Shrier’s book is giving parents permission to rethink the therapeutic paradigms that have dominated child-rearing literature for a long time now. She gives parents permission to see their children as moral agents who need their character formed by loving parents rather than as merely victims of an array of alleged pathologies that require third-party interventions from the medical authorities.

I finished Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up about two or three weeks ago. I’ve had a lot of time to ruminate on it, and I think it will be one of the most important books of the year. It really is a bit of a barn-burner. Her reporting gathers evidence against some of the sacrosanct totems of our age:

1. Trauma-informed therapy
2. Gentle parenting
3. Hyper-medicalization of children
4. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score
5. Empathy run amok

Shrier begins the book with a giant disclaimer that she’s not writing this book about kids with actual serious, debilitating trauma. She’s not writing as if real trauma doesn’t exist in the world or as if therapeutic interventions can never be helpful for people. She’s writing about an overweening therapeutic mindset that pathologizes the ordinary challenges of a child’s life. Parents who rashly thrust their child into therapy or under the influence of psychotropic drugs may be doing more harm than good. She argues that our presumption should be for our children’s resilience, not for our children’s inability to cope without medical interventions.

My sense is that Shrier has tapped into something that many parents are already beginning sense for themselves. They are starting to recognize that “gentle parenting” and a lack of skepticism about psychiatric interventions have led to a situation in which ordinary problems have been pathologized and medicalized—problems that in previous generations were dealt with through loving discipline.

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