Really loving your child might well mean telling the experts to get out of the way – or telling the drug pushers to butt out because there might be better ways to proceed. And good parenting will often mean just letting our kids be kids: letting them learn by trial and error, by failure, by disappointment. Trying to give them a sterile, hygienic and risk-proof life will not help them in the long run.

Our children are under massive attack in ways not even conceived of until just recently. Obviously the trans assault on our kids is one major example of this. And one of the best books penned on that subject was Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze by Abigail Shrier (Swift, 2020). See my discussion about that very important volume here: Link

Shrier has just released a new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (Sentinel, 2024). In it the investigative journalist examines the huge mental health crisis that our young people are experiencing. And much of the “therapy” that most children are receiving is simply making matters worse.

Many have written on our therapeutic culture and the enormous pressures our children are under. Shrier’s new volume may be among the more important books on these matters. She lays out her case early on: What children need most are loving and caring parents, not an army of “experts,” therapists and bureaucrats:

“We parents have become so frantic, hypervigilant, and borderline obsessive about our kids’ mental health that we routinely allow all manner of mental health expert to evict us from the room. (‘We will let you know.’) We’ve been relying on them for decades to tell us how to raise well-adjusted kids.” (xiv-xv)

Many well-meaning and caring people have made our children worse off in terms of mental and psychological health. Shrier does not decry all those in the helping professions, but she does remind us that wanting to help someone is not the same as actually helping someone.

And the history of recent therapy has been a mixed bag of frauds, fakes and fails, including of course lobotomies. Today therapists are pushing the gender dysphoria madness, resulting in a massive increase in diagnoses of this “condition.” Never mind the countless cases of regret and detransitioning.

This book looks at many of the recent therapies being foisted upon our young people, examines the research and various studies on them, and shares a number of personal stories along the way. She looks at how the digital age is causing extra stress and problems for young people, and examines various adult issues being foisted on our kids, such as radical sexualities, and fear mongering resulting in things like “climate anxiety”.

Yes the experts are now telling us that climate panic attacks are real things, and we need an army of therapists to “help” kids suffering from this. Hmm, maybe keeping adult worries and ideologies away from impressionable young people might be a better strategy.

Instead of feeding our kids the fantasies about how we are all going to die tomorrow, why not try telling them the truth, including the fact that trends in the environment are moving in the right direction. Shrier quotes Michael Shellenberger on this: “Deaths from natural disaster have declined over 95 percent over the last century. Actual disasters themselves have gone down over the last twenty years. . . . We’re more resilient than ever.” (p. 28)

But too many therapists, social workers, counsellors and drug companies all thrive on keeping our children in a constant state of panic and fear and depression – about everything. And since it is so often the far left pushing all this fear porn, be it about Covid or saving the planet, it is not surprising that teens “who identify with liberal and left-leaning politics have suffered worst of all” in terms of mental health problems. (p. 29)

Talk about creating a crisis and then perpetually pushing the therapy and help needed to deal with it all. Again, not all carers and helpers are in it for the money or what have you, but certainly many are. Simply consider the controversial and contentious issue of things like ADHD and a whole host of medicines and drugs that are being pushed out in the millions to deal with such matters.

Chapter 10, “Spare the Rod, Drug the Child” deals with this in some detail. She quotes from studies and experts who believe that “ADHD – characterized by overstimulation and distractibility – didn’t meet the standard definition of a ‘disorder.’ And Ritalin was no solution at all.” (p. 198)

Often behavioural modification, instead of a host of pharmaceuticals, is what our children in fact need. Moreover, instead of doing all we can to rid children of every sort of depression and anxiety, we need to learn that these two things may be an important part of our growth into mature and capable adults.

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