The pathologization of childhood: Abigail Shrier on how my generation got parenting so wrong

Shrier's new book, Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up, is a roundhouse kick to face of bourgeois liberal American parenting culture.

Eleven years ago, I experienced a huge personal crisis. I found myself a single mother of a four year old boy, after dramatically leaving my then- husband because of his spiralling mental health and addiction issues. I packed up two suitcases and my son’s little dinosaur Trunki and caught the next flight back to Ireland where I knew I could rebuild my life after several years of bitter fighting.  It was not a ‘conscious uncoupling’ — it was one of those yelling and screaming and constant hostility break-ups, and my beautiful, tender-hearted, son had witnessed most of it. 

As is often the case in the midst of a personal crisis, I was in constant communication with family and friends. One of my relatives back in the States urged me to get my four-year-old into therapy — because she loved us both very much and wanted the best for us, which, for her, was professional help. I remember the conversation very clearly, not because it was a strange request, but because of how it made me feel: a distinct and very strong resistance to the idea. I agreed half-heartedly with her while on the phone. In my rational brain I understood, appreciated and partly agreed with her suggestion. After all there had been a lot of upset, a lot of upheaval and a lot of loss for my son — and I myself was seeing a therapist once a week to help me process the fall-out. But there was a deeper, stronger, instinct, telling me not to trust my little boy’s psyche and heart to some total stranger. Even as we ended the call, I knew I would not be getting him a therapist. Instead, I instituted a stable routine of school, child-friendly weekend activities, and time spent playing with his new little friends. 

Over a decade later, Abigail Shrier has come along to tell me I was right. I already knew that of course, because my son is now a happy and confident and thoughtful teenager. But still, it’s nice to get validation on a macro, society-wide scale, of what my instincts told me: that in all but the most extreme circumstances, therapy for such a young child is a dicey proposition. 

Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up is a roundhouse kick to face of bourgeois liberal American parenting culture. Shrier provides, in exhaustive and meticulous detail, an irrefutable case against the mental health-influenced parenting that is now the norm — not just in the US, but in all middle-class, educated circles of the English speaking world. 

This is a subject I feel very strongly about, and not just because I have lived my own small version of it. My views are based on my belief that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and you do not need any expert qualifications to be a good parent. If I subscribe to any parenting philosophy, it would be that of the ‘good enough’ mother — willing to let my child experience difficulty, pain, or discomfort in age appropriate amounts that increase as he gets bigger, stronger and more capable. I have the utmost faith in my son’s ability to overcome. I also strive to be firm but fair in meting out discipline. My aim as a parent has been to create a human who is enjoyable to be around and who in a few short years will no longer need me, because he will be capable of taking care of himself. So far, it’s working out fine. 

For millions of families, this is not the case. Shrier’s research is a devastating indictment on the wellbeing of American youth. 

“The rising generation has received more therapy than any prior generation. Nearly 40 percent of the rising generation has received treatment from a mental health professional — compared with 26 percent of Gen Xers. Forty-two percent of the rising generation has a mental health diagnosis, rendering ‘normal’ increasingly abnormal.”

She also tells a truly disturbing anecdote about bringing her 12-year-old son to a clinic because he was complaining about a stomachache. She wanted to rule out appendicitis, which the doctor quickly did. But then a big burly male nurse appeared with a questionnaire that he wanted to give the child in private — about suicide, of all things. First question: “ In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?” What?

So has all this attention paid to mental health in young people made them happier and more stable? Of course it hasn’t. We all know the answer because we live in the world and see with our own eyes the catastrophic degradation of our youth. Shrier just confirms what we already know. 

“Millions of us bought in, believing [it] would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted kids. Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record.”

At the risk of upsetting some readers who may have had positive experiences with mental health care for themselves of their families (and if you have, that’s great, and I don’t doubt you) for many, many parents of my generation, natural, common sense engagement with their offspring is scary and uncomfortable. They have no faith in their own instincts, no respect for their own desires to have a well-behaved child — in case, god forbid, that child’s self-esteem be damaged even slightly by common sense discipline, or the faintest expectation being imposed upon them. For these unsure parents, going to a member of the professional managerial class takes the pressure off them, because as Shrier pointed out in her interview with Joe Rogan, they are “unwilling to be an authority in their own home…unwilling to impose any kind of discipline.” 

