written here, not just on mental health but every aspect of public health, physical and emotional)
Ch 2 : A crisis in the era of therapy
Particularly struck by how many of the top professionals say xyz is a bad idea, but then people with a weekend certificate are running all over implementing these horrible plans.
Ch 3 : Bad Therapy (had either 10 or 11 "Rules" need a poster with these).
Pt 2 : therapy goes airborne, sprinkling therapeutic language into the vernacular, watering down the meaning of mental health and diagnosis.
Ch 4 : social-emotional meddling, the darkside of social emotional learning and why it is total rubbish, bad for adults, terrible for kids. Plus, the removal of ethical guardrails in schools and the blurring of lines between therapists and teachers.
Ch 5 : The schools are full of shadows, giving students fidget toys will lean they fidget less and pay attention less because they are playing with toys instead of listening... duh.
Ch 6 : Trauma Kings, victim points, and the idea that trauma is incurable. Searching for trauma where there is none. Treating real trauma counterproductivly, having non-qualified experts doing stupid things because they are unqualified and ignorant.
Ch 7: Hunting Fishing Mining, Mental Health Survey Mischief; suggest selling problems
Ch 8: Full of Empathy and Mean as Hell
Ch 9: The Road Paved by Gentle Parents: gentle parenting ruining children's lives by setting zero boundaries, setting low low low expectations, encouraging narcissistic thinking.
Ch 10: Spare the Rod, Drug the Child
Pt 3 : Maybe there's nothing wrong with our kids. Rolling back seudo therapy from schools and pulling that babble out of our parenting practices. Letting kids be kids
Ch 11: This will be our final session, how therapy should not be endless, there should be a plan to venture out solo, having resolved the problem (whatever that is) or learned to live with it on your own.
Ch 12: Spoons Out, take your spoon out of your coffee before you drink it to avoid stabbing yourself in the face.
This book is another phenomenal piece by Mrs. Shrier, I preodered the very first day it could be ordered and have been impatiently waiting. Binged the whole thing today, and I will have to take a slower read through over the weekend. My audiobook was about 30 minutes a chapter, I now have the paper copy on its way (highlighting those 11?12? Rules is at the very top of my to-do list)
AND I am now hoping to see a book on iatrogenic medicine from Mrs. Shrier.
On a personal note, I am just past the gentle parenting wave and have seen how abysmally that stragaty has worked out for those around me, who really (with best intentions) thought it would EVENTUALLY pan out. As someone with tiny people of my own, I have done my best to take my grandmas, my mome, my MILs advice and mix it with intuition.
I also went to a horrible "life affirming" therapist for 2 or 3 sessions a few years back. After realizing that therapy was making everything worse, internally in my mind and externally in my relationships and behavior. I abandoned that course and muddled through that rough patch with my friends and my sister. I was asked to ruminate and record negatives endlessly in detail to then "unpick" them. Looking back, I can totally see why it didn't work and can't imagine what that woman thought she would accomplish by having me ignore any positive around me.
But as Mrs. Shrier points out therapy for adults is different than for kids, particularly vulnerable kids. It felt as bad as breaking up with someone telling that therapist I was cutting ties and that I thought her approach wasn't right for me. There is no way I could have done that as a child.
March 11, 2024
I’m biased as hell and knew that going into this book. I was hoping for a more-balanced and informative piece (yeah, my first mistake), but it’s just cherry-picked studies and an overall extreme anti-therapy POV. She applies incredibly specific and generally poor examples, which I fully agree are poor examples, and attempts to generalize them to an entire field. There were interesting points to consider, as all fields have good and bad, but don’t take them for face value. Overall, this felt like an extremely long and uninformed rant.
March 14, 2024
I found this book troubling, in that I agree with many of her criticisms about over-pathologizing kids, stupid and counterproductive school policies, and the really, REALLY frustrating prevalence of under-trained, unsupervised yet mind-bogglingly self-assured “therapists…” But I don’t share her obvious political bent, and I don’t think much of her rambling, anecdotal writing (nostalgic stories of the Greatest Generation? Jordan Peterson presented as an authority on… anything?) and “data”cherry-picked to support her pre-existing opinions. The book isn’t an investigation; it’s more of a rant in the style of Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow.
I have real concerns about the phenomena covered in the book - but I don’t think “Back in my day, we didn’t stand for this nonsense” or “Kids should just be told to get over it” (and these are actual recurring messages in the book). It’s uncomfortable to sort of agree with a writer like Schrier. (For example, I have many doubts and concerns about the “trans” phenomenon, but I’m not a conservative bigot. I’m perplexed by some of the raging controversies that are reportedly occurring on American college campuses - but not because I’m a right-winger.)
These issues warrant serious study and discussion. This book isn’t a serious study of anything.
I have real concerns about the phenomena covered in the book - but I don’t think “Back in my day, we didn’t stand for this nonsense” or “Kids should just be told to get over it” (and these are actual recurring messages in the book). It’s uncomfortable to sort of agree with a writer like Schrier. (For example, I have many doubts and concerns about the “trans” phenomenon, but I’m not a conservative bigot. I’m perplexed by some of the raging controversies that are reportedly occurring on American college campuses - but not because I’m a right-winger.)
These issues warrant serious study and discussion. This book isn’t a serious study of anything.
March 28, 2024
"Having kids is the best, most worthy thing you could possibly do. Raise them well. You're the only one who can."
Wow. As a therapist AND a mom, this book was a mix of emotions for me.
The thing is, Shrier is not wrong about therapists and it's something I have decried in this field. The over diagnosis of perfectly healthy people, teens especially, as well as the standard of care we call "affirmation" and "unconditional positive regard" falls so short. We as a field are truly needing to evaluate where we are. I don't believe most therapists mean harm, but school has scared us into believing there is only way to do therapy. As Shrier notes, an angsty teen whose parents pay for weekly therapy is an easier client than say, the borderline. And as therapists are reliant on a client for a pay check, the motivation is high to keep the teen coming week after week.
HOWEVER, in my own experience, most teens are being forced into therapy by their parents, do not want to be there, the parents are "helicopter" and demand constant reports on progress (could be an issue for confidentiality) and the teens feel disconnected from their parents. Therapists CAN do good for these teens. Giving them a place to feel known and seen. Given helpful motivation (I know you feel like this hard thing is going to last forever, but it's not!) or coping skills (going on a walk is helpful - fresh air and sunshine are mood boosters!). I think in many ways parents have damaged these kids and the kids really resent it. They want a "normal" childhood.
I try my best to get parents to come into therapy, because 99% of the time, THEY are the problem. Most refuse.
I also do believe therapy js valuable and don’t agree with much of the book that says techniques and studies aren’t valuable. Our field is only about 100 years old and we do have lots of room to grow. However, I have seen real progress and lives changed in therapy. That feeling of understanding ourselves better and becoming more connected and in tune with the world is irreplaceable. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to therapy.
Oof. Parenting. I had a client tell me parents these days aren’t helicopter anymore - they are “lawnmower” - clearing every obstacle out of their kids path.
But aren’t some of the most interesting and well rounded people those who have face adversity and overcome?
I plan to continue being an "old-school" mom, but with a bit more emotional emphasis in place. I think it's important to check on our children's emotional world and not just focus on behavior modification and discipline. We can't overemphasize one aspect of development and ignore the other. YES, your emotions matter and they are VALID but they are not always logical and we CANNOT rely on them to govern our lives.
I am endlessly curious to see how the pendulum will swing back with my kids generation, the "alpha gen" as a backlash to Millennial / Gen X parenting and the overwhelming emotional immaturity of Gen Z. I hope we can course correct, because the current path we are on as a society is treacherous.
I love this saying: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Good times have created weak men and we are seeing these weak men creating hard times as we speak. Perhaps alpha gen will need to endure the hard times in order to bring back a strong generation.
Wow. As a therapist AND a mom, this book was a mix of emotions for me.
The thing is, Shrier is not wrong about therapists and it's something I have decried in this field. The over diagnosis of perfectly healthy people, teens especially, as well as the standard of care we call "affirmation" and "unconditional positive regard" falls so short. We as a field are truly needing to evaluate where we are. I don't believe most therapists mean harm, but school has scared us into believing there is only way to do therapy. As Shrier notes, an angsty teen whose parents pay for weekly therapy is an easier client than say, the borderline. And as therapists are reliant on a client for a pay check, the motivation is high to keep the teen coming week after week.
HOWEVER, in my own experience, most teens are being forced into therapy by their parents, do not want to be there, the parents are "helicopter" and demand constant reports on progress (could be an issue for confidentiality) and the teens feel disconnected from their parents. Therapists CAN do good for these teens. Giving them a place to feel known and seen. Given helpful motivation (I know you feel like this hard thing is going to last forever, but it's not!) or coping skills (going on a walk is helpful - fresh air and sunshine are mood boosters!). I think in many ways parents have damaged these kids and the kids really resent it. They want a "normal" childhood.
I try my best to get parents to come into therapy, because 99% of the time, THEY are the problem. Most refuse.
I also do believe therapy js valuable and don’t agree with much of the book that says techniques and studies aren’t valuable. Our field is only about 100 years old and we do have lots of room to grow. However, I have seen real progress and lives changed in therapy. That feeling of understanding ourselves better and becoming more connected and in tune with the world is irreplaceable. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to therapy.
