Topic for May. 15. ( Thur )

[Alex !]

A Book, Bad Therapy- written by Shrier Abigail

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up is showing us that 
From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

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 helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

• Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
• Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
• “Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Shrier, no idiot, surely knows that several of her arguments—especially the ones about how we overreact to normal childhood setbacks, restricting kids from independence in the real world while giving them far too much digital autonomy—resonate with liberal parents too. Instead, this book becomes another entry in that vaunted American tradition of telling parents what they are doing wrong.

This idea that children need less therapy, not more, may feel surprising when we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis (and also, a therapist availability and affordability crisis). But Shrier argues we have made children helpless by overvalidating every fear and anxiety, noting that 1 in 6 U.S. children from the ages of 2 to 8 has a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

“Teens today so profoundly identify with these diagnoses, they display them in social media profiles, alongside a picture and family name,” Shrier writes. If young people view their bad feelings as pathological, one expert she interviews explains, they will be more likely to turn to drugs for relief.

The root of these problems is a misguided attempt by today’s parents to throw off the authoritarian parenting styles of yore, an attempt fueled by Gen X’s embrace of therapy. 

Successful parenting became a function with a single coefficient: our kids’ happiness at any given instant,” she writes. “An ideal childhood meant no pain, no discomfort, no fights, no failure—and absolutely no hint of ‘trauma.’ ” When this was not producing perfectly happy kids, Shrier argues, parents rushed back to the experts for testing, diagnosis, and medication.

Of the many claims in Bad Therapy, the idea that we are pathologizing normal childhood distress while limiting children’s opportunities to be independent and take risks is the one that truly lands, but it’s also hardly a revelation.
 

This concept is everywhere! We all know our kids don’t have enough independence; we just don’t know what to do about it. Even if you want to let your child run free with the neighborhood kids, they’re all at soccer, and you always have to wonder which neighbors may be more likely to narc on you for negligence than lend a friendly eye.

The statistics on skyrocketing rates of diagnoses for kids are sobering and deserve a hard look, the idea that therapy is where it all went wrong is where things get a little slippery. The vast majority of American children are not, in fact, in therapy, in the “one-on-one, weekly-ish conversation with a professional” sense. They are, instead, receiving some elements of it through social-emotional learning curricula in schools.

For those of you not up to date on the parenting culture wars, social-emotional learning has become the latest flashpoint. The idea behind the curricula, which started gaining traction in the past decade, is to cultivate interpersonal skills and self-awareness in children to help them succeed in school and beyond. A recent report from the Yale School of Medicine shows evidence of benefits, and personally, I’ve seen how it has helped my own kids learn healthy conflict resolution and how to apologize.

As yet another way we are teaching our children to overfocus on their emotions, promoting helplessness instead of resilience. Shrier reports on a Salt Lake City fifth grade classroom where the teacher’s morning prompt, “What is something that is making you really sad right now?,” led to a sort of group breakdown, with kids crying about their parents’ divorces.

A teacher explains how she openly discusses with her students the pain of growing up with a drug-addicted mother, in order to model emotional vulnerability. At a California conference that Shrier attends, the facilitator encourages participants to share emotions like anxiety and fear with students before math class. 

If Shrier tried to invent examples that sounded like a conservative fever dream of progressive educators run amok, she could not do better than these. I feel for the students put in these situations, and agree with Shrier that schools need to be very careful about emulating therapeutic techniques without the training and confidentiality you would find in a professional setting.

Observe highly educated, progressive, therapist-directed parents as they air dilemmas and seek advice from their equally flummoxed counterparts.” Although these parents have read every book and listened to every podcast, nothing works. Because they can’t bring themselves to punish their children or say no, the kids become more and more wild and out of control. 

We want the same thing, which is to raise capable, confident humans who are able to go out into the world and thrive. There is no political philosophy that maps perfectly onto the right way to raise a child. The sooner we figure that out, the better.