Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 07:1 (Spring 2025)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

Eikon 7.1 (Spring 2025) p. 116

Book Reviews

Smartphones, Therapists, And Your Kids: A Review Essay

Reviewed by Josh Blount

Josh Blount is Pastor of Living Faith Church, Franklin, WV.

Abigail Shrier. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. New York, NY: Sentinel, 2024.

Parenting has never been easy. Parenting Christianly — that is, for the glory of God and the salvation of our children’s souls — is impossible.

Impossible, that is, by human power or ingenuity. Our goal is too glorious and supernatural for “expert tips.” Imagine “Ten Steps to Regenerate Your Kids” and you’ll see the problem. And yet our task as Christian dads and moms is not impossible because we are not left to our own strength, but instead have the good news of the gospel, in the power of the Holy Spirit, through the sufficient and authoritative Scriptures, in the midst of the local church. Supplied with these resources, we parent in faith as we pass on the faith once delivered to the coming generations.

And yet, parenting is still hard. But the

Eikon 7.1 (Spring 2025) p. 117

reasons for its difficulty vary from age to age. The perennial struggles of the human soul, and the maturation of those young souls to responsible adults, modulates in time to the melody of each generation’s riff on the old, old song. Cultural pathologies create parenting challenges. And it’s the challenges we’re most immersed in that can be the most challenging to spot. Omnipresence renders problems nearly invisible.

That’s where Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier’s works serve us. In their books Anxious Generation and Bad Therapy, they give us new eyes to see contemporary parenting problems that are easy to miss because they are everywhere. What are those problems? Technology and therapy. So what does parenting amid smartphones and trauma therapists require from us as Christian parents?

In this article, I have two goals: I want to provide an overview of the analysis Haidt and Shrier make of our current parenting moment, and then I want to provide a Christian lens through which to view their work. There’s a paradox here: Haidt and Shrier are very good at diagnosing a problem, better than most Christian parents. But their diagnosis of the problems are mostly partial and incomplete, and (in one specific case) harmful. We need a thoughtful engagement with their work on explicitly Christian presuppositions.

Growing Up On Mars: Haidt’s Argument

Haidt begins Anxious Generation with a brilliant thought experiment. Imagine ...