There was a time when parents, schools and society aimed to create resilient, independent kids.
But somewhere along the way, we ceded that noble pursuit for squishy concepts like happiness while helicopter-like hovering became the parental default setting.
And that shift has produced Gen Z, who report being more anxious, more depressed and less capable of moving through the world without having their hands held.
Astonishingly, nearly 40 percent of young people have received mental health treatment compared to 26 percent of Gen Xers.
But a new book, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up,” by Abigail Shrier, does not just explore how a generation reared in a hyper-therapized culture with more resources and diagnosis than ever can be so mired in mental health struggles — it also offers solutions.
And though the writer notes she’s not a parenting expert — but does have twin 13-year-old boys and an 11-year-old girl — this blueprint for escaping the doom loop couldn’t be more welcome.
“Our goal was to raise happy kids and we now know that goal isn’t helpful,” Shrier, 45, told me.
“And if our kids are the rising generation, we didn’t [succeed].”
She identifies a few culprits in creating our current precarious state: social media and iPhones, a shift to “gentle parenting” where parents neither punish, establish guard rails nor assert authority.
Our schools have been “crop dusted,” she said, with “Social Emotional Learning,” which emphasizes emotional skills alongside other academic disciplines.
Yes, kids are now being taught to obsessively gauge their feelings over and over, treating eternal rumination like it’s a standalone subject. And they’re becoming A+ worriers as a result.
And they’re also encouraged — no matter how comfortable their middle class existence — to identify their “trauma.”
“We don’t really know much about what causes trauma, but I do know one thing that could cause trauma or a feeling of trauma,” said Shrier.
“And that’s constantly telling kids, they’ve been traumatized and constantly making excuses for them. Or getting them out of responsibilities we know they can handle.”
This book is rigorously reported, heavily researched and filled with enough interviews with child psychologists, teachers, parents and Gen Zers to more than buttress her premise. It shows how far astray we’ve been led by the so-called “experts.”
But what’s most compelling is that it’s filled with good old-fashioned bombs of common sense that could have been dropped from Grandma’s little book of wisdom.
For example, encourage kids to “knock it off, shake it off” which teaches them to work out conflicts and shake off small injuries.
And that setting up rules, tasks and assigning chores cultivate independence and respect. Humor is one of life’s best defenses.
They’re concepts we know well. And that we have the societal muscle memory to return to.
The 45-year-old Shrier also says we should be looking for models of grit in our own family trees.
Shrier writes about her grandmother, whose own mother died in childbirth. She had an unstable childhood, spent a year in an iron lung from polio yet still grew up to marry, have three children and become one of the first female judges in Maryland.
But if her grandmother grew up today, Shrier says, teachers would be mining her trauma instead of her potential.
“It’s a huge loss to us as Americans that we didn’t tell our kids what our families went through. That’s their only proof that they come from sturdy stock.”
Shrier is not anti-therapy nor is she opposed to medication, but she stresses that putting developing children on psychotropic drugs is vastly different from prescribing them to fully formed adults.
She simply wants parents to understand the myriad of risks of both before proceeding down this path.
But ultimately, talk therapy, especially for a naive and malleable child, can have an iatrogenic effect, meaning the treatment itself can harm. She is not talking about kids with genuine disorders like anorexia.
However the scale of intervention — four in ten Gen Zers having some form of help — suggests something is wrong.
“I think there’s no question that there are people who are making their living by convincing parents that their children are sick or convincing children that they’ve been traumatized when they haven’t been.
“I would like to shrink mental health staffs in schools. Why? Because I want them only treating kids who need it. Not everyone,” said Shrier who also penned the 2020 book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” about the sudden spike in girls identifying as transgender.
She also looks back to a book called “Children of the Great Depression” by Glen H. Elder Jr.
“It was a longitudinal study of kids raised in Oakland during the Great Depression. He wanted to know who fared the best.”
It was not the poorest kids, who were abandoned or orphaned. It was not the rich kids. It was the Depression-hit middle class who took on extra jobs, chores and wore hand-me-downs — and then they thrived.
“They, by every measure, psychologically, in terms of success and lifetime happiness, did the best. And it wasn’t because they didn’t struggle.”
Some adversity is a good thing: it will, said Shrier, help build up “immunity” to the hardships life throws at you.
“We want our kids to experience some level of failure when they are still in our home, so it doesn’t lead to devastation as adults.”
