Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

Abigail Shrier‘s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

... the book is, in my view, superb, and should be read by every literate adult, whether or not you have children. For it offers not only guidelines for parenting, but also explains why young people in society (as well as adolescents, college students, and young adults) are showing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They are emotionally stuck at about age twelve. And that, says Shrier, is due to “bad therapy”: the rise of an American therapy culture in which every child is constantly assessed, supervised, and psychologized by parents, their schools, and doctors. (It is the schools and doctors, which include therapists, that have convinced parents that their children have psychological problems and need treatment.) The result is that we have one generation (I’d say two or more) that has grown up fragile, solipsistic, afraid to engage with the world, and socially inept.

Here, therapy means psychotherapy. I do not think anyone is criticizing physical or speech therapy.

I have not seen the book, but I do believe that child psychotherapy is almost entirely harmful. My advice is that parents should keep all children away from psychotherapists.