Hi everyone,
I thought this was a great article in the Atlantic. We've been talking about this in class, but it made a lot of sense that anxiety needs to be tolerated, not avoided, because if it is avoided, the anxiety will compound. I thought it was really smart, too, how the article at once discussed the difficult position parents are in, the societal and personal factors that make modern parenting so difficult, while at the same time, describing their complicity. It really is wild to me that there is a licensing test to drive a car but nothing to formally prepare or support you to bring a life into the world.
One thing that seemed off to me about this article was that it claimed one of the downfalls of using CBT with children was that it “focuses on the child’s role in his or her anxiety disorder, while neglecting the parents’ responses to that anxiety.” I won’t claim to be an expert on CBT, but just having taken this class last semester, this was certainly not the idea that Dr. Speer left us with. She described CBT work with children—her specialty and area of focus—as being primarily work done with the parents. Yes, you’re doing work with the kids, but it is the parents who are being “trained” to be the child’s therapist in the future. Without the parents’ involvement, she seemed to say, the treatment will not be effective after therapy ends. Still, I think SPACE was serving a similar purpose with decreasing parental accommodation. In both senses, parents are modeling boundaries and taking on the therapeutic role. As social workers that might work with parents and/or children, it seems like both approaches would be useful to have in one's toolkit.
As always, I find the most discouraging part of this article the one where society fails to provide for its citizens with unaffordable child care costs, poor wages in relation to cost of living, and labor requirements which serve corporations instead of workers, like short or unpaid parental leave and schedules that don't align with school hours. As social workers, our job is to help support people to manage their difficult lives. I just can't help but sometimes worry that we risk causing people to conform to a crazy system instead of conforming the crazy system to our clients very real needs.
Thanks,
Melissa