Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

y son returned home from sleepaway camp this summer with a stomachache. When it didn’t quickly abate, I took him to a pediatric urgent care clinic, where a doctor ruled out appendicitis. “Probably just dehydration,” came the verdict. But before the doctor cleared us to go home, he asked us to wait for the nurse, who had a few questions.

In bustled a large man in black scrubs wielding a clipboard. “Would you mind giving us some privacy so that I can do our mental health screening?” he said. After a beat, I realized that the privacy the man wanted with my son was from me.

I asked to see his questionnaire, which turned out to be issued by the National Institute of Mental Health, a federal government agency. Here is the complete, unedited list of questions the nurse had planned to put to my twelve-year-old in private:

1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?

2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?

3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?

4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?

5. Are you having thoughts of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.[1]

When the nurse asked me to leave the room, he wasn’t going off script. He was following a literal one. The “Script for Nursing Staff” directs nurses to inform parents: “We ask these questions in private, so I am going to ask you to step out of the room for a few minutes. If we have any concerns about your child’s safety, we will let you know.”[2]

Driving my son home from the clinic, I was haunted by the following possibility: What if I had been just a little more trusting? Children often try to please adults by producing whatever answers the grown-ups seem to want. What if my son, alone in the room with that large man, had given him the “yes” the questions appeared to prompt? Would the staff have prevented me from taking my son home?

And a child who was entertaining dark thoughts? Was this really the best way to help him? Separate him from his parents and present him with a series of escalating questions about killing himself?

I hadn’t signed my son up for therapy. I hadn’t taken him for a neuropsychological evaluation. I had taken him to the pediatrician for a stomachache. There was no indication, no reason to even suspect, that my son had any mental illness. And the nurse didn’t wait for one. He knew he didn’t have to.

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. Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite: that psychologists were the last people you should consult on how to raise normal kids.

When we were little, my brother and I were spanked. Our feelings were seldom consulted when consequential decisions about our lives were made—where we would attend school, whether we would show up at synagogue for major holidays, what sort of clothes fit the place and occasion. If we didn’t particularly relish the food set out for dinner, no alternate menu was forthcoming. If we lacked some critical right of self-expression—some essential exploration of a repressed identity—it never occurred to either of us. It would be years before anyone in my generation would regard these perfectly average markers of an eighties childhood as vectors of emotional injury.

But as millions of women and men my age entered adulthood, we commenced therapy.[3] We explored our childhoods and learned to see our parents as emotionally stunted.[4] Emotionally stunted parents expected too much, listened too little, and failed to discover their kids’ hidden pain. Emotionally stunted parents inflicted emotional injury.

We never doubted that we wanted kids of our own. We vowed that our child-rearing would reflect a greater psychological awareness. We resolved to listen better, inquire more, monitor our kids’ moods, accommodate their opinions when making a family decision, and, whenever possible, anticipate our kids’ distress. We would cherish our relationship with our kids. Tear down the barrier of authority past generations had erected between parent and child and instead see our children as teammates, mentees, buddies.

More than anything, we wanted to raise “happy kids.” We looked to the wellness experts for help. We devoured their bestselling parenting books, which established the methods by which we would educate, correct, and even speak to our own children.

Guided by these experts, we adopted a therapeutic approach to parenting. We learned to offer our kids the reasons behind every rule and request. We never, ever spanked. We perfected the “time-out” and provided thorough explanation for any punishment (which we then rebranded as a “consequence” to remove any associated shame and make us feel less authoritarian). Successful parenting became a function with a single coefficient: our kids’ happiness at any given instant. An ideal childhood meant no pain, no discomfort, no fights, no failure—and absolutely no hint of “trauma.”

But the more closely we tracked our kids’ feelings, the more difficult it became for us to ride out their momentary displeasure. The more closely we examined our kids, the more glaring their deviations from an endless array of benchmarks—academic, speech, social and emotional. Each now felt like catastrophe.

We rushed our kids back to the mental health professionals who had guided our parenting, this time for testing, diagnosis, counseling, and medication. We needed our kids and everyone around them to know: our kids weren’t shy, they had “social anxiety disorder” or “social phobia.” They weren’t poorly behaved, they had “oppositional defiant disorder.” They weren’t disruptive students, they had “ADHD.” It wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t theirs. We would attack and finally eliminate the stigma surrounding these diagnoses. Rates at which our children received them soared.

In the course of writing my last book, Irreversible Damage, and for years after its publication, I spoke to hundreds of American parents. And during that time, I became acutely aware of just how much therapy kids were getting from actual therapists and their proxies in schools. How completely parents were relying on therapists and therapeutic methods to fix their kids. And how expert diagnoses often altered kids’ perceptions of themselves.

Schools, especially, jumped at the opportunity to adopt a therapeutic approach to education and announced themselves our “partners” in childrearing. School mental health staffs expanded: more psychologists, more counselors, more social workers. The new regime would diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward. It directed kids in routinized habits of monitoring and sharing their bad feelings. It trained teachers to understand “trauma” as the root of student misbehavior and academic underperformance.

These efforts didn’t aim to produce the highest-achieving young people. But millions of us bought in, believing they would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted kids. Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why?

How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own?[5] How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?[6]

The source of their problem is not reducible to Instagram or Snapchat. Bosses and teachers report—and young people agree—that members of the rising generation are utterly underprepared to accomplish basic tasks we expect all adults to dispatch: ask for a raise; show up for work during a period of national political strife; show up for work at all;[7] fulfill obligations they undertake without requiring extensive breaks to attend to their “mental health.”

It’s not unheard of for boys of sixteen or seventeen to put off getting a driver’s license on the grounds that driving is “scary.”[8] Or for college juniors to invite Mom along to their twenty-first birthday celebrations. They are leery of the risks and freedoms that are all but synonymous with growing up.

These kids are lonely. They settle into emotional pain for reasons that seem, even to their parents, a little mysterious. Parents seek answers from mental health experts, and when our kids inevitably receive a diagnosis, they grasp it with pride and relief: a whole life, reduced to a single point.

No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth, and mental health experts are no exception. By feeding normal kids with normal problems into an unending pipeline, the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them.

These mental health interventions on behalf of our kids have largely backfired. Recasting personality variation as a chiaroscuro of dysfunction, the mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered. The experts operate from the assumption that everyone requires therapy and that everyone is at least a little “broken.”

They speak of “resilience” but what they mean is “accepting your trauma.” They dream of “destigmatizing mental illness” and sprinkle diagnostic labels like so much pixie dust. They talk of “wellness” while presiding over the downward spiral of the most unwell generation in recent history.

With the charisma of cult leaders, therapeutic experts convinced millions of parents to see their children as challenged. They infused parenting with self-consciousness and fevered insecurity. They conscripted teachers into a therapeutic order of education, which meant treating every child as emotionally damaged. They pushed pediatricians to ask kids as young as eight—who had presented with nothing more than a stomachache—whether they felt their parents might be better off without them.[9] In the face of experts’ implacable self-assurance, schools were eager; pediatricians, willing; and parents, unresisting.

Maybe it’s time we offered a little resistance.