Oof. Parenting. I had a client tell me parents these days aren’t helicopter anymore - they are “lawnmower” - clearing every obstacle out of their kids path.
But aren’t some of the most interesting and well rounded people those who have face adversity and overcome?
I plan to continue being an "old-school" mom, but with a bit more emotional emphasis in place. I think it's important to check on our children's emotional world and not just focus on behavior modification and discipline. We can't overemphasize one aspect of development and ignore the other. YES, your emotions matter and they are VALID but they are not always logical and we CANNOT rely on them to govern our lives.
I am endlessly curious to see how the pendulum will swing back with my kids generation, the "alpha gen" as a backlash to Millennial / Gen X parenting and the overwhelming emotional immaturity of Gen Z. I hope we can course correct, because the current path we are on as a society is treacherous.
I love this saying: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Good times have created weak men and we are seeing these weak men creating hard times as we speak. Perhaps alpha gen will need to endure the hard times in order to bring back a strong generation.
March 14, 2024
"We parents have become so frantic, hypervigilant, and borderline obsessive about our kids’ mental health that we routinely allow all manner of mental health expert to evict us from the room. (“We will let you know.”)
We’ve been relying on them for decades to tell us how to raise well-adjusted kids. Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite: that psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids..."
Bad Therapy was another excellent contrarian work from the author. Broadly speaking, the more orthodoxy takes over, the more important the voices of heterodox thinkers becomes. Strongly influenced by our pro-social bias and evolutionary wiring, society can often head off on ill-fated journeys, firmly reinforced by pathological groupthink.
Accordingly, this book will likely rub many people who are caught up in the groupthink the wrong way. Contrarian voices always piss the majority off. A cursory glance at the low reviews here confirms as much. However, It is an important and timely book, as the rates of mental health issues and usage of psychotropic medications among young people in the West have increased by baffling amounts in the last few decades (see quote below).
Author Abigail Shrier is an American writer and former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She drops the quote above in the book's intro. The book is my second of hers, after her 2020 book: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which I also enjoyed.
Abigail Shrier:
As the book's title implies, it is an in-depth examination of the recent explosion of therapy aimed at treating an ever-expanding litany of mental health "problems" in young adults and even children. Far from being beneficial, or even benign, Shrier posits that much of this therapy is unnecessary, and possibly harmful.
In the second ~half of the book, she also talks about how the style of parenting has changed in the last few decades. Parents have transitioned from largely "free-range" raising their children, with punishments used as deterrents, to recently becoming "helicopter parents" who are punishment averse, preoccupied with avoiding "trauma," and being overly permissive towards their children's recalcitrant behaviour.
The writing style here is exceptional, and the book is very readable. The book's got a great flow. The author sounds like a super sharp mind, and she writes very well. The audio version I have was also read by the author, and she did a great job of the narration.
She gets the writing in the book off to a great start with a well-written and lively intro, where she talks about how her 12-year-old son was given a mental health screener after she brought him to the doctor for a stomach ache.
As a quick aside; The book was a massive wake-up call for me. Kids today are not being raised the way they were in the author's (and my) generation. She touches on this in the book.
For example, anecdotally speaking: I left for school much later than my parents left for work, and got back from school much earlier than they got back from work. I woke myself up, ate breakfast, left the house, locked the door, and walked to the bus stop a block away from the age of 5 (GASP) onwards. When I got home, I made myself something to eat, and watched TV and did my homework until my parents got back. Most of my friends did the same. When I got a little older, I was out in the neighbourhood with my friends all day long; typically out riding our bikes, skateboarding, climbing trees, etc. My parents had no idea where I was. I was told to come home when the streetlights came on, and I did.
As anyone with kids ~16 and younger living in the West can attest to, this is definitely not how children are raised today. Where I live children who are ~9 years old are not allowed to walk to the bus stop (~300 meters away) without being accompanied by an adult. When I go for a Sunday drive in my neighborhood, I rarely ever see children outside playing together. The kids that I do see are all glued to their phones. Most of them even while they're walking on the sidewalk; alone or in pairs...
The author talks of the genesis of the book in this bit of writing:
Part of the problem is that the mental health industry is incentivized to create life-long patients:
The incidence of mental health issues among young people has exploded recently. She writes on the gravity of the situation:
The modern-day trend of helicopter parenting and constant close supervision of children may prevent some schoolyard fights, and prevent a few injuries, but it's not without a huge downside.
She says:
What is the end result of all this supervised play and constant monitoring of young children? Reduced agency in later life:
Some more of what Shrier talks about in here includes:
• Spare the Rod, Drug the Child
• Anxiety and Even Depression Can Be Good for Us
• Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong with Our Kids
• They Aren’t Weak—Unless We Make Them That Way
• What We Can Learn from a Three-Year-Old Japanese Kid
• The decline of social networks among people in the West
• The life-changing effects of having children; turfing "the experts."
I'm going to drop just one more quote. It's an amazing piece of writing commenting on the current state of childhood/young adulthood of the average person in the modern West. I've covered it with a spoiler bc it's pretty long (but well worth the read):
********************
Bad Therapy was another excellent read from the author. She did a fantastic job of this book. It should be on the reading list of every new parent.
I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested.
5 stars, and a spot on my favorites shelf.
We’ve been relying on them for decades to tell us how to raise well-adjusted kids. Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite: that psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids..."
Bad Therapy was another excellent contrarian work from the author. Broadly speaking, the more orthodoxy takes over, the more important the voices of heterodox thinkers becomes. Strongly influenced by our pro-social bias and evolutionary wiring, society can often head off on ill-fated journeys, firmly reinforced by pathological groupthink.
Accordingly, this book will likely rub many people who are caught up in the groupthink the wrong way. Contrarian voices always piss the majority off. A cursory glance at the low reviews here confirms as much. However, It is an important and timely book, as the rates of mental health issues and usage of psychotropic medications among young people in the West have increased by baffling amounts in the last few decades (see quote below).
Author Abigail Shrier is an American writer and former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She drops the quote above in the book's intro. The book is my second of hers, after her 2020 book: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which I also enjoyed.
Abigail Shrier:
As the book's title implies, it is an in-depth examination of the recent explosion of therapy aimed at treating an ever-expanding litany of mental health "problems" in young adults and even children. Far from being beneficial, or even benign, Shrier posits that much of this therapy is unnecessary, and possibly harmful.
In the second ~half of the book, she also talks about how the style of parenting has changed in the last few decades. Parents have transitioned from largely "free-range" raising their children, with punishments used as deterrents, to recently becoming "helicopter parents" who are punishment averse, preoccupied with avoiding "trauma," and being overly permissive towards their children's recalcitrant behaviour.
The writing style here is exceptional, and the book is very readable. The book's got a great flow. The author sounds like a super sharp mind, and she writes very well. The audio version I have was also read by the author, and she did a great job of the narration.
She gets the writing in the book off to a great start with a well-written and lively intro, where she talks about how her 12-year-old son was given a mental health screener after she brought him to the doctor for a stomach ache.
As a quick aside; The book was a massive wake-up call for me. Kids today are not being raised the way they were in the author's (and my) generation. She touches on this in the book.
For example, anecdotally speaking: I left for school much later than my parents left for work, and got back from school much earlier than they got back from work. I woke myself up, ate breakfast, left the house, locked the door, and walked to the bus stop a block away from the age of 5 (GASP) onwards. When I got home, I made myself something to eat, and watched TV and did my homework until my parents got back. Most of my friends did the same. When I got a little older, I was out in the neighbourhood with my friends all day long; typically out riding our bikes, skateboarding, climbing trees, etc. My parents had no idea where I was. I was told to come home when the streetlights came on, and I did.
As anyone with kids ~16 and younger living in the West can attest to, this is definitely not how children are raised today. Where I live children who are ~9 years old are not allowed to walk to the bus stop (~300 meters away) without being accompanied by an adult. When I go for a Sunday drive in my neighborhood, I rarely ever see children outside playing together. The kids that I do see are all glued to their phones. Most of them even while they're walking on the sidewalk; alone or in pairs...
The author talks of the genesis of the book in this bit of writing:
"In the course of writing my last book, Irreversible Damage, and for years after its publication, I spoke to hundreds of American parents. And during that time, I became acutely aware of just how much therapy kids were getting from actual therapists and their proxies in schools. How completely parents were relying on therapists and therapeutic methods to fix their kids.
And how expert diagnoses often altered kids’ perceptions of themselves.
Schools, especially, jumped at the opportunity to adopt a therapeutic approach to education and announced themselves our “partners” in childrearing. School mental health staffs expanded: more psychologists, more counselors, more social workers. The new regime would diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward. It directed kids in routinized habits of monitoring and sharing their bad feelings. It trained teachers to understand “trauma” as the root of student misbehavior and academic underperformance."
Part of the problem is that the mental health industry is incentivized to create life-long patients:
"No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth, and mental health experts are no exception. By feeding normal kids with normal problems into an unending pipeline, the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them.
These mental health interventions on behalf of our kids have largely backfired. Recasting personality variation as a chiaroscuro of dysfunction, the mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered."
