My submission to the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest. It was not a finalist. Comments are appreciated. (Especially ones pointing out how much better it is than the actual finalists.)
Man, your starting anecdote of the kid who dies at camp is devastating. It’s amazing how we are both so fragile and so resilient.
Also, do you think the pendulum is swinging back on the coddling? I feel like young people of a particular age think everything is trauma related, but maybe it’s peaked.
Yeah. It was a messed up situation to be sure. The family ended up suing the BSA, I was going to be called on to testify, and then they settled the day before the trial was supposed to start.
As far as the pendulum, I don't think it's peaked, but I think it's bifurcated. I think there are areas and people that are even more trauma focused, while there are areas and people who have definitely moved away from that, and are deeply focused on resilience.
Hey a few things about this book: I haven't read it, but I've listened to podcasts with her. AND i've read Raising Raffi that she's talked about and that you mention here.
First of all, Raising Raffi is written by a dad who is obscenely oversharing about his life, and so is the mom, writer Emily Gould who overshares everything including having a fundraiser for her divorce and then canceling her divorce, cheating on her husband and then publicly admitting it in a very famous essay, which her husband than shared on twitter..... long story short, they are not emotionally stable people.
And the kid Raffi has a hole in his heart. Not metaphorical, a real hole in the heart he had to have surgeries to fix.
So this kid already has started off at a disadvantage. He has more pain in his life than other comparable toddlers. So he isn't going to be the best behaved kid.
And then the book is full of their disciplinary tactics, which often involve locking the kid in a dark bathroom. I'm Indian and no one in my extended family/community would ever do that to a child because they worry it'll be a villain origin story. But that's considered totally normal in Raffi's house, unfortunately. A huge chunk of the book involves all the tactics the parents use to keep Raffi locked in his room and not come seeking his parents if he had a nightmare. Right from when he could walk. This child is learning to scale child gates just to be able to be with his parents. In most of the rest of the world, parents would never pathologize a child wanting to be with his mom. But this author and his wife literally get "experts" to tackle this "problem" their kid has.
There's just so much emotional neglect and abuse that Raffi goes through that it's totally understandable if he's so angry and wants to hit everything in sight. To blame gentle parenting on this despite all the admissions of abuse and neglect in the book is simply dishonest and insane.
Also while I'm not one for labeling parenting styles, most "gentle parents" I know are actively trying to not be like their parents, who, you guessed it, locked them in dark rooms or beat them with a switch. Not everyone has an intuitive grasp of how to parent differently when they have been parented with beatings, so you're going to get some people making mistakes. They need to be given grace and help. Also most of them I see on forums try to be emotionally present for their children while they enforce boundaries. So it's more like holding a kid and soothing them while they cry about not being able to have more candy rather than giving a kid more candy because you can't stand to see them cry. The author could have logged on to ANY forum and gotten this explanation, but she doesn't. She creates a straw man and then takes it down with "gentle parenting"
These two things by themselves seems like extreme dishonestly and I wouldn't trust anything else the book says. These are the easiest things to do right - they don't involve any studies or anything complicated. She's proven quite dishonest with these simple things and I wouldn't take anything complicated she says at her word.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, in particular your insight into Raising Raffi, which you're right, I haven't read. Some other people have accused me of steelmanning Shrier, which is probably far. The book did help me come of with the framework which featured so prominently in the piece, the zero-sumness if you will of bad therapy with resilience. And I'm not sure I entirely agree that one example of Shrier's lack of effort (or worse) should necessarily invalidate everything else in the book, though I agree it should count as a pretty point against it.
The narrative feels strong, but once you start going down the citations and looking at missing information, you find that the narrative doesn't add up.
Not a huge fan of the author, I think she plays it a bit shoddy with the facts but that isn't necessarily fatal to opening a discussion of a topic.
I would begin with this entertaining discussion/sort of debate that I stumbled upon in my YouTube feed for 'booktube' (basically people talking about books and reading).
The discussion begins with self-help books and the older book reviewer Steve Donoghue's assertion that they are all bad versus younger guy's assertion "sure there are bad self-help gurus but some of them are good?!" This then goes into a deep discussion about whether therapy is effective and trauma.
Two things about this discussion:
1. Trauma's proper place is addressed at the 35 minute mark. Actual real trauma is usually not treated by therapy...at least per Steve.
2. If you could mute Steve in this debate, I think this would be the only example I've seen where someone's eyebrow movement actually was as effective in winning a debate as the actual words they used.
So far there's a lot of alignment here. Therapy seems to have almost no objective ways to measure it's usefulness. Very suspect the one assertion made by therapy's defender here is that 'therapy seems effective regardless of what type is used'...this leads to a divergence in my mind with the position staked out in the book.
The deeper question to ask is why has the industry taken off so solidly? It can't really be because somehow salesmen conned nurses and doctors into asking leading questions to push everyone into therapy. There seems to be something many people are getting out of it and they seem to know the medicalization aspect is on shaky ground if strictly applied, but that also seems to be a feature more than a bug.
