For a number of years, I have joked with my friends that I plan to write a book called “WASP Therapy,” in which I will advise readers that they and their loved ones might be better off if they stopped talking about their feelings so much. It brings me no small amount of joy to find out that I’m not the only Jewish mother who thinks, as Abigail Shrier says, that “a healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression.”

In her new book, Shrier presents all sorts of provocative but useful observations on child-rearing, in an effort to show that we (parents, schools, government, and American culture) have created the oft-decried mental-health crisis among children and teens. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up argues that, by focusing adult attention so much on children’s feelings, we have made things worse.

“Therapists, teachers, and parents in America all seem to proceed under the belief that checking in is a little like sticking a thermometer outside your front door: harmless and occasionally helpful.” But as one psychiatry professor tells her: “Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling’ is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn’t do that. . . . Nobody feels great. Never, never ever. Sit in the bus and look at the people opposite from you. They don’t look happy. Happiness is not the emotion of the day.”

It’s not just that asking about kids’ emotions induces negative ones. It’s that it prevents them from doing the things that actually could make them happier and better. “How is a child supposed to get through a day of school if she’s never learned to put aside her hurt feelings and concentrate on the lessons in front of her? How will she ever be a good friend if her own feelings are always, at every instant, front and center? How will she ever hope to function at work?”

As Shrier notes, it is helpful to remember that it was not always thus. She recalls two pieces of advice that the parents of Gen Xers and of earlier generations would proffer to their children: “Knock it off” and “Shake it off.” The first “didn’t overexplain,” she writes. “It credited kids with common sense or nudged them to develop it. Rules had exceptions and workarounds, but ‘knock it off’ signaled a parent’s disinclination to become entangled in them.” And “shake it off” didn’t solve the worst injuries but “did a helluva job playing triage nurse to kids’ minor heartaches and injuries, proving to kids that the hurt or fear or possibility of failure need not overwhelm them.”

We mean well. As Shrier emphasizes, the parents she is criticizing want what is best for their children. They want them to be happy and healthy and to lead productive lives. But they have taken an approach of “gentle parenting” that prevents kids from experiencing any kind of challenge — physical, intellectual, emotional. We have made our playgrounds too safe. We are doing our kids’ homework or at least intervening with teachers when we think it’s too hard. We are not just monitoring their feelings but bringing them to psychiatric professionals and offering kids medication.

This last part — the professionals, the therapy, the drugs — is the focus of much of Shrier’s ire. Her previous book — Irreversible Damage, a blockbuster look at the transgender movement and how the so-called experts (schools, therapists, doctors) are weaponizing a dangerous ideology to do untold harm to children — seems to have alerted her to larger problems in the ways we treat children.

First, she notes that most therapeutic interventions being used on children have little to no evidence behind them. Whether it’s play therapy for young children or talk therapy for older ones, Shrier maintains that there is little upside to these methods and plenty of downside. Perhaps one of the biggest downsides is that they suggest to our children that there is something really wrong with them when actually they are going through the normal difficulties of childhood. Maybe telling them they have ADHD when really they just have a little more trouble paying attention or sitting still than some of their peers is not helpful. Maybe diagnosing them with anxiety and ensuring that they have more time to take tests or don’t have to wear clothes with tags on them or deal with children who bother them, instead of forcing them to just confront these problems a little bit at a time, is making things worse.

At the beginning of her book, Shrier explains that there are two “distinct groups of young people” who are conflated in discussions of the “youth mental health crisis.” One suffers “profound mental illness” that prevents them from doing productive work or having stable relationships. They require psychiatrists and medication. The other group is “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad.” These kids require something else.

One problem, though, is how to tell the difference. I worry that the line is not as clear as Shrier thinks it is. Many of those in the latter group have gotten to a point where they cannot function normally. Indeed, Shrier notes that the behavior of some of these worriers, fearful, etc., is a cause of deep concern to their parents — the children’s anxiety or depression, however mildly it began, is now causing them to engage in self-harm and preventing them from participating in family life or handling the basic requirements of schooling.

A traditionalist mother (not a gentle-parenting one) I spoke to recently about this said that 18 years ago, when her oldest was born, she probably would have agreed wholeheartedly with Shrier’s assessment, but four children later she’s not so sure. Maybe there are too many factors outside a parent’s control that make it hard to keep a child in the second group from migrating into the first.

Those factors include the school environment and electronics. And those are the focus of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Ensuring that kids have more of a play-based childhood and less of a screen-based one, which is Haidt’s central concern, is not a new prescription for fixing what ails kids. (A humbler reviewer might not mention that she published a book six years ago whose subtitle was Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat.)