The incidence of mental health issues among young people has exploded recently. She writes on the gravity of the situation:
"The mental health establishment has successfully sold a generation on the idea that vast numbers of them are sick. Less than half of Gen Zers believes their mental health is “good...”
...The rising generation has received more therapy than any prior generation. Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional—compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers.
Forty-two percent of the rising generation currently has a mental health diagnosis, rendering “normal” increasingly abnormal. One in six US children aged two to eight years old has a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. More than 10 percent of American kids have an ADHD diagnosis—double the expected prevalence rate based on population surveys in other countries. Nearly 10 percent of kids now have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. Teens today so profoundly identify with these diagnoses, they display them in social media profiles, alongside a picture and family name.
And if you ask mental health experts if young people, in aggregate, have undiagnosed mental health problems, they invariably answer in the affirmative. Meaning, according to experts, not having a mental health problem is increasingly anomalous."
The modern-day trend of helicopter parenting and constant close supervision of children may prevent some schoolyard fights, and prevent a few injuries, but it's not without a huge downside.
She says:
“Kids today are always under the situation of an observer,” said Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College and author of the classic introductory textbook on psychology. “At home, the parents are watching them. At school, they’re being observed by teachers. Out of school, they’re in adult-directed activities. They have almost no privacy...”
...Actually, Gray said, adding monitoring to a child’s life is functionally equivalent to adding anxiety. “When psychologists do research where they want to add an element of stress, and they want to compare people doing something under stress versus no stress, how do they add stress? They simply add an observer,” Gray said. “If you’re watched by somebody who seems to be assessing your performance, that’s a stress condition.”
In the last generation, we came to think of unsupervised time as dangerous—a host site for childhood trauma, bullying, and abuse. Better that a recess monitor establish clear rules for schoolyard kickball and insist that everyone play fairly than a kid ever feel left out. Better to hire bus monitors than risk some kid taking another’s lunch money. Better that parents track their teens’ whereabouts with an app than ever wonder where they are—or trust them to get home safely. But this incessant monitoring has infested childhood with stress..."
What is the end result of all this supervised play and constant monitoring of young children? Reduced agency in later life:
“Locus of control” is the term psychologists use to refer to a person’s sense of agency. If you have an internal locus of control, you believe you have ability to improve your circumstances. If you have an external locus of control, you do not. Instead, you tend to attribute events to things outside of your control, like other people or bum luck. The rising generation has moved toward an external locus of control, Twenge said. The generation standing at the very beginning of life’s journey also believes it can’t do anything to improve its lot."
Some more of what Shrier talks about in here includes:
• Spare the Rod, Drug the Child
• Anxiety and Even Depression Can Be Good for Us
• Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong with Our Kids
• They Aren’t Weak—Unless We Make Them That Way
• What We Can Learn from a Three-Year-Old Japanese Kid
• The decline of social networks among people in the West
• The life-changing effects of having children; turfing "the experts."
I'm going to drop just one more quote. It's an amazing piece of writing commenting on the current state of childhood/young adulthood of the average person in the modern West. I've covered it with a spoiler bc it's pretty long (but well worth the read):
********************
Bad Therapy was another excellent read from the author. She did a fantastic job of this book. It should be on the reading list of every new parent.
I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested.
5 stars, and a spot on my favorites shelf.
April 3, 2024
50000000% recommend this book to every single person.
This book is helps state some of the reason why we are choosing a different education path for our child. And the reason why more parents should know what is happening in their schools with their children!
Abigail does a great job at explaining why a lot of therapy does not work for some individuals, it also explains why it’s important to know what type of therapist you’re going to and what is being talked about. There were so many things she brought up that really concerned me as a mother & why some schools are acting as therapists to a child when that is not the job given to them.
Anyway, great book! The audio was a good listen, too!
This book is helps state some of the reason why we are choosing a different education path for our child. And the reason why more parents should know what is happening in their schools with their children!
Abigail does a great job at explaining why a lot of therapy does not work for some individuals, it also explains why it’s important to know what type of therapist you’re going to and what is being talked about. There were so many things she brought up that really concerned me as a mother & why some schools are acting as therapists to a child when that is not the job given to them.
Anyway, great book! The audio was a good listen, too!
February 28, 2024
Brilliant! This should be required reading for parents. So many good intentions yet so much going wrong with kids’ mental health. Like her other book, this book is important and insightful. Well written and well researched.
March 6, 2024
"Experts have completely ignored good evidence about what actually works with kids because it didn't grant them the centrality they crave" (182).
Mental health is the overarching concern du jour. We celebrate people for taking time to attend to their mental health. We react immediately at any hint of "bullying," which is what we used to call unkindness. We attempt to reduce children's stress and risk of rejection or harm in every way. We provide unprecedented accommodations to students: no "cold calling" in class (too traumatic); only soft deadlines for submitting work; no "triggering" readings. For standardized testing, the accommodations are outrageous, but no one has the guts to protest: 1.5 or double extra time, private room, a personal reader to read it aloud, permission to take the test over various days—all of it is obscenely unjust and not only privileges the weakest links but the already privileged, since it is the wealthiest who benefit most from these accommodations. (See also the College Board's own data.)
Consider: "in today's tony prep schools, all of which emphasize social-emotional skills, 'only what you believe and what you feel matters. You don't have to treat grownups with trust or respect....They don't know more than you. Only what you feel is what you know. And then you're just letting loose a bunch of tiny little narcissists and giving them reasons to attack each other" (158).
It gets worse.
This is the "tattletale generation": "Like the disempowered masses of a totalitarian regime, kids read for the remaining implement in an otherwise empty toolbox: tattling" (161). There is a "bizarre and chilling trend among the rising generation....Many teens maintain a cache of screenshots to incriminate their friends just in case they should need to retaliate against an accuser." Then, if the parent gets involved with some conflict, he or she "also typically sends along an incriminating cache on the student accuser." When asked how they came across these old pictures, "the answer was always the same: oh my kid saved these screenshots of her friends saying something racist or doing something stupid—just in case. Call it insurance. Call it blackmail" (162). It is disturbing, but it is not surprising.
Shrier wants us to believe the mess is just two decades old, but it goes back much further. Even in 1990, I was told by a preschool director that I was never to say "no" to a child, just redirect him or her to a more positive behavior. But there is older evidence: Dr. Benjamin Spock'sThe Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sold 500,000 copies six months after it was published in 1946, when just 3M were born in 1945. Moreover, broadcast from 1957 to 1963, Leave It to Beaver was a television situation comedy about a suburban family. In those episodes, we observe how the parents modeled and shaped common-good values. The parents consistently guided the children to be responsible, consider others' feelings and wellbeing, and generally be good citizens, not narcissists. When Beaver exploits for monetary gain the shut off water main on a hot day, the dad does not praise his entrepreneurial mindset. Instead, he worries that Beav may be "a sharp operator." Ward and June Cleaver never called their sons "Buddy;" they wouldn't have considered their children friends; they rarely attended the older son's athletic events, far less their practices; their children were not the center of their lives; they had their own to lead. But the serpent enters this Eden as the advent of child psychology supplanting common sense and traditional parenting as Ward increasingly referred to and applied child psychology, often to undesirable results.
Psychological treatment, and its offspring, social-emotional learning, which has really taken control of schools, are an excellent means by which to "induce anxiety, depression, a feeling of incapacity, or family estrangement." How?
1. "Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings."
2. "Induce rumination," habitually giving "voice to negative feeling or personal problems."
3. "Make happiness a goal" but reward victimhood and suffering; identify with your struggles. (I had a student who decided to embrace her trichotillomania, pulling out every hair on her body from head to eyelashes to legs, as an identity and not seek treatment; she believed that it was oppressive to consider a mental illness as such.)
4. "Affirm and accommodate kids' worries."
5. "Monitor, monitor, monitor."
6. "Dispense diagnoses [a new, negative understanding of oneself] liberally."
7. "Drug 'em."
8. "Encourage kids to share their 'trauma'."
9. "Encourage young adults to break contact with 'toxic' family."
10. "Create treatment dependency."
The most important points echo what Haidt and Lukianoff wrote in their book. I can only imagine that Shrier believed that her readers would have already read The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, a less journalistic and more academic and prescriptive, though still accessible, treatment of the issue. Shrier never mentions the fact that liberal girls have far worse mental health than conservative girls and those who identify as religious, a fact explored by many authors, but most extensively here , along with a summary of Haidt and Lukianoff's thesis and recommendations. To wit:
Isn't that significant enough to include in a book about young people's mental health? She didn't want to alienate her readers, so she didn't include it.
Shrier's book would have benefited greatly from the brilliant work of Rabbi Edwin Friedman of blessed memory: contemporary society's attempt to assuage anxiety through an addiction to "collecting more and newer data in the belief that newer and better information is always the key to leadership and success" actually erodes "confidence, judgment, and decisiveness." That goes for parents, CEOs, educators, and everyone else. "'The great myth of our data-gathering era . . . has two sides, ‘If only we knew enough, we could do (or fix) anything’ and it’s obverse, ‘If we failed, it is because we did not use the right method’' (p. 98). Read Friedman's work; it's extraordinary.