It appears part of the service is a formalized 'friend' who has a detachment from the patient and a legal confidentiality requirement. The 'medicalization' of therapy and the fact that you pay for it rather than just 'take it' as you might do with a role model, mentor, peer, etc. makes this work (see around the 25:30 mark)
So here is the departure point I have. I don't think this is new. I think all cultures find ways to alter mental coping, especially when there is 'surplus' time and resources. I think the US did a lot of this in the past, it just wasn't called therapy.
C: We have a long history with using drugs. Leave aside the usual prohibition narrative of 'refer madness' causing overreaction. The fact is it has been a search for mind altering chemicals that can be produced on an industrial scale for the last 150 years. All the drugs that were outlawed were first taken up by doctors, chemists, pharmacists and consumer products companies.
E: We have the psychotherapy field going hitting over a century old now. While Freud and Jung did work with confined mental patients, the entire field quickly caught on almost as fast as any recreational drug and it caught on not for kids or people with problems but the upper class.
What this is hinting to me is that as long as we live in a state of surplus, which we will continue to do if there isn't massive wars, catastrophe or something else reducing us to a survival only mode, we will need to consume services to manage and alter our mental approach to just living.
This might be our first warp drive! The warp drive in Star Trek lore is pretty interesting. In their take, every civilization stumbles upon it in a different way. As a result the technology is developed along a unique path and every civilization's starships look unique and different. No actual technology is quite like that. North Korea, US, Europe, Russia, China, SpaceX etc. All rockets look more or less the same. All cars look more or less the same. Different cultures find a technology pushes and pulls down the same path leaving little room for variation.
The problem of what to do with a mind when it only needs to run 15% of the day to keep you alive maybe that technology. France finds ponderous philosopher academic celebrities does the trick. Family/friends/religion works too. America wants a mass consumer product and therapy gets you there.
That means this is not likely to be a problem that can be solved.
An interesting Idea. I think you might be over-reaching, but also I think you might be too timid. We've had surpluses before, but I think I would argue that we've ended up in a situation where we've got a super surplus (similar to the idea of super stimuli) and in that sense I think we might be able to do something about the particular excess we're dealing with.
I would say we have had the surplus a long time. It was old when the Roman Empire was young. It was old when kids asked their parents if they could listen to the bard do Gilgamesh. The surplus is simply a large number of people who can spend a good portion of their lives with at least some leisure time each day and mostly not in fear for their lives.
While it maybe new that we might have gotten or are close to getting a majority of humans in that condition. There never really was any period in human recorded history when large numbers didn't have that, even if they were only 5% of the world. And from that time, the numbers who had it spent time and resources finding ways to burn off that time. Drinking and drugs have always been ways. So have various hobbies, arts, etc. Going to 'oracles', for example, wasn't just for Greek Kings about to engage in mythological adventure.
This means then I suspect super stimuli doesn't really exist. You could overload easier on Big Macs, whiskey, and porn perhaps a bit easier today...but people could and did in the past as well.
Note from the video the younger man defies your sketch. He doesn't seem like someone whose been conned by a slick therapist into believing he must get therapy. He seems very smart and knows he likes therapy and knows how to make it sound like a medical necessity to others. I also noted when he said research seems to show therapy does something but it doesn't matter which therapy, that kind of sounds like what some have said about religion.
This makes me suspect we are seeing a consumption product and like most consumption products, we're going to get it and if you mess around too much with that you may just create poor substitutions rather than extinguish the actual demand for it.
But to make it condensed, I would say there's a very real chance all the rise of therapy, esp. in the US, really is shifting our need to burn off our surplus. We have shifted into making a very formal product out of the 'objective friend who will hold confidences'.
This increased consumption has probably been a net positive as it's come at the expense of less positive consumption products (i.e. getting drunk with the buds every Friday night at the pub) but also some things that we could do well to try to add more back into our lives (i.e. actually going out with the buds every Friday night).
I don't think we are being fooled into this. It's a purposeful decision mostly coming from the consumers rather than the producers who know exactly how to ask for it in ways that make it hard for insurance companies and other gatekeepers to deny them.
But remember, the reason you can read something like The Odyssey and say "I can relate to many of these emotions even though I've never been a king and butchered dozens of men who were flirting with my wife when I got home" is because back then there were people with plenty of 'surplus' and they spent the time mulling over a lot of things we mull over today. Today we have interns at HBO serve me Game of Thrones and Sopranos, back then it might have been slaves and bards but between keeping ourselves alive and eventually running out of life we had a lot of time to kill.
Great review, really appreciated this alternative perspective. As someone who benefited greatly from therapy in my 30s (it genuinely saved my life, but it was with a trained and talented psychotherapist, so not exactly relevant to what this book is talking about), it is great to get a perspective on how such interventions may not be beneficial at all ages. You review has given changed my mind on some things.
However, moving to your core question about whether "If my son absolutely did not want to return to camp should I have forced him to?", I feel like you have entirely missed the point of your own argument.
It seems that much of the thrust of Bad Therapy is that "these days" regardless of your son's wishes, one would have said that of course it would have been irresponsible to let your child go back to camp, you would need to keep him home where he would be around the familiar, could talk to his parents whenever he needed and have a regular therapy session.
