Why I don't send my kids to therapy

The look on his face told me everything. I had just told a colleague that I would never put my own son in a therapist’s office. He looked at me like I had admitted to burning books. This man is a good practitioner, but he is a true believer in the clinical machine. He thinks the solution to every developmental hiccup is a fifty minute hour with a stranger. I do not share that faith. I have spent sixteen years watching the machine from the inside. I know the gears. I know the grease. My refusal to send my children to therapy is not a rejection of my profession. It is an act of informed consent. I know exactly what I am refusing.

I look at the people coming out of graduate programs today. I interview them for my practice. I read their case notes during supervision. These new practitioners follow a script. They have been taught that their primary job is to validate every feeling a child has. Validation is a tool, but it is not a cure. When a child is thirteen and full of hormones, their feelings are often wrong. Their feelings are impulsive. Their feelings are based on a lack of experience. If I send my child to a twenty five year old therapist with a fresh license, that therapist will validate my child’s rebellion as an expression of autonomy. They will treat my child’s temporary discomfort as a clinical symptom. I am the parent. I am the one who knows the difference between a crisis and a bad mood. I do not want a third party in a swivel chair telling my kid that his chores are a violation of his boundaries.

The selection process in this field is a joke. I know how the directory works. I know how the referral networks function. If I want a therapist who is actually skilled, I have to find someone who has been in the trenches for a decade. Those people do not take insurance. They have six month waiting lists. They charge three hundred dollars an hour. The people who are available are the ones who are still learning. I will not let my child be a practice case for someone who is still figuring out the difference between anxiety and normal teenage stress. The credential does not mean the person is competent. It only means they finished their hours and passed a multiple choice test. I see incompetent therapists every single day. They are nice people. They are kind people. They are also people who can do real damage by pathologizing a normal life.

I have a client right now who illustrates this perfectly. I will not use her name. She came to me because her family was falling apart. Her sixteen year old daughter had been in individual therapy for three years. The daughter had a different therapist every year. Each therapist told the girl that her mother was the source of her stress. They told her she needed to set boundaries. The girl stopped talking to her mother. She spent her sessions complaining about her curfew. The therapist listened and nodded. The therapist told the girl that her feelings were valid. By the time the mother found me, the girl was a stranger in her own house. The mother was paying a monthly fee to have a professional alienate her own child. I had to spend months undoing that damage. I had to tell the mother to stop paying for the individual sessions. I had to bring them into the same room and force them to actually talk to each other without a clinical referee. The girl did not have a mental health disorder. She had a communication problem that a therapist had turned into a permanent identity.

The presence of a therapist in a house creates a strange triangle. It changes the chemistry of the family. When a child has a therapist, the parent often stops parenting. The parent becomes a driver. They drop the kid off at the office and wait in the car. They think the professional is fixing the problem. This creates a gap where the relationship used to be. The child learns to save their “real” thoughts for the professional. The parent becomes the person who provides the food and the shelter, while the therapist becomes the person who provides the understanding. I refuse to be sidelined in my own home. I want the friction. I want the arguments. I want my children to come to me when they are hurting. If I give them a therapist, I am giving them a way to avoid the hard work of family life. I am giving them a pressure release valve that should stay inside our relationship.

I also know what the outcome literature actually says. I read the studies that do not make it into the marketing brochures. The data on individual talk therapy for adolescents is remarkably thin. For many presentations, the results are no better than the passage of time. Teenagers get better because they grow up. They get better because their frontal lobes develop. They get better because they join a sports team or find a hobby they love. The specific effect of a therapist talking to a teenager for an hour a week is often negligible. I am a strategic therapist. I care about what works. I do not care about what feels good or what looks responsible at a dinner party. If the data shows that the intervention is weak, I am not going to buy it for my own family.

I see the way therapy has become a lifestyle accessory. Parents in my neighborhood talk about their kids’ therapists like they talk about their tutors or their soccer coaches. It is a status symbol. It says that they are proactive. It says that they are sensitive. To me, it says they are afraid. They are afraid of their children’s pain. They are afraid of their children’s anger. They think that if they can just find the right professional, they can bypass the messiness of adolescence. I am not afraid of the mess. I know that my children will be sad sometimes. I know they will be anxious. I know they will hate me for a week because I took away their phones. These are not clinical events. These are the requirements of growing up.

A therapist is a stranger. No matter how many degrees they have, they do not love my child. They do not know my child’s history. They see my child for fifty minutes. They see the version of my child that my child chooses to show them. My son is smart. He knows how to perform. He would figure out exactly what the therapist wanted to hear within two sessions. He would give them the right keywords. He would talk about his feelings in a way that made the therapist feel successful. It would be a performance. It would be a waste of his time and my money.

I have seen the way therapists talk about parents in their private circles. I have been in those circles for fifteen years. I know the condescension. I know the way they roll their eyes at the “difficult” mother or the “rigid” father. They see themselves as the child’s advocate against the family. They create a “we versus they” dynamic. I will not invite someone into my life who is trained to view me as the problem. I am the primary resource for my children. I am the one who will be there when they are twenty five and thirty five and fifty. The therapist will be a distant memory. The therapist will be a name on an old insurance form.

I value my profession. I know that for some people, a good therapist is the difference between life and death. I have seen clients make massive shifts in their lives because of the work we did. But those are clients who are in a specific kind of pain. They are people who have run out of other options. They are adults who are seeking change. An adolescent is rarely seeking change. An adolescent is usually seeking relief from the demands of their environment. A therapist provides that relief by creating a bubble where the rules of the real world do not apply. I want my children to live in the real world. I want them to learn how to handle their own minds without needing a paid consultant.

The most honest signal I can give about the state of our field is the choice I make for my own family. If I believed that the average practitioner was a master of human change, I would be the first in line. I am not in line. I am standing in my kitchen, talking to my kids. I am listening to their complaints. I am holding my ground when they are angry. I am doing the work that many parents outsource to people like me. I know what is behind the curtain. I know that the most powerful therapeutic intervention in a child’s life is a parent who refuses to blink. I am not a hypocrite. I am a man who knows exactly what he is doing. I will keep my children out of the office. I will keep them in the family. That is the most professional decision I can make.