Bad Child Psychology in Schools – How to Make Kids Feel like a Big Burden to Resentful Parents

 

Why aren’t many kids seemingly growing up as maturely as they used to any more? Why are mental health problems and suicidal ideation as well as actually suicides increasing? Why are more and more children losing self confidence and feeling defective? 

In a new book by Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing up, the author blames the mental health establishment. So does the parenting guru I’ve been reading for years, John Rosemond. And psychologists are indeed a big part of the problem. But both miss an important aspect of the phenomenon.

 

The definition of “traumatized” in children has been expanded beyond all recognition by the profession. In the mental health field, consideration of the effects of adverse childhood experiences have gone back and forth from one extreme to the other: the serious ones at times are almost completely ignored. At other times child abuse was thought to be everywhere. And now trauma is seen as almost any occurrence that makes a kid in the least bit unhappy or stressed. 

I described what has been going on at the college level in my review of the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, with students' reactions to “microaggressions,” and political incorrectnesss being equated with PTSD caused by a terrifying combat experience. 

Nowadays, according to Shrier, kids are seen as being unable to put aside even hurt feelings in order to concentrate on the school work in front of them. Resilience is now seen as “accepting” these “traumas” rather than dealing with them in a potent manner. Personal agency has seemed to have “snuck out the back door.”

 

And 40% of the current, rising generation has received psych treatment versus 26% of gen-X’ers when they were younger. More and more phony psych diagnoses are put on kids, often at the suggestion of teachers. More and more children are afraid to be wrong in school laboratories or to test new ideas for fear of making a mistake. Bullies are being suspended less and less frequently for fear of damaging their self esteem. American children are more likely than others to exaggerate all kinds of risks.

 

For those mental health professionals who do recognize all this as a problem, the usual explanation for why it is happening is that when parents and teachers over-protect and over-pathologize their children, they are preventing them from learning social skills which, it is believed, cannot be “taught” in most cases but must be learned through trial and error. 

If a parent always steps in, or even when parents don’t let their children go out to play or walk to school because they believe that something bad will happen to them, the kids are said to never get the chance to learn those things. As the author also points out, sometimes feeling mildly to moderately anxious or moody can be a good thing since it can motivate kids to evaluate their situation and lead them to take action.

 

Now don’t get me wrong. There is much truth to these assertions. What’s missing, however, is the way this sort of treatment by parents and teachers is interpreted by the children themselves. The children start to see themselves as a big burden to their over-anxious, worrying parents. Not only that, but the parents seem angry about it. I believe that if a child feels like too big a burden to their parents, they may start to think their parents would be better off without them. This could increase their risk of suicide.

 

Why? Because, as I have been arguing for years, children are willing to sacrifice their own best interests in order to stabilize their parents. This is due to the evolutionary force called kin selection. It is not just that kids don’t experiment with new behavior in order to figure out how to, say, respond to a bully. Hell, there are TV shows, YouTube channels, and many other sources for suggestions that they could try out at school. But as long as they feel the need to let their parents take care of them, they are not motivated to become independent. "Enabling" parents lead to co-dependent children.

 

Schrier does allude to this aspect of the process involved here, but it is not clear to me that she truly appreciates the extent of the issue. She does say that kids often feel responsible for their parents, and may feel like a “constant burden to their stricken parents.” She also says that there is nothing scarier to them than parents “overmatched and afraid.” She has also noticed that people who make parenting look exhausting do not seem all that fond of the kids they raised. If an untrained observer like the author can see this, then guess what? So can the children. And they will be induced to make any necessary sacrifice.

The Concept of Resilience - Another Way to Marginalize the Effects of Family Dysfunction on Children?

Some people are just born hardier and tougher than others. Such individuals are better able to process, handle, and bounce back from stress and can handle more of it - on the average - than other people. They are said to be more resilient. No denying it. 

However, it is also true that at least some of any apparent resilience does not come from having been born with a better innate temperament, but results from having had at least one supportive and nurturing adult family member who buoyed up the person's coping skills as a child. Dysfunctional families may contain some of these folks in addition to other adult members who are more, shall we say, problematic. This helps to reduce the adverse consequences created by the latter.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE's, are clearly shown by a variety of research methodologies to be, overall, the most important risk factors for the development of personality dysfunction (as well as being major risk factors for a wide variety of other health problems). Somehow, however, in reading the personality disorders literature, you might think that defective brains were instead the biggest factor. 

In many previous posts I have discussed several different ways in which this latter idea is falsely argued - such as by looking at how a normal brain processes trauma physiologically and declaring, ex cathedra, that those processes represent some sort of abnormality. I have also discussed one of the major reasons this sleight-of-hand is employed: to avoid holding parents responsible for their problematic parenting and chaotic family interactions. 

It's just not popular to discuss the role of dysfunctional parenting in creating psychological problems in their offspring. The poor dears just cannot take it! Better to blame the victim.

Of course, it is also true that bashing parents and making them feel guiltier, more defensive or angrier than they already do is counterproductive, as doing so often causes them to double down on whatever dysfunctional interactions they had been routinely engaging in previously. Nonetheless, pretending that their behavior has nothing at all to do with their child's problems is just a big fat, ugly lie.

The blog Aces Too High is devoted to discussing the effects of childhood trauma. It usually puts the family environment in the proper perspective in discussing the relative effects of children's inherent, genetic capabilities, the problems their child's innate tendencies present to parents, and the effects on children of ongoing interpersonal trauma and dysfunction.

A recent posting in the ACES blog by Christine Cissy White contains a highly informative and wide-ranging discussion about how vague a concept resilience actually is, as well as about how difficult it is to measure. I recommend reading it. 

She also points out how the concept of resilience can be used as another device for the purpose of blaming the child victims of severe family dysfunction for their predicament and pretending that the parents' behavior is hardly important at all, if not completely irrelevant:

"Many trauma survivors, with experiences that are often minimized, marginalized or medicalized, are often frustrated by what seems like excessive funding for or fascination with resilience. It can seem as though resilience and protective factors can get overemphasized while the prevention and treatment of ACEs ends up sidelined – as though human suffering might be optional if it’s served up with enough resilience." 

Well said.