Highlighting Interview with Abigail Shrier, Author of “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up” – Prager University

Full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGXDZXpNHvI&t=334s

They’re treating all kids as disabled. They all think they have anxiety and PTSD. Gender affirming care is a great evil. They consider all kids traumatized, treating them as emotionally damaged.

Kids are now brainwashed into therapist lingo from having been taught that they are damaged beyond repair by mental health experts, that they have ‘permanent disorders.’ Kids no longer say they are worried, they say they have anxiety. Kids no longer say they are sad, they say they are depressed. Kids are being flooded with therapy. You can get over being shy and lazy, but when you talk about diagnosis, these become viewed as permanent issues that can’t be overcome.

Getting kids to focus on their emotions all the time is the way to get them dysregulated. Having them ruminate (focus continually) on the past is not good for them! Focusing on emotions will break people down, it’s focusing on problems, which isn’t healthy!

Kids report being fine, and are pushed to focus on finding hardship, poor me, weakness, focusing on how hard things are.

Black kids are being taught that they inherit trauma. This is not helping anything!

Parents are afraid of not sending kids to mental health experts. Experts claim to have solutions to children’s suffering.

Try to help children via changing their environment, and if you have to use therapy and medication, you better research it heavily. Telling a kid they have a brain problem can really change their self-perception of what they can accomplish, so be very cautious with this.

Resilience is the story of humans. Even those who go through very hard things can recover. Their ancestors did. Tell them their own history. When they hear they have inherited trauma, they can respond no, I have the toughest grandparents around.

No, feelings aren’t the most important things in the world. When parents try to act like therapists, or send their kids to therapists all the time, they hold feelings over kids all the time and this crushes them.

The words trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) are now being used for regular life things. Like saying someone they will have PTSD from being told their work isn’t good enough, or from their grandma dying.

The mental health industry is an industry, it progresses into the HR (human relations) industry, making the workforce weird (rigid, unnatural, impersonal, boring, intimidating, etc.).

Kids need authority & independence in the home. We must give them skills and trust them to use them, like walking home from school, going to the store alone, cooking dinner, using knives, etc. They need to contribute to the home community and world. Social contribution (not just being needy & useless) is a huge help for mental health.

The “social-emotional learning” (SEL) being pushed in schools is a Trojan horse. Teachers are not therapists.  The school isn’t the place for emotional learning. Schools are feeders into the mental health industry. Counselors get you out of requirements, they remove challenges (challenges which would help you grow). Kids need high expectations.

Suicide is being brought up all the time. Kids with stomach aches are being asked if they are suicidal. When constantly asked about suicide, kids can say they are suicidal when they are not. (It becomes something they think you want to hear. And who can blame them, when we ask them all the time.) parents.

Parents are asked to leave the room while mental health surveys are performed on children, where suicide is routinely brought up. When parents question these mental health surveys they are bullied, gas lighted, and told it is for the mental health of the child.

The first thing the government thinks to do with a kid with suicidal thoughts is remove them from their parents.

Mental health people push kids toward gender confusion. They prod them all the time about whether they want to be a different sex, whether they want to try it, if they are sure, etc.

 

Parents who frequently take their children to therapists are celebrated. They are celebrating victimhood.

We reward kids with praise for changing their gender, for seeing a therapist on a regular basis, etc. (Not to mention adults praise other adult parents who do this with their children as being so responsible, when really those parents are often abdicating their parental responsibility to others, which is irresponsible.)

Now for high schoolers it’s weird if you don’t have mental health diagnosis. We make normal problems into brain problems and think we need experts and drugs to solve these problems. Everyone is different. Just because your kid is quirky doesn’t mean he has to be diagnosed.
Hold off on diagnosis unless they absolutely have a problem, because diagnosis changes the way a kid sees himself in a negative limiting way. Around the country the mantra for schools is to increase mental health.

The world needs disagreeable personalities, people who are willing to say the truth even when it will hurt feelings.

Putting kids on medication can be an emotional snowsuit. They might not feel the lows, but they won’t feel the highs either.

Stop asking how you can make your kids happy. Ask how you can make your kids strong. Strong kids will be happy kids.

SEL (social emotional learning) often means pure Marxism in the classroom. It’s about getting kids to dwell on their pain. It takes the place of what school was meant for, namely reading writing and arithmetic.

