I have just finished reading Abigail Shrier’s second book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up. One review of the book summarizes its message as “an investigation into how mental health overdiagnosis is harming, not helping, children.” Shrier is a journalist who previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal. In 2020, she published her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Wikipedia says “her book has proved controversial for its views about transgender issues”; and the Economist reports that “it has been widely ignored.” I have not read that book. As I read Bad Therapy, I wondered whether this book would compel anyone who does not already agree with Shrier. Her tone isn’t helpful – it is caustic and sarcastic – and Shrier is not on par with voices such as Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation. Shrier quotes Haidt, among many others, and is essentially in agreement with him.
Shrier seems to have gathered data particularly on the counseling personnel and instruction for teachers in public schools. A major premise of the book is that teachers and psychologists have co-opted authority over how to raise our children. Their emphasis is on excavating trauma in the lives of children, drawing out the emotions children feel. This is part of what is called Social/Emotional Learning, with an alleged goal of teaching children empathy. Shrier sees this “rumination” as dangerous to the well-being of children, moving counter to their natural resilience. Teachers and counselors invade the privacy of home life with mental health questionnaires asking young kids to assess how well understood they feel at home. Children can be provided in-school therapy without the knowledge of their parents. Additionally, teachers might send home a report to parents on the behavior of their child with a strong urging that the child be assessed for disorders such as ADHD, sending parents into a crisis of uncertainty. Shrier sees an unfortunate trend to medicate children and teens rather than to address their behavior in other ways. Much of this is a response to concerns about the reportedly rising mental health crisis among children and youth.
I often heard as a campus minister of the need to de-stigmatize mental illness. I also heard that a large percentage of students came to college on medication for either ADHD or depression and anxiety. I observed over the course of my years in ministry an increase in talk about mental health, even at times supplanting any consideration of spiritual health as an avenue for addressing malaise in a person’s life. In my counseling program at Westminster Seminary which I completed in 2011, a professor raised this problem: “How do we counsel a psychologized person?“ This was because of the increasingly dominant conception in our culture of human problems as physical and psychological. I had a conversation with a friend of mine recently and she related that her daughter had come home from school when she was 12 and asked to have a therapist, because all of her friends had therapists and talked during lunch period about what their therapists diagnosed and advised about their lives. No mention of parents as trusted advisors, nor of God.
During 2022, I endeavored to read a book per week. Two of the books I read were by John Rosemond (To Spank or Not To Spank and The Well-Behaved Child). Both were counseling parents to raise their children with greater confidence and authority. Both alluded to the incursion of government and psychologists on family life, particularly threatening parental authority to set and enforce rules for their own children. I suspect Rosemond would agree significantly with Shrier.
Shrier is Jewish and seems to be a person of faith. She also seems to me to have an insufficient recognition of the sinfulness of humanity and she repeatedly emphasizes that children are more resilient than psychologists think they are. Still, I think she is right about much of her assertions. She affirms parental authority to set moral standards for their children and to back them up with consequences. She sees value in negative emotions such as anxiety and depression. She defends those as an evolutionary development which helps humans learn from their mistakes or learn to avoid danger. She would reserve the use of medications only for such emotions when they seriously impair function and the sufferer is unable to move forward. Both of these ideas – the importance of parental authority and the value of suffering in all of our lives – accord with biblical principles (see Proverbs 3:1-2, Ephesians 6:1-3, and James 1:2-4, for example). I feel particularly strongly about parental authority. (Their authority over their own children is repeatedly and uniquely referred to in the Bible.) Shrier writes in Chapter 10:
“Mental health experts . . . have presided over a disaster. They convinced a generation of parents who wanted to give their kids everything – who devoted more time and energy to their children than any prior – that we didn’t know what we were doing. They convinced us that parenting involved skills and expertise, things we needed them to provide us.”
Perhaps Shrier overstates her concerns at times, such that she sounds as if parenting is so intuitively obvious that every parent can be trusted to figure out the right way to do things on their own. Yet she gives a great deal of advice in her final chapter: remove access to technology, get kids involved in their extended family, give them appropriate independence. I am a believer in young parents getting advice. Along with John Rosemond, I primarily seek that advice in the Bible and in prior generations of parents who have a track record of warm relationships with adult children. I think experienced teachers can be a huge help to parents as well. It does not have to be an adversarial relationship between teachers and parents. Teachers spend many hours with children and teens and they see our kids interacting in groups in ways parents might not see. If teachers ally themselves with parents, I believe they can be enormously helpful. But I believe parents are the primary authorities in the lives of their children, and unless there is good reason or evidence that something is happening in the home which endangers children, parents should be treated with trust.
There are parents who are abusive in varied and egregious ways. A friend, who is very knowledgeable about sex trafficking, commented on reading an early draft of this post that parents are among the most common category of pimps of their own children. She wrote, “a certain percentage of parents ARE abusing/traumatizing/neglecting their kids.” This means that schools, mental health experts and government agencies are crucial to ensuring that children are well cared for. But if all parents become suspect because some are abusive, this results in a wide scale threat to all children, in that children grow up without respect for authority and the long-term benefits of discipline yielding the growth of beneficial self-control.
Shrier occasionally acknowledges that not all school counselors are misdirected in their concerns or practices as they work with children, but she strongly advocates for counseling parents of children exhibiting troubling symptoms rather than working directly and independently with the children. Shrier believes the mental health crisis among kids today has been ushered in by mental health professionals. John Rosemond would concur that to the extent that ideology among educators and counselors has undermined authoritative parenting, this generation of children is growing up without proper guidance and discipline. Even if both authors are not fully right in their claims, both authors express viewpoints that should not be ignored. I strongly encourage you to read them or authors like them.