Now we have created a false dichotomy of "should we force him if he wanted to stay home"?
It seems obvious to me, that in one of these "potential traumatic" situations, we should trust the child. Children tend to know their own minds, and they will know if they have been unaffected and want to continue their adventure, or whether right now they need the love and support of their parents close at hand.
Directly after the death of someone close to them isn't the time to "tough them up a little" and teach them death is a way of life, and your parent won't always be there to help you get through it, so good luck at camp son, feel free to cry yourself to sleep alone every night! The idea that you are genuinely considering whether, had your son been pleading not to go back, sobbing at your feet, grabbing at your ankles pleading to stay with you (which is how I interpret a child expressing they "absolutely did not want to return to camp"), you think it would have been to your son's benefit to exile him from your love and care when he genuinely feels that he needs your love and support to understand an incredibly traumatic event that has just happened to him makes my blood run cold!
My best friend as a child died in a car crash when I was 13. I was largely unaffected, and I don't think it had any lasting effects on me. But it could have. My parents checked in on me regularly, asking how I felt, whether I missed Josh, but they respected my response when I said no. They didn't make me talk about my feelings, or make anything up, but neither did they say "big boys don't cry" when occasionally I would realise I would never get to play with my friend again.
There is definitely a space for traumatising kids a little. Yes, give them a bit of prodding to go down that slide that is a little scary for them, encourage them to join that sports team when they don't know anyone and are worried no one will like them, give them a movie that is perhaps a little bit too mature for them and will give them nightmares for a week. But you also need to know when they really just need their parents to hug them, and take care of them and make everything alright, and witnessing the death of someone close to them is definitely one of those times!
Glad you enjoyed to review, and particularly glad that I was able paint the picture a different perspective.
As to your main point, I didn't mean to paint quite as strong a picture as you did with the term absolutely. (Sobbing at my feet, etc.) And I think knowing our kids is probably the best tool we have for finding the dividing line between the traumatic and the non-traumatic. This is separate from listening to them. Kids are often very bad at predicting what effect something will have on them, which is not to say listening isn't important, but that it's separate and a step down from actually understanding them.
My final point would be, as loving parents we default to shielding them as much as possible, and I think that's the wrong way to go about it, that we should actually default to exposing them to more negative experiences to the point we're both of us are a little bit uncomfortable.
I am reminded of a skit done by a UK comedian - about health and safety for kids specifically - he starts by acknowledging that some kids need them as they are default reckless and cannot recognise danger, and all notices are calibrated to them. But he was a nervous child, and needed to be told the opposite - it will probably be alright, the world will not end.
This seems similar - some kids need to be told to "buck up" and grow thicker skin. Some need to be told it is not their fault and it will be ok. Some respond to being told no, some respond to having it explained why they cannot do something.
The trick is working out which is which.
Current culture went from "buck up" to "nothing is your fault" for everyone without any calibration for which of the above types they were. this was done as many people, often marginalised, were suffering under the "buck up" regime.
Some people did better in this new regime and some did worse. This is a book about those doing worse, which fails to acknowledge those doing better.
Now it may be that overall society is better or worse for this change, but unless we get better at tailoring solutions to individual types we will cause problems as well as solve them
That's a good way of putting it. And I worry that you've identified a meta-problem. We're great at optimizing, and optimizing at scale. So when we find something that appears to work we go all in on it. (A phenomenon I touched on here: https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/eschatologist-3-turning-the-knobs-of-society)
We decided that therapy was good and suddenly it's ubiquitous, and as you say it hardly matters whether the child in question is reckless or timid. When things were less scaled up, and less ubiquitous parents had greater latitude and greater responsibility to do this sort of thing. And they could probably tailor the warnings and the like with more finesse.
The problem is, that when you get a kid that really does need dedicated professional help and special techniques (EMDR, CBT) a parent is not as good. So you get a situation where for the average child things probably got worse, and for the children who were really bad off things got better.
Children in the yard are talking to a woman upstairs:
— Will Vasya come out and play?
— Vasya has died.
— Could you throw us the ball then?
To me, this illustrates the fact that children are more resilient than we think maybe because different things end up traumatic to them compared to adults? Death of a child seems a hundred times more traumatic to the parents the to this child's peers. Divorce too — parents will tiptoe around that with the kids while they might not care that much.
The picture of someone force feeding a child is deeply disturbing, and the description of this well-trained child is even more so. Sounds like a perfect traumatic experience to me! (Some of my friends went through this as little kids, and now it's hard to quantify the trauma or to know whether it affected them in any way)
Yeah, it's difficult to know when to intervene and when it's best to just let the child handle it. In another conversation I had on the subject I think the standard we kind of unconciously adopted with my son was to wait for him to come to us. Certainly we were attentive to signs of distress, but we didn't bring it up. I wonder with your friends, if there's any correlation between how much parents and friends treated the situation as traumatic and how traumatic they view it now. (Though such a thing might be tough to disentangle even on the level of anecdote)
I think my main area of disagreement is that I think you are sanewashing the book. Shrier says a lot of crazy stuff! Your review seems more like a steelman of her ideas than actually engaging with them.
I just had breakfast with David (also of the Mind Killer) on Monday! Small world. I'll definitely check out your review. I do think Shrier has the zeal of the ideologue, and in part that's why I included links to some critical reviews near the end. But I also feel that the pendulum has swung pretty far in one direction and sometimes the zeal of the ideologue is what's necessary to get it pushed back in the other direction. Also I've seen lots of kids suffering from what she describes. So while I think there is some crazy stuff in there, the ideas deserved something of a steelmanning, but I totally take your point.
When I read the bit about the clip-on ties, I thought about a paragraph in another ACX book review that also didn't make it - which turns out to be a direct quote from the book:
"As we walked in single file, with red and green tracer fire arcing across the black sky
over the city, I realized that I had placed my life in the hands of the young corporal
leading the patrol, a twenty-two-year-old Marine. In my office back in Washington, we
wouldn’t let a twenty-two-year-old run the copying machine without adult supervision.
Here, after just two days on the ground in Africa, the corporal was leading his squad into
unknown territory, with a confidence that was contagious."
I think Shrier would approve of raising boys a bit more like the U.S. Marines? (Baron Baden-Powell might have agreed too.)
My own opinion is that Bad Therapy is in the category of "really dangerous mistakes" - which means they're built around a kernel of truth. Whenever you have a kid who's perfectly capable of doing more, but won't until you kick them up the backside, go ahead (metaphorically of course, although Shrier might not object to a physical kick). But you need to make double damn sure first that the kid's really capable of what you ask, because inside the ring of "potentially traumatic, but if it doesn't kill you it'll make you stronger" there is the ring of "actually traumatic and might actually kill you". Where that is varies for everyone, but for example it might be a stupid idea to give a haemophiliac kid a scout knife and think, as one did in my youth, you learn to respect the knife as a tool after you've cut yourself the first few times.
Also, I really liked your review! I read it the first time in the review contest.
Thanks for the kind words! I like your category of "really dangerous mistakes" the mistakes that are built around a kernal of truth. Because we seem to have. a lot of those these days ant they end up being particularly pernicious.
Haidt ended up talking about this in his newsletter today, that it's not just that smartphones are destroying kids they're destroying adults, because the adult never has to fully trust the kid, they can monitor them 24/7. He gives an example of someone embedding a GPS tracker in their daughter's pig tail!
I suspect quite a bit. Certainly most of Shrier's data comes from the US, and I haven't looked for data outside the US, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some major differences, even when you're looking at some place like Western Europe.
Children are metaphorically immersed in their trauma, until it comes to define them.
---------
This is no joke. There are actually trauma informed day camps for 6 year olds who are survivors of trauma. Met a parent in a special needs group who was sending her child there for the summer.
There's an assumption underpinning both the book (per your review) and the review itself that I find problematic — that parents actually raise their kids, or that parents are the arbiters of this trauma/resilience continuum. And no — I will not be echoing the rationalist zeitgeist by bring up nature versus nurture. I think the genetic determinists with their beloved twin evidence are even more misguided. Instead, I will paraphrase Neufeld and Maté (of Hold On to Your Kids) and suggest that parents don't really raise their kids.
Culture raises kids. Of course parents are a part of the culture equation, but an increasingly small part.
Most kids are wards of the state for 6-10 hours per weekday. Overlapping with much of the school day, but extending well into after-school hours, they are under heavy peer influence. Besides that, they feed heavily on media (with social media tipping that scale by an order of magnitude). As such, parents are a distant 4th place — even the helicopter ones.
So, while the problems raised may be legitimate, and the psychological analysis may have merit, the snake oil here is parental agency. And that's the case for 95-99% of Americans.
If we roll the clock back 100 years, will we find more parental agency? Yes. But we'll also find a completely different culture in terms of school/peers/media — so good luck figuring out "what changed". It all changed.
I like to use Dazed & Confused as exhibit A of this change being long in the making. You can already see the transition from resilience (not necessarily enviable resilience, btw) to trauma in early 70s Texas depicted in that movie.
Christina came from bad things and was fortunate enough to land in a foster home with a truly resilient head of household. It didn't matter — culture did a number on her and she still can't see how lucky she had it.
For the most part, nobody wants to hear that parents don't matter. But at least with the genetic determinist argument, parents are given a digestible excuse for why their kids might suck. The tough part about my alternative "parents don't matter" take is that they actually do have the ability to do something — it's just (nearly) impossibly hard, a la Viggo as Captain Fantastic.
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.
Man, your starting anecdote of the kid who dies at camp is devastating. It’s amazing how we are both so fragile and so resilient.
Also, do you think the pendulum is swinging back on the coddling? I feel like young people of a particular age think everything is trauma related, but maybe it’s peaked.
Yeah. It was a messed up situation to be sure. The family ended up suing the BSA, I was going to be called on to testify, and then they settled the day before the trial was supposed to start.
As far as the pendulum, I don't think it's peaked, but I think it's bifurcated. I think there are areas and people that are even more trauma focused, while there are areas and people who have definitely moved away from that, and are deeply focused on resilience.
Hey a few things about this book: I haven't read it, but I've listened to podcasts with her. AND i've read Raising Raffi that she's talked about and that you mention here.
