Bad Therapy
Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up
By: Abigail Shrier
[Fulfilled ‘Book without death or murder’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
“We parents have become so frantic, hyper vigilant, and borderline obsessive about our kids’ mental health that we routinely allow all manner of mental health expert to evict us from the room.”
[If you are a critical thinker, I give this book 4 stars because there is a lot to glean and think about in this book. If you read books and either reject them wholesale or accept them wholesale, I give this book 3 stars because I’m not sure you can handle it. You’re going to either miss out on some important things because something she said offended you or you will miss out on some important nuances of what she isn’t saying because you might be blinded by the shininess of Abigail Shrier and her validation of your parenting style.]
Abigail Shrier doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects. She took a lot of heat with her book Irreversible Damage and I’m sure this one has had a similar, polarized reception.
I read Irreversible Damage and thought it was a really good book and that there wasn’t a whole lot to disagree with. I think Bad Therapy differs in that the subject matter is less concrete. The situations and circumstances surrounding anxiety and depression in kids is more abstract and harder to pin down for obvious reasons.
I also think it’s going to be common for readers to forget that from the first, Shrier says that there are indeed kids with profound mental illness or disorders that need therapy. She is not trying to oust therapy from the world.
This book is framed for: “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad.”
What Shrier is tackling are those who think therapy will solve every problem or those who think prioritizing our feelings is the healthy way. The tricky thing is being able to identify the cases where children actually do need help from the ones that just need to build more confidence and resilience. This book may not necessarily help with that.
Shrier points out that the parents of this generation are striving to undo the ‘parenting mistakes’ of their own parents who historically took on a more authoritative role in their lives.
But if we as parents were “resolved to listen better, inquire more, monitor our kids’ moods, accommodate their opinions when making a family decision, and, whenever possible, anticipate our kids’ distress” then why have we “raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record”?
This is a book that is a little hard to take wholesale and the snarky tone, though it does make it more interesting to read, is likely to give the reader a reason to hesitate before throwing out high fives.
I would say that overall I have a pretty laid-back parenting style and so a lot of the ideas she is challenging are things I was already trying to avoid and the things she encourages parents to do are things I was already trying.
Shrier points out the ways that children are disadvantaged when it comes to therapies because they are highly suggestible and likely to give adults the answers they think they want to hear. They are also likely to believe anything the therapist says and leading questions can take them down a road they didn’t need to travel.
“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.’”
She also talks about the dangers of ruminating on our feelings. Constantly asking our kids (or anyone) how they’re feeling can actually lead to them feeling worse. No one feels ‘good’ or ‘great’ all the time.
The prioritizing of feelings is a big problem in today’s world. In fact, we are being told that whatever we feel is true, and further, more true than anything else. When a society as individualized as America begins to hold so tightly to their feelings to a point where anything that we don’t like becomes violent, unsafe, or ‘unhealthy’ then unity, cooperation, and mutual respect becomes real hard.
It inevitably creates children who see their own feelings as more important than anyone else’s and come to believe that others should accommodate them in every way possible so that they can be in a place where they feel good.
She touches on the use of phones and social media, though I believe Johnathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation spends more time on that facet. It’s hard to deny the research that shows all the psychological and physical damage excessive phone usage and social media has on kids.
She points out the MANY problems with assuming everything can be traced back to a childhood trauma or trauma in general. Even if there was childhood trauma, I’m not convinced that it’s always helpful to be able to identify that in order to move forward.
Bad Therapy
To sum it up, here are the tenets of how to do ‘bad’ therapy:
Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings
Induce rumination
Make ‘happiness’ a goal but reward emotional suffering
Affirm and accommodate kids’ worries
Monitor, monitor, monitor
Dispense diagnoses liberally
Drug ‘em
Encourage kids to share their ‘trauma’
Encourage young adults to break contact with ‘toxic’ family
Create treatment dependency
Here’s the thing.
I don’t think creating more hidden areas on the school playground so kids can have space to be unsupervised is a stellar idea.
I don’t think having a diagnosis always cripples a child— sometimes it’s validating to know what you’re up against so you can use more effective strategies to work against the actual problem.
I don’t think it’s wrong for teachers to be observant of students and to bring up potential problems with parents. I don’t think it’s bad for teachers to have some semblance of training in identifying trauma or other mental problems; they are with our kids for a decent chunk of the day and a lot of kids don’t have attentive parents.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea to provide explanations to your child when they question your decisions or are about to be punished for their behavior.
I don’t think an evolutionary look at anxiety and depression is helpful. (Or true.)
