You can watch the full conversation here:
Until very recently, the differences between childhood and adulthood were universally understood. Adulthood was characterised by responsibility, authority, and endurance. Parents were responsible for their children and exercised authority over them - mother knew best and her word was often law. It was widely understood that life could be difficult, work monotonous, and childhood turbulent. None of this automatically signalled pathology. Today, however, more and more of ordinary life is being interpreted through the language of therapy, diagnosis, and psychological vulnerability.
In the latest Beyond Gender podcast episode, Mia Hughes and I spoke with Ellie Lee, Professor of Family and Parenting Research at University of Kent and Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, about how this profound cultural shift took hold and how it impacts parents, children and wider society.
Professor Lee’s work began in abortion politics, but over time she became interested in a much broader transformation in Western culture. Increasingly, the major social roles of adult life - parenting, education, work, and even relationships - have come to be framed through what she calls “therapy culture.” Distress is no longer seen as an inevitable part of life or development, but as evidence of psychological harm, unmet emotional needs, or hidden trauma. Difficulties are increasingly treated as conditions to be managed rather than experiences to be endured.
My first book, Cotton Wool Kids, explored the impact of contemporary parenting culture, and I have long been a fan of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, so I was especially keen to hear Ellie Lee speak about modern parenting culture. We spoke about how parents are now often expected to operate as amateur psychologists, constantly monitoring emotional states, validating feelings, and interpreting behaviour through diagnostic frameworks. Parenting advice increasingly treats ordinary childhood misbehaviour as evidence of potential disorder. Tantrums are interpreted as emotional dysregulation, shyness as a potential anxiety disorder, and defiance as a pathological condition.
Ellie explains how these changes have profoundly altered the relationship between parents and children. Historically, parents were expected to provide guidance, structure, and authority. Today, many parents feel uncertain about exercising authority at all. Instead, parenting models increasingly place the child’s feelings and perceptions at the centre of family life while parents are often encouraged to suppress their instincts, downplay their authority, and avoid imposing their values too strongly.
This child-led approach is often presented as compassionate and progressive. Yet parents of trans-identified children now know that this approach raises difficult questions about what happens when children make immature or self-destructive decisions. More broadly, the reluctance to challenge children’s perceptions or impose limits reflects a wider cultural uncertainty about adult authority itself. Development often requires frustration, discipline, and adaptation to reality. As adults become increasingly reluctant to exercise authority, set boundaries or tolerate conflict, children are given fewer opportunities to develop resilience, self-regulation, and maturity.
Our conversation explored how these trends have intensified over recent decades. As traditional sources of meaning and authority weakened, psychological language expanded to fill the vacuum. Therapy culture has increasingly become not simply a way of treating severe mental illness, but a framework for interpreting ordinary life, parenting, and childhood.
Many of us recognise that childhood has transformed in recent decades. Ellie has studied this shift extensively and explains how it has happened. She points to the growing phenomenon of what she calls the “diseasing of childhood,” where the threshold for defining children as vulnerable or disordered has steadily lowered. Increasing numbers of children are now viewed through diagnostic categories, with behaviours once considered part of normal development reframed as symptoms requiring intervention.
We discuss the condition known as Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a controversial and increasingly popular label often used to explain oppositional or avoidant behaviour in children. Ellie questions whether some modern diagnostic trends risk encouraging adults to reinterpret normal developmental struggles through a medical lens, often in ways that lower expectations for children rather than helping them mature.
These themes connect directly to contemporary debates around trans-identified children. In many cases, adults have become hesitant to challenge or question a child’s self-declared identity. The older assumption that adults guide children through confusion and developmental instability has weakened. Increasingly, the child’s subjective feelings are treated as authoritative and fixed. Parents too are more often judged by other involved adults and found wanting. The ‘good enough mother’ is now more often perceived as not really good enough after all.
This has created profound consequences. Now that distress is interpreted primarily through identity and pathology, medical intervention begins to be viewed as compassionate, necessary, and even morally urgent. Ellie’s analysis helps explain why debates around gender identity medicine cannot be separated from wider cultural changes in parenting, authority, therapy culture, and the medicalisation of everyday life.
Yet despite the seriousness of these issues, the conversation was not pessimistic. One of the most hopeful parts of the discussion centred on the importance of boundaries, confidence, and adult responsibility. Children benefit when adults are willing to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, and temporary unhappiness rather than attempting to eliminate all distress.
Ellie’s broader point is both simple and deeply countercultural. Human development depends not only on care and empathy, but also on structure, limits, and learning to live with frustration and reality. A culture that pathologises ordinary life risks weakening the very capacities that help people grow stronger.
The episode raises important questions for parents, clinicians, educators, and wider society. At what point does compassion stop helping individuals develop resilience and instead begin encouraging fragility? What authority should parents have over their children? Who decides what is best for a child? What is the impact of the medicalisation and pathologisation of distress?
Watch our conversation here: