Do less for your kids. Give them rules and discipline and love. Don’t be their friend. Be their parent. Let them be bored, let them screw up. Teach them no, please, thank you and table manners. An industry of psychologists and gentle parenting help on the margins but likely cause more damage than help.
That’s from conservative author Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.
The book starts off with a big, wide criticism of therapy and mental wellness, of which I was skeptical. But as Shrier turned to its impact on parenting styles, my interest grew — especially as a parent of young children myself. In the end, I found it to be a welcome contribution to Jonathan Haidt’s high-profile Anxious Generation.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Iatrogenesis: when the healer causes harm, which is always a risk but higher when a well person like a kid with fewer defenses are put into this
- “Fixing the problems of the human mind is incomparably more difficult than setting a broken bone. We can’t expect therapists to fail less often than medical doctors.”
- Argues the DARE program may have exposed more kids to drugs
- Psychiatric work fell out of favor because of the discipline of medicine
- Less than half of Genz say their mental health is good; 40% have received therapy
- 2022 Paper “More Treatment but No Less Depression”
- Suicide rising between 1950 and 1988 — so even if expansion of definitions of mental health grew numbers not all
- But therapists say “they are the lifeguards, not the sharks”
- Twenge and Haidt first warned that social media should be treated like cigarettes
- Climate anxiety and liberal kids having worse mental health than conservative ones
- Kids in 1960s didn’t skip school because of nuclear war threats
- The “50 minute hour” of therapy
- Therapy without a therapist is big tech’s answer to scale
- Camilo Ortiz: “A therapist should treat a kid’s anxiety by treating the kid’s parents” because “parents often unwittingly transmit their own anxiety to their kids”
- “Emotions are not only unstable, they’re also highly manipulable”
- Michael Linden: happiness is actually a statistically rare emotion so constantly asking how someone is feeling reinforces that point. Feelings need to be managed and even ignored sometimes
- Action orientation or state orientation: the former is how we progress
- A Brooklyn teen: “ identifying with your strengths [athletics, math, popularity] now isn’t seen as too cool because some people may manipulate you into thinking that you’re privileged because of it.”
- Social emotional learning
- “Restorative circles are abusive”
- Rob Henderson: kids from troubled backgrounds have the most to lose from accommodation
- Resilience is the norm: don’t assume kids from bad backgrounds have trauma
- Influential 2014 book The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk, based on his 1994 paper but this author call BS on repressed memory
- Martin Seligman: childhood trauma doesn’t noticeably contribute to adult depression
- Paul Bloom’s 2016 “Against Empathy” book: we can only empathize with a few people at a time, so leading with empathy creates an out group , rather than fairness
- Of gentle parenting, “shouldn’t flowers bloom in powdered sugar? Turns out, they grow best in dirt.”
- Empathy is monogamous, meaning it narrows your focus on one or a few at the expense of many (175)
- Diana Baumrind: parenting styles of permissive, authoritative or authoritarian
- Author is critical of popular parenting books like How to talk so kids will listen — which advises against punishment. She feels much of this therapy-informed language is about weak parents wanting to be friends with their kids and not disciplining
- Why do we send a kid to her room when she misbehaves? Four reasons: Get em to stop, assert who is in charge, internalize a boundary and give justice to whomever was hurt (it’s not for self reflection)
- P. 190: “Want to know why the rising generation of kids doesn’t want to have children of their own? It’s because we made parenting look so damn miserable. It’s because we listened to all the experts and convinced ourselves we couldn’t possibly appeal to life experience, judgment, knowledge gleaned over decades — tens of thousands of hours with our kids — or what our parents had done, and figure this thing out for ourselves. It’s because forty-year-old parents — accomplished, brilliant, and blessed with a spouse — treat the raising of kids like a calculus problem that was put to them in the dead of night, gun to the head: Get it right or I pull this trigger. We played a part with our kids: the therapeutic parent. We let them throw food on the floor and kick us and hit us-and each time extended them more understanding. We offered them an endless array of choices. And we absolutely renounced our own authority. And it scared them. It scared these kids so badly. Look at them. They know there’s no one running the place. They know they’re far too young to be exercising the amount of power we’ve handed them. They know that if they’ve brought their towering father, an accomplished man in his forties, to his knees, clueless and despairing— then something has gone desperately wrong.”
- Midge Decter: “we pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would’ve fed your strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.”
- Advice? Make your kid wait to interrupt with a question, make them sit at the dining table, make them wait for a snack
- 15% of American boys have ADHD and need medication? Or is that a problem?
- 4Ds of abnormal psychology: deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger, and ADHD isn’t any of them, author says
- ADHD is Not an Illness and Ritalin is Not a Cure: academic paper and then 2022 book
- There are good reasons for bad feelings
- “Life without meaning…is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.” Edgar Lee Masters
- The great African American poet Robert Hayden felt his father’s devotion not through any declaration, which his father may never have made, but paid out in steady acts of sacrifice. “Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,” Hayden wrote.?
- “Then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.” Warmed by the fire, bolstered by his father’s durable love, Hayden asks: “What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
- Give your children choice with risk, advises Chentsova Dutton (each birthday in Russia her parents gave a farther boundary she could cover on her own away from home)
- Nassim Taleb: Nature “loves small errors”
- Collectivist cultures (India, Japan, Russia) think of their children disrupting other people when a kid shouts but in America it is very individual (Maybe a lil embarrassment for disrupting others is good)
- Harvard grant study: we need altruism, humor, sublimation, anticipation and suppression
- To be a good parent “You don’t need sophisticated knowledge of the human brain, and it’s infinitely complex systems to discover which troubling your own kids. You likely don’t need mind altering meds to cure them. You simply need a willingness to improve your kids life by removing the bad stuff and making space for the good.”
- “The purpose of childhood is to allow kids to take risks” (241)
- Banning smartphones from schools is as obvious as banning smoking from schools
- “I brought you into this world to play a part in something far bigger than yourself. An indispensable strand in the chord of our family. Don’t be the chords frayed edge.”