Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy – Why the Kids Aren’t Alright

On the heels of Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, comes another well-researched examination of Gen Z and its difficulties: Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy – Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up (although I like my Who reference better for a subtitle!). Like Haidt, Shrier is concerned with the mental health of Gen Z (born 1995 – 2012). But where Haidt lays the blame on too much time on smartphones and not enough time in unsupervised play, Shrier takes aim at the enormous and exponentially growing therapy industry.

Bad Therapy is divided into three parts: Healers Can Harm, Therapy Goes Airborne, and Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong With Our Kids. As she asks in the Introduction, “How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own? How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psycho-therapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?” (page xvii) Bad Therapy is Shrier’s attempt to provide answers to these questions.

Part I: Healers Can Harm begins with a chapter on iatrogenesis, which refers to “the phenomenon of a healer harming a patient in the course of treatment”. As Shrier points out, therapists have a built-in conflict of interest: since they are their patients’ treatment, any acknowledgment of ineffectiveness is an acknowledgement of personal failure. To make matters worse, the most common treatments really have no track record of success. Treating trauma victims by having them discuss and rehash their trauma is more likely to be counterproductive than helpful.

Also, it is a prevailing belief among many therapists that Gen Z uniquely faces an unprecedented combination of stressors, the main three of which are smartphones, COVID-19 lockdowns, and climate change. Shrier recounts a humorous exchange with Karla Vermuelen, an associate professor of psychology at State University of NY at New Paltz and author of Generation Disaster: Coming of Age Post-9/11:

“I ask Vermeulen if it would ever be appropriate to say to a kid, Listen, you’re really exaggerating the threat of climate change right now. Let’s get through the week.

Vermeulen looks visibly stricken. ‘I would never tell someone they’re exaggerating. That’s very invalidating and not helpful. That’s going to raise defenses and make them feel unheard.'” (p. 30)

Later in the book, Shrier mentions that of all the children and adolscents she interviewed for the book, not one blamed climate change for his or her emotional issues.

In Chapter 3, Bad Therapy, Shrier goes through ten modes of therapy that can be harmful:

1. Teach Kids to Pay Close Attention to their Feelings
2. Induce Rumination
3. Make “Happiness” a Goal but Reward Emotional Suffering
4. Affirm and Accommodate Kids’ Worries
5. Monitor, Monitor, Monitor
6. Dispense Diagnoses Liberally
7. Drug ‘Em
8. Encourage Kids to Share Their “Trauma”
9. Encourage Young Adults to Break Contact with “Toxic” Family
10. Create Treatment Dependency

Part II, Theory Goes Airborne, is the longest section and the most interesting, as it deals with how schools have adopted a therapeutic mindset towards their students. Shrier catalogs all kinds of abuses schools inflict in the name of “social-emotional learning”, “restorative justice”, and other trendy educational theories. 

Through prompts and exercises, social-emotional learning (SEL) pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness”, “social awareness”, “relationship skills”, “self-management”, and “responsible decision-making”. (p. 77)

On its face SEL, doesn’t sound harmful, except that psychologists have long understood that the more you ask kids to assess their feelings, the more they focus on negative and narcissistic things, and less on actual learning.

Even more troubling is the use of surveys and assignments that undermine a child’s relationship with his or her family. Here’s an example of a seventh grade assignment, titled Homework: I Spy:

“You are a private investigator”, it prompts. “You have been hired by an unnamed source to ‘spy’ on your family. The source wants to find out all the various feelings that one or more of your family members have while doing activities at home. You won’t be able to talk to your family (you don’t want to blow your cover!) so you’ll have use your keen skills of observation.” (p. 85)

What educational benefit an assignment like this can possibly have is beyond me. I can, however, think of lots of ways it could be used to destroy a family’s cohesion.

A lot of what Shrier discovers is counter-intuitive. For example, focusing on empathy to the exclusion of other virtues can lead to students treating each other horribly. How?

Empathy invariably involves a choice of whose feelings to coronate and whose to disregard. Overreliance on empathy as a guide to mediating human affairs leads to precisely the injustices we see today in schools: phony show trials allegedly in defense of marginalized students, alongside breathtaking cruelty to undesirables. Empathy supplies a narrow aperture of intense caring. Those outside it blur into nothing. (p. 160)

What happens when a community is consumed with adhering to the latest of ever-changing standards of propriety? Members file away potential violations committed by others as an escape route:

One mom, Ellen, who consults to private school parents, apprised me of a bizarre and chilling trend among the rising generation. Many teens maintain a cache of screenshots to incriminate their friends just in case they should need to retailate against an accuser. (p. 161)

In Chapter 9, The Road Paved By Gentle Parents, Shrier is particularly harsh. Its thesis is that, beginning in the 1990s, parents ceded their authority and personal experience to parenting “experts” who all counseled a parenting style that was “gentle” – treating your child as an equal and using reason to modify bad behavior, as opposed to setting rules and boundaries and imposing consequences. The result has been a generation of children who are holy terrors, physically attacking their parents and making ever-increasing demands from them.

