In The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups, family physician and psychologist Leonard Sax insists that too many parents these days misunderstand the role they should play in their children’s lives.

American parents today face a perfect storm of cultural and social circumstances that undermine the very foundations of parental authority. In response, mothers and fathers are beginning to see therapists as irrelevant and to challenge the entire social, educational, and economic context of childrearing.

A son reconstructs his story of his mother.

At the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, DC they don't believe self-knowledge fires the engine of change and insist instead that therapy is really just a process of persuasion. Here, therapy is about metaphor and boldly sweeping clients along in unexpected directions. In fact, a visitor might wonder what on earth the institute's clients tell their friends about the things they're asked to do in the name of "therapy."

Has the time come to consider whether the profound changes in our economy, technology, and culture over these last couple of decades have opened up a breach in the very experience of intimate connection in middle-class families around the world? And if so, what can we as therapists do about it?

We used to think that disordered attachment was the result of early parental neglect or abuse. But today, has a paradoxical mix of parental overinvolvement and inattention led to a social epidemic of pseudo-attachment?

We've become so focused on keeping children safe that we exaggerate the dangers they face despite the fact that they’ve never been safer. Still, no amount of statistical reports can get parents to stop hovering over their child. What’s a therapist to do?

Part of the epidemic of misdiagnosed ADHD in young children today results from a failure to understand how trauma often leads to difficulty learning in school.

After Italian psychiatrist Mara Selvini Palazzoli became celebrated for her work with therapeutic paradox in the 1970s, she stunned the family therapy world with an even more flamboyant intervention—the invariant prescription.

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

In an encyclopedic new book, Andrew Solomon explores how parents and children forge emotional bonds with one another in the presence of sometimes vast inborn differences.