I don’t think that revering old beer drinkers who spend years ‘putting in the work’ trying to like the bitter taste of beer is a good analogy for anything.
I don’t think ignoring our kids if they are cutting is a great strategy.
I don’t think “nature” created a “period of prolonged childhood”.
But there are a lot of takeaways in these pages, not least of which include:
Have high expectations. Let them learn through experience. Let them feel pain— emotional, social, physical. Let them learn how to cope and how to persevere. Schools should be able to give consequences for bad behavior for obvious reasons. Stop calling our kids victims or promoting victimhood as a badge of honor. ‘Knock it off’ and ‘Shake it off’ should be normal parenting strategies and gentle parenting (as described in this book) should indeed, take a hike. Decrease use of technology and social media. Let your child be independent. Use the word ‘stop’ and ‘no’ so your children know what they mean and can better treat other people.
Where’s the Road?
I am not anti-therapy. I have used a counselor in the past few years and really benefited from it. She was a counselor with similar values to myself and someone I would trust with my children should they ever need it.
I admit that a lot of the examples Shrier gives and stories she tells feel so far-fetched to me— is this really happening in schools? do therapists really do this?— because in my personal experience, I haven’t encountered the problems to the degree that Shrier presents them.
It could easily be that Iowa is a bit more sheltered from the strategies popularized on the coast and in the bigger cities.
For example, she talks about the surveys that schools, counselors, or doctors give to children and the leading questions they contain about suicide, self-harm, or parent estrangement that seem like they would do the opposite of what they are attempting to do. I asked my child’s teacher at school if they ever do surveys and she said Iowa recently passed a law that prohibits schools from doing surveys.
I’m inclined to believe that pretty much everything Shrier says is true, however, my question is: how prevalent and widespread are these tactics and methods?
The road of treating mental health is a narrow one.
In one ditch we have all the problems Shrier lays out in this book: an over-reliance on therapy and mental health experts to tell us how to raise our children, helicopter parenting that fixes and accommodates and prevents opportunities for children to build resilience, an over-emphasis on the importance of feelings. Yet in the other ditch we have an anti-therapy attitude that won’t even consider getting their kids diagnosed for ADHD or anxiety, a belief that everyone is out to harm their child, and an environment where children might not be able to share deep and hard feelings they have for fear their parents will just tell them to get over it.
In trying to normalize getting help and being honest about our struggles, we’ve created a trend (just like transgenderism in Irreversible Damage) where it’s popular in schools to have depression or a mental health crisis of some kind. It gives kids attention and makes them feel like they belong.
How do we stop stigmatizing mental health in a negative way without making kids feel like they SHOULD be in the middle of a crisis?
How do we find the road and avoid the ditches?
A critical thinker reading this book will be able to identify the pitfalls of the ditches and to recognize our own shortcomings in our parenting and how we can set better boundaries without having to hold our children’s hands while they try to understand them.
This book might not be the center of the road, and perhaps some readers see the pendulum swinging a little too far in one direction, but I think this book will help straighten us out if we read it critically.
Shrier’s writing tone may cause you to see her in the ditch, but I also can relate to the exasperation she feels with being told she’s incapable of raising her children without professional help when she sees the harm that many professionals are having on children.
I think her call to arms for parents is an honorable one. We are capable of raising our kids. We need to step up to the plate and start enjoying our work as parents to do our best to grow our kids up to go out into the world with confidence and resilience.
The Role of Parents
That’s one of my favorite things about this book: the elevation of parents. I think culture has done a lot of damage to the child/parent relationship, sometimes overt but mostly in subtle ways. To undermine the authority of parents or even the morality of parents.
The way parents are portrayed in TV and movies. The way schools allow for parents to be left out of the picture for some of the biggest struggles our kids face.
Parents are so often portrayed as the bad guys, the ones who just won’t understand, the ones who are doing everything wrong.
“Never do the materials seem to consider that undermining a child’s relationship even with imperfect parents creates psychological damage all its own. How is a child supposed to feel secure after you’ve undermined her faith that her parents know what’s best or have her best interest at heart?”
But I like how Shrier reminds us parents that our role is vital! We know our kids! I also like how she reminds parents that parenting shouldn’t be miserable. It is a joy to be with our kids and when we engage in the methods of bad therapy, we lose sight of who our kids are and what we love about them.
“Having kids is the best, most worthy thing you could possibly do.”
[I’ll pause here to admit that she doesn’t really consider the children whose parents are not around and who do neglect them physically and emotionally. In that way, professionals—schools and counselors— offer the children something they need that they aren’t getting— attention.