_______________-
The most important points in Bad Therapy are:
Teachers and school support staff are acting as unlicensed therapists practicing therapy. This is widespread in higher ed as well. See Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
Iatrogenesis: a healer can harm a patient in the course of treatment. Therapy can harm patients in a variety of ways: "lead a client to understand herself as sick and rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis...encourage family estrangement....exacerbate marital stress...compromise a patient's resilience...render a patient more traumatized, more depressed, and undermine her self-efficacy so she's less able to turn her life around...lead a patient...to become overly dependent on her therapist" (8). The therapy industry benefits financially from treating "the least sick for the longest period of time," so it's in therapists' best interests to keep clients on the hook. And there is no tracking required, so no one knows who has benefited and who was harmed. Shrier asserts convincingly that providing a generally healthy population unnecessary mental health treatments has resulted in "unprecedented iatrogenic effects" (13).
Children need boundaries. They are happier, less anxious, and more confident with parenting styles that are authoritative, not authoritarian or permissive. Parents who consistently affirm children's "impulses, desires and actions" do them a grave disservice. They need structured chores to do, tasks that contribute to the household. "When we made a point of inducting children into the adult world—through the gradual assignment of chores, after-school jobs, and an allowance of hours of unsupervised time with peers—they were eager for more. More freedom, more responsibility. But today, instead, we alter the adult world around them to make it more amenable to a child" (227).
Share life stories and family history with kids. It gives them roots, a sense of belonging, relation, and history, and shows them that the family has prevailed despite many trials (and they can too). This comports with an article I read in 2022:The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing (2022)
.
The trendy system replacing punishment and discipline, restorative justice, not only does not work, but is also harmful to the victim, who "is pressed not only to accept the apology but to offer one of her own—for whatever she may have done to provoke her attacker" (95).
Shrier calls out the entire field of psychology for its poor methodology and research practices. As I have written many times, social pseudoscientists selectively report data, routinely p-hack (manipulate data to achieve statistical significance), rely on small (often non-random) sample sizes, have a bias in publication toward positive results, and cannot make accurate predictions. Psychologists promote narcissism to replace millennia of wisdom traditions like religions that concerned themselves with the common good and how to live a good life. They are bad religionists, not scientists, but society regards them as scientists and gurus, and has successfully spread their gospel from institutions to the family. Their studies capture the media and captivate society because they confirm our biases. For example, Cathy Widom's work proved that parents who had suffered physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect during their childhoods were no more likely to physically abuse their own children (125), but we hold on to the opposite notion because it comports with our own ideas. Most importantly, the fact is actually that trauma rarely leads to lasting damage; resilience is actually the default, but "trauma informed teaching" is all the rage as though every child not only experienced trauma but must be treated differently because of it.
What short memories we have! Many parents think that their kids were traumatized by COVID and have lost a part of their childhood, so the parents make excuses for them. Plagues, famines, wars, death, trauma is part of the human condition. Again, resilience is the default, not paralysis. If you treat kids as though they were fragile, they will become so. If you keep relying on experts, your lack of confidence in your own ability to parent frustrates your kid.
Instead, take the power invested in you. Let your kid know who is in charge. You have all the knowledge you need. Don't put the counselor, the teacher, the pediatrician, the therapist in charge. "Remove...the technology, the hovering, the monitoring, the constant doubt. The diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medications you aren't convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat your children as disordered" (250).
If you haven't read The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, read that. This isn't as good as that or as Shrier's previous Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which clearly led to this book. It is an unpardonable omission that she doesn't really discuss the role of therapists in gender dysphoria and redress. The journalistic details here like "We sat on damp plastic chairs, ten feet apart..." are tiresome and irritating. Just get on with it! On that same page (33), her response to a young person saying, "I was very scared to start college. But I guess everyone was when they were my age?" was "Actually, I was there. No we weren't." That's not what the research says; the terror of leaving home has always been quite common. Stick to the data please; personal anecdotes to support a thesis are part and parcel of journalism, of course, but credibility is built on science.
________________
Notable quotes:
If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. Viktor Frankl (228)
"Our constant emphasis on our kids' uniqueness reinforces this sense that they need to be preoccupied with themselves. That they are their own entirely bespoke individuals. That they are very much alone" (232)
"Five traits associated with greater life satisfaction were: altruism (focus on others); humor; sublimation ('finding gratifying alternatives to frustration and anger'); anticipation ('being realistic about future challenges'); and suppression (yes, keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of unpleasant thoughts and events). Every one of the five involves taking your own feelings less seriously. Life with uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents helps with all of them. 'The secret to life is good and enduring intimate relationship and friendships'" (Charles Barber Yale psychiatry professor) (235).
Mental health is the overarching concern du jour. We celebrate people for taking time to attend to their mental health. We react immediately at any hint of "bullying," which is what we used to call unkindness. We attempt to reduce children's stress and risk of rejection or harm in every way. We provide unprecedented accommodations to students: no "cold calling" in class (too traumatic); only soft deadlines for submitting work; no "triggering" readings. For standardized testing, the accommodations are outrageous, but no one has the guts to protest: 1.5 or double extra time, private room, a personal reader to read it aloud, permission to take the test over various days—all of it is obscenely unjust and not only privileges the weakest links but the already privileged, since it is the wealthiest who benefit most from these accommodations. (See also the College Board's own data.)
Consider: "in today's tony prep schools, all of which emphasize social-emotional skills, 'only what you believe and what you feel matters. You don't have to treat grownups with trust or respect....They don't know more than you. Only what you feel is what you know. And then you're just letting loose a bunch of tiny little narcissists and giving them reasons to attack each other" (158).
It gets worse.
This is the "tattletale generation": "Like the disempowered masses of a totalitarian regime, kids read for the remaining implement in an otherwise empty toolbox: tattling" (161). There is a "bizarre and chilling trend among the rising generation....Many teens maintain a cache of screenshots to incriminate their friends just in case they should need to retaliate against an accuser." Then, if the parent gets involved with some conflict, he or she "also typically sends along an incriminating cache on the student accuser." When asked how they came across these old pictures, "the answer was always the same: oh my kid saved these screenshots of her friends saying something racist or doing something stupid—just in case. Call it insurance. Call it blackmail" (162). It is disturbing, but it is not surprising.
Shrier wants us to believe the mess is just two decades old, but it goes back much further. Even in 1990, I was told by a preschool director that I was never to say "no" to a child, just redirect him or her to a more positive behavior. But there is older evidence: Dr. Benjamin Spock'sThe Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care sold 500,000 copies six months after it was published in 1946, when just 3M were born in 1945. Moreover, broadcast from 1957 to 1963, Leave It to Beaver was a television situation comedy about a suburban family. In those episodes, we observe how the parents modeled and shaped common-good values. The parents consistently guided the children to be responsible, consider others' feelings and wellbeing, and generally be good citizens, not narcissists. When Beaver exploits for monetary gain the shut off water main on a hot day, the dad does not praise his entrepreneurial mindset. Instead, he worries that Beav may be "a sharp operator." Ward and June Cleaver never called their sons "Buddy;" they wouldn't have considered their children friends; they rarely attended the older son's athletic events, far less their practices; their children were not the center of their lives; they had their own to lead. But the serpent enters this Eden as the advent of child psychology supplanting common sense and traditional parenting as Ward increasingly referred to and applied child psychology, often to undesirable results.
Psychological treatment, and its offspring, social-emotional learning, which has really taken control of schools, are an excellent means by which to "induce anxiety, depression, a feeling of incapacity, or family estrangement." How?
1. "Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings."
2. "Induce rumination," habitually giving "voice to negative feeling or personal problems."
3. "Make happiness a goal" but reward victimhood and suffering; identify with your struggles. (I had a student who decided to embrace her trichotillomania, pulling out every hair on her body from head to eyelashes to legs, as an identity and not seek treatment; she believed that it was oppressive to consider a mental illness as such.)
4. "Affirm and accommodate kids' worries."
5. "Monitor, monitor, monitor."
6. "Dispense diagnoses [a new, negative understanding of oneself] liberally."
7. "Drug 'em."
8. "Encourage kids to share their 'trauma'."
9. "Encourage young adults to break contact with 'toxic' family."
10. "Create treatment dependency."
The most important points echo what Haidt and Lukianoff wrote in their book. I can only imagine that Shrier believed that her readers would have already read The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, a less journalistic and more academic and prescriptive, though still accessible, treatment of the issue. Shrier never mentions the fact that liberal girls have far worse mental health than conservative girls and those who identify as religious, a fact explored by many authors, but most extensively here , along with a summary of Haidt and Lukianoff's thesis and recommendations. To wit:
...Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence.
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality.
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people.
Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives.
Isn't that significant enough to include in a book about young people's mental health? She didn't want to alienate her readers, so she didn't include it.
Shrier's book would have benefited greatly from the brilliant work of Rabbi Edwin Friedman of blessed memory: contemporary society's attempt to assuage anxiety through an addiction to "collecting more and newer data in the belief that newer and better information is always the key to leadership and success" actually erodes "confidence, judgment, and decisiveness." That goes for parents, CEOs, educators, and everyone else. "'The great myth of our data-gathering era . . . has two sides, ‘If only we knew enough, we could do (or fix) anything’ and it’s obverse, ‘If we failed, it is because we did not use the right method’' (p. 98). Read Friedman's work; it's extraordinary.