But Haidt brings decades of research in psychology to the task. Building on the work of Jean Twenge, who convincingly showed in her book iGen that the steep decline in youth mental health coincided exactly with the rise of the smartphone (Twenge writes on the topic elsewhere in this issue of NR), Haidt explains to readers exactly how the process occurred.

The first and most obvious problem with the explosion of smartphone usage is the opportunity cost of its replacing so many of the other important activities of childhood. From sleeping, to spending time in nature, to reading books, to socializing with friends, there is hardly an activity that has gone undisturbed by the phone’s march through childhood. Haidt takes care to explain why all of those activities are necessary to mental health and a successful transition to adulthood.

Take sleep. “A review of 36 correlational studies found significant associations between high social media use and poor sleep, and also with poor mental health outcomes.” A study cited by Haidt of 11,000 nine- and ten-year-olds who were followed through adolescence found that “greater sleep disturbance and shorter total sleep time were associated with greater internalizing scores (which include depression) and externalizing scores (which include aggression and other antisocial actions associated with a lack of impulse control).”

When it comes to the loss of social interaction, Haidt’s work is chock-full of studies showing that children need “face-to-face, synchronous, embodied physical play” and that “the healthiest play is outdoors and includes occasional physical risk taking and thrilling adventure.” This does not describe the experience of most of the adolescents we see around us.

Defenders of the screens and of social media in particular have always claimed that they allow for children who are isolated to find others like them. But Haidt is skeptical. “The same demographic groups that are widely said to benefit most from social media are also the most likely to have had bad experiences on these platforms. The 2023 Common Sense Media Survey found that LGBTQ adolescents were more likely than their non-LGBTQ peers to believe their lives would be better without each platform they used.” Black teens had worse experiences online than white teens, and poor teens had worse experiences than higher-income ones.

Haidt’s book is a careful one; he is scrupulous about discussing the harms of screens for kids of different ages and the specific dangers for boys and for girls. Generally, he finds girls are more severely affected — certainly by social media — because their “core developmental needs are more easily exploited and subverted by social media.” Girls, Haidt notes, are more subject to predation and harassment, more likely to be perfectionists, and more likely to share their emotions.

Which is not to deny that boys are severely affected by the pull of video games and pornography. Haidt has all the studies to show the harmful effects of these factors as well. His arguments will be familiar to anyone who has followed this topic over the past few years. But Haidt is clearly hoping to create systemic change. He wants parents to read this book, but he is also trying to get schools to ban phones altogether. He is trying to get communities to change playgrounds to make them more interesting and to change laws to allow more kids to be independent without their parents’ getting investigated by Child Protective Services. He is trying to get tech companies to make it harder for kids to access social media and Congress to create laws that would force that outcome.

Shrier is less sanguine, perhaps because she has seen the ways in which schools and government and mental-health experts have actively harmed children. Indeed, with all the evidence that has been amassed in recent years, she can’t understand why therapists haven’t told parents they must immediately remove devices from the hands of their children. Such therapists are like doctors who treat lung-cancer patients without telling them to stop smoking. Where, Shrier wonders, were the school leaders and the psychologists when Covid lockdowns were profoundly damaging our kids’ psyches? And she is particularly galled by the oft-repeated idea that parents are schools’ partners in raising children. She says it is time parents stop putting up with this “demotion.”

I am more sympathetic to Shrier’s call for parents to storm the barricades than to Haidt’s push for legal changes, but Haidt is right that, for most families, this change in childhood is a “collective action” problem. Not all parents are going to homeschool their children, and many cannot find a school nearby that will adopt the screen rules they want. They are not going to send five-year-olds to the supermarket (as parents do in Japan) knowing the police could be called. And even if they send their nine-year-olds to the park alone, if no one else is there the kids will come home five minutes later. So I am hoping that school leaders and policy-makers will also get involved.

The ground is already shifting. A critical mass of educated parents is very worried and sees screens as a big problem. A critical mass of teachers has had enough of poor behaviors and constant distractions. Still, for those of us who have had children grow up in the past decade, change may come too late. Even if you have managed to protect your own children from the worst ravages of screens, they are still surrounded by peers whose gentle parents have stifled any achievement of independence. They are going to school and then to work with a cohort scarred by diagnoses and medications that have permanently altered their development. It is not too late to reverse the youth mental-health crisis, but plenty of damage has already been done.