"The parenting industry feeds our childhood wounds by telling us we aren't enough"
How to move beyond trauma.
Tanmoy (T): "The world is making our children mad" – what do you mean by that?
Louis Weinstock (L): Around the world, we're seeing an acute rise in children's mental health problems. That's not a random trend, there are clear environmental reasons for it. The mainstream western approach to mental health is too focused on the individual, even though we know that a child's brain develops in the context of relationships and the environment in which they grow up. I wanted to ask, What are the ways in which this world we live in might be contributing to the child mental health crisis? And what can we do about it?
T: Another great title for the book would be 'How the World Is Making Parents Mad'. Our parents had the excuse of not knowing child psychology. But we have all these books and YouTube videos and Instagram reels. We have to be the absolute pinnacle of parenting. I think our generation that grew up in the 80s and 90s deserves a lot of credit for the normalisation of mental health conversations. But many of us are still dragging with us our own unresolved childhood angst. Healing our inner child while nurturing our children – it's exhausting.