First of all, Raising Raffi is written by a dad who is obscenely oversharing about his life, and so is the mom, writer Emily Gould who overshares everything including having a fundraiser for her divorce and then canceling her divorce, cheating on her husband and then publicly admitting it in a very famous essay, which her husband than shared on twitter..... long story short, they are not emotionally stable people.
And the kid Raffi has a hole in his heart. Not metaphorical, a real hole in the heart he had to have surgeries to fix.
So this kid already has started off at a disadvantage. He has more pain in his life than other comparable toddlers. So he isn't going to be the best behaved kid.
And then the book is full of their disciplinary tactics, which often involve locking the kid in a dark bathroom. I'm Indian and no one in my extended family/community would ever do that to a child because they worry it'll be a villain origin story. But that's considered totally normal in Raffi's house, unfortunately. A huge chunk of the book involves all the tactics the parents use to keep Raffi locked in his room and not come seeking his parents if he had a nightmare. Right from when he could walk. This child is learning to scale child gates just to be able to be with his parents. In most of the rest of the world, parents would never pathologize a child wanting to be with his mom. But this author and his wife literally get "experts" to tackle this "problem" their kid has.
There's just so much emotional neglect and abuse that Raffi goes through that it's totally understandable if he's so angry and wants to hit everything in sight. To blame gentle parenting on this despite all the admissions of abuse and neglect in the book is simply dishonest and insane.
Also while I'm not one for labeling parenting styles, most "gentle parents" I know are actively trying to not be like their parents, who, you guessed it, locked them in dark rooms or beat them with a switch. Not everyone has an intuitive grasp of how to parent differently when they have been parented with beatings, so you're going to get some people making mistakes. They need to be given grace and help. Also most of them I see on forums try to be emotionally present for their children while they enforce boundaries. So it's more like holding a kid and soothing them while they cry about not being able to have more candy rather than giving a kid more candy because you can't stand to see them cry. The author could have logged on to ANY forum and gotten this explanation, but she doesn't. She creates a straw man and then takes it down with "gentle parenting"
These two things by themselves seems like extreme dishonestly and I wouldn't trust anything else the book says. These are the easiest things to do right - they don't involve any studies or anything complicated. She's proven quite dishonest with these simple things and I wouldn't take anything complicated she says at her word.
Thanks for your thoughtful response, in particular your insight into Raising Raffi, which you're right, I haven't read. Some other people have accused me of steelmanning Shrier, which is probably far. The book did help me come of with the framework which featured so prominently in the piece, the zero-sumness if you will of bad therapy with resilience. And I'm not sure I entirely agree that one example of Shrier's lack of effort (or worse) should necessarily invalidate everything else in the book, though I agree it should count as a pretty point against it.
This is a good very specific takedown of the book https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/bad-journalism
The narrative feels strong, but once you start going down the citations and looking at missing information, you find that the narrative doesn't add up.
Not a huge fan of the author, I think she plays it a bit shoddy with the facts but that isn't necessarily fatal to opening a discussion of a topic.
I would begin with this entertaining discussion/sort of debate that I stumbled upon in my YouTube feed for 'booktube' (basically people talking about books and reading).
https://youtu.be/FeoDcZoZSgE?si=I-YjOoAtNYsNsF5X
The discussion begins with self-help books and the older book reviewer Steve Donoghue's assertion that they are all bad versus younger guy's assertion "sure there are bad self-help gurus but some of them are good?!" This then goes into a deep discussion about whether therapy is effective and trauma.
Two things about this discussion:
1. Trauma's proper place is addressed at the 35 minute mark. Actual real trauma is usually not treated by therapy...at least per Steve.
2. If you could mute Steve in this debate, I think this would be the only example I've seen where someone's eyebrow movement actually was as effective in winning a debate as the actual words they used.
So far there's a lot of alignment here. Therapy seems to have almost no objective ways to measure it's usefulness. Very suspect the one assertion made by therapy's defender here is that 'therapy seems effective regardless of what type is used'...this leads to a divergence in my mind with the position staked out in the book.
The deeper question to ask is why has the industry taken off so solidly? It can't really be because somehow salesmen conned nurses and doctors into asking leading questions to push everyone into therapy. There seems to be something many people are getting out of it and they seem to know the medicalization aspect is on shaky ground if strictly applied, but that also seems to be a feature more than a bug.
It appears part of the service is a formalized 'friend' who has a detachment from the patient and a legal confidentiality requirement. The 'medicalization' of therapy and the fact that you pay for it rather than just 'take it' as you might do with a role model, mentor, peer, etc. makes this work (see around the 25:30 mark)
So here is the departure point I have. I don't think this is new. I think all cultures find ways to alter mental coping, especially when there is 'surplus' time and resources. I think the US did a lot of this in the past, it just wasn't called therapy.
A: US cigarette consumption per capita rose from 1,000 or so at the turn of the last century to nearly 4000 at its peak in 1960. (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Adult-age18-years-per-capita-cigarette-consumption-and-major-smoking-and-health-events_fig1_11080330). That is basically half a pack a day for every American at the end of the 'respectable family friendly 50's'.