Photo by Christopher Ott on Unsplash

The result is mind-numbingly predictable: deeply disordered children. But that’s ok! Because now you go to a doctor and get a diagnosis, and a diagnosis means: “it wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t [the children’s].” It allows for outsourcing to experts who can drug your children, or provide highly prescriptive behaviour plans — reducing the parent into a mid-level bureaucrat managing the complex whims of a tiny tyrant.  And it gives the child absolutely zero incentive to make any effort whatsoever. Why bother, when you have a team of specialists with flow charts and advanced degrees making a fuss over you? 

There is ample evidence of this to be found in the wild. For about a year now, I have been following an Instagram account ironically called At Peace Parents, for the sheer perverse pleasure of watching someone commit what to my mind are the most egregious parenting errors outside of actual abuse or neglect. 

The page, with over a hundred thousand followers, is made up of video after video of a harmless, nerdy looking woman — with ‘PhD’ and pronouns in her bio — describing the shocking behaviours of one of her two sons, who she says has a condition called pathological demand avoidance. PDA, she explains, is a ‘nervous system disability.’ So any time the child’s nervous system perceives that “anyone is above them in stature, power or authority,’ they act like a feral animal. Common symptoms of this disability include growling, hissing, kicking and hitting, and refusal to get dressed or go to school. And over time, a “build-up” of these extreme responses in their “nervous system” stops them from eating, defecating, brushing teeth and other basic life functions. This looks like 'behaviour’, she concedes, but it’s actually a disability.

Ok. So I’m not a doctor. My qualifications are being a grown-ass woman, and I also used to be a child. So I know that a feature of being a child is living under the authority of an adult — that is kind of the definition of childhood, actually. Up until this woman and her peers came along five minutes ago, it was the norm, even if children often rebelled against the restrictions on their behaviour. Now, that is considered a disability.

I have also raised a child who in his younger days was extremely stubborn and defiant and just generally made a big fuss over almost every mundane decision that was imposed upon him — like taking baths, going to or leaving the playground, or being made to give back a toy that wasn’t his. Every single bed time was an epic battle of wills, until he was about 5 or 6 years old. So while I recognise some of the challenging behaviours that this deeply misguided woman describes, I am horrified by her response. Indulge, do not correct. Affirm the child’s worst impulses, and when those impulses escalate to requiring dental surgery or an enema, that’s just what they must endure. When the child is violent to a sibling (which happens a lot), hey — at least their “disability” is being accommodated. This woman goes so far as to arrange separate vacations for each child, because the PDA child is so out of control that their younger child is not safe around them.

A perusal of the comments of her followers tells me a similarly shocking story. Parents writing about their five year old on Zoloft, or a boy put on Prozac at age 10, with the heartbreaking outcome: “Reduced anxiety but now at 17 he mostly sleeps all day.” Another parent writes about a six year old girl: “Guanfacine + sertraline eliminated physical aggression, upped problem solving ability.” As if the only way an adult could get a little girl to cease acting aggressively is to drug her.

Five and six year olds on anti-depressants? What the actual fuck? Is this considered normal and ok? Have I been living under a rock for the last decade? And then we wonder why we are seeing all these deranged young people babbling about bug pronouns on TikTok? My heart breaks for these poor kids. I will reserve my ire for the fools who raised them.

My only quibble thus far with Shrier’s book is that she is so patient in presenting evidence to what I think is blindingly bloody obvious. I find myself screaming internally: “how is this a surprise to anyone?!?” I do not need an expert — Shrier or anyone else — to tell me that removing all discipline and expectation from a child’s life will have very poor results. But I hope her book reaches the moms and dads who need her the most, the ones who still have time to pull their families back from the brink of disaster. 

In the meantime, how many young people have had their minds destroyed by this total abdication of sane parental authority? I shudder to think. 

If you would like to peruse some of my other content on the subject of children and raising them, see here, and here, and here.

Or enjoy this chat I recorded two years ago with two other moms formerly of Brooklyn, Nancy McDermott, author of The Problem with Parenting: How Raising Children is Changing Across America, and CRT whistleblower Jodi Shaw.