Abigail Shrier returns to talk about her latest book Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren't Growing Up . She and Bridget discuss what led her to write the book, her initial premise, how it changed along the way, why kids today seem to be in a lot of psychological pain, the potential harms of too much therapy, the overuse of the word trauma, how talking about and focusing on your pain can make it worse, and how kids are being taught to make their pain an organizing principle of their lives. They cover how our blanket culture of therapy can feed on parents' insecurities and how they really need to take back their authority, what kids today are really anxious about, how being a parent means you have to do things that are uncomfortable but that are good for your kids, why a certain amount of repression is healthy, how important independence and risk taking is for children's development, overmedication and how numbing a kid to the ups and downs of life has a lot of consequences, why you should research your therapist the way you would a surgeon, and what you can do as a parent to counteract these issues.
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Bridget Phetasy admires grit and authenticity. On Walk-Ins Welcome, she talks about the beautiful failures and frightening successes of her own life and the lives of her guests. She doesn’t conduct interviews—she has conversations. Conversations with real people about the real struggle and will remind you that we can laugh in pain and cry in joy but there’s no greater mistake than hiding from it all. By embracing it all, and celebrating it with the stories she’ll bring listeners, she believes that our lowest moments can be the building blocks for our eventual fulfillment.
Bridget, if you come around to read this: After your talk with Abigail, do you think the reason why GenX parents are so over-managing their kids because we GenXers never let go of our own trait of fixing problems? In other words, instead of giving our kids the same experience of freedom to take risks and solve our own problems that we had and are so proud of, we're now diving head first into solving their problems too because that's just what we do?
Are we like the king who's still occupying the throne, so his son the prince cannot ascend because the king is still in his prime and nowhere near done yet?
I don't have kids BTW. I say "our kids" meaning kids of our generation.
I'm enjoying much of Schrier is talking about with her recent interviews. She comes at ideas differently and considers solutions that don't necessarily seem obvious but end up becoming it in hindsight.
I am utterly baffled by how GenXers, who grew up being latchkey kids with so much freedom, who delight in that and are proud of their independence and problem-solving skills, became helicopter parents who raised the most coddled and weak generation. What happened? Why didn't GenXers value the very thing that made them strong and resilient in their kids?