The Pathologisation of Parenting | Ellie Lee
7 May 2026
With Ellie Lee
Global
Ellie Lee, Professor of Family and Parenting Research at the University of Kent, examines how parenthood has been swept up in therapy culture — a process that pathologises ordinary family life and erodes adult authority. From the diseasing of childhood to contested diagnoses such as PDA, her research reveals the intellectual infrastructure that has made it easier to frame gender-distressed children as candidates for medical intervention rather than as beneficiaries of patient, authoritative parenting.
Ellie Lee is Professor of Family and Parenting Research at the University of Kent and Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies. Her academic work spans several decades and connects subjects that might appear unrelated — abortion politics, the sociology of risk, and the shifting cultural expectations placed on parents. What links them, she argues, is a broader process by which ordinary adult life has come to be understood through the lens of pathology and professional therapeutic intervention. The conversation traces how therapy culture has reshaped the way parenthood is understood and practised. Rather than seeing parents as ordinary adults exercising reasonable authority, the dominant cultural framing increasingly positions them as potential sources of psychological harm to their children, in need of constant professional guidance and emotional management. This shift has practical consequences: it undermines parental confidence, transfers authority from families to credentialled experts, and creates a climate in which children's emotional states are treated as clinical data requiring specialist interpretation. A substantial part of the discussion concerns what Lee calls the diseasing of childhood — the expansion of diagnostic categories applied to children's behaviour and development. One example examined in the episode is Pathological Demand Avoidance, or PDA, a contested profile frequently associated with the autism spectrum. Critics of the PDA framework argue that it pathologises ordinary childhood resistance to adult authority, with the practical consequence of removing the expectation that children should learn to tolerate and navigate reasonable demands from parents and teachers. Lee draws a direct line between these broader cultural dynamics and the specific question of gender-distressed children. When parenthood has been pathologised, when adult authority over children is routinely treated with suspicion, and when childhood behaviour is reflexively medicalised, the ground has been prepared for the idea that a child's stated gender identity should not be questioned or guided by parents and clinicians but simply affirmed and, where requested, medically accommodated. The episode presents this not as an isolated development but as the logical extension of several decades of cultural and institutional change. The relevance for Ireland is considerable. Irish parents navigating gender services have encountered the same conflicting messages as parents elsewhere in the English-speaking world — being told simultaneously that affirming a child's gender identity is a safeguarding necessity and that any questioning of it risks serious harm. The scrutiny applied to the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine, most visibly in the Cass Review published in Britain in 2024, sent ripples through Irish policy discussions, raising the same questions Lee poses here: whether diagnosis and affirmation have become default responses that leave little room for psychotherapy, watchful waiting, or meaningful parental involvement. The episode ends on a note of cautious optimism. Lee identifies a growing appetite among parents, researchers and some clinicians for a more measured approach — one that takes children's distress seriously without immediately reaching for diagnostic labels or medical pathways. For those in Ireland who want to make the case for therapeutic support and parental engagement over early medical intervention, understanding the cultural mechanisms that have made those arguments so difficult to advance is an essential starting point.