"When leaders allow the most dependent, most easily hurt members of any organization to effectively set the agenda, they promote adaptation to immaturity, rather than responsibility. They shift power to the recalcitrant, the complainers, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of the group rather than to the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the most creatively motivated" (Friedman in Reinventing Leadership).
_______________-
The most important points in Bad Therapy are:
Teachers and school support staff are acting as unlicensed therapists practicing therapy. This is widespread in higher ed as well. See Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities.
Iatrogenesis: a healer can harm a patient in the course of treatment. Therapy can harm patients in a variety of ways: "lead a client to understand herself as sick and rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis...encourage family estrangement....exacerbate marital stress...compromise a patient's resilience...render a patient more traumatized, more depressed, and undermine her self-efficacy so she's less able to turn her life around...lead a patient...to become overly dependent on her therapist" (8). The therapy industry benefits financially from treating "the least sick for the longest period of time," so it's in therapists' best interests to keep clients on the hook. And there is no tracking required, so no one knows who has benefited and who was harmed. Shrier asserts convincingly that providing a generally healthy population unnecessary mental health treatments has resulted in "unprecedented iatrogenic effects" (13).
Children need boundaries. They are happier, less anxious, and more confident with parenting styles that are authoritative, not authoritarian or permissive. Parents who consistently affirm children's "impulses, desires and actions" do them a grave disservice. They need structured chores to do, tasks that contribute to the household. "When we made a point of inducting children into the adult world—through the gradual assignment of chores, after-school jobs, and an allowance of hours of unsupervised time with peers—they were eager for more. More freedom, more responsibility. But today, instead, we alter the adult world around them to make it more amenable to a child" (227).
Share life stories and family history with kids. It gives them roots, a sense of belonging, relation, and history, and shows them that the family has prevailed despite many trials (and they can too). This comports with an article I read in 2022:The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing (2022)
.
The trendy system replacing punishment and discipline, restorative justice, not only does not work, but is also harmful to the victim, who "is pressed not only to accept the apology but to offer one of her own—for whatever she may have done to provoke her attacker" (95).
Shrier calls out the entire field of psychology for its poor methodology and research practices. As I have written many times, social pseudoscientists selectively report data, routinely p-hack (manipulate data to achieve statistical significance), rely on small (often non-random) sample sizes, have a bias in publication toward positive results, and cannot make accurate predictions. Psychologists promote narcissism to replace millennia of wisdom traditions like religions that concerned themselves with the common good and how to live a good life. They are bad religionists, not scientists, but society regards them as scientists and gurus, and has successfully spread their gospel from institutions to the family. Their studies capture the media and captivate society because they confirm our biases. For example, Cathy Widom's work proved that parents who had suffered physical abuse, sexual abuse, or neglect during their childhoods were no more likely to physically abuse their own children (125), but we hold on to the opposite notion because it comports with our own ideas. Most importantly, the fact is actually that trauma rarely leads to lasting damage; resilience is actually the default, but "trauma informed teaching" is all the rage as though every child not only experienced trauma but must be treated differently because of it.
What short memories we have! Many parents think that their kids were traumatized by COVID and have lost a part of their childhood, so the parents make excuses for them. Plagues, famines, wars, death, trauma is part of the human condition. Again, resilience is the default, not paralysis. If you treat kids as though they were fragile, they will become so. If you keep relying on experts, your lack of confidence in your own ability to parent frustrates your kid.
Instead, take the power invested in you. Let your kid know who is in charge. You have all the knowledge you need. Don't put the counselor, the teacher, the pediatrician, the therapist in charge. "Remove...the technology, the hovering, the monitoring, the constant doubt. The diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medications you aren't convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat your children as disordered" (250).
If you haven't read The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, read that. This isn't as good as that or as Shrier's previous Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which clearly led to this book. It is an unpardonable omission that she doesn't really discuss the role of therapists in gender dysphoria and redress. The journalistic details here like "We sat on damp plastic chairs, ten feet apart..." are tiresome and irritating. Just get on with it! On that same page (33), her response to a young person saying, "I was very scared to start college. But I guess everyone was when they were my age?" was "Actually, I was there. No we weren't." That's not what the research says; the terror of leaving home has always been quite common. Stick to the data please; personal anecdotes to support a thesis are part and parcel of journalism, of course, but credibility is built on science.
________________
Notable quotes:
If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. Viktor Frankl (228)
"Our constant emphasis on our kids' uniqueness reinforces this sense that they need to be preoccupied with themselves. That they are their own entirely bespoke individuals. That they are very much alone" (232)
"Five traits associated with greater life satisfaction were: altruism (focus on others); humor; sublimation ('finding gratifying alternatives to frustration and anger'); anticipation ('being realistic about future challenges'); and suppression (yes, keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of unpleasant thoughts and events). Every one of the five involves taking your own feelings less seriously. Life with uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents helps with all of them. 'The secret to life is good and enduring intimate relationship and friendships'" (Charles Barber Yale psychiatry professor) (235).
March 29, 2024
I rarely write reviews but I cannot let this terrible book come across as anything but. It is clear from the first chapter the author is completely biased and coming from a position of privilege. She honestly sounds like a Boomer, “back in my day…”
Let’s briefly look back to the time she so often cites, growing up before smart phones and any significant research on social psychology. The number of people with neurodivergence has not increased, we just know what to look for now and how to diagnosis it. We all suspected Einstein, Oppenheimer, Di Vinci, Warhol, Beethoven, I could go on. The reality is there were equally as many neurodiverse (including depression) “back in the day” it just wasn’t given a name.
The other issue I have is when she comments on how people dealt with depression and anxiety in earlier decades. We know, alcohol and abuse. Again, I can guarantee my grandparents were alcoholics but they were never given the diagnosis. And abuse was way more prevalent in prior decades. Not only by parents but look at the Boy Scouts, church, etc.
Also, let’s not forget the kids that got to “run wild” in the neighborhood. That worked out really well for all the victims of Dahmer and other serial killers. I would bet money that a single person could not get away with kidnapping and killing over 40 pre-teen boys these days. Yes, some parents over compensate for their paranoia and are raising sheltered children. But it’s a much smaller percentage than Shrier wants us to think.
I’m sorry but if Shrier wants to write a book without turning into the next J.D. Vance she’s going to need better research and less confirmation bias in her writing. I feel like I wasted too many hours reading some woman’s opinions on youth in America and then grasping at straws trying to blame someone or something.
Honestly, I’m still struggling to figure out the point of the book? Do therapists suck? Or is it the parents? Or do we blame the teachers? Or was it the doctors we should fault? All of the above? Except Shrier, she’s got this whole parenting thing figured out. She’s just not going to offer any solutions in her book. She’s just here to remind us of what we’re all doing wrong.
Unless you want to feel like a terrible parent, teacher, therapist or doctor by the end of this book I would suggest finding a different book by an actual psychologist with peer reviewed evidence not cherry-picked stories by a slew of wealthy kids Shrier interviewed.
Let’s briefly look back to the time she so often cites, growing up before smart phones and any significant research on social psychology. The number of people with neurodivergence has not increased, we just know what to look for now and how to diagnosis it. We all suspected Einstein, Oppenheimer, Di Vinci, Warhol, Beethoven, I could go on. The reality is there were equally as many neurodiverse (including depression) “back in the day” it just wasn’t given a name.
The other issue I have is when she comments on how people dealt with depression and anxiety in earlier decades. We know, alcohol and abuse. Again, I can guarantee my grandparents were alcoholics but they were never given the diagnosis. And abuse was way more prevalent in prior decades. Not only by parents but look at the Boy Scouts, church, etc.
Also, let’s not forget the kids that got to “run wild” in the neighborhood. That worked out really well for all the victims of Dahmer and other serial killers. I would bet money that a single person could not get away with kidnapping and killing over 40 pre-teen boys these days. Yes, some parents over compensate for their paranoia and are raising sheltered children. But it’s a much smaller percentage than Shrier wants us to think.
I’m sorry but if Shrier wants to write a book without turning into the next J.D. Vance she’s going to need better research and less confirmation bias in her writing. I feel like I wasted too many hours reading some woman’s opinions on youth in America and then grasping at straws trying to blame someone or something.
Honestly, I’m still struggling to figure out the point of the book? Do therapists suck? Or is it the parents? Or do we blame the teachers? Or was it the doctors we should fault? All of the above? Except Shrier, she’s got this whole parenting thing figured out. She’s just not going to offer any solutions in her book. She’s just here to remind us of what we’re all doing wrong.
Unless you want to feel like a terrible parent, teacher, therapist or doctor by the end of this book I would suggest finding a different book by an actual psychologist with peer reviewed evidence not cherry-picked stories by a slew of wealthy kids Shrier interviewed.
March 24, 2024
Must read for all parents, educators and counselors. There are few books that I’ve found that seem to be able to capture the terrifying trend in the next generation and the lack of resilience and problem solving. This book was well written and researched and I found myself struggling to put it down. There are a lot of bad trends in the world of parenting, psychology and education today. Books like this are hopefully playing a part in turning the tide.
March 8, 2024
One of the best books I have read this year. The thesis of this book is that therapy for children specifically has caused more harm than good over the past few decades. The author looks at the evidence and makes a convincing case for this. Even as a parent who is relatively conservative and with an old-fashioned mindset when it comes to children, I found many things in this book that were personally eye-opening.
