books Archives - Psychotherapy Notes

A therapist fact check of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up

April 12, 2024April 11, 2024 by Ben Caldwell

Front cover of Bad Therapy: Why the kids aren't growing up by Abigail Shrier As a licensed therapist, I am not the intended audience for Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. It’s written for those who are skeptical of mental health care and even mental health terminology directed at kids. It casts therapists and teachers as condescending elites who generally view parents as obstacles to children’s thriving.

I’ll credit author Abigail Shrier for this: I found myself agreeing more than I expected to. She identifies some potentially problematic trends in mental health care, criticizes some ways the language of mental health (and trauma in particular) has become culturally ingrained, and ultimately encourages anxious parents to chill out and let their kids’ childhood unfold. My wife and I are both licensed family therapists, and she works with kids, so we spend a lot of time discussing these very issues — and often land where Shrier does.

Three books every couple therapist should read

December 20, 2018December 19, 2018 by Ben Caldwell

Wikimedia Foundation visitors' bookshelf closeup, 2010-10-25 I’ve been doing couple therapy (not “couples therapy”) for almost 20 years now, going back to my time as a graduate student. I truly enjoy the work. It’s enriching in countless ways, one of which is the amount of time I get to spend learning about and thinking about how romantic relationships are built and sustained. While my couples have taught me a great deal, I’ve also learned from some great books that take the mechanics of couple relationships and either break them down or bring them to life.

Here are, in just one therapist’s opinion, three books every couple therapist should read.

Why you should read Saving Psychotherapy, in two charts

September 27, 2015August 31, 2015 by Ben Caldwell

My new book, Saving Psychotherapy, will be officially released September 22 [Update: Here it is!]. An edited excerpt about licensing exams is available here. Another excerpt focused on student debt appeared in the January/February 2015 issue of AAMFT’s Family Therapy Magazine (it starts on page 26).

I could spend a lot of time convincing you why you should read the book, but I think these two charts will be sufficient.

Boy trouble

October 13, 2011 by Ben Caldwell

A discussion of Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up and Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift.

While men have long been stereotyped as perpetual teenagers, a swath of recent books and articles have expressed rising concern about the failure of boys and young men in the United States to achieve traditional markers of adulthood. Young men appear to be falling behind young women in educational achievement, meaningful careers, and social relationships, and often seem unmotivated to move forward in their lives.

I have been reading both Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up and Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift, two books that take jarringly different perspectives on what is happening to boys and young men in America, and what needs to be done about it.

As a social critic, Hymowitz is unconvincing. Manning Up reads like more like the off-the-rails final essay from her Marriage and Caste in America than the sharp, concise and well-supported other essays that led up to it. In Manning Up, Hymowitz far too frequently relies on anecdotes as evidence, as if Sex and the City reflected the average American woman’s daily life. Manning Up displays assumptions about feminism and suggestions about men that Hymowitz never bothers to defend, like the notion that men marrying at later ages is bad for women and society. The book is not as shrill as some of its Amazon reviews would have you believe, but neither is it particularly strong in landing its argument. That argument essentially is that feminism is to blame for the struggles of boys and young men, but it is up to men to adapt to the changing world, and they’re dropping the ball so far.

Boys Adrift is a welcome contrast. It frames the problems American boys are facing in the context of five causes: Video games, teaching methods, prescription drugs, environmental toxins, and devaluation of masculinity. Some of those proposed causes may strike you as questionable at first (that was certainly my reaction), but Sax lays out the research on each quite well.

Perhaps more importantly, the tone of the book is right. Sax strikes the difficult balance between objective researcher and social activist, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of a concerned, but not panicked, parent. Boys Adrift is clear and convincing, and while it makes a number of public policy arguments, it focuses primarily on what parents and family members can do to ensure their own sons are the motivated and active young men we would all want them to be.

By simply confirming what some may want to believe about men, Hymowitz is likely to enjoy higher sales. But Sax wrote the better book.

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What are your thoughts on the struggles boys are facing in the United States? Have either of these books, or others, changed your thinking? Your comments are welcomed. You can also email me at ben[at]bencaldwell[dot]com, or share your reactions via Twitter.