That has to be part of a discussion, though I think it’s okay that she didn’t spend all her time talking about it. Those parents and families are not her target audience. Those parents won’t be reading this book. This book is for the parents that are involved and wanting what is best for their kids. It’s to present a different set of ideas than the mainstream. What she poses here won’t work in homes where the parents are absent or neglectful.]
We can trust our instincts about our kids and we can demand to be involved.
Kids look to their parents for guidance. They NEED their parents’ guidance. No one loves kids more than their parents (obviously there are sadly exceptions to this but we’re talking in generalities).
“Kids toss a lot of worries at their parents, sometimes just to see which ones bounce back.”
So much of how our kids respond to things have to do with how WE respond.
Sissy Goff reiterates that in her book Raising Worry-Free Girls (which I highly highly recommend).
She says that when parents handle their children’s struggles by swooping in, we actually prevent our kids from the opportunity to learn how to cope.
“they rescue, they fix, they help her avoid the situations that trigger the fear. But when you rescue her, you’re communicating to her that she needs rescuing. You’re telling her the situation is a frightening one and she’s not capable of handling it.”
Shrier’s books carries many of the same sentiments.
She pulls out some interesting information regarding worldviews and values and how kids cope.
“While teen girls have seen a severe mental health decline, those who identify with liberal and left-leaning politics have suffered worst of all. Liberal teen boys experience worse depression than conservative teen girls. That ought to suggest that most of what we’re seeing isn’t a mental illness crisis. It’s deeply connected to the values and worldview we’ve given our kids, the ways they’ve raised them, the influences around them.”
The role of parents is to love our children and to pass down our values. I know some parents who think they are doing their kids a favor by allowing them to “choose” what they want to believe. That’s, frankly, rubbish. They are kids. They need guidance. They can grow up and change their minds if they want, but you are HELPING your child by instilling values and beliefs in them because it helps them know how to view the world. They need us to show them how to treat people. They need us to teach them what is right and wrong.
By allowing them to ‘figure it out’ themselves is actually still teaching them. It’s teaching them that whatever they think and feel is true and right and what matters most. You may not say it with those words but that’s what the result is likely to be.
Which leads me to my most important observation of this book:
The Missing Piece
However accurate Shrier is in pointing out problematic, therapeutic strategies for helping our kids cope with their struggles, I believe this book is missing a pretty big piece to the puzzle: Jesus.
At every turn of this book I kept thinking to myself, the gospel message and teachings of the Bible do wonders in explaining these problems and offering hope in a dark world.
Scripture gives us the foundational beliefs of right and wrong. It tells us how to treat people. It tells of love, compassion, sacrifice. It talks about fear all the time. But every time it points to hope. It points to enduring. It points to the refuge of Christ that no matter what life throws at us, we are held by the most capable, powerful, and loving hands we could ask for.
It provides the basis for our identity— image-bearers— that protects us from the burden of identity culture tries to fashion for us that just causes depression, anxiety, and discontentment because we could never measure up to their standards or the weight of holding it up on our own is too much.
I find it a little laughable that Shrier kept quoting evolutionary psychologists and biologists who try to explain depression and anxiety as evolutionary mechanisms. Millions and millions of years of evolution and what’s left is an entire human race that is susceptible to anxiety and depression? That’s not an answer.
The Bible knows the problem, the real disease. And it has the cure.
Again, what we are talking about here is not necessarily the deep mental illness and disorders, though I think the Bible has a lot to say in that regard as well, but as a Christ-follower, the world view that I have from the Bible is the framework through which my children can find stability, help, hope, and community.
The Bible even shows us (i.e. Psalms) how to have big feelings of lament, sadness, anger, etc., and to express that, but then to circle back around to say— Yet I will trust you, Lord. I know you are good and my hope is in you.
It’s not enough to just ignore our feelings. The biblical process says to feel the feelings, redirect your gaze, and keep walking forward. “In this world there will be trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world.” (Jn 16:33)
A biblical understanding of the world doesn’t depict rainbows and unicorns. It is honest about the pain and the struggle; it offers the only framework to explain what we experience, but it is also the only thing that offers true hope and a path forward.
You can read Bad Therapy front to back a million times, but if you don’t have the gospel message of Christ dying to save us from our sin and the consequences of our sin, rescuing us from the darkness, helping us see the light, then you don’t really have much.
Other Reviewers
Considering the natural polarity of this book’s reception, I read quite a few reviews to see what others thought. I found some common threads.
Those who hate it don’t like her politics (or Jordan Peterson), her wealth and economic standing, or think that this book may keep therapy and help away from kids who actually need it. Many who hate it have also had a good experience with a therapist or work in a good school system where they don’t see the things Shrier talks about.
