For thousands of parents, it’s Pipher who can explain what’s happening. Two years ago, as a clinical psychologist practicing in Lincoln, Neb., she published “Reviving Ophelia,” a red alert to the dangers of what she called America’s “girl-poisoning culture.” The brand of femininity she saw being imposed on adolescent girls (think Calvin Klein ads) was obliterating the confidence and self-knowledge they had amassed since childhood; usually their own peers acted as the enforcers. These insights weren’t brand new–Carol Gilligan sparked the discussion with “In a Different Voice” (1982)–but few feminists or psychologists have nailed the problem in such tough terms, while offering parents strong support and practical advice. “Ophelia” is still a best seller, with 415,000 copies in print. “I was afraid the book might be too alarmist,” says Pipher. “I don’t think that anymore. From what I hear, the book was low-key compared with reality.”
Now Pipher has expanded her thinking to the whole family in a new book that she’ll introduce on a cross-country speaking tour beginning next week. In B_The Shelter of Each Other_b (304 pages. Putnam. $24.95), Pipher argues that families are disintegrating in the wake of technology. “We really underestimated the effects of TV and other tools,” she says. “For the first time in history, children are not being socialized by their parents.”
The problem isn’t TV per se, or Nintendo or the Internet or any other single household toy, but rather the sheer pileup in recent years of electronic substitutes for home life. “I did a lot of interviews with teachers for this book,” she says. “They see a significant change in children’s behavior in the last five or six years. Kids have worse manners and fewer social skills. They can’t negotiate conflict or cope with frustration or sadness. They don’t have the equipment kids had even 10 years ago, when children were still being raised by their parents.” All TV is educational, Pipher emphasizes, especially the ads: they teach kids to be “self-centered, impulsive and addicted.”
Though she’s been on “Today” and “Oprah,” and numbers Hillary Clinton among her fans, Pipher is probably the least glamorous candidate for guruhood who’s ever been hooked up to a mike. She and her husband, Jim, also a therapist, share offices with a friend. She has three outfits, she admits, all drab, and drives a family-size van around Lincoln. If she’s famous in town, few folks bother to acknowledge it. But much of the power of her writing comes from the person we sense behind the text: a smart, solid Midwesterner who believes that for all their mistakes, most parents are trying to do their best.
Back in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, Pipher says, it was easier for a family to stay a family. Those decades were hardly a golden era, but such hazards as poverty, blizzards or failing crops had to be faced together. Today the enemies are materialism and selfishness–cultural demands that keep people isolated. “A school superintendent told me he came from what would be considered a dysfunctional family,” she says. “But he lived in a functional community. He thought his childhood was easier than what kids go through now.”
“Shelter” bears some of the hallmarks of typical pop psychology: the writing tends to be repetitive, and the case studies are mostly composites. While using composites is a standard way to protect people’s privacy, it’s harder to believe in these perfectly illustrative portraits than ff Pipher had simply altered identifying details. But she breaks dramatically with many of her colleagues when she blames her own profession for making people’s problems worse. Therapy, she writes, frequently undermines families by labeling normal parental love as “co-dependency” or as “emotional incest.” It tends to encourage narcissism and insists that patients strive for an impossible goal of pure psychological freedom when they’re likely to be desperate for connectedness. “A woman friend has a husband with a heart disorder,” writes Pipher. “Over lunch she said to me, ‘I’m not sure I have a right to ask him to see a doctor. Am I being controlling or codependent?’”
Pipher says she herself has made most of the mistakes she now criticizes. Today her ways of shoring up tottering families are startlingly humble: she describes her method as “solution-focused.” Designate one evening a week to spend together; go backpacking; encourage an angry teenager to volunteer at a soup kitchen; build ties to far-flung relatives. And remember that normality is full of imperfections. “Most of us live in families that have elements of both the Waltohs and ‘Mommie Dearest’,” she writes. Pipher makes no grandiose claims for the power of her therapy; her clients have been largely white and middle class,and her methods are most applicable to them, she acknowledges. She admits she’s not always successful, and even when she is, the larger problem of a greed-and-trash culture isn’t addressed. “If you say, ‘We need cultural change,’ people’s eyes glaze over,” Pipher says. “I concentrate on what individuals and families can do. People really can protect their own families, and they can get to work helping to rebuild their communities.”
Despite an undercurrent of sharp social criticism, “Shelter” is no diatribe; neither is it depressing. Her canny mix of optimism and practicality gives Pipher’s fans a way to resist the worst of the culture around them and substitute the best of themselves. Why not try bike rides instead of Prozac? It’s about time we had a guru from Nebraska.
