In her latest book ‘Bad Therapy’ she lifts the lid on the therapy culture that’s become prolific in our psychologised age, and she demonstrates the damage that much of it is doing to our kids.
Her initial observations are really provocative and rightly challenge psychological associations to be held to higher standards, in fact just the same standards that we’d rightly hold medical doctors to.
She points out that whilst Doctors have an ethical responsibility to tell their patients to stop harmful behaviours, psychologists rarely take the same approach. Whereas a Doctor, concerned about my liver function and being motivated by the evidence, would insist that I stop drinking alcohol a psychologist or counsellor would rarely offer the same important and lifesaving (albeit drastic) advice. The links have been proven for example that social media usage and smartphones are harming our children’s mental wellbeing - and yet where are the counsellors insisting that we make it illegal for them to use them before a certain age? We do the same for alcohol and cigarettes after all.
Make it a law that kids up until 16 are only allowed ‘dumb phones’ for example. Any, so called mental health professionals advocating this sort of thing? Nope.
As a Brit I was appalled by the examples in her book of what many young children in America are being quizzed about or taught in the name of ‘emotional and social learning’,
Without any prior symptoms of depression or anxiety young kids are being asked (without their parents consent one should add):
“In the last month have you thought seriously about killing yourself, O 7year old boy?” Or “dear sweet 8yr old girl, have you recently cut yourself or been so sad you that you didn’t want to leave the house?”
Fortunately kids in the UK seem to be spared from this sort of meddling, for now at least.
Her book acts as a warning siren to us, on this side of the pond, but also as a reason to be concerned about the normalisation of therapy-speak, the reductive labelling and the clinical diagnosing away of our humanity that’s so ubiquitous in our day.
Since our culture lost (deliberately abandoned more like) its grander narrative for being along with its symbols, myths and social codes that helped us make sense of the world, it has instead turned with all the frenzy of a person starving to science and medicine to solve our spiritual malaise. The trouble is, as Tom Holland observes in Dominion, science is mirror that can be used to reveal whatever we want it to. The Nazis used it to legitimate genocide and, in recent years, it’s been/being used to build a case for excusing rape, legitimising polygamy or decriminalising paedophilia…
I digress.
In recent decades, coinciding with the weakening of the domestic family and the increased interference of the state with parenting, parents have taken to believe that they need not just ‘help’ from others (grandparents and their community - all of which is a good), but that they need help from ‘experts’. That is, help from people who don’t know our kids or love our kids anywhere near as well as we/you do as parents.
“Parenting” she writes, “isn’t a skill we master, but a relationship we develop.”
Shrier’s book calls upon parents to reclaim their authority and regain their confidence.
She demonstrates how the child-led approach to parenting is leading to increased anxiety among children, and estrangement from their parents when they’re older. She calls on parents to lead with the authority they have as parents.
Some quotes:
When we refer to our own children by the labels the interlopers give us we allow these experts to downgrade how we see our daughters and sons.
and
The tags and labels are occasionally useful for experts but for us they just get in the way; they are reductive and demeaning and they have absolutely no business in polluting our love.
Whether our culture can legitimately recover from the nanny state, counsellor interference problem, is yet to be seen. My hunch is that without a life-giving grander narrative that makes sense of the world, provides spiritual reasons for the authority of parents that also embeds our kids within communities and lives deep with meaning and purpose, it is unlikely.
We’re living through the age of scientific-paganism, that calls on the same elemental spirits and forces of nature that the pre-christian world did. The difference is that now, with our technologies, and armed as we are with our exhaustive taxonomies and greater knowledge we’ll usher in an age of chaotic nihilism never before seen.
What overturned the ancient world again? What toppled the fatalism and barbarism of that world?
That’s right, it was the chaos taming, grave-killing, order creating saviour who triumphed over the elements and brought peace to the world. He bore the reductive labels for us in order that we might be fully human once again
Alongside him, parents read this book.