In the last post, I explained why I’m interested and sympathetic with the message of Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier.
But now we need to talk about why I’m disappointed with Shrier’s book.
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Dismissive Rhetoric
While raising important issues (which I’ll be talking about in the remaining posts), Shrier too often catered to right-wing talking points and dismissive rhetoric.
While making a valid point, backed by research, she would then add a needless zinger to make her point, calling out parents, or therapists, or the children themselves.
It is frustrating because it means I won’t be able to hand this book to moderate or liberal-leaning people in order to start a conversation.
Non-conservatives will automatically become defensive—and we all know that you can’t constructively explore new ideas if you’re in a protective mindset.
This is the main problem with the book.
Trauma Simplifications
Shrier oversimplifies and is sometimes dismissive of trauma.
Amid valid points about whether we can reason backward from adult PTSD in war veterans to childhood experiences, and amid concerns that we should be more skeptical of “repressed” memories, Shrier unfortunately becomes generally dismissive of trauma and just about all implicit processing, which is an overcorrection.
She tragically reinforces the idea of pitting “natural” resilience against fragile trauma, as if you can just tell people to “Be more resilient”—which doesn’t help.
Unfortunately on the popular level, oftentimes people talking about resilience are dismissive of the effects of trauma, as if resilience is a conservative trait and having trauma is what happens to liberals. Problematically, people on the more progressive, trauma-informed side will hear all talk of resilience as “not listening” and “victim blaming”.
Trauma and resilience should not be part of a cultural war. Period. And I’m disappointed that Shrier perpetuates this.
Parenting and Childhood
Shier’s view of parenting swings back to the other opposite extreme from progressive, permissive parenting to free-range childhood. It is as if she moves from risk-off to risk-on parenting view of parenting.
As we will see once I move on to an engagement of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness and his understanding of the shift from a play-based to a phone-based childhood (subscribe so you don’t miss it), there are good reasons to think that changes in parenting are related to the current mental health crisis. But it seems that Shrier gives in to certain idealized versions of childhood and what parenting should look like.
For me, the perspective of attachment theory has clear advantages to both the permissive parenting that Shrier is reacting against, and the kind of idealized independence of childhood she is advocating for.
Children need both sides of intimacy and independence—of coming toward parents for comfort, protection, acceptance, and belonging (intimacy) and of going out from parents with support, encouragement, and even challenge (independence). It seems that Shrier—and much engagement for/against psychology—is caught in an understanding that progressives care about belonging and acceptance and conservatives care about independence and challenge.
See Raising a Secure Child: How Circle of Security Parenting Can Help You Nurture Your Child's Attachment, Emotional Resilience, and Freedom to Explore for more on this attachment perspective (or check out our Attaching to God cohort).
What Next?
Ok, so those are the problems with the book, and why I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to strongly recommend it to people outside conservative circles.
Next post I’ll be diving into 1) whether therapy can do harm, 2) and if so, does anyone track it like they do in the medical profession (quick answer is “Yes” to the first, and “No” to the second).
I had very similar thoughts about the book. There are long sections that had me noting... "This is complete and utter crap..." and then on the next page there would be an interesting idea to work out. It felt like a rant in numerous places. As someone with a family full of educators it felt as if she found the most extreme examples of SEL that she could (which I would argue are rather rare across the scope of American education) and made them exemplars of the entire educational system. My wife is a school counselor and her life looks nothing like what is suggested by this work.
I would guess that we are going to end up in a similar place with this book, and I look forward to the next post to see where you find helpful ideas in the book.