B: Throughout our history we've consumed a lot of alcohol (https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxbusiness.com/foxbusiness.com/content/uploads/2020/01/720/405/prohibition-2-AP.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
C: We have a long history with using drugs. Leave aside the usual prohibition narrative of 'refer madness' causing overreaction. The fact is it has been a search for mind altering chemicals that can be produced on an industrial scale for the last 150 years. All the drugs that were outlawed were first taken up by doctors, chemists, pharmacists and consumer products companies.
D: We used to drink 46 gallons of coffee per person per year, we still drink a solid 20+. Leave aside whether soda is just a different caffeine delivery mechanism. (https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consumption-over-the-last-century/)
E: We have the psychotherapy field going hitting over a century old now. While Freud and Jung did work with confined mental patients, the entire field quickly caught on almost as fast as any recreational drug and it caught on not for kids or people with problems but the upper class.
What this is hinting to me is that as long as we live in a state of surplus, which we will continue to do if there isn't massive wars, catastrophe or something else reducing us to a survival only mode, we will need to consume services to manage and alter our mental approach to just living.
This might be our first warp drive! The warp drive in Star Trek lore is pretty interesting. In their take, every civilization stumbles upon it in a different way. As a result the technology is developed along a unique path and every civilization's starships look unique and different. No actual technology is quite like that. North Korea, US, Europe, Russia, China, SpaceX etc. All rockets look more or less the same. All cars look more or less the same. Different cultures find a technology pushes and pulls down the same path leaving little room for variation.
The problem of what to do with a mind when it only needs to run 15% of the day to keep you alive maybe that technology. France finds ponderous philosopher academic celebrities does the trick. Family/friends/religion works too. America wants a mass consumer product and therapy gets you there.
That means this is not likely to be a problem that can be solved.
An interesting Idea. I think you might be over-reaching, but also I think you might be too timid. We've had surpluses before, but I think I would argue that we've ended up in a situation where we've got a super surplus (similar to the idea of super stimuli) and in that sense I think we might be able to do something about the particular excess we're dealing with.
I would say we have had the surplus a long time. It was old when the Roman Empire was young. It was old when kids asked their parents if they could listen to the bard do Gilgamesh. The surplus is simply a large number of people who can spend a good portion of their lives with at least some leisure time each day and mostly not in fear for their lives.
While it maybe new that we might have gotten or are close to getting a majority of humans in that condition. There never really was any period in human recorded history when large numbers didn't have that, even if they were only 5% of the world. And from that time, the numbers who had it spent time and resources finding ways to burn off that time. Drinking and drugs have always been ways. So have various hobbies, arts, etc. Going to 'oracles', for example, wasn't just for Greek Kings about to engage in mythological adventure.
This means then I suspect super stimuli doesn't really exist. You could overload easier on Big Macs, whiskey, and porn perhaps a bit easier today...but people could and did in the past as well.
Note from the video the younger man defies your sketch. He doesn't seem like someone whose been conned by a slick therapist into believing he must get therapy. He seems very smart and knows he likes therapy and knows how to make it sound like a medical necessity to others. I also noted when he said research seems to show therapy does something but it doesn't matter which therapy, that kind of sounds like what some have said about religion.
This makes me suspect we are seeing a consumption product and like most consumption products, we're going to get it and if you mess around too much with that you may just create poor substitutions rather than extinguish the actual demand for it.
This may be the most deluded thing you've ever contributed as a comment to something I've posted.
Remember, dogs never need therapists :)
But to make it condensed, I would say there's a very real chance all the rise of therapy, esp. in the US, really is shifting our need to burn off our surplus. We have shifted into making a very formal product out of the 'objective friend who will hold confidences'.
This increased consumption has probably been a net positive as it's come at the expense of less positive consumption products (i.e. getting drunk with the buds every Friday night at the pub) but also some things that we could do well to try to add more back into our lives (i.e. actually going out with the buds every Friday night).
I don't think we are being fooled into this. It's a purposeful decision mostly coming from the consumers rather than the producers who know exactly how to ask for it in ways that make it hard for insurance companies and other gatekeepers to deny them.
But remember, the reason you can read something like The Odyssey and say "I can relate to many of these emotions even though I've never been a king and butchered dozens of men who were flirting with my wife when I got home" is because back then there were people with plenty of 'surplus' and they spent the time mulling over a lot of things we mull over today. Today we have interns at HBO serve me Game of Thrones and Sopranos, back then it might have been slaves and bards but between keeping ourselves alive and eventually running out of life we had a lot of time to kill.
Great review, really appreciated this alternative perspective. As someone who benefited greatly from therapy in my 30s (it genuinely saved my life, but it was with a trained and talented psychotherapist, so not exactly relevant to what this book is talking about), it is great to get a perspective on how such interventions may not be beneficial at all ages. You review has given changed my mind on some things.
However, moving to your core question about whether "If my son absolutely did not want to return to camp should I have forced him to?", I feel like you have entirely missed the point of your own argument.
It seems that much of the thrust of Bad Therapy is that "these days" regardless of your son's wishes, one would have said that of course it would have been irresponsible to let your child go back to camp, you would need to keep him home where he would be around the familiar, could talk to his parents whenever he needed and have a regular therapy session.
