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There's been some buzz lately around Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier (also known "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze").
The central thesis is that therapy, to the extent that it's effective even a little, comes with risks as well as benefits, and it's a bad idea to engage in recreational or mental hygiene therapy, in the same way that it's a bad idea to get unnecessary physical operations done. She argues that it's an especially bad idea to do this to children, who don't come into it with a fully formed self understanding, and that parents and schools have been engaging in way too much therapeutic activity without monitoring for harmful results. For most children, it's a better idea to try giving them as much freedom as is culturally reasonable and try telling them firmly to stop behaving badly and do better (and this is what better looks like), rather than trying to figure out if something's wrong with them psychologically. It probably isn't, unless adults introduce that. To back those assertions up, she conducted interviews with some psychiatrists, psychologists, other mental health professionals, as well as teens and their parents.
Caveat: the book is primarily about and intended for middle class, essentially functional families that are assumed not to engage in abusive behavior, and therefore doesn't spend a lot of time worrying that the reader, released from the constraints of the therapeutic model, will start escalating from naming feelings to hitting or starving kids or anything like that. I don't know if this is warranted, but do suspect that families who are practicing overly authoritarian child rearing (e.g. "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl) are in an entirely different informational ecosystem. That seems likely.
There are three main threads: therapists, schools, and parenting practices. There's a lot of culture war fodder in each of these, especially an argument to massively downgrade the SEL components of schools -- that to the extent people actually go along with them, they aren't just a waste of time and money, but actively harmful. But more than that, to lay off the SEL inspired ways of talking about problems. Working in a public school, I find this somewhat convincing. There are kids who may or may not have psychiatric problems, I can't really tell, but as far as I can tell, the previously normal things (having to sit alone for a while, suspensions, ISS, noticing that other people are angry about the destruction of their concentration and personal property...) haven't ever been tried, in favor of treating the children as not entirely human (doling out pieces of candy one by one, each time they do a tiny positive thing, pretending like them terrorizing their peers can't be helped, organizing a bunch of meetings between six or so adults to consider ways to use behaviorist psychology on them). To the extent that the kid is basically a human being, this is counterproductive -- it's not actually helpful to become a raving lunatic that everyone else averts their gaze from. But there doesn't seem to currently be a path available for school personnel other than deeper and deeper into more and more therapeutic techniques, or for the parents of the other kids other than transferring schools entirely (something mentioned by some kids in relation to potentially complaining about an extremely bad classmate). There was a "mindset training" about how maybe when a kid who's known to be unreasonable throws a tantrum, maybe we should just instantly cave and find them what they want. "Bad therapy" is not very helpful there, since there's a legal apparatus built up around the problem. In my experience school staff understands that the procedures are stupid, but aren't really in a position to change anything, even up to state legislators.
I found the section on gentle, therapeutic parenting especially interesting. When I had my first baby, and had to sit around nursing the baby for an absurd amount of time day and night, said baby was very bad at sleep -- I hadn't previously realized that humans have to learn how to fall asleep -- so I would read parenting advice from generic online sources about my problems. There's a lot about "attachment parenting," gentle, gradual sleep training, and then as they get a bit older, a lot about gentle parenting. In my household, most of this was not so much tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and left untried -- we both like our parents and come from stable households, so kind of just act similar to our respective parents. Shrier found people who had given gentle, therapeutic parenting a really hard try, but not been blessed with gentle toddlers. The most optimistic account was of an Israeli psychiatrist with a young ADHD son who didn't want to use drugs (at least so young), and spent a lot of time gardening with him as an outlet, and seemed to be enjoying the bonding and enjoying the son. "Raising Raffi" by Keith Gessen chronicles attempts at fatherhood by a highly educated man fully bought in to never yelling or punishing, and Shrier's read on the situation is that maybe some small amount of punishment was in order. An observation from both Shrier and Jordan Peterson is that parents who keep losing power struggles with their young children can, and sometimes do, go on to resent the children, and people more broadly don't like them either, since they're out of control much of the time. That seems plausible, though I can't think of any specific examples. She also thinks that the children in question tend to be the ones who go on to cut their parents off anyway, after all that effort, and not want children themselves, since it looks like such a terrible slog. She doesn't present a lot of evidence for that, just her gestalt impression from interviews. Shrier advocates for parents who themselves like their parents and come from functional households to follow their intuitions and ask their families for advice, rather than reading contemporary parenting books. She, again, doesn't have much advice for parents who come from dysfunctional households with traumatic practices.
In general I liked the book as a bit of casual sociology, it has some interesting anecdotes in it, and would tepidly recommend it to anyone interested.
Thanks for the post. I find parents who don’t discipline their kids kind of sad; I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, my grandmother probably hit me twice and my grandfather probably three or four times between the ages of 4 and 12, but by god that made us behave. Kids need a lot of love but a little fear, I think.
