Children and Bad Therapy

Our kids need good parenting, not ‘experts’ and endless medication:

Our children are under massive attack in ways not even conceived of until just recently. Obviously the trans assault on our kids is one major example of this. And one of the best books penned on that subject was Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze by Abigail Shrier (Swift, 2020). See my discussion about that very important volume here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/11/01/the-truth-about-transgenderism/

Shrier has just released a new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (Sentinel, 2024). In it the investigative journalist examines the huge mental health crisis that our young people are experiencing. And much of the “therapy” that most children are receiving is simply making matters worse.

Many have written on our therapeutic culture and the enormous pressures our children are under. Shrier’s new volume may be among the more important books on these matters. She lays out her case early on: What children need most are loving and caring parents, not an army of “experts,” therapists and bureaucrats:

“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.” (xiv-xv)

Many well-meaning and caring people have made our children worse off in terms of mental and psychological health. Shrier does not decry all those in the helping professions, but she does remind us that wanting to help someone is not the same as actually helping someone.

And the history of recent therapy has been a mixed bag of frauds, fakes and fails, including of course lobotomies. Today therapists are pushing the gender dysphoria madness, resulting in a massive increase in diagnoses of this “condition.” Never mind the countless cases of regret and detransitioning.

This book looks at many of the recent therapies being foisted upon our young people, examines the research and various studies on them, and shares a number of personal stories along the way. She looks at how the digital age is causing extra stress and problems for young people, and examines various adult issues being foisted on our kids, such as radical sexualities, and fear mongering resulting in things like “climate anxiety”.

Yes the experts are now telling us that climate panic attacks are real things, and we need an army of therapists to “help” kids suffering from this. Hmm, maybe keeping adult worries and ideologies away from impressionable young people might be a better strategy.

Instead of feeding our kids the fantasies about how we are all going to die tomorrow, why not try telling them the truth, including the fact that trends in the environment are moving in the right direction. Shrier quotes Michael Shellenberger on this: “Deaths from natural disaster have declined over 95 percent over the last century. Actual disasters themselves have gone down over the last twenty years. . . . We’re more resilient than ever.” (p. 28)

But too many therapists, social workers, counsellors and drug companies all thrive on keeping our children in a constant state of panic and fear and depression – about everything. And since it is so often the far left pushing all this fear porn, be it about Covid or saving the planet, it is not surprising that teens “who identify with liberal and left-leaning politics have suffered worst of all” in terms of mental health problems. (p. 29)

Talk about creating a crisis and then perpetually pushing the therapy and help needed to deal with it all. Again, not all carers and helpers are in it for the money or what have you, but certainly many are. Simply consider the controversial and contentious issue of things like ADHD and a whole host of medicines and drugs that are being pushed out in the millions to deal with such matters.

Chapter 10, “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child” deals with this in some detail. She quotes from studies and experts who believe that “ADHD – characterized by overstimulation and distractibility – didn’t meet the standard definition of a ‘disorder.’ And Ritalin was no solution at all.” (p. 198)

Often behavioural modification, instead of a host of pharmaceuticals, is what our children in fact need. Moreover, instead of doing all we can to rid children of every sort of depression and anxiety, we need to learn that these two things may be an important part of our growth into mature and capable adults. She looks into some of the research into these realities as well:

In the main, anxiety and depression are healthy responses to life’s threats and debacles. Either can be uncomfortable and, if they preclude normal functioning, disordered. But anxiety and depression themselves aren’t a dysfunction. It’s only if you’re experiencing chronic anxiety or depression that you cannot otherwise resolve that you might begin to consider pharmaceutical intervention. (p. 202)

The answer to so many of our children’s problems is NOT more drugs, more medication, and more “experts” offering endless bouts of therapy with them, but good and loving parenting. Yes, we are not all great parents. But it is not too late to learn how to become one. Our kids need this more than anything.

Thus really loving your child might well mean telling the experts to get out of the way – or telling the drug pushers to butt out because there might be better ways to proceed. And good parenting will often mean just letting our kids be kids: letting them learn by trial and error, by failure, by disappointment. Trying to give them a sterile, hygienic and risk-proof life will not help them in the long run. Says Shrier:

For years, therapeutic experts have attempted to iron out the idiosyncrasies of parent-child interaction—and in the last two decades, all but succeeded. They injected ideology and faux perfectionism into the parent-child relationship, and subjected every aspect to their examination and judgment.