One section of this book that stood out to me, and that I became convinced of a few years ago, is that the repressed memory movement and those that promote it (like the author of The Body Keeps The Score) have done massive damage to individuals and to our society. The author brings up several specific points about this author and the book. I plan on reading it next and posting my review of it as well, have put it off for a long time.
The over diagnosis, treatment by non-professionals (often teachers), and demoting of parents from authority to 'partners' for raising their children have combined to severely limit and hurt the next generation. Great read, well worth your time - especially if you are a parent.
One section of this book that stood out to me, and that I became convinced of a few years ago, is that the repressed memory movement and those that promote it (like the author of The Body Keeps The Score) have done massive damage to individuals and to our society. The author brings up several specific points about this author and the book. I plan on reading it next and posting my review of it as well, have put it off for a long time.
The over diagnosis, treatment by non-professionals (often teachers), and demoting of parents from authority to 'partners' for raising their children have combined to severely limit and hurt the next generation. Great read, well worth your time - especially if you are a parent.
March 16, 2024
I read this to learn about a perspective different from my own. As a public school teacher and mother, a lot of this had me rolling my eyes and talking out loud to the narrator about the author’s misinformed ideas of what actually happens in schools (schools that I’ve associated with, anyway). There’s a lot of misinformation in this book that could enrage people. It’s interesting to see what goes on in some people’s minds.
March 19, 2024
Absolutely vital book for every parent to read. This generation of kids is being crippled by our hyper focus on their emotions, and we are removing their ability to cope with normal childhood adversity by medicating their developing brains.
March 13, 2024
I sped through this and loved it. I’ll start by saying I did find a lot of over generalization and complete dismissal of any kind of gentle parenting. I do think there are some merits to aspects of gentle parenting.
I also noticed it was very focused on elite/rich families and areas! Overall however, it was incredibly readable (she’s a great writer) and the examples were often spot on.
As a parent in the thick of all this, it helped me step back and re-evaluate of what I’m bombarded with online. Also, I had never considered that therapy when not truly needed could be harmful. Now I’m thoroughly convinced!
Most of all, I left the book knowing I want to empower my kids with as much independence as possible. And trust my gut as a parent.
She also writers beautifully about her own journey as a mom and I reallly resonated with that.
I also noticed it was very focused on elite/rich families and areas! Overall however, it was incredibly readable (she’s a great writer) and the examples were often spot on.
As a parent in the thick of all this, it helped me step back and re-evaluate of what I’m bombarded with online. Also, I had never considered that therapy when not truly needed could be harmful. Now I’m thoroughly convinced!
Most of all, I left the book knowing I want to empower my kids with as much independence as possible. And trust my gut as a parent.
She also writers beautifully about her own journey as a mom and I reallly resonated with that.
March 24, 2024
Some books of this kind are probably more accepted because they attempt to provide a justification for what you perceive as a problem. Of course, it's more comforting when someone suggests that you may have a certain condition trying to find excuses, rather than hurting you by telling the honest truth. This book leans more towards this side of the spectrum.
Probably it doesn't have anything to do with the book, but it got me thinking. Imagine if someone claimed a red cup was green—not because of color blindness, but because they associate the color red with 'green'. Somebody might accommodate them, suggesting, "I understand your perspective, let's find a common ground". Over time, this new condition could be called 'Color Shiftedness'. Eventually, more people might start confusing colors, going by the name of 'Color Shifters', and this would all lead to a mess. In the past we would say, "That's red, don't be stupid", period. In my opinion, the book is a bit about this, how we overcomplicate things that are actually straightforward.
I understand that it's not all black and white and sometimes the book can go a bit too far, but everyone should read it to get their own opinion. I liked it.
Probably it doesn't have anything to do with the book, but it got me thinking. Imagine if someone claimed a red cup was green—not because of color blindness, but because they associate the color red with 'green'. Somebody might accommodate them, suggesting, "I understand your perspective, let's find a common ground". Over time, this new condition could be called 'Color Shiftedness'. Eventually, more people might start confusing colors, going by the name of 'Color Shifters', and this would all lead to a mess. In the past we would say, "That's red, don't be stupid", period. In my opinion, the book is a bit about this, how we overcomplicate things that are actually straightforward.
I understand that it's not all black and white and sometimes the book can go a bit too far, but everyone should read it to get their own opinion. I liked it.
April 5, 2024
Every parent, teacher, any person involved in the lives of children should read this book.
March 6, 2024
Like so many millennials, I’ve questioned my parenting. I’ve been a part of Mom groups online that make me feel like I’m going to inevitably ruin my children with doing what I feel is best for them if it goes against what the group think is. I feel like this book granted me permission to parent my kids the way that I know best, and maybe in a more traditional way than is popular with a lot of my peers. I don’t agree with everything that the author states, especially when it comes to ADHD, but I can get on board with the importance of giving kids chores, consequences, and independence. I also agree that the importance placed upon social/emotional learning in schools is a waste of time T best, and could also be harmful. This is a must read.
March 22, 2024
Humans are bad at nuance.
I am a therapist and a mother. I also lean liberal but live in a more conservative area which gives me a different perspective from people living in liberal areas. And most importantly I feel it is important for me to be aware of criticisms of my field and to see how valid those criticisms are. My verdict is that Shrier has some good points about how we have become anxiety and "bad" feeling avoidant as a culture to the detriment of our children (I call this trend "internet mental health") but then I feel that the book fell prey to the same lack of nuance that she critiques.
I agree completely with Shrier's points about how normal childhood traits have been overly pathologized and how kids need to learn to face and confront anxiety and discomfort and mild forms of adversity. I also agree that medication needs to be an extreme last resort for children. And I've also found that unless the parents are very receptive to feedback, taking responsibility and trying something new, that therapy with children is not very effective. And frustratingly, it is very hard to sell to parents the idea that they should see me so I can help them work on their own anxiety. They want someone to fix their child.
But it's not just a matter of fixing a child. A few years ago my kids experienced the loss of both of their grandmothers within a few months of each other, and in the aftermath we had a few conversations that were deep, emotional, and where they felt heard and their needs validated, I would never want to offload that experience to a paid professional, nor would I want to rob a parent of having that experience with their child and their child having it with them. I know this comes more easily to some parents than others but I think it is powerful for kids to feel heard by their parents in this manner and for parents to feel that sense of efficacy and connection after such a conversation.
The other problem, that Shrier does not shy away from, is that we live in a culture that has confused helping people with anxiety with enabling people's anxiety and talks about how this has infested schools. And this is where I feel this nuance dance, as both of my kids are autistic with severe speech delays (not just the "quirky" kid thing) and both my husband and myself have disabilities but also completed masters degrees and live independently and stopped receiving services in elementary school. Shrier does acknowledge that for people with learning disabilities, labeling the disability and having proper accommodations is helpful. But she is also right that people have been abusing accommodations, I have seen situations where this has happened, and it makes me concerned because humans tend to be binary thinkers, either or, and unable to see the complexity of the situation.
We went from a society where parents had to fight to get reasonable accommodations to one that dished them out unnecessarily, and in the backlash what will happen to families with kids like mine? One of my kids is likely to get out of special education services soon but the other will likely need services for a long time.
I think the nuance that has gotten lost in this is that if the goal is reasonable for a child to achieve, the accommodation needs to help them to reach that goal. It is not reasonable to expect a blind child to read a print book. A good accommodation would be braille or someone reading aloud to the child. But the nature of blindness is cut and dry while the nature of something like autism and dyslexia is not and figuring out whether a goal is possible for a child to reach with the right supports or not can be difficult. One child with autism may be able to learn to speak with a certain type of therapy but for another is is not a realistic goal and we have no test to discern which is which. Further some teachers tend to be better at looking at an individual child's patterns to figure out where that sweet zone of growth is while other teachers paint every kid with the same brush without accommodating for where each individual child is.
Factor in the pathologizing of normal childhood behaviors with accommodations that are really giving children excuses out of performing at any reasonable standard, and you have a bad recipe basically.
Where I really saw that lack of nuance was in Shrier's attack on gentle parenting. Shrier painted parenting in America as though it is monolithic and gentle with bold statements of "every parent" when America is a large place with a lot of variety. And even among parents who practice gentle parenting there is a lot of variation. For instance, I don't spank and aside from when my kids were toddlers and I was extremely stressed out I rarely yell. I give compliments and encouragement and don't criticize or nag. And still my nonverbal, autistic thirteen year old gets up, gets himself dressed, unloads the dishwasher, feeds the pets and makes his lunch every morning without me asking him to. Both of my kids sleep through the night and for the past five years have always gotten exemplary behavioral grades and are not on any medications, not even melatonin. I can take them anywhere without worrying about meltdowns and tantrums. The toddler years were hard teaching gentle parenting techniques when their behavior was at its worst, but as their brains matured and the emotional regulation skills I taught took root it paid off long term (and gentle parenting is ultimately long term parenting, not short term, which I don't think a lot of parents anticipate going into it. It's very hard in the toddler years but if done well pays off afterwards). All this it say you can use gentle parenting techniques AND have standards, and I know other parents who strike this balance. So gentle parenting with standards can and does work!
