Our local school board voted down a social-emotional learning curriculum. My feelings about this are mixed. Social-emotional learning integrates lessons of morality and getting along with others into the variety of classes many students take. This makes some sense. Schools have our children for the best hours of their days and such lessons of self-and-other awareness are necessary for growing up. The home is the best place for these lessons, but more often than we would like to think, it is not happening. In fact, parents can be very destructive to their children.

The board voted this down because it seemed sudden, expensive and largely because many members of the public see social-emotional learning curricula as a Trojan horse for such things as critical race theory and gender ideology. Let these busy bodies through the door and your children might become litter-box-using fuzzies.

These are not the reasons why I would lean against social-emotional learning curriculum.

I just finished an interesting book by journalist Abigail Shrier and I will apply her ideas here. In Bad Therapy, Shrier postulates that some mental health therapy might be doing more harm to our children than good. Parents and children want answers to the messy perils of adolescence and therapy’s cloak of science lends them confidence that the labels therapist apply do indeed clean up and structure what is wrong. The growing list of technical acronyms and diagnoses, in other words, do their part to clarify how a confused or manipulative parent might act on their fourteen-year old daughter.

With this, however, are self-fulling prophesies. Bad therapy, the bad practice, not the book, encourages rumination about negative feelings and the development of a victim self. Add to this the medical and drug industry’s willingness to meddle with brain chemistry through medication and we may have a patient for life, a person unable to heal and move on. Good therapy shies from diagnosing, but insurance bureaucracies and organizational policies often insist. Sociology has an entire branch called labeling theory that tracks this very thing. Tune in public chatter and hear the new identities.

Shrier has been controversial. In an earlier, overstated book, she was very skeptical of the late increase in transgender identification among groups of girls and caught hell for it. People on the right don’t like to believe that gender is socially constructed. People on the left don’t like to believe the concept of transgender is also socially constructed. But as the left and right tilt an one another’s windmills, Shrier makes points in this new book that I cannot fully dispute. She essentially applies sociology to psychology unscientifically but with great prose. That is worth something.

Shrier brings up social-emotional learning curricula in schools. She likens it to bad therapy going airborne. Do we want to apply this force of labeling at large to children and teachers who would rather concentrate on history or math? Yet one more thing to do? More paperwork. More interruptions. This is why I would be against the curriculum. Good therapy is not broadcast across a school. It is tactfully and strategically pinpointed by extraordinarily skilled professionals who are self-aware themselves enough to know the bads of the process that can come with the goods.

Is there a growing need for therapy that is not the product of therapy itself? YES. In fact, now is the time to improve good therapy, not clumsily spread bad therapy. If you have not noticed, we have lost a good deal of social structure in the last decades as the result of mighty political, economic and technological changes. I criticize Shrier for seeing these things from the charmed life of a middle-class parent. Stable homes are relatively rare around here. Parents are impoverished. Parents are single. Parents are mentally ill themselves. On top of all that, we live in a society that practically fantasizes about the apocalypse. We could be near the end and perhaps children are the canaries in the coal mine. We have a more honest supply of mental illness and our response to it needs more traction.

Shrier is not a scientist, but scientists have no monopoly on concern and I am glad she broached the subject. She writes well in plain, short sentences which is something scientists should do. It would behoove us social scientists to do our own ruminating.

Greg Walker is a professor at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania – Lock Haven.