Shrier doesn’t pull any punches here:

Want to know why the rising generation of kids doesn’t want to have kids of their own? It’s because we made parenting look so damn miserable. It’s because we listened to all the experts and convinced ourselves that we couldn’t possible appeal to life experience, judgment, knowledge gleaned over decades – tens of thousands of hours with our kids – or what our parents had done, and figure this thing out for ourselves. It’s because forty-year-old parents – accomplished, brilliant, and blessed with a spouse – treat the raising of kids like a calculus problem that was put to them in the dead of night, gun to the head: Get it right or I pull this trigger.

We played a part with our kids: the therapeutic parent. We let them throw food on the floor and kick us and hit us – and each time extended them more understanding. We offered them an endless array of choices. And we absolutely renounced our own authority.

And it scared them. It scared these kids so badly. Look at them. They know there’s no one running the place. They know they’re far too young to be exercising the amount of power we’ve handed them. They know that if they’ve brought their towering father, an accomplished man in his forties, to his knees, clueless and despairing – then something has gone desperately wrong. (p. 190)

Part III: Maybe There’s Nothing Wrong With Our Kids is a call to parents to reclaim their authority. Shrier’s main point is that no one knows a child better than his or her parent, and when parents show fear and anxiety, kids pick up on it.

This section also overlaps with Haidt’s call to give children the freedom to take risks and grow independent. Shrier uses Japanese and Israeli families as examples – both countries give very young (by our standards) children responsibilities and freedom. In Israel, it is expected that 8-year-olds get themselves to school. It is Shrier’s contention that many children diagnosed with ADHD can be helped if their parents give them specific chores to complete, and hold them responsible if they lose things. Just like Haidt says, children will only grow into competent adults if they are allowed to make mistakes and learn how to play with other children on their own, without adult supervision. “When kids miss their “window” of independence – of wanting to hazard a risk and venture something new on their own – they stop asking for it.” (p. 218)

Bad Therapy is a powerful call to parents to resist the diagnoses and therapeutic approach of experts, remember that their parents raised them without all the meds and therapy, and they turned out okay. Parenting is not a job that requires extensive training and advice. It’s a calling that each one of us is capable of doing, as long as we understand that every child is a unique person with his or her own quirks and strengths. “In all but the direst circumstances, your child will benefit immeasurably from knowing you are in charge – and that you don’t think there’s something wrong with her.” (p. 247)

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation – A Call To Action

Every so often, a book is published that causes a huge societal shift – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made abolition a widespread movement in pre-Civil War America; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring jumpstarted the contemporary environmental movement (for better or worse). I hope that Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation creates a mass movement against the tech and social media giants that have been targeting Gen Z and younger: people born after 1995.

As Haidt observes,

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and – as I will show – unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness – perpetually – to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence.
(p. 6)

A related threat to the mental health of children and adolescents is the trend of adults to overprotect them. Haidt posits that without unsupervised outdoor play, children fail to develop strategies of negotiation, compromise, and dealing with setbacks. This sets them up for weakness and fragility as adults. So, the main thesis of The Anxious Generation is that “… two trends – overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world – are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” (p. 7)

The Anxious Generation is in four parts. Part 1 is A Tidal Wave, and it is loaded with data that make the case for childhood and adolescent access to smartphones causing significant increases in depression and anxiety. For example, here’s a graph of the rate of hospital visits due to self-harm incidents:

From page 30 of The Anxious Generation

As you can see, there is a shocking increase in girls’ incidents beginning in 2010. This chart is one of many, taken from data all over the world, that illustrate how young adolescents’ mental health fell off a cliff beginning in 2010. Haidt maintains that the primary cause was the introduction of smartphones with front-facing cameras that allowed users to take selfies, along with apps like Instagram. Unfortunately, the trend is not leveling off, let alone declining. As a high school math teacher of almost 40 years experience, I can affirm that something has gone very wrong with teenagers over the past ten years. The amount of anxiety I see in my students is truly alarming. My school has a no-phones policy during school hours for which I am very thankful. I can’t imagine trying to compete with social media during class time.

Part 2 is The Backstory: The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood. Haidt says that children have a need for free play. In a play-based childhood, young humans develop social skills involving others like connecting, synchronizing, and taking turns. These skills can only be learned in face-to-face, synchronous activities. Social media, on the other hand, promotes asynchronous, unconnected experiences. Most interestingly, there seems to be a critical period for children aged 9 to 15 where the lessons learned are “imprinted” on their psyches. This is also the age at which most teens begin using smartphones. Instead of learning how to behave socially with others their own age or with trusted, older mentors, they are thrust into a virtual world that promotes skewed and fringe “adult” values and behaviors.

There are two modes of cognition – discover and defend. For productive learning to take place, children need to be in discover mode, which means they are eager to have new experiences and make new connections. If they are in defend mode, they worry about being “triggered” and desire “safe spaces”. Children who don’t experience small setbacks and failures early on won’t be able to withstand larger setbacks later in life. The best way for children to learn how to respond to setbacks is during free play – unsupervised activity that involves a manageable amount of physical risk.

