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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Have you read the book [i]Hidden Valley Road[/i]? Spoiler alert--don't read this summary if you want to read the book. https://www.supersummary.com/hidden-valley-road/summary/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwmouZBhDSARIsALYcourmM9OlUjv7RwKJDMANAQvK9hC_cjIvv1TVsj06j3yq_9zJGCAvbEgaAiTQEALw_wcB&utm_content=144782650207&utm_term=hidden%20valley%20road%20summary&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=18307755797

It's a wonderful but truly horrifying read. It's about a family with 12 kids. Many end up seriously mentally ill. The mother tries desperately to get help for her kids and most of the therapists tell her her kids are sick because she was a "refrigerator" mother, cold and unloving. Except the truth is....she wasn't. The therapists reasoned backwards. All of these kids from the same family have serious mental health issues so they must have had a terrible mother. And of course, having all those kids meant none of them got enough attention. And they looked at all the evidence to frame it to support the conclusion that it was the mother's fault and due to the fact that there were just too many kids. And they did. They write these smug reports about how awful the mother is and how it is all her fault.

Their criticisms of her mothering lead her to go too far in trying to help them. Their problems lead to serious  issues for the sane kids forced to live in the same family. They too blame their mother for the horrible childhoods they endured.

Eventually, after the mother's death, it is discovered that the mentally ill kids shared a defective gene and that was probably the cause of their mental illness.

Anyway...the book is a great description of how willing therapists can be to blame deficient parenting for serious mental health problems because they are implicitly biased to look for causes in early childhood and especially parenting.

Most parents do the best they can and they are only one of the many factors that influence their children's lives. Otherwise..it's all  Adam and Eve's fault as each generation can blame the one before it.

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But the mother should never have had 12 kids regardless of how great a parent she was. That’s too much for any parent to be able to handle.[/quote]

Why do you blame only the mother? Surely you can also blame the father too[/quote]

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