The NYTimes recently had an opinion piece in which the author claims that one of the reasons that young people are not marrying and having children is because they have too high expectations of parenting, that many of them feel their parents have failed them, and therefore they believe they will fail their children.
I am not interested in the author's thesis, but I am interested in the existence of a therapy culture on the internet which seems to have hooked many young people into blaming everything upon their parents. I have placed that portion of the article on my website; it has a link to the full article.
1. There is no doubt in my mind that the presence of Alcohol Abuse, Drug Abuse, Physical Abuse and Sexual Abuse in a person's history causes very high mental health costs. I did a study in our system in which I compared persons for each major diagnosis (depression, schizophrenia, etc.) comparing the cost of people within each diagnosis who did or did not have these various problems. Taking the conservative assumption that people who had these problems would have had depression, etc. without these problems, the problems were responsible for much of the costs of our system. Therefore, figuring out how to deal with these problems is just as important as dealing with depression, schizophrenia, etc.
2. There is no doubt in my mind that parents in many cases are the abusers, and that children of abusers become abusers themselves. But children do have exposure to persons other than their parents, who are often abusers. So, we can't blame it all on the parents.
3. There is no doubt in my mind that parents often set unrealistically high goals for themselves and their children. One of my psychology professors in graduate school said he was a convinced behaviorist until he had children. One of them was simply a bundle of energy from day one; the other was calm and placid from day one. He said a managed to calm the first down a little and liven the second up a little bit over the years. In other words parenting 101 should say don't think that your children will be like you because they have your genes or because you raised them. Rather start with the assumption that a random number has assigned you a child, and deal with it in the same way as if a random number had assigned you a coworker.
4. My discipline of social psychology says that the social environment determines our behavior far more that any internal traits, values, etc. Therefore when you want to change the behavior of anyone (child, spouse, coworker) think about how you might change their environment rather than their personalities. I have found it surprising easy to change environments, even large organizational environments, in comparison to trying to change personal behaviors, beliefs, values, etc.
5. Finally, to what extent do you think internet subculture environments such as therapy cultures exist and have a large influence over internet users.