Now we have created a false dichotomy of "should we force him if he wanted to stay home"?
It seems obvious to me, that in one of these "potential traumatic" situations, we should trust the child. Children tend to know their own minds, and they will know if they have been unaffected and want to continue their adventure, or whether right now they need the love and support of their parents close at hand.
Directly after the death of someone close to them isn't the time to "tough them up a little" and teach them death is a way of life, and your parent won't always be there to help you get through it, so good luck at camp son, feel free to cry yourself to sleep alone every night! The idea that you are genuinely considering whether, had your son been pleading not to go back, sobbing at your feet, grabbing at your ankles pleading to stay with you (which is how I interpret a child expressing they "absolutely did not want to return to camp"), you think it would have been to your son's benefit to exile him from your love and care when he genuinely feels that he needs your love and support to understand an incredibly traumatic event that has just happened to him makes my blood run cold!
My best friend as a child died in a car crash when I was 13. I was largely unaffected, and I don't think it had any lasting effects on me. But it could have. My parents checked in on me regularly, asking how I felt, whether I missed Josh, but they respected my response when I said no. They didn't make me talk about my feelings, or make anything up, but neither did they say "big boys don't cry" when occasionally I would realise I would never get to play with my friend again.
There is definitely a space for traumatising kids a little. Yes, give them a bit of prodding to go down that slide that is a little scary for them, encourage them to join that sports team when they don't know anyone and are worried no one will like them, give them a movie that is perhaps a little bit too mature for them and will give them nightmares for a week. But you also need to know when they really just need their parents to hug them, and take care of them and make everything alright, and witnessing the death of someone close to them is definitely one of those times!
Glad you enjoyed to review, and particularly glad that I was able paint the picture a different perspective.
As to your main point, I didn't mean to paint quite as strong a picture as you did with the term absolutely. (Sobbing at my feet, etc.) And I think knowing our kids is probably the best tool we have for finding the dividing line between the traumatic and the non-traumatic. This is separate from listening to them. Kids are often very bad at predicting what effect something will have on them, which is not to say listening isn't important, but that it's separate and a step down from actually understanding them.
My final point would be, as loving parents we default to shielding them as much as possible, and I think that's the wrong way to go about it, that we should actually default to exposing them to more negative experiences to the point we're both of us are a little bit uncomfortable.
They're tougher than we think.
Yep, agreed entirely.
I am reminded of a skit done by a UK comedian - about health and safety for kids specifically - he starts by acknowledging that some kids need them as they are default reckless and cannot recognise danger, and all notices are calibrated to them. But he was a nervous child, and needed to be told the opposite - it will probably be alright, the world will not end.
This seems similar - some kids need to be told to "buck up" and grow thicker skin. Some need to be told it is not their fault and it will be ok. Some respond to being told no, some respond to having it explained why they cannot do something.
The trick is working out which is which.
Current culture went from "buck up" to "nothing is your fault" for everyone without any calibration for which of the above types they were. this was done as many people, often marginalised, were suffering under the "buck up" regime.
Some people did better in this new regime and some did worse. This is a book about those doing worse, which fails to acknowledge those doing better.
Now it may be that overall society is better or worse for this change, but unless we get better at tailoring solutions to individual types we will cause problems as well as solve them
That's a good way of putting it. And I worry that you've identified a meta-problem. We're great at optimizing, and optimizing at scale. So when we find something that appears to work we go all in on it. (A phenomenon I touched on here: https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/eschatologist-3-turning-the-knobs-of-society)
We decided that therapy was good and suddenly it's ubiquitous, and as you say it hardly matters whether the child in question is reckless or timid. When things were less scaled up, and less ubiquitous parents had greater latitude and greater responsibility to do this sort of thing. And they could probably tailor the warnings and the like with more finesse.
The problem is, that when you get a kid that really does need dedicated professional help and special techniques (EMDR, CBT) a parent is not as good. So you get a situation where for the average child things probably got worse, and for the children who were really bad off things got better.
The UK comedian in question is David Mitchell, being characteristically brilliant.
There is a (distasteful, sorry) russian joke:
Children in the yard are talking to a woman upstairs:
— Will Vasya come out and play?
— Vasya has died.
— Could you throw us the ball then?
To me, this illustrates the fact that children are more resilient than we think maybe because different things end up traumatic to them compared to adults? Death of a child seems a hundred times more traumatic to the parents the to this child's peers. Divorce too — parents will tiptoe around that with the kids while they might not care that much.
The picture of someone force feeding a child is deeply disturbing, and the description of this well-trained child is even more so. Sounds like a perfect traumatic experience to me! (Some of my friends went through this as little kids, and now it's hard to quantify the trauma or to know whether it affected them in any way)
Yeah, it's difficult to know when to intervene and when it's best to just let the child handle it. In another conversation I had on the subject I think the standard we kind of unconciously adopted with my son was to wait for him to come to us. Certainly we were attentive to signs of distress, but we didn't bring it up. I wonder with your friends, if there's any correlation between how much parents and friends treated the situation as traumatic and how traumatic they view it now. (Though such a thing might be tough to disentangle even on the level of anecdote)
Nice review! I had somewhat of a different take https://livingwithinreason.com/p/book-review-bad-therapy
I think my main area of disagreement is that I think you are sanewashing the book. Shrier says a lot of crazy stuff! Your review seems more like a steelman of her ideas than actually engaging with them.
