The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

by Jonathan Haidt

“Social network sites benefit their users when they are used to make meaningful social connections and harm their users through pitfalls such as isolation and social comparison when they are not.”

there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.

We should all take reasonable precautions to protect our children’s physical safety—for example, by owning a fire extinguisher—but we should not submit to the pull of safetyism (overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risk), which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.

We suggest that modern parenting practices may unwittingly teach children the Great Untruths, and we examine how parents and elementary schools may unknowingly work together to induct children into the culture of safetyism. The shift to this more fearful and overprotective way of treating children, which began in the 1980s and reached high levels in the 1990s—especially among more educated parents—is our third explanatory thread.

The abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is among the most horrific crimes one can imagine. It is also, thankfully, among the rarest. According to the FBI, almost 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated their plans, misunderstood directions, or run away from home or foster care,6 and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home.7 The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing—roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors.8 And since the 1990s, the rates of all crimes against children have gone down,9 while the chances of a kidnapped child surviving the ordeal have gone up.

In 2013, for example, the murder rate dropped to the same level it had been at sixty years earlier.15 Nevertheless, the fear of crime did not diminish along with the crime rate, and the new habits of fearful parenting seem to have become new national norms. American parenting is now wildly out of sync with the actual risk that strangers pose to children.

We can understand a mother’s fear that her son might encounter a pervert in a public restroom. But wouldn’t it be better to teach the boy to recognize perverted or inappropriate bathroom behavior so he can get away from it on those very rare occasions when he might encounter it, rather than teaching him to fear for his life and maintain verbal contact with a parent every time he needs to use a public restroom?

The success of childhood safety campaigns helps explain why modern parents often take a concern about safety to the extreme of safetyism. After all, if focusing on big threats produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible?

A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems.

But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment. (Keeping them indoors also raises their risk of obesity.)

Skenazy puts the case succinctly: “The problem with this ‘everything is dangerous’ outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself.”

As Taleb showed us in Antifragile, by placing a protective shield over our children, we inadvertently stunt their growth and deprive them of the experiences they need to become successful and functional adults.

“Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children,” she says. “However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile.”

When countries attain material prosperity and women gain educational equality, full political rights, and access to good healthcare and contraception, birth rates plunge and most couples have just one or two children. They invest more time in these fewer, healthier children.30 In fact, even though mothers today have fewer children and spend far more time working outside the home than they did in 1965, they are spending more total time taking care of their children.31 Fathers’ time with kids has increased even more.

Parents spending time with their kids is generally a good thing, but too much close supervision and protection can morph into safetyism. Safetyism takes children who are antifragile by nature and turns them into young adults who are more fragile and anxious, and therefore more receptive to the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

When the police endorse safetyism, it forces parents to overprotect. The police chief of New Albany, Ohio, advises that children should not be allowed outside without supervision until the age of 16.35 When you combine peer pressure, shaming, and the threat of arrest, it’s no wonder that so many American parents simply don’t let their kids out of their sight anymore, even though many of those same parents report that their fondest memories of childhood were unsupervised outdoor adventures with friends.

Both scholars find that, with respect to parenting practices, social class matters far more than race, so we’ll set race aside and focus on the ways that class differences in parenting may be relevant for understanding what is now happening on college campuses.

Parents using this style see their task as cultivating their children’s talents while stimulating the development of their cognitive and social skills. They fill their children’s calendars with adult-guided activities, lessons, and experiences, and they closely monitor what happens in school. They talk with their children a great deal, using reasoning and persuasion, and they hardly ever use physical force or physical punishment.

The second kind of family is very common in the bottom third of the socioeconomic spectrum, where most children are born to unmarried mothers. These families generally employ a parenting style that Lareau calls “natural growth parenting.” Working-class parents tend to believe that children will reach maturity without needing much guidance or interference from adults.

Spock encouraged parents to relax and let children be children, and indeed, Baby Boomers and GenX children were generally given the freedom to roam around their neighborhoods and play without adult supervision. But Putnam notes that, beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, “the dominant ideas and social norms about good parenting [had] shifted from Spock’s ‘permissive parenting’ to a new model of ‘intensive parenting,’”38 which essentially describes Lareau’s concerted cultivation.

This change happened primarily among middle-class parents, who were immersed in news reports about the importance of early stimulation (for example, the erroneous idea that babies who listen to Mozart will become smarter)39 and who wanted to give their children every possible advantage in the increasingly competitive race to get into a good college.

One is that all those organized activities help to familiarize middle-class children with the ways of adults in professional settings and adult-run institutions. 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.

Working-class kids, in contrast, have generally had less exposure to adult institutions and have not seen their parents engage with these institutions with the same sense of strength, rights, or entitlement to good treatment. Working-class kids are therefore more likely to feel like “fish out of water” in college. (This may have contributed to the feelings of not belonging that Olivia wrote about,

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 adversity creates “toxic stress.” It resets children’s stress responses to kick in more readily and for longer periods in the future.

The lesson we draw from this brief review of research on social class and parenting is that although kids are naturally antifragile, there are two very different ways to damage their development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity. This has happened to some of today’s college students, particularly those from working-class or poor families. The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.

