Thursday, February 10, 2011

Podcast 56: It's All Your Mother's Fault


Oh, not really.
In this episode, we talk about parenting. Now why do we talk about parenting: this is a psychiatry podcast, did someone forget to tell us that?

We talked about parenting for a few reasons:

It started with the tie in between trying to understand how mentally ill people become violent and we mentioned the very poignant article that Susan Klebold wrote on Oprah.com called "I Will Never Know Why?" about her son's role in the Columbine shootings and the awful toll this has taken on her. Somewhere, as a society, we've decided that parents are responsible for how their children turn out, and parenting topics are frequently addressed by patients in psychotherapy. We hear from patients who feel wronged by their parents and from parents who worry about doing right by their children. Ah, if only we had crystal balls!

This led us to talk about Amy Chua, the Yale attorney who wrote
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom and whose article "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" in the Wall Street Journal has gotten everyone talking about parenting styles of the East versus the West. Is this a good thing or does it contribute to student suicide?

We also mentioned Dr. Richard Friedman's article from the New York Times, "Accepting that Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds" and Susan Reimer's article in the Baltimore Sun, "Blame Jared Loughner's Parents--It's the Easy Way Out."

Mostly we talk about the uncertainty of it all and mention issues related to good-enough parenting, lousy parents who get resilient kids, and good parents who get lousy kids.

Thank you for listening. P
lease do write a review on iTunes!



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This podcast is available on iTunes or as an RSS feed orFeedburner feed. You can also listen to or download the .mp3or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com.
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1 comment:

Sarebear said...

I haven't been able to finish it yet (listened to over half) but have enjoyed it so far!