Why do you have to tell them what to do? I usually explore with kids their experiences and guide them through problem solving (which can include reporting it). In general, telling patients what to do to solve their problems isn't a very therapeutic approach.
It happened even back in the AIM days. I could be way out of the loop, but it seems better in some ways in that your online identity, at least on Facebook, is matched with who you really are. Back in the late 90s, there was an anonymous person who wrote "I'm going to kill you" to me on AIM. And I didn't know who it was, but someone who knew my screen name. It turned out to be a guy who razzed me who said it was a joke. I don't think I knew of the word bullying, but he was one of many people who did things that would now be called bullying. There was another kid who was bullied by both teachers and students, and a group of students put his soul up for sale on eBay. He retaliated in a profanity-laden e-mail (we had school e-mail accounts), and he was expelled (very unfairly).
They were like, "Next time, just say, "I'd rather not discuss that." It sounds rather daft to say that had never occurred to me.
Right on the money with this. Kids already get advice on how to deal with bullying from any adult or even peer in their life. Having someone talk through the experience and assisting the patient in deciding what to try for themselves is more in line with psychotherapy, Psychotherapy is not about giving advice. It’s not like we have better advice than anyone else except for a few researched psychological concepts such as avoidance of anxiety provoking stimuli can make the anxiety worse or catharsis doesn’t release anger and it can increase it. The patient has to figure out what to do in their own life.
Right. Major difference between saying, "Here's how some people choose to approach a situation like the one you're struggling with (and why)...what do you think about it?" vs. "Here's what you should do."
I tend to refer to that as activating a paternal transference and there are indeed times that I am very directive and in very similar situations that you are referring to. I don’t feel that this is the same as the “advice” that we are more generally referring to which I think you understand as well, but just clarifying for any newer folk who might be reading.
Completely agree with this. One reason I emphasize not giving advice is that too many bad therapists fall into the trap of telling patients what they should or shouldn’t do in their life. I like to use the term judiciously for things like when do I give advice or when do I self-disclose. When I was learning, it was important to learn to break the habit of trying to help people by giving advice all the damn time like everyone else in the world seems to do. I often tell my patients that I rarely give advice and when I explain why, they tend to appreciate it. It also makes it more likely that they will listen to me if a more directive stance is needed.
I'm on my child rotation right now and I swear almost every kid, aside from IRL bullying, has some form of "snapchat" related bullying. The difference these days is how public social media is--you're talking to literally everyone in your mutual friend groups, not just whoever is in earshot.
I tend to think that changes in parenting have a good deal to do with labor. You had the first industrial age when a large number of both men and women (and sometimes children) worked outside the home, which was a change from the more tribal family work in which children worked with their parents. Then a period of greater income equality and social mores were such that women focused more on housekeeping, although not necessarily child-rearing as we would consider it today. And then a period of both greater income inequality and stagnating wages but also coupled with ever-increasing consumerism that has led again to both men and women working outside the home and children being entirely separate from the world of adults.
Of course it's not causal and we actually talked about the alternative explanations during supervision including the above and also parents with ADHD kids wanting them to watch more tv because they can be exhausting or that both tv and attentional problems being cause by another variable such as neglectful parenting. Regardless, I think it is pretty safe to say that involvement in a wider variety of activities is predictive of better development.