Further, given that I tend to be liberal and live in a conservative area where authoritarian parenting techniques are still popular, I see a lot of parents who are exceedingly strict and spank their kids and whose kids have to be medicated into compliance just like the children of permissive parents do (I did my internship at a children's mental hospital. Most of the kids there had been spanked and treated harshly).
Kids do need routine, high expectations and structure, but this is not incompatible with gentle parenting. And Shrier did not do much to make a great argument that this is more of a problem in areas where gentle parenting is popular than in areas where it isn't. It may be. But I can personally attest to the fact that the problems that Shrier details in this book apply in places where authoritarian parenting styles are popular as well.
Overall I would say that this book is worth a read because as a society the way we are approaching anxiety is completely wrong and harmful and the more people learn about that the better. As for the rest, it's a mixture of Shrier having good points but overly simplifying something that is very complex and falling for the same lack of nuance that many people practicing an extreme and ineffective form of gentle parenting fall for.
I am a therapist and a mother. I also lean liberal but live in a more conservative area which gives me a different perspective from people living in liberal areas. And most importantly I feel it is important for me to be aware of criticisms of my field and to see how valid those criticisms are. My verdict is that Shrier has some good points about how we have become anxiety and "bad" feeling avoidant as a culture to the detriment of our children (I call this trend "internet mental health") but then I feel that the book fell prey to the same lack of nuance that she critiques.
I agree completely with Shrier's points about how normal childhood traits have been overly pathologized and how kids need to learn to face and confront anxiety and discomfort and mild forms of adversity. I also agree that medication needs to be an extreme last resort for children. And I've also found that unless the parents are very receptive to feedback, taking responsibility and trying something new, that therapy with children is not very effective. And frustratingly, it is very hard to sell to parents the idea that they should see me so I can help them work on their own anxiety. They want someone to fix their child.
But it's not just a matter of fixing a child. A few years ago my kids experienced the loss of both of their grandmothers within a few months of each other, and in the aftermath we had a few conversations that were deep, emotional, and where they felt heard and their needs validated, I would never want to offload that experience to a paid professional, nor would I want to rob a parent of having that experience with their child and their child having it with them. I know this comes more easily to some parents than others but I think it is powerful for kids to feel heard by their parents in this manner and for parents to feel that sense of efficacy and connection after such a conversation.
The other problem, that Shrier does not shy away from, is that we live in a culture that has confused helping people with anxiety with enabling people's anxiety and talks about how this has infested schools. And this is where I feel this nuance dance, as both of my kids are autistic with severe speech delays (not just the "quirky" kid thing) and both my husband and myself have disabilities but also completed masters degrees and live independently and stopped receiving services in elementary school. Shrier does acknowledge that for people with learning disabilities, labeling the disability and having proper accommodations is helpful. But she is also right that people have been abusing accommodations, I have seen situations where this has happened, and it makes me concerned because humans tend to be binary thinkers, either or, and unable to see the complexity of the situation.
We went from a society where parents had to fight to get reasonable accommodations to one that dished them out unnecessarily, and in the backlash what will happen to families with kids like mine? One of my kids is likely to get out of special education services soon but the other will likely need services for a long time.
I think the nuance that has gotten lost in this is that if the goal is reasonable for a child to achieve, the accommodation needs to help them to reach that goal. It is not reasonable to expect a blind child to read a print book. A good accommodation would be braille or someone reading aloud to the child. But the nature of blindness is cut and dry while the nature of something like autism and dyslexia is not and figuring out whether a goal is possible for a child to reach with the right supports or not can be difficult. One child with autism may be able to learn to speak with a certain type of therapy but for another is is not a realistic goal and we have no test to discern which is which. Further some teachers tend to be better at looking at an individual child's patterns to figure out where that sweet zone of growth is while other teachers paint every kid with the same brush without accommodating for where each individual child is.
Factor in the pathologizing of normal childhood behaviors with accommodations that are really giving children excuses out of performing at any reasonable standard, and you have a bad recipe basically.
Where I really saw that lack of nuance was in Shrier's attack on gentle parenting. Shrier painted parenting in America as though it is monolithic and gentle with bold statements of "every parent" when America is a large place with a lot of variety. And even among parents who practice gentle parenting there is a lot of variation. For instance, I don't spank and aside from when my kids were toddlers and I was extremely stressed out I rarely yell. I give compliments and encouragement and don't criticize or nag. And still my nonverbal, autistic thirteen year old gets up, gets himself dressed, unloads the dishwasher, feeds the pets and makes his lunch every morning without me asking him to. Both of my kids sleep through the night and for the past five years have always gotten exemplary behavioral grades and are not on any medications, not even melatonin. I can take them anywhere without worrying about meltdowns and tantrums. The toddler years were hard teaching gentle parenting techniques when their behavior was at its worst, but as their brains matured and the emotional regulation skills I taught took root it paid off long term (and gentle parenting is ultimately long term parenting, not short term, which I don't think a lot of parents anticipate going into it. It's very hard in the toddler years but if done well pays off afterwards). All this it say you can use gentle parenting techniques AND have standards, and I know other parents who strike this balance. So gentle parenting with standards can and does work!
Further, given that I tend to be liberal and live in a conservative area where authoritarian parenting techniques are still popular, I see a lot of parents who are exceedingly strict and spank their kids and whose kids have to be medicated into compliance just like the children of permissive parents do (I did my internship at a children's mental hospital. Most of the kids there had been spanked and treated harshly).
Kids do need routine, high expectations and structure, but this is not incompatible with gentle parenting. And Shrier did not do much to make a great argument that this is more of a problem in areas where gentle parenting is popular than in areas where it isn't. It may be. But I can personally attest to the fact that the problems that Shrier details in this book apply in places where authoritarian parenting styles are popular as well.
Overall I would say that this book is worth a read because as a society the way we are approaching anxiety is completely wrong and harmful and the more people learn about that the better. As for the rest, it's a mixture of Shrier having good points but overly simplifying something that is very complex and falling for the same lack of nuance that many people practicing an extreme and ineffective form of gentle parenting fall for.
April 27, 2024
Read Understood Betsy instead.
I wanted to like this book but its sloppy. Much of the premise I agree with but reading one short Charlotte Mason PNEU article in comparison is 1000x more substantive philosophically, theologically and practically. Not sure how this book contributes to the conversation to those who think deeply and care about questions like "what is a person" and "what are they made for". I think watching one interview will be suffice to understand what she argues for (which are true observations.)
A better review here: https://mereorthodoxy.com/bad-therapy...
I wanted to like this book but its sloppy. Much of the premise I agree with but reading one short Charlotte Mason PNEU article in comparison is 1000x more substantive philosophically, theologically and practically. Not sure how this book contributes to the conversation to those who think deeply and care about questions like "what is a person" and "what are they made for". I think watching one interview will be suffice to understand what she argues for (which are true observations.)
A better review here: https://mereorthodoxy.com/bad-therapy...
March 16, 2024
"Bad Therapy" presents occasional insights, yet its credibility is marred by misinformation and overly broad assertions, further compounded by its ableist undertones. The author's claim that inquiring about children's emotions is harmful not only raises eyebrows but also perpetuates harmful stereotypes about mental health practices. This book resembles a passionate yet misguided critique one might overhear from a skeptical family member during a dinner conversation.
April 6, 2024
DNF @ 13%
Poorly researched and completely ignorant. I could write a full paper for EACH PARAGRAPH, highlighting incorrect or misconstrued information. This argument/book is wildly stupid, misleading, and inappropriately applies research/sources. This book has already gotten more of my time than it deserves. Do not read.
Poorly researched and completely ignorant. I could write a full paper for EACH PARAGRAPH, highlighting incorrect or misconstrued information. This argument/book is wildly stupid, misleading, and inappropriately applies research/sources. This book has already gotten more of my time than it deserves. Do not read.
March 16, 2024
An absolutely necessary and timely book.
March 23, 2024
I picked this up based on conservative Twitter's discourse and the fact Elon Musk said every parent needed to read it. I have no intention of taking parenting advice from Elon Musk of all people, but I was curious was making the right cheer and left jeer.
There are parts of this that are interesting to consider. I've always seen therapy as a finite treatment for a specific problem, but I can't say I'd ever thought about the implications of a child receiving therapy long term and without an end goal in mind, besides "be happier." I also agree with Shrier that gentle parenting can be taken too far and there are instances where parents are expecting their children to react like full formed adults and abdicating their role as creators of structure and meaning. Finally, her argument about how we sometimes frame disabilities or conditions such as ADHD as a bad thing that kids need to have fixed is worth some consideration.
But there are some serious issues with Shrier presents in this book. First, it is very clear this book is written by a rich parent in an insulted bubble of wealth, and expects everyone to have similar experiences. Her sections about the mental health work in schools is almost singularly focused around private schools. No parents from Title I public schools are interviewed. I looked up the school mentioned in one parent quote and the tuition is $60,000 a year for K-12 education. Not exactly the experience of the masses. There are some teachers interviewed that are listed as public school teachers, but I have to side eye any public school orchestra teacher that actually hears "I was having a rough day with my gender identity," which apparently happens "all the time." Sure, Jan. Yet Schrier chooses not to address how wealth and eco chambers of the wealthy can create additional variables that influence student health, mental or otherwise. I used to be a public school teacher at a Title I school, and our students were dealing with hunger, long bus rides, and complicated family dynamics. Drug offenses were centered around weed. But across town, at the high school that served the richest portion of the town? Those teachers were dealing with cocaine rings and parents trying to force them into a passing a child that was failing because they didn't do any work. So it's hard to take Shrier's words at face value when it's clear she is leaving out a lot of information to support her point.