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%.42 This means that overparenting is probably a much greater cause of fragility on such campuses than is underparenting.

Paranoid parenting is a powerful way to teach kids all three of the Great Untruths. We convince children that the world is full of danger; evil lurks in the shadows, on the streets, and in public parks and restrooms. Kids raised in this way are emotionally prepared to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people—a worldview that makes them fear and suspect strangers.

Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults

Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity.

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.

Genes are essential for getting the various cell lines started in the embryo, and genes guide brain development toward a “first draft” in utero. But experience matters, too, even while the baby is in the uterus; and after birth, it matters enormously. Experience is so essential for wiring a large brain that the “first draft” of the brain includes a strong motivation to practice behaviors that will give the brain the right kind of feedback to optimize itself for success in the environment that happens to surround it. That’s why young mammals are so keen to play, despite the risks.

The genes get the ball rolling on the development of brain structures for language, but the child must actually encounter and practice a language to finish the process. 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. It’s fun for them to exchange sounds, and later, real words, with other people. A child who was deprived of these linguistic interactions until puberty would be unable to fully acquire a language or learn to speak normally, having missed the “critical period” for language learning that is part of the normal developmental process.

The genes get the ball rolling on the first draft of the brain, but 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. Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults.

We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development [emphasis

The decline of unsupervised free play—including ample opportunities to take small risks—is our fourth explanatory thread.

Piano lessons and soccer practice are not free play, but goofing around on a piano or organizing a pickup soccer game are. Gray and other researchers note that all play is not equal. Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most.

Twenge’s analysis of iGen, the current generation of kids, shows that the drop in free play has accelerated. Compared with Millennials, iGen spends less time going out with friends, more time interacting with parents, and much more time interacting with screens (which can be a form of social interaction but can have some negative effects, as we discussed in chapter 7).

Compared with previous generations, members of iGen have therefore had much less of the kind of unsupervised free play that Gray says is most valuable. They have been systematically deprived of opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk.

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. They will see more ordinary life tasks as beyond their ability to handle on their own without help from an adult. It should not surprise us that anxiety and depression rates began rising rapidly on campus as soon as iGen arrived.

One of the major reasons for the decline of all forms of unsupervised outdoor activity is, of course, the unrealistic media-amplified fear of abduction, which we described in the previous chapter. In one large survey, published in 2004, 85% of mothers said that their children played outdoors less frequently than they themselves had played when they were the same age. When asked to select reasons to explain why their children didn’t spend more time on outdoor play, 82% of the mothers chose “safety concerns,” including the fear of crime.

But there’s a second reason, a second fear that haunts American parents and children—particularly those in the middle class and above—far more than it did in the late twentieth century: the college admissions process.

Researchers at the University of Virginia compared kindergarten classes in 1998 (composed of some of the last members of the Millennial generation) to kindergarten in 2010 and found that by 2010, the use of standardized tests in kindergarten was much more common. Teaching methods and classroom organization had changed, and far more time was spent on advanced reading and math content. The study also found that teachers’ academic expectations of kindergarteners in 2010 were far higher than they had been in 1998,27 a trend that seems to continue. For example, today’s Common Core kindergarten math standards include “construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others,”28 and reading skills include “read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.”

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.

“Let’s say this is math. If they don’t get an A in sixth-grade math, it means they might not be on track to be in the highest level of math in high school, which means they won’t get into Stanford.”

And it is precisely these elite, wealthy, and hypercompetitive school districts that provide the largest share of students at the top universities in the United States.45 “Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life,” says Gray, “which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems.”46 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.

eighteenth birthday. It takes many years to cultivate these skills, which overlap with the ones that Peter Gray maintains are learned during free play. 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. They must work out conflicts over fairness on their own; no adult can be called upon to side with one child against another. Horwitz points out that when adult-supervised activities crowd out free play, children are less likely to develop the art of association:

Denying children the freedom to explore on their own takes away important learning opportunities that help them to develop not just independence and responsibility, but a whole variety of social skills that are central to living with others in a free society. If this argument is correct, 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.” This is one of the “vulnerabilities of democracies” noted by Vincent Ostrom.

In June 2017, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, was invited to be the commencement speaker at his son’s graduation from middle school. Like Van Jones (whom we quoted in chapter 4), Roberts understands antifragility. He wishes for his son’s classmates to have the sorts of painful experiences that will make them better people and better citizens.54 Here is an excerpt from his speech: From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

Free play helps children develop the skills of cooperation and dispute resolution that are closely related to the “art of association” upon which democracies depend. When citizens are not skilled in this art, they are less able to work out the ordinary conflicts of daily life. They will more frequently call for authorities to apply coercive force to their opponents. They will be more likely to welcome the bureaucracy of safetyism.

Given that the misguided policy was both stigmatizing and likely to put suicidal students at increased risk, mental health professionals roundly criticized the policy. Nevertheless, in an interview with a local newspaper, the dean defended the practice, claiming that “relying on your friends can be very disruptive to them.”4 Please read that quote again. The dean seemed to believe that if students talked about their suffering, it would harm their friends. It is an illustration of the Untruth of Fragility (What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker) trumping common sense and basic humanity.