The Pathologisation of Parenting | Ellie Lee
7 May 2026
With Ellie Lee
UK
Sociologist Ellie Lee, of the University of Kent, traces how therapy culture and the pathologisation of everyday life have reshaped parenting and childhood over recent decades. Her research provides essential sociological context for understanding how child-led, affirmation-centred models took hold in clinical settings — a pattern the Cass Review identified as a root cause of the failures in NHS gender services for young people in England.
Ellie Lee holds the Chair in Family and Parenting Research at the University of Kent and directs the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies. Her academic work spans more than two decades of sociological inquiry into how contemporary culture has come to frame the ordinary difficulties of adult life — working, raising children, managing relationships — through the lens of pathology and therapeutic intervention. That framing is not politically neutral, and Lee has spent years tracing its origins and consequences. Her route into this territory began with abortion politics, where she observed how women's reproductive decisions were increasingly medicalised and psychologised. That observation led to a wider question: how did so many normal human experiences come to require professional management and clinical narration? The concept of therapy culture — the expectation that emotional life should be supervised through clinical frameworks — sits at the heart of her inquiry. Lee argues this is not simply a medical development but a cultural one, rooted in shifting attitudes toward selfhood, expertise, and risk. A central thread of the conversation concerns the reversal of authority in the parent–child relationship. Lee traces a historical movement away from models in which adults exercised clear, confident guidance over children's development, toward child-led approaches in which children's expressed preferences and self-reported inner states are accorded near-diagnostic weight. This shift has accompanied a dramatic expansion in childhood diagnosis, as traits once understood as normal developmental variation were reconceived as conditions requiring identification and management. The episode discusses PDA — Pathological Demand Avoidance — as one illustration of this broader pattern, which Lee describes as the diseasing of childhood. The connection to gender-distressed young people is not incidental. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, documented in detail how NHS gender services had allowed a child-led and affirmation-centred model to displace careful, exploratory clinical work. It found that children's stated gender identities were routinely treated as authoritative, that co-occurring mental health conditions were under-explored, and that parents who raised questions about treatment direction were sometimes marginalised. Lee's sociological account of how parental authority eroded and diagnosis culture expanded provides an important wider frame for understanding how that clinical failure became possible — and why it was so difficult to challenge from within. If parenting itself has been pathologised — if parents are now expected to function as pseudo-therapists, deferring to professional frameworks at every turn — the conditions are created in which children's distress is readily medicalised and parents feel unequipped to offer grounded, ordinary guidance. Lee's research suggests that recovering confidence in adult authority, and in children's capacity to navigate difficulty without clinical intervention, is part of the broader cultural correction the evidence now demands.