 

Parent-child relationships have always varied according to values, family culture, and the variegations of personality. Our friendships and marriages and sibling and parent relationships aren’t precious because they conform to an approved pattern. They are precious because they are ours.

 

Experts are not the only ones getting in the way of our kids’ normal maturation; parents’ epidemic of overinvolvement in kids’ lives is by now the stuff of legend. We ask teachers to seat our elementary kids next to others we’ve chosen, demand to speak to high school teachers and even college professors who dare give our children a bad grade, and intervene with our young adults’ bosses (all stories people have told me). (pp. 215-216)

So much of our victim mentality culture that we are now experiencing comes from parents seeking to overprotect their children from the realities of life. We want them cocooned from everything that might hurt them – or even from things that they might FEEL will harm them:

Stop acting as if your child will die if she doesn’t get her snack; that she’ll fall apart if she’s made to sit next to an obnoxious child in class. If she’s not in the same reading group as her friends, don’t call the teacher and insist that the groups be reorganized because your daughter can’t possibly discuss Wonder seated next to anyone but Kennedy.

 

Stop implanting your outsized worries in their heads. Stop flinging the word “bullying” around just because another girl said something mean to your daughter; that’s an unpleasantness she’s destined to face again and must learn to handle. Stop monitoring and evaluating everything your kids do and stop overpraising them for doing things that aren’t hard. You’re not spurring them to adulthood, you’re insisting that they always regard themselves as little children.

 

Stop telling them they’re weak, in so many ways; if you could do something at their age, let them give it a whirl. They aren’t weak—unless you make them that way. They’re remarkably sturdy and naturally very strong.

 

Somewhere along the line, we forgot all this. We abjured authority and lost all perspective. Any evidence of a mental health “symptom” became a command that we immediately hand the kid over to an expert. We forgot that with adolescents, some things are a phase. Many episodes of teen sadness will resolve on their own. (p. 217)

The things these experts are doing to our young people are in large measure contributing to the very messed up adult world we now find ourselves living in. ‘All my problems are someone else’s fault.’ ‘You folks are hurting my feelings.’ ‘Your words offend me’ ‘That is hate speech!’ ‘You are not allowed to say that – or think that.’ Hmm, where did all this nonsense come from? I think you can see the connections here.

Both I and Shier believe there is a place for some therapy and counselling, and for some medications for various mental and emotional problems. But we are now living in a therapeutic/pharmaceutical culture where personal responsibility and choice are being supplanted by ‘experts’ and drugs. This is simply making everything worse.

Her closing words are worth recording here:

But if we want kids to register the endless bounty of life’s pleasures, we must get out of their way, and get the tech out of their way, too. Screens do not offer companionship—not the sort that fills us up, anyway. Your kids don’t require an iPad to survive a dinner or car trip any more than you did. Teens manage fine with flip phones. They aren’t weaker than you—unless you make them so.

 

Proceed by subtraction. Clean the dirt out of the cut and the body heals itself. Until you’ve subtracted environmental contaminants that may be hampering your kids—expert, tech, monitoring, meddling, medicinal, or otherwise—you may not know how happy she is or could be.

 

How do you know whether to put your thirteen-year-old in therapy? Simple: don’t take your kid to a shrink unless you’ve exhausted all other options. If you must sign your adolescent up for therapy, research the therapist as you would any surgeon. In all but the most serious cases, your child is much better off without them. In all but the direst circumstances, your child will benefit immeasurably from knowing you are in charge—and that you don’t think there’s something wrong with her….

 

Claims from experts that they know—or more laughably, that they care—what’s best for our kids with anything comparable to the degree that we do ought to be met with derision, contempt, the creeps. The experts are out there, minting young patients faster than anyone could possibly cure them. They watch a rising tide of adolescent suffering and present themselves as its solution. Most of them ought to be fired on the spot.

 

Remove the spoons: 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.

 

You don’t need them. You never needed them. And your kids are almost certainly better off without them. Having kids is the best, most worthy thing you could possibly do. Raise them well. You’re the only one who can. (pp. 246, 250)

Amen to that.

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