Beginning in the 1980s, parents became much more fearful and limited their children’s opportunities to be outdoors unsupervised. This led to a lack of trust in other adults and a decline in “neighborhood” parenting. If you don’t know and trust your neighbors, you won’t involve yourself in policing their kids’ behavior and they won’t help parent yours.

In addition to a loss of adult role models and mentors, children began to be denied rites of passage, starting in the 1980s. Throughout human history, cultures have all practiced rites of passage that help adolescents transition from dependent child to responsible adult. Our secular society has eliminated many of these transition experiences. Instead, we have instituted experience blockers like safetyism and smartphones. It used to be that turning 16 was an extremely significant age of transition, because almost all teens got their drivers license at that time. In 1978, over 90% of U.S. high school seniors had a drivers license. Since then, that percentage has steadily declined; in 2018 less than 60% of seniors had a license.

Part 3 is The Great Rewiring: The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood. Adolescents who have had a phone-based childhood are liable to be harmed in four ways: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Since the average teen is on his or her phone for more than seven hours a day, there is a large proportion of Gen Z  that is dealing with the effects of these harms.

While both girls and boys are harmed by 24/7 access to the internet and social media, they are harmed in different ways and by different media. Boys spend their time on YouTube, Reddit, and multiplayer videogames. Girls primarily use Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok. The goal of these platforms is to maximize user attention time. They have very sophisticated algorithms that quickly detect what a young girl shows interest in. If she looks up posts on nutrition, it isn’t very long before she is exposed to influencers promoting dangerous lifestyles that lead to anorexia.

Girls are more susceptible to visual social comparison. The filters Instagram uses turn the average person into an impossibly beautiful woman that young girls compare themselves to. This leads to depression and dissatisfaction with one’s self. In a fascinating study, women were shown images of very thin women for only 20 milliseconds – not long enough to be consciously aware of them – and they still became more anxious about their own body! 

Social media enable girls to practice aggression through sabotaging reputations and relationships. Social media also exacerbate girls’ vulnerability to sociogenic illnesses – illnesses caused by social influence. That helps explain the explosion in young women claiming to be “transgender”.

The effects of a phone-based childhood have also been bad for boys. There has been a drastic drop in boys doing risky behavior, which sounds like a good thing, right? However, it’s become so widespread that we have a generation of young men who avoid taking any kind of risk, whether it’s riding a bike up and off a ramp, to asking a young woman to go out on a date. This has consequences for our society at large. Men are traditionally the risk-takers, and that sparks innovation and moves a culture forward (think Elon Musk and SpaceX). If our males would rather stay in their bedrooms playing videogames and watching porn – which is so commonplace in Japan they have a name for it, hikikimori – it doesn’t bode well for our future.

Haidt wraps up Part 3 with six recommendations to help restore some spirituality to our culture – which is interesting, given he admits he’s an atheist. They are: Share Sacredness – engage in communal ceremonies, whether they be worship services or sporting events; Embodiment – do them in person; Stillness, Silence, and Focus – train yourself to ignore distractions to mindfulness; Transcend the Self – focus on something (or Someone) higher than yourself; Be Slow to Anger, Quick to Forgive – resist the temptation to participate in cancel culture; and  Find Awe in Nature – get outside! Notice that all six of these practices are impossible to perform online with social media.

So what can we do? That is the focus of Part 4: Collective Action for Healthier Childhood. All of his recommendations are common sense, such as raising the age of internet “adulthood” from 13 to 16, along with reliable methods of age verification. Haidt has some very interesting ideas of how software and hardware companies could accomplish accurate age verification without sacrificing user privacy.

Haidt also recommends making schools phone-free zones. As he writes, “A school that is phone-free and play-full is investing in prevention. It is reducing overprotection in the real world, which helps kids to cultivate antifragility. At the same time, it is loosening the grip of the virtual world, thereby fostering better learning and relationships in the real world.” (p. 253) The independent school where I teach has always been phone-free from 8:00 am to 3:10 pm. Visitors often remark on how the students are engaged in conversation and active play, instead of glued to their screens!

On the issue of encouraging more childhood independence, local governments need to stop assuming unsupervised kids are being neglected by their parents. They also need to legislate more play time during the school day and design playgrounds and neighborhoods that encourage foot and bicycle traffic. School systems need to drop the emphasis on getting high school graduates into college and provide more vocational and technical training.

The final chapter provides age-specific strategies parents can employ to safeguard their children’s mental health. At each age level, he shares practices that will provide “More (and Better) Experience in the Real World” as well as “Less (and Better) Experience on Screens”. If a critical mass of parents begin implementing these, we will see a huge improvement in the mental health of our next generation, which means we all will benefit.

Haidt has put together a very helpful companion to the book at anxiousgeneration.com. There are all kinds of resources there, as well as more documentation of the research he cites. I hope the book and the community he’s building via this site spark a global backlash against the exploitation of vulnerable children by social media.