#judith warner

[bigtickhk]

Traumatized by Memories of Middle School? You Are Not Alone

“And Then They Stopped Talking to Me,” by Judith Warner, considers the lasting torment that is junior high.

And Then They Stopped Talking to Me: Making Sense of Middle School by Judith Warner https://amzn.to/2SM2q7M

[msooey]

BOOK REPORT: We've got issues: children and parents in the age of medication

We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication

By Judith Warner  © 2010 Riverhead Books

COMMENTARY: I don’t remember when I wrote this.  I found it on my laptop as I was printing out the book reports I’m recording for the podcast.    I remember writing it and sitting on it because I was worried that I didn’t have a strong enough conclusion or ending…  or maybe because of the delicate controversial nature of the topic – or perhaps my response.  But I decided to post it anyway.  Let’s keep this conversation going for sure.

I have not been thrown a literary curve-ball for quite awhile.  This book broke the streak.  I bought Warner’s book because I enjoyed one of her previous books, Perfect Madness, Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.  Plus the title of this new book led me to believe I was going to gather more fuel for my “we are drugging our kids too much” fire.  As it happens, when Warner set out to write the book she too was on the “we are drugging our kids too much” side of the fence.  The book was originally entitled UNTITLED:on affluent parents and neurotic kids.  Then she changed her mind.  During her research for the book she claims to have discovered that the data and research available did NOT in actuality support some of her positions.  So she set out to write a different book. Hence the curveball. 

In the preface Warner states that while doing her research a couple truths emerged:

1.     The suffering of children with mental health issues is very real. She says there are millions of children in the USA who are suffering from mental health disorders. (SIDEBAR:  I’d like aspecific source)

2.     Almost no parent takes the issue of psychiatric diagnosis lightly or rushes to “drug” his or her child; and, she continues, responsible child psychiatrists don’t either.

Warner states that by acknowledging these “truths” it doesn’t mean that she believes in (or supports) everything being done by child psychiatrists.  She does acknowledge the sometimes criminally irresponsible role of Big Pharma.  And she admits that there are many toxic aspects of our current contemporary family life that should raise alarms.  To her credit she addresses all of these issues in the book. 

Warner says that we must view the social climate of the family and the irresponsible marketing practices of Big Pharma separately from the lives of children and parents suffering from mental health issues. (Sidebar:  this was my biggest take-away from the book).

Through this book she wanted to “set the record straight” about what life is really like for families with serious mental health issues.  

I get that some kids need assistance, chemical or otherwise.  I get that many children, due to many reasons, are deprived of the services they so desperately require; what I don’t often see addressed (and I'm not implying that Warner should've, it just brought up a bigger question for me) is how and why “issues” of bi-polar children, depressed toddlers and overanxious tweens still appear to be an American problem.  My honest question is how can a supposed rampant epidemic of “research supported” psychological issues be contained within our borders?  (FROM ME: perhaps because we don't let them play??) She does agree that certain issues related to children and medicating them have been influenced by the power of Big Pharma, and does acknowledge that certain medical practitioners have been influenced by the same.

Warner not only attempts to tackle (head-on) the supposed “myth” that we are medicating our kids too much, but sets out to make a case for the complete opposite. 

She says the research supports the claim that parents DON’T jump to medicate kids, that actually more kids need meds than are being served by them, and although yes, some kids do fall into the hands of doctors who do nothing but write scripts, there are (she claims) thousands of children who’d probably benefit from a pharmacological cocktail who never even get a diagnosis and consequently go through life deprived of the interventions which may have assisted (whether those interventions be therapeutic, medical, or pharmacological in nature).

Duly noted and point taken.  Her notes and bibliography seem solid, but I also know we can find “research” that pretty much proves anything.  Forgive my skepticism. That being said, I’d be ignorant to not consider the other side of the coin when such information is presented. 

It’s difficult to not at least examine the point-counter-point made in Warner’s book.  It’s hard to admit that we might have been wrong, or at least misled (again) by the media into thinking that we have such a problem in our midst.  It can feel embarrassing to realize we might have been one of the sheep blindly following an absent shepherd that we have accused others being.

I have struggled with my reaction to the book.  Am I just upset because she didn’t support my views.  Am I upset that maybe the book has (possibly) blown one of my positions out of the water?  If there is so much “evidence” saying that we don’t have a “we are drugging our kids” problem what does that say about the “evidence” presented in the books that say we do? 

