A recent New York Times article, "There’s a link between therapy culture and Childlessness", stirred up a lot of conversation by suggesting that therapy might be driving more people to opt out of parenthood. The piece implies that as therapy helps people name their childhood wounds, it’s also fostering fear—fear of becoming like one’s own parents, fear of harming a child, fear of not getting it right. It paints therapy as something that leads to estrangement, over-identification with trauma, and a kind of paralysis around parenting.
But as a trauma therapist—and a mother—I want to offer a different perspective.
Good therapy doesn’t tell people they’re too broken to parent. It helps them understand why they feel that way. And often, it helps them recognize that those feelings are old stories—shaped by experiences where they didn’t get what they needed, not because they were unworthy or unlovable, but because the people and environment around them were struggling too.
Therapy helps people see that trauma isn’t just what happened. It’s how what happened shaped the way we saw ourselves.
And that’s a crucial distinction. Two people can live through the same event and walk away with completely different internal experiences. When we name something as trauma, we’re not assigning blame—we’re acknowledging that our nervous system had to make sense of something overwhelming, often alone.
Naming our experiences as trauma-related doesn’t lock us in. It creates space—a little bit of distance between the self and the story, between the blame and responsibility. That’s where healing begins. That’s where flexibility in thought starts to grow. And from that place, people can start to reexamine their assumptions about themselves, their parents, and what kind of parent they might become.
Therapy doesn’t create estrangement. Sometimes it helps people recognize that proximity to certain relationships keeps them stuck in old roles, old wounds, and survival strategies that no longer serve them. Sometimes, healing requires space.
And let me be clear: we are not wired to detach from our caregivers. We are wired for connection. Children will go to extraordinary lengths—emotionally, cognitively, even physically—to maintain closeness. So when someone reaches the conclusion that they need distance from a parent to heal, it’s not because therapy talked them into it. It’s because the relational dynamic offered no other way forward. That’s not the “easy way out.” That’s a deeply painful outcome born from an unmet longing for safety.
Sometimes, that space allows for repair down the road. Sometimes it doesn’t. But in either case, therapy helps people honor their limits and build the internal scaffolding for a more integrated self.
And here’s what the article misses most of all: therapy doesn’t make people afraid to parent; It acknowledges that parenting in our current environment and with our previous experiences is hard and helps them parent with more intention. It helps them say, “This hurt—I want to do it differently,” without needing to be perfect. It gives them language for rupture and repair. It helps them recognize when their fear is old and when their child is safe. It helps them break cycles—not because they’ve figured it all out, but because they’re finally paying attention.
And for those who choose not to have children, it’s not because they’re “too therapized.” It’s because they finally had the space to ask themselves, without pressure or guilt, “Is this what I truly want?” That’s not fear. That’s clarity.
So no, therapy isn’t making people fragile.
It’s helping them slow down and ask better questions.
It’s helping them tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty, rather than defaulting to inherited patterns.
It’s making space—for grief, for clarity, for intention.
That space can feel unfamiliar at first. Lonely, even. But it’s also where new things begin—new ways of relating, of parenting, of living. And that’s not something to be afraid of. That’s something to honor.
As a therapist, I’ve witnessed how brave it is to choose curiosity over certainty.
And as a parent, I know how deeply uncomfortable and disorienting that can be—especially when you’re trying to do it differently than what was modeled for you.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
It just needs to be intentional—rooted in a willingness to grow.
And if having a therapist makes that easier, why question that?