Therapists: 10 Things That Are Mother-Bashing and Deny Kids the Best Mental Health Treatment

Some surprising insights from a 30-year-old article that I consider one of my best ever

“Important gaps in the literature are identified, and a consistent, if unintentional, "mother-bashing" quality in the existing literature is noted.”—Downey & Coyne, 1990

My ‘Children of Depressed Parents: An Integrative Review’ was co-authored with Geraldine Downey and remains in second place among my favorite papers I have written, ahead of over 425 competitors.

When I need a boost to my morale, I sometimes take a look at this paper again. I remind myself that hard work sometimes pays off, although we had a horrible experience when this article was submitted to Psychological Bulletin (Editor and child psychologist John Masters, was soon jailed for soliciting sex from an underage boy. So he could not respond to our frantic requests asking what happened to the manuscript we had submitted. Someone plagiarized the manuscript, etc.)

According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited almost 4000 times

Here is a link to a free PDF of the paper. The last sentence of the abstract capture…