Bad Therapy

Bad Therapy argues that the elaborate apparatus American society has built over the past two decades to support children's psychological well-being — the routine therapy, the school counselors, the social-emotional learning curricula, the trauma-informed accommodations, the steady drip of expert advice telling parents to validate, soften, and never let their children encounter unmediated difficulty — has, against its own intentions, produced a generation of young people who are more anxious, more depressed, less independent, and less prepared for adult life than the generations raised more roughly before it; Shrier's claim is that the cure for this is not more of the same but a substantial pulling-back, a return of authority to the parents who know their children best, a restoration of the older parenting practice that combined warmth with high expectations, consistent consequences, and the deliberate provision of unsupervised independence in which the muscles of agency, resilience, and self-direction could actually develop — and her deeper claim, only partly stated, is that adults stopped trusting themselves with children at roughly the same moment children stopped doing well, and that the two events are not coincidences but cause and effect.

Abigail Shrier is an American journalist and author whose work focuses on the intersection of contemporary culture, parenting, education, and mental health. Born in 1978 and raised in Los Angeles, she earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University in philosophy, completed graduate study at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar where she received a B.Phil. in philosophy, and then took her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as a Coker Fellow. Before turning to full-time book writing she practiced commercial litigation and contributed widely as a freelance journalist, with work appearing in The Wall Street Journal, where she long served as a contributing opinion writer, City Journal, and various other outlets. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020 by Regnery Publishing, examined what she characterized as a sudden cluster of female adolescents identifying as transgender and the role of social and clinical influences in that trend. The book was both a bestseller and the subject of substantial controversy, including attempts at retail removal that prompted debates about viewpoint suppression. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, published in 2024 by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, debuted near the top of the New York Times bestseller list and renewed the public debate about youth mental health, parenting culture, and the role of therapeutic institutions in American childhood. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.