Warner said she heard a lot of people saying, “All the kids are on meds.”  So she started asking, “Who?”   She said she hears that, “All the kids are on meds.”   “Except,” she says, “they’re not.”

She heard, “Parents are pushing to get kids on meds.”  “Except,” she says, “they’re not.” 

She hears, “Doctors are diagnosing willy-nilly and prescribing corresponding meds.”  “Except,” she says, “they’re not.”

Towards the end of the book Warner states, “I know that crying out against ‘drugging’ and pathologizing children may seem very humanistic… the truly humane response to sickness, to suffering, to distress, is to try to do something to make it go away.”

Maybe the hardest part of all this for me is wondering how in the hell our kids got so damn sick. And what the hell is causing so much distress in the first place.

=================

Lisa Murphy, June 26, 2013

Edited for clarity and reposted February 2014

[repetition-is-holy]

the NYT has a magazine article this week that is an update on their 2000 opt-out revolution piece. the original article was a sort of touch stone that we discussed in my intro women's studies class, and is deeply flawed and classist. I'm really interested in looking at this update, though, because it combines really well with SEWSA's conference topic on historic feminist landmarks and the paper I'm planning to pitch/finally write for my intro women's studies seminar. last fall I had plotted out a paper that examined the current state of motherhood studies, rooting itself in texts like Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born and Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex. I think there's real potential for using this article/some other Judith Warner texts in this paper. just some things to keep in mind.

[withoutawomanoragirl]

What About the Men?

By Judith Warner in Time Ideas on October 28, 2011

“What About the Men?” was the title of a Congressional briefing last week timed to commemorate National Work and Family Month. “What about them?” you may be tempted to snarl.

When Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, first went out on the road to talk about her organization’s research into men’s work-family conflict, she received many such snappish responses – and worse. Work-life experts laughed at her. Men are privileged, they said. They don’t have the right to complain. In New Orleans, when she spoke about generational differences and gender role change, she was swarmed by “angry men,” she said in the Capitol last week. “They were defensive. They were saying, ‘We played by the rules and now you’re telling us it’s not good enough.’”

That was in 2008, before the full force of the Great Recession had hit. This year, when Galinsky went out on the road again to talk about the results of a new study on male work-life conflict, published this summer as “The New Male Mystique,” she got a very different response. Some men were in tears. “Two men became emotional because they had wives at home. They felt they didn’t have permission to feel stressed about work and home, but they worried: were they good enough fathers?” she said. ”‘This is what I think about each and every day,’” she recalled another man telling her. “‘I didn’t realize that anyone else did,’” he said. “He thought he was alone,” Galinsky told me. “He asked himself, ‘Am I being the father I want to be? Am I being the employer I want to be?’ Other men were less emotional, but they were agreeing.”

That men are experiencing work-family conflict isn’t new. Indeed, it’s been some time now that they – and younger men in particular – have been complaining of feeling the squeeze in even greater numbers of women. What appears to be new is that they’re starting to talk about it – just a bit. Which means that maybe they’re starting to realize that they’re not unique or alone in feeling they’re failing at the impossible task of “doing it all.”

In other words, men just might be poised to have a collective “click” moment. “My experience,” said Galinsky, “is that, when they have permission to speak, they have a lot to say and it’s very profound and real for them.” Failure, instability, uncertainty, the self-doubt that comes from a spending a lifetime playing one game only to find, mid-way through, that the rules have suddenly changed, seem to have shaken up the old categories of self, work and meaning for many men.

Is this a bad thing? Another nail in the coffin of the Beached White Male? I’d rather see it as a moment ripe with possibility. “A new beginning,” as Brad Harrington, executive director of the Center for Work and Family at Boston College put it at the briefing. After all, what men are starting to say sounds an awful lot like the conversational stirrings that paved the way for the modern women’s movement. The vague sort of dissatisfaction. The sense that life wasn’t adding up to be all that it was supposed to be. Even the anger from those who’d lived their lives according to the old rules then found that a new generation – or even their own spouses – didn’t value their choices, accomplishments, and sacrifices.

For some years now, sociologists have been tracking the patterns of what they call convergence in men and women’s lives. Mostly, when we think of this, we tend to focus on how they live, what they do, spend their time, whether they do or do not empty the dishwasher or care for their children. But what about how they feel? Now that this final frontier is being breached, I wonder if we aren’t poised to see more meaningful change in men’s — and women’s and families’ — lives than ever before. That is: if we own the change and act upon it with courage, not fear.

http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/28/what-about-the-men/