The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Childhood and childrearing are, according to Maté, in crisis. The very profusion of experts and books on childrearing are testament to this. As Maté says, “[W]e arrive at the bookshelf already lost, seeking direction” (160). Our normal instincts and efforts at parenting seem to be failing, and we look to others to provide a miraculous answer. Meanwhile, child health problems like anxiety, depression, and obesity provide grim collective evidence of this void. Yet, the fault does not, for the most part, lie with individual parents or their choices. Rather, for Maté, the current problem is a symptom of a deeper cultural malaise. This malaise goes back to the advent of capitalism and the deterioration of conditions for child-rearing it caused: “[I]n the small-band hunter-gatherer milieu, the extended family and clan formed an indispensable network of warm, responsive support” (174). In other words, child rearing was not in human prehistory predominantly carried out by just two parents. Instead, the extended human community assisted and supported the parents, referred to as “allomothers” (175), to ensure that children received sufficient love. Likewise, the group ensured that parents received emotional and practical support to achieve their potential.

This communal form of parenting has continued in various forms up until relatively recently. Extended families and communities supporting parents and children have been the norm in many places right through to the 20th century. However, modern capitalism has gradually eroded this model. On the one hand, as Maté says, “[T]he need to make a living impels many people to move far away from their extended families” (177). Economic necessity and capital’s mobility mean that parents and prospective parents increasingly live outside of traditional family networks. At the same time, capitalism has caused an “erosion of community ties” (180). The standardization and mechanization of life and consumption has detached parents from a tangible sense of community and accelerated the norm of the isolated nuclear family. Unsurprisingly, the results for childrearing have been disastrous. Combined with parental stress, itself a result of hypercompetitive capitalist labor markets, the decline in parental support has left both children and parents feeling isolated, unable to forge proper bonds with either each other or the world overall.

Maté highlights how corporations and advertisers have “exploited and exacerbated the void created by the loss of connection” (188). In the absence of meaningful connections with adults, advertisers teach children that social identity and acceptance by peers depends upon buying their products. Like other forms of addiction, consumption based on this drive undermines genuine human connections and fuels the need for more consumption to compensate.

This exploitative logic dovetails with and is accelerated by contemporary technology. As Maté says, quoting Shimi Kang, “video games, social media, and apps are engineered to keep young brains glued to their screens by finding ways to reward them with hits of dopamine” (190). These products can market themselves as “essential” to the social lives of children and teenagers, and themselves provide the platform for still more advertising and consumption. Not only that, but these technologies actively seek to “hook” their users. They do this by providing immediate, superficial gratification that real-world interactions cannot match, making them seem increasingly dull or difficult in comparison. In this way, proper childhood development is dealt yet another blow. This is also why a deeper study of addiction and how it operates is crucial to Maté’s efforts to understand the effects of late capitalist culture on our health.