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October 20 - October 29, 2024
In 2015, two Florida parents were charged with felony child neglect when they were delayed getting home.33 Unable to get into his house, their eleven-year-old son played with a basketball in their yard for ninety minutes.
Parental modeling gives them a sense that institutions can be made to serve their needs if they can make the right argument to the right person at the right time.
As the number of yes responses increases beyond two, measures of health and success in adulthood tend to decline,
an important complication to our story about antifragility: Severe adversity that hits kids early, especially in the absence of secure and loving attachment relationships with adults, does not make them stronger; it makes them weaker. Chronic, severe
A recent analysis found that at thirty-eight top schools, including most of the Ivy League, there are more undergraduate students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.
They may be more likely to interpret words, books, and ideas in terms of safety versus danger, or good versus evil, rather than using dimensions that would promote learning, such as true versus false, or fascinating versus uninteresting.
When the young rats were later put into new situations, those that had engaged in rough-and-tumble play showed fewer signs of fearfulness and engaged in more exploration of the new environment.
The linguistic brain is “expecting” certain kinds of input, and children are therefore motivated to engage in back-and-forth reciprocal exchanges with others in order to get that input.
the brain is “expecting” the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop.
Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child’s perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger.
defines “free play” as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”
If members of iGen have been risk-deprived and are therefore more risk averse, then it is likely that they have a lower bar for what they see as daunting or threatening.
There is growing evidence that with young children, these methods can backfire and produce negative effects on creativity as well as on social and emotional development.
Beginning in preschool and continuing throughout primary school, children’s days are now more rigidly structured. Opportunities for self-direction, social exploration, and scientific discovery are increasingly lost to direct instruction in the core curriculum, which is often driven by the schools’ focus on preparing students to meet state testing requirements.
“grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that’s tragic,” psychology professor Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit, told us. “Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.” She wants young people to “devote themselves to pursuits that are intrinsically fulfilling.”
One paradox of upper-middle-class American life is that some of the things parents and schools do to help kids get admitted to college may make them less able to thrive once they’re there.
Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going.
parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.”
seventeen of the top twenty-five universities in the world are in the United States.
“a market-driven decision by universities, made decades ago, to treat students as consumers—who pay up to $60,000 per year for courses, excellent cuisine, comfortable accommodations and a lively campus life.”
Many campuses have become less like scholarly monasteries and more like luxurious “country clubs.”
But bias alone is not harassment or discrimination.
but psychological experiments have consistently shown that to be human is to have biases.
Universities have an important moral and legal duty to prevent harassment on campus. What counts as harassment, however, has changed quite a lot in recent years.
They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
“moral dependence.” People come to rely on external authorities to resolve their problems, and, over time, “their willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy.”66
They found that there is a window of higher impressionability running from about age fourteen to twenty-four, with its peak right around age eighteen.
distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy).
“humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones,” and “when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”
If you want to motivate people to support a new policy or join a movement in the name of justice, you need to activate in them a clear perception, or intuition, that someone didn’t get what he or she deserved (distributive injustice) or that someone was a victim of an unfair process (procedural injustice).
“Social justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities. Social workers aim to open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.”
“Equal outcomes” means that of all the students who participate in sports, the ratio of men to women will be the same as the ratio of men to women in the student body as a whole.
Any departure from those numbers means that a group is “underrepresented,” and underrepresentation is often taken to be direct evidence of systemic bias or injustice.
Ideas may be accepted not because they are true but because the politically dominant group wants them to be true in order to promote its preferred narrative and preferred set of remedies.
That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.
kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict.
Dr. Leahy’s book The Worry Cure. Also, Freeing Your Child From Anxiety, by Tamar Chansky,
They include curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility.
Strong and clear policies on free speech and academic freedom are useless if the people at the top aren’t willing to stand by them when the going gets tough and the leadership faces a pressure campaign—whether
Include viewpoint diversity in diversity policies.
As we make progress in such areas as safety, comfort, and inclusion, we raise our expectations. The progress is real, but as we adapt to our improved conditions, we often fail to notice it.
It has become increasingly clear that identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy.
What we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire
