Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

My thoughts on the danger of parenting (Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2024, "Parenting Is Hazardous to Your Health, the Surgeon General Warns") - 1. Be leery of startling statistics. 2. Babies demand that their parent's personality change to best meet their survival needs. Which must create great parental stress since the mind is naturally conservative and loathe to change. 3. The mother is the most critical figure in the first three years of a child's life, the father then becoming equally important to break the maternal bond and move the child into the larger world. 4. Ignorance of child psychological development is widespread among parents, doctors, politicians, and the general public. Thus do spurious advice and solutions abound.

"Court-Ordered Therapy That Separates Kids from a Parent They Love Stirs a Backlash/A controversial treatment used in custody fights can keep family members apart for years against children's wishes./'It all absolutely destroyed me.''' begins the article.

Knowledge of child psychological development is greatly lacking among doctors, the legal system, and the general public. Children are not easily swayed, being fully capable of deciding who most loves them. The concept that a child needs both parents in their life for healthy psychological development is untrue. What most often reflects such Family Court conflict is parental narcissism, the lack of self-knowledge.

I have known children who were overjoyed when their parents separated, one teenager telling her mother that if she divorced the alcoholic father she would get a job to help support the family. A seven-year-old once told me, "I need a new family."

As every lawyer will tell you, the Family Court is a Wild West show where the parent with the most skilled lawyer usually wins despite the best interests of the child being the sole deciding mandate which should occur. In New York State two children were recently murdered by their abusive parent after being returned to them from foster care despite the opposition of mental health professionals. Nuff said.

Ignorance about mental health conditions is widespread, fostered by such reductionist psychiatric nonsense as "chemical imbalance" and the FDA's love of psychotropics and electrical gadgets. Depression is merely the "depressing" of feelings which can occur for one or more of several reasons: feeling that one's difficulties are great and giving up; the loss of ability through illness or injury or a beloved's death; or uncertainty about a decision and being "stuck." PTSD symptoms reflect the mind's healthy attempt to recover its equilibrium after an excessive stressful event(s).

The publicized benefits of drugs, which are often based on inadequate or faulty research, tend to be vastly exaggerated with their side-effects being downplayed. The ignorance of child psychological development and developmental psychopathology, widespread among doctors and the general public, motivates this search for miracle psychotropic solutions, and people getting "high" on dangerous substances instead of life.

Alcohol is an acquired taste best left unacquired. Having said this, the tendency to develop substance abuse problems derives from early childhood experiences during which basic ego capacities governing thinking, behavior, and others develop. Usually arising during adolescence, it isn't easy to treat since the pleasurable/quickly acting drug substance must be given up before psychotherapy can affect the needed change of damaged personality which aroused its use.

But personality tendency matters too, an instinctive need for self-control, and also learning from others that unfortunate and sometimes deadly things can happen when using such substances. Nuff said.

One reason might be the ease of self-publishing with many considering their life story and imagined fantasy of value to a wider public, and another being the generally poor state of public education in which literacy is no longer considered the minimal requirement for high school graduation.

The encouragement of reading by parents may also be less prevalent with some parents failing to read first to and then with their toddlers, this being a time when the child can naturally learn reading since the mind has an inherent capacity to induct the nature of reading just as it does the grammatical structure of the language of the nation into which they are born.

A smaller factor, I believe, is that reading involves a loss of self-control while immersed in the written words which is unconsciously scary for anxious youth. I having known good readers who never read, preferring video game play which is heavily obsessive-compulsive, one of the mind's natural ways to reduce anxiety and thus powerfully motivating.