Over the last decade, therapy has become the default solution to solving every problem for kids. Parents getting divorced? See a therapist. Lose a loved one? See a therapist. Middle school crush dump you? Therapist. Someone said something mean? Therapist. But instead of helping kids work through difficult circumstances and solve real problems, what if it’s just making the problems worse? That’s what Abigail Shrier thinks is happening, and in this conversation, she reveals some surprising reasons why.
Shane and Shrier discuss the real reason therapy is “bad,” how we got to this point of acceptance as a culture, and what you can do as a parent to get back to normalcy. Shrier also shares her experiences with lifelong therapy patients, who should actually be in therapy, and the one thing that makes someone a successful parent.
Available now: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Abigail Shrier is an author and former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She’s the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She holds degrees from Columbia University and Oxford University and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
Here are a few highlights from the episode:
When you drop your child off at therapy, you’re ruining the parent-child relationship.
We don’t trust ourselves to handle our lives in the way that we used to. We think that basically our lives require a certain amount of expertise.
The rising generation never says it’s shy. They say they have social phobia. They never say they’re sad; they say they’re depressed. They never say they went through a tough time in middle school; they say they have PTSD. They’re speaking the language of psychopathology to understand themselves and each other.
You can be as affectionate as you want, but you can’t not be the authority in your home.
There may be kids who need the stimulant, but stimulants are profound and they’re given out way, way too readily without first seeing if we can make adjustments in a child’s environment to help them handle their distractibility.
Expectations are one of the greatest things you can give kids because it’s a way of saying, “I have faith in you. You can do great things.”
There is a major conflict of interest with schools getting involved in mental health.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:12 – Inverse: How do we raise mentally unstable kids?
03:57 – How we got to now
07:13 – Bad therapy…or just social trends?
08:49 – Being your kids’ friend: good or bad?
11:23 – The parenting type that raises the BEST kids
17:03 – Is this all the parents’ fault?
25:21 – Is “Bad Therapy” a world-wide problem?
28:25 – Talk to your kids’ therapist about these things
37:37 – The importance of facing adversity in childhood
42:34 – Can we blame grad schools for all of this?
44:42 – On technology and social media
46:31 – Schools should “never” have gotten involved in mental health
50:11 – Did COVID accelerate “bad therapy?”
51:35 – How to return to normalcy
53:49 – Why Shane shares negative YouTube comments with his kids
56:51 – Shrier’s experience being “cancelled”
59:41 – On prestige media
01:03:15 – Small steps parents can take to return to normal
01:06:30 – Dealing with schools saying one thing and parents saying another
01:09:00 – Why is the silent majority…silent?
01:12:00 – If this continues, what happens?
01:13:47 – What makes someone a successful parent?
