Kids. Therapy. Yikes.

The girl and I are settling into quite a lovely routine on our days home together. We do something fun in the morning (perfect weather today = Madison's lovely and free zoo, just add it to my why I love this city list...) and then after lunch A rocks out a long nap (loving the transition to one nap a day) while I enjoy some lovely introvert time. Today, this meant reading this article by Lori Gottlieb, which I saw several times posted on Facebook but finally sat down to read when my dear sis Bek sent it my way. She always knows the ones I'll really like.

Wow. It's a long read, but in my humble opinion, well worth your time. The article, aptly titled How to Land Your Kids in Therapy, touches on many of the themes that have interested me for years as a therapist, and now I'm invested in them in a totally new (more intense, I might add) way as a parent. Therapy is obviously a pretty common topic around our house, and P and I always joke that we have no doubt that our kid(s) will end up in therapy some day because of us, we just hope it's not for the exact same reasons we need therapy. Breaking at least some cycles, so to say.

I digress. Common. This long article has many themes, but overall, the author is making the point that while we commonly joke about how kids end up in therapy due to their families of orgin, the emerging tide is shifting. Today's young people (er, really my generation, as this author asserts) aren't struggling because their parents ignored their emotional needs - quite the contrary. They are struggling because they have been too coddled, protected and sheltered. They have grown up in a setting where their parents "saved" them from any stressful, hurtful or frustrating experiences, and because of their lack of exposure to this in their early lives, they are now struggling as adults. And, moreover, in the process of "building up" their children, the implicit message has been that they don't hold personal responsibility for anything bad that happens, rather they are helpless victims to the big, bad, mean world.

This article made me remember a supervision hour several years ago at work, with a psychologist I respect a great deal. This psychologist has seen a lot, and shared in this particular conversation that the biggest problem she sees with children today is that their parents have allowed them to be exempt from anything "hard." As soon as an activity, or school, or a friendship becomes even the littlest bit undesirable, difficult, frustrating, you name it - they allow their children to quit, in order to "fix" whatever problem they might be having. And, so, her conjecture, becomes the systemic issue of a generation of people who don't want to do anything that isn't fun or wonderful for every single moment. Problem.

So before I get too high on my own soap box, a few of my favorite bits from the article...

Early on, Gottlieb writes:

But after working with these patients over time, I came to believe that no florid denial or distortion was going on. They truly did seem to have caring and loving parents, parents who gave them the freedom to “find themselves” and the encouragement to do anything they wanted in life. Parents who had driven carpools, and helped with homework each night, and intervened when there was a bully at school or a birthday invitation not received, and had gotten them tutors when they struggled in math, and music lessons when they expressed an interest in guitar (but let them quit when they lost that interest), and talked through their feelings when they broke the rules, instead of punishing them (“logical consequences” always stood in for punishment). In short, these were parents who had always been “attuned,” as we therapists like to say, and had made sure to guide my patients through any and all trials and tribulations of childhood. As an overwhelmed parent myself, I’d sit in session and secretly wonder how these fabulous parents had done it all. Until, one day, another question occurred to me: Was it possible these parents had done too much? Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids? 

The article has only begun at this point, and I'm already feeling a wee bit guilty. Already thinking about all of the times that I've let A play me for far too long at bedtime all for the sake of "making sure she has healthy attachment." And I can't tell you the hours I've spent already thinking about how I can possibly attune to her all of the time, make sure she feels heard and felt and understood no matter what. So. Wow. Here's some more on raising children seeking the ideal of "happiness..."

“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.” It’s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively—only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults? Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Oh, jeesh, do I agree with this point. I believe this is also a bigger cultural issue - that in general we're afraid to be in, confront, even just acknowledge our "negative" emotions. We think that a well-lived life includes all doses of happiness and joy and bliss but no experiences of sadness, regret, loss or despair. But, in contrast, I would contend if we never experience the raw, gut-wrenching, painful moments of life then those moments of joy and bliss - we can't appreciate them for how beautiful they are. If you've gotten an email from me you've seen my most favorite quote at the bottom, from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, where he writes, Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that the sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? Beautiful. And thus, sadly, if we protect our children from any experience where they might possibly experience discomfort or pain or sadness, we're stripping them from the experience of knowing the richness that waits on the other side of those feelings. Of course, as much as we try, we cannot fully protect them from such hardships, life happens - but perhaps by allowing them to experience them on a small scale when they are young, we are setting them up to handle life's larger struggles later on.

Continuing (this might be the longest post I ever write). I love Gottlieb's follow-up bit about this same issue:

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.” 

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’” 

I love the analogy of the immune system. I also understand, more than ever, the inherent struggle to not see your child suffer. It is so brutal for me to watch my girl struggle, and I know the struggles she has right now and absolutely small potatoes compared to those she will know later in life. I empathize with the desire to protect your child from pain, and might be printing out this article to read it once in a while to remind myself of why it's important to let children forge that road on their own.

Later, Gottlieb touches more on the self-esteem movement. And don't get me wrong, self-esteem is way important, but also a tricky web...


I asked Wendy Mogel if this gentler approach really creates kids who are less self-involved, less “Me Generation.” No, she said. Just the opposite: parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment. “A principal at an elementary school told me that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in the name of our children’s self-esteem.” 

And so what a challenge it becomes - trying to instill in your child a strong sense of self, of self-worth, of great and unconditional love (enter, faith...). Of wanting your child to indeed feel special - but special because every single human being is unique and special, not because they are taught to believe that they are "more" special than other people. And, in the midst of this, that each person is special because of their individual strengths and gifts - conveying somehow that your child too will have their own strengths, and hand in hand, weaknesses.


I've only scratched the surface, my friends. The article is mighty full. Touching on parent's attempts to meet their own emotional needs through their children, to the whole "no competition, everyone is a winner" phenomenon, to what it means to seek and experience contentment, to parents who actually hinder their child's development in their attempts to protect them. Yowza.

And I share this all not because I believe I am a place to preach, nor because I agree with every single word written, but because I am humbled and nervous and always seeking along this crazy journey of parenting. Because just when I've convinced myself that we're doing the "right" thing, I read something or hear some story or get a different point of view that makes me think otherwise. Because I find myself turning back to what I learned in grad school (as this author empathizes) or working in the field to justify the way that I affirm or discipline or give A choices...and I'm not saying that now I think that's wrong, just saying that I am reminded to be aware. To keep reading. To keep listening to my gut. To keep trying to get some perspective. And to acknowledge that as hard as we try, we are broken humans foremost, parents second - and in doing what we adamantly feel is best, we might just fall short. But hopefully, with love as our greatest intention, our children will flourish in spite of our varied mistakes. Or, at very least, have the tools to find a very skilled therapist.

(Meta-theme: parenting is way hard.)