More generally, I think significant introspection is a bad idea. The happiest people (unironically Donald Trump) seem to do very little introspection at all.
As a parent, parents who "gentle parent" almost universally have awful kids to be around. Our kids are generally very well behaved (twins age 5) to the point that it's not uncommon to get complimented at the store about it. We follow the "reprove betimes with sharpness, followed by an increase in love" approach. We like being around our kids.
Whenever my kids have play dates with gentle parented kids, the amount of yelling, mean things, stealing toys, hitting, breaking things (ours or their own) is genuinely shocking. But you know, even our kids sometimes act out, what's annoying is that there is no discipline in the moment. The moms just take the kids and be like "ohhh dear oh no, are you having some big feelings?" And then kid goes right back to it after sitting with his mom for a few seconds. Sadly, these moms also often complain that they can't control their kids! We saw one really awful moment with one of these where a 4 year old smacked his mom at Church (hard enough that people gasped). She got embarassed (understandably) but then kinda just went, "aww, yeah, he just does that haha", again, understandable when tons of people are around but, i know for a fact that it happens at home too.
like, i guess we just have no qualms or even see it as a point of pride to calmly and sternly take our kids out of a situation to correct the behavior. And i think it shows! And we vastly prefer to hang out with kids of parents who are more like us!
Sound like the direction my wife was taking with out daughter, before I put my foot down and said we must discipline her. We don't have to let her act the way she's acting. She'll probably freak out and throw a giant tantrum. It probably won't work, effectively, at least at first. But calmly doling out consequences for actions will work. I wasn't even proposing anything bonkers. Just sending our daughter to her room when she talked back and refused more gentle corrections to cease.
My wife pushed back claiming that sounded "abusive". She claimed nearly all corrective measures were "abusive". She'd swallowed some bonkers gentle parenting bullshit. The problem was, our kid would walk all over her until she blew up at the kid about what a shitty brat she was acting like. This seemed far worse, to me, than just calmly sending our daughter to her room.
I won that argument, one of the few I have won, and after sending our daughter to her room for a week when she back talks, it stopped. For whatever reason my wife, after that resounding success, said she didn't think it worked. I was utterly baffled, and asked why she thought that, our daughter has almost completely stopped back talking. She said she didn't know, she just felt like it didn't work.
Can't win em all I guess.
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Working in a childcare setting (don't worry, I'm not dealing directly with the kids), the whole point of the "oh no, are you having a moment?" stuff is follow-through. You help the kid identify their feelings (angry, frustrated, etc.) and then you go on to coping strategies ('we don't bite/throw stuff/hit when we feel sad/angry, what we do is....') and what behaviour is acceptable and what is not. No yelling or smacking but you don't just let it go.
Kids go through a biting phase, all kids. That's why we have a written-down biting policy in place to be followed. But if the kid continues to bite (as per one case recently) that's when you get the therapist or educational psychologist or whomever involved.
So mom may be embarrassed and that might be good if it motivates her to start follow-through, but if she's going to go with "he just does that" then it's bad parenting. She's probably let him have his way up to now, and he will have a melt-down if she tries to discipline him, and she doesn't know how to cope with that (and feels bad if he starts crying because she made him feel sad like a big meanie) but sometimes you do have to be a big meanie for the betterment of your kid.
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When I was little, I was disciplined a couple of times by hair-pulling, and it made me too fearful of parents and their reaction to, say, meet with friends outside of normal meeting times, which in turn contributed to my social life only really getting going once I moved away from home to university (19 in theory, 20 in practice since I returned to home city for conscription in the nearby brigade).
Jesus, that sounds horrific. There's something intimate and hateful about it?
I was given Tobasco as a punishment for swearing (which led to a long-term love of hot sauce and hatred of Tobasco) and was hit with a spoon maybe once a year. The spoon broke when I was 14, and then after that control was exerted more through money etc.
All that to say I now have a good relationship with my parents.
Within the Finnish cultural context of the era, at least, it was the most common form of physical punishment (already illegal at this point, but these things take time to percolate through culure) and considered a lighter punishment to spanking.
Genuine question, because I don’t know- in countries where it’s illegal, is corporal punishment an ‘everyone does it, just don’t brag about it on social media’ thing, or is there some kind of alternate discipline method in common use, or what? I don’t get the impression of all those kids acting like they never got spanked.
I think those countries generally being more affluent might help.
My parents never used corporal punishment, but we were also well-off, so they had the option of taking away things that less well-off kids wouldn't have had in the first place.
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I once remember some younger people (like 20s) expressing astonishment that physical punishment would still happen in middle-class families during my times. I would guess still happens but as a low-class thing, not something that a sensible person would do.
The methods of discipline are the usual - shame, go to your room, no allowance and so on. I guess the modern Nordic societies just rely most of all on internalized discipline and social pressure.
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