Those who love it are those who don’t like gentle parenting, the common use of drugs to fix problems, and feel validation for the ‘tough love’ parenting style they have often felt judged for. Many who love it have had a bad experience with a therapist or with a school’s intervention in their own child’s life.
It is probably good to remind readers here that we tend to think that our personal experiences are normative, whether or not they are good or bad, and that’s not necessarily true. I am not qualified to say for sure that she is exaggerating, cherry-picking, or spot on. What I can do is be open to the possibility that what she talks about is probably more prevalent than I think but that good therapists and good schools are probably more prevalent than Shrier makes it seem. I can live in that tension. Some readers, apparently, cannot.
Many reviewers say that she contradicts herself a lot and that the citations are either questionable or just absent. The last 40 pages of the book show that they are not absent, but as to their credibility, I am not willing (or qualified) to go through the process to check them. I’m not going to accept everything wholesale, but I’m also not going to reject her conclusions just because she quoted someone I don’t like.
As to contradictions. She probably did. Nothing stuck out super loudly to me, but again, with a more abstract topic like this I think it’s hard to have rigid lines of thought and practice, and so some seemingly contradictory statements may still be true. I have decided not to try to find some to prove it to you.
Other Insights
Here are a few other quotes or insights I found interesting.
“The system that elevated emotional harm to physical harm wound up excusing physical harm in the name of emotional well-being.”
She told a story here to explain this; it also reminded me of The Coddling of the American Mind book.
“Beware of symptoms checklists because, like fortunes and horoscopes, everyone will be able to find themselves in it.”
I think this same advice can be applied to the Enneagram in a lot of respects.
“‘It creates unbelievable narcissists’ All of this self-focus invariably leads kids to the realization that someone in the class is making them unhappy ‘which then requires policing the classroom so people with the wrong opinion have to either not speak or say the wrong thing and take the consequence.’”
Considering some videos my husband has watched on the prevalence of narcissists, it’s interesting to think how we’ve created so many of them. They’re everywhere!
“People who are motivated by fairness or a keen sense of right and wrong will often treat people humanely, despite feeling no particular empathy with the beneficiaries… Conversely, psychopaths utilize empathy to exploit their victims.”
It was interesting to think about empathy not actually being that helpful. Obviously it’s good to think about other people’s feelings, but when you look at how that actually plays out… we need something more than just empathy. We need a foundation of what is right and wrong. And it’s true that a lot of people can use empathy to manipulate and exploit other people for their benefit.
It’s also interesting to think about those revelations in light of this non-helpful book: The Future of Feeling.
“This is a remarkably sturdy research finding: kids are happiest when raised in a loving environment that holds their behavior to high standards, expects them to contribute meaningfully to the household, and is willing to punish when behavior falls short. And it flies in the face of virtually everything therapists and parenting books now exhort.”
”Soul-searching was never the point of punishment. Self-reflection is the therapeutic quest. Parents’ objectives [in the past] were different and four fold: We wanted kids to knock it off when their bad behavior involved mistreating others or their property. We wanted to let our kids know who was in charge— us, not them. We wanted them to feel bad that their behavior crossed a line and to internalize that boundary. And we wanted to give their poor sister, who’d just been clocked in the head with a Magna-Tile, a little justice.”
I’m not afraid to punish my kids for bad behavior and these are all reasons for why, though, again, it’s missing the gospel-oriented reason which is that sin involves consequences and as parents it is our desire to teach our kids God’s design for the world and how we treat his image-bearers. That children respecting authority and obeying their parents is just like how we respect God and obey his commands. Boundaries and justice are also both concepts grounded in Scripture.
If you love the idea of self-reflection, you may find Tim Keller’s book, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness interesting.
Recommendation
Overall, I would recommend this book. Even if you don’t buy into the degree to which Shrier presents these problems to occur, she has a lot of good insights and warnings. Things to be looking for and wary of as a parent.
It will encourage you that you are capable of raising your kid and you’re not crazy for thinking so. It will also encourage you that your child is capable of more than you think. Resilience is more common than you think. They can do more and handle more than we think.
If you come away from this book refusing to ever see a therapist, you missed the point. If you come away thinking Shrier wants your children to never have feelings, you missed the point.
Even if I didn’t agree with everything she said, I still think this book is important right now in a world where we’ve accommodated our kids into selfishness and fear.
And if you’re serious about this topic, I would definitely check out Sissy Goff’s book Raising Worry-Free Girls or James Stephen’s book Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys.
This book released in February, 2024. You can order a copy of this book using my affiliate link below.
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