Abigail Shrier

Abigail Shrier is a journalist, columnist at The Free Press, and bestselling author whose work centers on parenting, family relationships, and the cultural forces shaping childhood.

Tough Love

Shrier writes a weekly advice column for The Free Press called “Tough Love,” in which readers submit their hardest personal and family dilemmas for her response.

In this series, she addresses questions about parenting and conflict, including whether a child should hit back at a bully, how a parent should react when a son gets a girlfriend and shuts his mother out, and what to do when a husband is jealous of a new baby.

Recent columns also take on issues like an older sibling who has stolen an inheritance and long‑standing resentments between parents and adult children, with the letters foregrounding loyalty, obligation, and boundaries inside families.

The Tough Love column runs on a fixed weekly cadence for subscribers and has been positioned by the masthead as a way for readers to have their “thorniest questions” answered, underscoring that advice and analysis are central to her role.

Across these pieces, she keeps the focus on concrete situations and the practical choices facing parents, partners, and grown children, rather than on abstract parenting theory.

Parent Your Kids

Beyond the advice format, Shrier writes essays and reported features on parenting that examine how institutions and professionals influence everyday family life.

In “Parent Your Kids,” part of a series on repairing America in an age of political violence, she argues for parents’ direct responsibility for their children and scrutinizes trends that outsource that responsibility to schools, experts, and activists.

Her work in the parenting vertical includes pieces on parents who face criminal charges for ordinary decisions, such as a mother who lets her son go for a walk and is later treated as a criminal and placed on a child‑abuse registry.

She highlights stories where therapeutic advice leads children to cut off contact with their parents, then examines the regret and fallout that follow “no contact” decisions made under professional guidance.

In articles like “Give Your Kid Real Work,” she contrasts fashionable parenting aesthetics with the idea that children need meaningful work and responsibility, reinforcing her interest in how independence, competence, and resilience develop in the home.

Across this strand of her writing, she returns to the tension between safety‑driven or therapeutic parenting norms and the demands of raising children who can manage risk, work, and conflict.

Bad Therapy

Shrier extends her focus on children and parents into book‑length work, notably “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up,” a New York Times bestseller about the impact of modern therapeutic culture on young people.

In public discussions of the book, she examines how an expanded therapeutic framework can keep children from assuming adult responsibilities, linking those themes back to the anxieties and dilemmas that appear in her columns.

Her earlier bestseller “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” investigates the rise of adolescent gender medicine and its social drivers, and has been cited by the masthead as part of her broader investigative work.

Alongside these books, Shrier participates in conversations and events that delve into parenting, anxious child‑rearing, and the long‑term effects of therapeutic trends, reinforcing that her journalism and authorship revolve around how children grow up in the current culture.

Her background as a journalist and her recognition with the Barbara Olson Award for Excellence and Independence in Journalism underscore that she approaches these subjects as reported arguments rather than purely personal reflection.

How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Shrier also writes investigations and opinion pieces on education, gender, and speech that sit alongside her parenting work and give context for the pressures families face.

In articles such as “How the Gender Fever Finally Broke,” she tracks policy and cultural shifts around gender‑affirming care and the politics surrounding it, paying particular attention to how institutions respond to dissent and changing public sentiment.

Pieces like “The Kindergarten Intifada” and coverage of anti‑Israel ideology in public schools examine how political activism and identity narratives are introduced to children in educational settings.

Other work, including “Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Our Government Censors,” addresses technology platforms and government actors in the context of censorship and free expression, again connecting institutional behavior to the environment in which parents are raising children.

Across this body of work, Shrier’s distinguishing focus is on the convergence of parenting, education, therapy, and activism, and on how those systems shape the real choices facing families rather than on day‑to‑day news from any single institution.

Her combination of advice columns, narrative features, investigative pieces, and books makes her coverage notably different from a generic parenting reporter who might focus only on trends, tips, or child‑development research without this sustained attention to institutions and cultural change.