I just had breakfast with David (also of the Mind Killer) on Monday! Small world. I'll definitely check out your review. I do think Shrier has the zeal of the ideologue, and in part that's why I included links to some critical reviews near the end. But I also feel that the pendulum has swung pretty far in one direction and sometimes the zeal of the ideologue is what's necessary to get it pushed back in the other direction. Also I've seen lots of kids suffering from what she describes. So while I think there is some crazy stuff in there, the ideas deserved something of a steelmanning, but I totally take your point.
When I read the bit about the clip-on ties, I thought about a paragraph in another ACX book review that also didn't make it - which turns out to be a direct quote from the book:
"As we walked in single file, with red and green tracer fire arcing across the black sky
over the city, I realized that I had placed my life in the hands of the young corporal
leading the patrol, a twenty-two-year-old Marine. In my office back in Washington, we
wouldn’t let a twenty-two-year-old run the copying machine without adult supervision.
Here, after just two days on the ground in Africa, the corporal was leading his squad into
unknown territory, with a confidence that was contagious."
I think Shrier would approve of raising boys a bit more like the U.S. Marines? (Baron Baden-Powell might have agreed too.)
My own opinion is that Bad Therapy is in the category of "really dangerous mistakes" - which means they're built around a kernel of truth. Whenever you have a kid who's perfectly capable of doing more, but won't until you kick them up the backside, go ahead (metaphorically of course, although Shrier might not object to a physical kick). But you need to make double damn sure first that the kid's really capable of what you ask, because inside the ring of "potentially traumatic, but if it doesn't kill you it'll make you stronger" there is the ring of "actually traumatic and might actually kill you". Where that is varies for everyone, but for example it might be a stupid idea to give a haemophiliac kid a scout knife and think, as one did in my youth, you learn to respect the knife as a tool after you've cut yourself the first few times.
Also, I really liked your review! I read it the first time in the review contest.
Thanks for the kind words! I like your category of "really dangerous mistakes" the mistakes that are built around a kernal of truth. Because we seem to have. a lot of those these days ant they end up being particularly pernicious.
Haidt ended up talking about this in his newsletter today, that it's not just that smartphones are destroying kids they're destroying adults, because the adult never has to fully trust the kid, they can monitor them 24/7. He gives an example of someone embedding a GPS tracker in their daughter's pig tail!
How much of this is unique to the US?
I suspect quite a bit. Certainly most of Shrier's data comes from the US, and I haven't looked for data outside the US, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some major differences, even when you're looking at some place like Western Europe.
Children are metaphorically immersed in their trauma, until it comes to define them.
---------
This is no joke. There are actually trauma informed day camps for 6 year olds who are survivors of trauma. Met a parent in a special needs group who was sending her child there for the summer.
Banger of a review. Loved it in the ACX context
There's an assumption underpinning both the book (per your review) and the review itself that I find problematic — that parents actually raise their kids, or that parents are the arbiters of this trauma/resilience continuum. And no — I will not be echoing the rationalist zeitgeist by bring up nature versus nurture. I think the genetic determinists with their beloved twin evidence are even more misguided. Instead, I will paraphrase Neufeld and Maté (of Hold On to Your Kids) and suggest that parents don't really raise their kids.
Culture raises kids. Of course parents are a part of the culture equation, but an increasingly small part.
Most kids are wards of the state for 6-10 hours per weekday. Overlapping with much of the school day, but extending well into after-school hours, they are under heavy peer influence. Besides that, they feed heavily on media (with social media tipping that scale by an order of magnitude). As such, parents are a distant 4th place — even the helicopter ones.
So, while the problems raised may be legitimate, and the psychological analysis may have merit, the snake oil here is parental agency. And that's the case for 95-99% of Americans.
If we roll the clock back 100 years, will we find more parental agency? Yes. But we'll also find a completely different culture in terms of school/peers/media — so good luck figuring out "what changed". It all changed.
I like to use Dazed & Confused as exhibit A of this change being long in the making. You can already see the transition from resilience (not necessarily enviable resilience, btw) to trauma in early 70s Texas depicted in that movie.
Another example I like to use is an episode of the Heavyweight podcast: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/j4hlkd/11-christina
Christina came from bad things and was fortunate enough to land in a foster home with a truly resilient head of household. It didn't matter — culture did a number on her and she still can't see how lucky she had it.
For the most part, nobody wants to hear that parents don't matter. But at least with the genetic determinist argument, parents are given a digestible excuse for why their kids might suck. The tough part about my alternative "parents don't matter" take is that they actually do have the ability to do something — it's just (nearly) impossibly hard, a la Viggo as Captain Fantastic.
I have talked about the dominance of culture as opposed to parents before:
https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/the-ineffability-of-conservatism
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.
Exceptional, per usual.