Along with this, Shrier can't make up her mind about what the problem really is. She said schools are overstepping and having conversations with students that treat parents like they don't know how to parent. But then she spends several chapters arguing that parents don't know how to parent and we should go back to the good ol' days because she has such wonderful memories of growing up. But then again, it's really the school's fault. This is where her private school bubble is displayed the most. Does she really think educators want to be building mental health supports into the curriculum and budget? Uhhh, they don't. They would love to focus on reading, writing and math. They would love to not worry that their students are struggling. Shrier makes it sound like schools are nefariously staffing their campuses with hordes of school counselors and psychologist with the sole purpose of controlling your child. They are apparently forcing children to discuss their trauma daily and in great detail. This is hilarious. What educators have time for that? The national average ratio of school counselors to students is 415. In some states, its over a thousand. The numbers are even worse for school psychologists. They barely have time to support the students who need the most help. And even with these low levels of support, students are struggling. Public schools are doing the best they can with what they've got. And what a lot of them have is hundreds of students who are experiencing real trauma outside the lens of what Shrier is talking about. Kids who are hungry, don't have access to healthcare, or live in areas with high levels of violence. Meanwhile, Shrier laments about kids who are in therapy for anxiety about climate change. LOL. That is 100% rich-people shit.
Her other argument against schools is the curriculums like Second Step that seek to further divide and brainwash students into questioning their parents. Shrier cherry picks examples of lessons that are concerning in isolation and implies they are all like that, while ignoring the other lesson topics, such as goal setting. I do agree that schools that should be upfront with their curriculum and there should be completely transparency about what is in the curriculum. And parents should have the right to opt their students out. But again, the idea that schools are keeping secrets from parents sounds like a problem in private schools. I'm sure there are the occasional school administration that have gone rogue, but the vast majority has state and federal laws they have to comply with.
At one point, Shrier tried so assert that mental health screeners are harmful and induce kids to commit suicide because they are asked about it. However, every expert she talked to said that is NOT the case. She interpreted that to mean, without evidence, they didn’t want to give up their data source and therefore didn't care if children were potentially harmed. So she goes to Jordan Peterson (who does not work with children in his research and takes great joy in being the Master of All Things) and he says all the other doctors are clueless and they have no idea what they are talking about. Oh, okay. Well that clears that up. Because Jordan freaking Peterson has decreed it so.
Towards the end, Shrier wraps up her argument with the statement that "In all but the most serious cases, your child is much better without [therapy]." But she doesn't give any data to support this. We have no idea what proportion of kids in therapy are the "serious cases" and Shrier doesn't either. While her goal is to create a research-based case on why therapy is bad for kids, she ends up doing exactly what she accuses others of doing- finding people who agree with her, highlighting their opinion as the only relevant facts and ignoring anything that doesn't support her worldview. She argues against medicating children for conditions like ADHD and there is definitely a conversation worth having about the effects. But instead of having that conversation and also presenting information on children who find that medication to be an amazing resource that helps them be successful (because there are plenty out there), she talks about a psychologist in Israel that spent years recommending meds for his patients before refusing to medicate his own. And it turned out great, because he makes his son do chores and that helps manage everything.
Overall, if you read this, make sure you treat like any parenting book. See what thoughts it is creates and what that means for you, but don't treat it an infallible dogma. But if you if are rich parent who lives in a very specific type of bubble like the author or Elon Musk, I see why this book resonates.
There are parts of this that are interesting to consider. I've always seen therapy as a finite treatment for a specific problem, but I can't say I'd ever thought about the implications of a child receiving therapy long term and without an end goal in mind, besides "be happier." I also agree with Shrier that gentle parenting can be taken too far and there are instances where parents are expecting their children to react like full formed adults and abdicating their role as creators of structure and meaning. Finally, her argument about how we sometimes frame disabilities or conditions such as ADHD as a bad thing that kids need to have fixed is worth some consideration.
But there are some serious issues with Shrier presents in this book. First, it is very clear this book is written by a rich parent in an insulted bubble of wealth, and expects everyone to have similar experiences. Her sections about the mental health work in schools is almost singularly focused around private schools. No parents from Title I public schools are interviewed. I looked up the school mentioned in one parent quote and the tuition is $60,000 a year for K-12 education. Not exactly the experience of the masses. There are some teachers interviewed that are listed as public school teachers, but I have to side eye any public school orchestra teacher that actually hears "I was having a rough day with my gender identity," which apparently happens "all the time." Sure, Jan. Yet Schrier chooses not to address how wealth and eco chambers of the wealthy can create additional variables that influence student health, mental or otherwise. I used to be a public school teacher at a Title I school, and our students were dealing with hunger, long bus rides, and complicated family dynamics. Drug offenses were centered around weed. But across town, at the high school that served the richest portion of the town? Those teachers were dealing with cocaine rings and parents trying to force them into a passing a child that was failing because they didn't do any work. So it's hard to take Shrier's words at face value when it's clear she is leaving out a lot of information to support her point.
Along with this, Shrier can't make up her mind about what the problem really is. She said schools are overstepping and having conversations with students that treat parents like they don't know how to parent. But then she spends several chapters arguing that parents don't know how to parent and we should go back to the good ol' days because she has such wonderful memories of growing up. But then again, it's really the school's fault. This is where her private school bubble is displayed the most. Does she really think educators want to be building mental health supports into the curriculum and budget? Uhhh, they don't. They would love to focus on reading, writing and math. They would love to not worry that their students are struggling. Shrier makes it sound like schools are nefariously staffing their campuses with hordes of school counselors and psychologist with the sole purpose of controlling your child. They are apparently forcing children to discuss their trauma daily and in great detail. This is hilarious. What educators have time for that? The national average ratio of school counselors to students is 415. In some states, its over a thousand. The numbers are even worse for school psychologists. They barely have time to support the students who need the most help. And even with these low levels of support, students are struggling. Public schools are doing the best they can with what they've got. And what a lot of them have is hundreds of students who are experiencing real trauma outside the lens of what Shrier is talking about. Kids who are hungry, don't have access to healthcare, or live in areas with high levels of violence. Meanwhile, Shrier laments about kids who are in therapy for anxiety about climate change. LOL. That is 100% rich-people shit.
Her other argument against schools is the curriculums like Second Step that seek to further divide and brainwash students into questioning their parents. Shrier cherry picks examples of lessons that are concerning in isolation and implies they are all like that, while ignoring the other lesson topics, such as goal setting. I do agree that schools that should be upfront with their curriculum and there should be completely transparency about what is in the curriculum. And parents should have the right to opt their students out. But again, the idea that schools are keeping secrets from parents sounds like a problem in private schools. I'm sure there are the occasional school administration that have gone rogue, but the vast majority has state and federal laws they have to comply with.
At one point, Shrier tried so assert that mental health screeners are harmful and induce kids to commit suicide because they are asked about it. However, every expert she talked to said that is NOT the case. She interpreted that to mean, without evidence, they didn’t want to give up their data source and therefore didn't care if children were potentially harmed. So she goes to Jordan Peterson (who does not work with children in his research and takes great joy in being the Master of All Things) and he says all the other doctors are clueless and they have no idea what they are talking about. Oh, okay. Well that clears that up. Because Jordan freaking Peterson has decreed it so.
Towards the end, Shrier wraps up her argument with the statement that "In all but the most serious cases, your child is much better without [therapy]." But she doesn't give any data to support this. We have no idea what proportion of kids in therapy are the "serious cases" and Shrier doesn't either. While her goal is to create a research-based case on why therapy is bad for kids, she ends up doing exactly what she accuses others of doing- finding people who agree with her, highlighting their opinion as the only relevant facts and ignoring anything that doesn't support her worldview. She argues against medicating children for conditions like ADHD and there is definitely a conversation worth having about the effects. But instead of having that conversation and also presenting information on children who find that medication to be an amazing resource that helps them be successful (because there are plenty out there), she talks about a psychologist in Israel that spent years recommending meds for his patients before refusing to medicate his own. And it turned out great, because he makes his son do chores and that helps manage everything.
Overall, if you read this, make sure you treat like any parenting book. See what thoughts it is creates and what that means for you, but don't treat it an infallible dogma. But if you if are rich parent who lives in a very specific type of bubble like the author or Elon Musk, I see why this book resonates.
Want to read
March 8, 2024Shrier also wrote Irreversible Damage (re: the transgender issue). Here's her conversation with Jordan Peterson.
March 28, 2024
In this book, Abigail Shirer sets out to show how the modern-day obsession with therapy has made the American world worse, especially when it comes to children. With a few qualifications here and there, she largely succeeds. Can therapy have side-effects? Are there any negative consequences to asking people to talk about their feelings? Why does gentle parenting seem to be raising weaker and less-prepared children than older approaches to parenting? Does the body really keep the score? Shirer aims to answer these in the book.
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