Elizabeth Loftus, one of the Great psychologists of our time, speaks of memory poking. Memory poking is when you put kids in a group setting to talk about trauma, and they often try to make their trauma sound worse than the next guys trauma. You don’t want to come up with something boring so you exaggerate things. You’re also likely to talk yourself into the idea that you were traumatized. All this does is make them more sad.

A new term is ‘parentified.’ Mental health experts say that parents who have high expectations and give responsibilities for their kids have “parentified” them, meaning mentally abused them. The truth is that giving kids responsibility is not only normal, it is a key to good mental health.

Immigrants kids are often told they were ‘parentified,’ that the responsibilities their parents put on them were ‘emotional abuse.’ But kids of immigrants do great precisely because of that responsibility. When kids aren’t allowed to be kids for the rest of their lives it’s now called abuse. The reality is that social contribution is extremely good for mental health.

Latino moms don’t put a therapist in charge. They have a community and expectations. This is why Latino kids do better than others.

Give kids people who love them over a lifetime like extended family members. This connects them to a broader world. Teach them that they must contribute to it.

Give kids a sense of efficacy by giving them chores, giving them tasks they can do. Yes they can walk home. ‘I can trust you to look both ways go ahead.’ Etc.

When someone something mean to your kid and they complain to you, tell them they’ll be fine go play.

We have never had so many American kids choosing to live at home with their parents from 18 to 25. They aren’t growing up!

We’ve convinced everyone that every bit of heartache is trauma. No, a grandmother dying is not trauma. You’ll get over it and be fine.
We are applying the term trauma to a population that didn’t go through anything particularly scary.

Note- it’s popular in education (and of course most of education now is socialist Marxist) to suggest that special-ed learning styles are really needed not just for special-ed kids, but for all kids. (To say nothing of the questionable methods of special-ed itself.) The same thing is happening with the mental health world, we are treating everyone as though they are dramatically disabled. I see in these movements a dramatic lowering of expectation and trivializing of human greatness.

If you want advice on parenting, get it from someone who has successfully raised good children. Many parenting books are by people who never had kids. Put away the parenting books, use your parental instincts which you have out of love for your children.

Note- I have seen a trend that among therapists and social workers, they often have never had kids, or are people whose marriages have fallen apart and whose parenting has been catastrophic. We would do well to take caution who we take parenting advice from.

Parents talk to children now like they are therapists. They make the parent-child relationship and interactions weird. They say things like ‘big feelings’ and ‘I can see how that makes you feel’ etc. The parent-child relationship was never supposed to be a professional relationship! Parenting is not an assembly line or a test we have to ace. We need to place more emphasis on instincts and autonomy. In this way, parenting can be fun as in times of old.

Passing on your values to your kids is essential. We aren’t doing this. We aren’t following what we know works.

Teach kids to do something and don’t monitor them. We stress out kids by monitoring them. We must trust them to exercise their judgment. Our reluctance to give punishments as needed has led to us helicopter parenting to try and make sure no wrong choices are made.

Note- this is a brilliant point, not only is punishing important, without it serious detriment occurs. Full parental love must include tough love. It is tough love that enables them to be at peace, strong, and mature. It is what brings a feeling of consistency and safety, as this author points out.

Teachers and the establishment in general see parents as non-essential service providers. They think they get to make all the decisions about whether your parenting is good.

Many books are coming out about teaching SEL through the lens of equity.

Note- when you hear equity think Marxism. It’s about social redistribution, centralized planning, welfare state, essentially the government taking over because they see us peasants are incompetent to solve social problems.

The message of equity and SEL is that the system is set up to hurt you. (Victimhood.)
‘Transformative SEL’ is the explicitly Marxist SEL.

Many parents are aware that critical race Theory is Marxist. But parents are less aware that the whole mental health world is Marxist too. Now that people are catching on to the dangers of the term ‘equity,’ politically correct goons have moved on to take over the whole mental health industry.

Mental health regulation material is doing great harm. Wellness, emotional regulation, coping techniques, the kids who go through these programs and up sadder, more anxious, and more alienated from their parents. Several studies have demonstrated this.

Parental authority is needed. This doesn’t mean not being loving, it means parents make the rules, there are consequences, and it’s okay to say no.

Note- another terrific book on this topic is “The Collapse of Parenting” by Dr. Leonard Sax. Read my highlights of that book here: https://richardsonstudies.com/2023/10/30/collapse-of-parenting/
And a shorter version here: https://richardsonstudies.com/2023/12/17/the-collapse-of-parenting-book-highlights-abbreviated-version/

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