Abigail Shrier: ‘Parents need to reclaim authority over their children’

Last summer, Abigail Shrier’s 12-year-old son came home from camp with a stomach ache. When it showed no signs of clearing up, the US journalist and author of the controversial bestseller Irreversible Damage, took him to a paediatric urgent-care clinic near their LA home, where a doctor ruled out anything serious and handed the boy over to a nurse, who asked Shrier to “give us some privacy so I can do our mental health screening”.