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

by Jonathan Haidt

Twenge’s analyses suggest that there are two major generational changes that may be driving the rise of safetyism on campus since 2013. The first is that kids now grow up much more slowly. Activities that are commonly thought to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood are happening later—for example, having a job, driving a car, drinking alcohol, going out on a date, and having sex. Members of iGen wait longer to do these things— and then do less of them—than did members of previous generations.

The bottom line is that when members of iGen arrived on campus, beginning in the fall of 2013, they had accumulated less unsupervised time and fewer offline life experiences than had any previous generation.

The second major generational change is a rapid rise in rates of anxiety and depression.11

Applying labels to people can create what is called a looping effect: it can change the behavior of the person being labeled and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.14 This is part of why labeling is such a powerful cognitive distortion.

Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.

The first is that social media presents “curated” versions of lives, and girls may be more adversely affected than boys by the gap between appearance and reality.

While this can increase FOMO (fear of missing out), which affects both boys and girls, scrolling through hundreds of such photos, girls may be more pained than boys by what Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen calls “FOBLO”—fear of being left out.29 When a girl sees images of her friends doing something she was invited to do but couldn’t attend (missed out), it produces a different psychological effect than when she is intentionally not invited (left out).

Another consequence of social media curation is that girls are bombarded with images of girls and women whose beauty is artificially enhanced, making girls ever more insecure about their own appearance.

The second reason that social media may be harder on girls is that girls and boys are aggressive in different ways. Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive—more likely to shove and hit one another, and they show a greater interest in stories and movies about physical aggression. Girls, in contrast, are more “relationally” aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals’ relationships, reputations, and social status—for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out.

Clearly universities were not causing a national mental health crisis; they were responding to one, and this may explain why the practices and beliefs of safetyism spread so quickly after 2013. But safetyism does not help students who suffer from anxiety and depression. In fact, as we argue throughout this book, safetyism is likely to make things even worse for students who already struggle with mood disorders. Safetyism also inflicts collateral damage on the university’s culture of free inquiry, because it teaches students to see words as violence and to interpret ideas and speakers as safe versus dangerous, rather than merely as true versus false. That way of thinking about words is likely to promote the intensification of a call-out culture, which, of course, gives students one more reason to be anxious.

Depression and anxiety tend to go together.39 Both conditions create strong negative emotions, which feed emotional reasoning. Anxiety changes the brain in pervasive ways such that threats seem to jump out at the person, even in ambiguous or harmless circumstances.40 Compared to their nonanxious peers, anxious students are therefore more likely to perceive danger in innocent questions (leading them to embrace the concept of microaggressions) or in a passage of a novel (leading them to ask for a trigger warning) or in a lecture given by a guest speaker (leading them to want the lecturer disinvited or for someone to create a safe space as an alternative to the lecture). Depression distorts cognition, too, and gives people much more negative views than are warranted about themselves, other people, the world, and the future.41 Problems loom larger and seem more pervasive. One’s resources for dealing with those problems seem smaller, and one’s perceived locus of control becomes more external,42 all of which discourages efforts to act vigorously to solve problems. Repeated failures to escape from what is perceived to be a bad situation can create a mental state that psychologist Martin Seligman called “learned helplessness,” in which a person believes that escape is impossible and therefore stops trying, even in new situations where effort would be rewarded.43 Furthermore, when people are depressed, or when their anxiety sets their threat-response system on high alert, they can ...

One factor that is already emerging as a central variable for study is the quality of a teenager’s relationships and how technology is impacting it. In a recent review of research on the effects of social media, social psychologists Jenna Clark, Sara Algoe, and Melanie Green offer this principle: “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.”45

The generation born between 1995 and 2012, called iGen (or sometimes Gen Z), is very different from the Millennials, the generation that preceded it. According to Jean Twenge, an expert in the study of generational differences, one difference is that iGen is growing up more slowly. On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations.

A second difference is that iGen has far higher rates of anxiety and depression. The increases for girls and young women are generally much larger than for boys and young men. The increases do not just reflect changing definitions or standards; they show up in rising hospital admission rates of self-harm and in rising suicide rates. The suicide rate of adolescent boys is still higher than that of girls, but the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.

According to Twenge, the primary cause of the increase in mental illness is frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices. Less than two hours a day seems to have no deleterious effects, but adolescents who spend several hours a day interacting with screens, particularly if they start in their early teen years or younger, have worse mental health outcomes than do ...

Girls may be suffering more than boys because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and ha...

iGen’s arrival at college coincides exactly with the arrival and intensification of the culture of safetyism from 2013 to 2017. Members of iGen may be especially attracted to the overprotection offered by the culture of safetyism on many campuses because of students’ higher levels of anxiety and depression. Both depression and anxiety cause changes in cog...

In addition to Lenore Skenazy, we spoke with Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of the best-selling book for parents How to Raise an Adult, and Erika Christakis, an expert in early-childhood development and author of The Importance of Being Little.

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?

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. For example, efforts to prevent financial instability by bailing out companies can lead to larger and more destructive crashes later on;24 efforts to protect forests by putting out small fires can allow dead wood to build up, eventually leading to catastrophic fires far worse than the sum of the smaller fires that were prevented.25 Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences. Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all.

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.

When parents get together and talk about parenting, it is common to hear condemnations of helicopter parenting. Many parents want to do less hovering and give their kids more freedom, but it’s not so easy; there are pressures from other parents, from schools, and even from laws that push parents to be more protective than they would like to be. Skenazy says that societal pressures often prompt parents to engage in “worst-first thinking.”32 Unless parents prepare for the worst possible outcomes, they are looked down on by other parents and by teachers for being bad parents (or even “America’s Worst Mom”). Good parents are expected to believe that their children are in danger every moment they are unsupervised.

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.

understand how social class influences parenting practices, we’ll draw on two books that combine in-depth profiles of families with sociological theory and data: Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau, and Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. 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.

The big divide in parenting practices is best seen in the contrast between two kinds of families: those in which children are raised by two parents who each have four-year-college degrees and are married to each other throughout their children’s childhood, and those in which children are raised by a single or divorced parent (or other relative) who does not have a four-year-college degree. The first kind of family is very common in the upper third of the socioeconomic spectrum, in which marriage rates are high and divorce rates are low. These families generally employ a parenting style that Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” 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. Children therefore experience “long stretches of leisure ...

working-class kids have one advantage: they get more unstructured and unsupervised play time, which, as we’ll say in the next chapter, is very good for developing social skills and a sense of autonomy.

To the extent that iGen college students are behaving differently from previous generations of college students, a contributing factor may be that, compared with previous generations, middle-class iGen (and late Millennial) students were overscheduled and overparented as children.

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.

Compared with middle-class kids, the second major disadvantage plaguing working-class kids is that they are more likely to have been affected by chronic and severe adversity.

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.

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.

When we overprotect children, we harm them. Children are naturally antifragile, so overprotection makes them weaker and less resilient later on.

Children in the United States and other prosperous countries are safer today than at any other point in history.

There are large social class differences in parenting styles. Families in the middle class (and above) tend to use a style that sociologist Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation,” in contrast to the “natural growth parenting” used by families in the working class (and below). Some college students from wealthier families may have been rendered more fragile from overparenting and oversupervision. College students from poorer backgrounds are exposed to a very different set of risks, including potential exposure to chronic, severe adversity, which is especially detrimental to resilience when children lack caring relationships with adults who can buffer stress and help them turn adversity into growth.

Paranoid parenting prepares today’s children to embrace the three Great Untruths, which means that when they go to college, they are psychologically primed to join a culture of safetyism.

Why don’t kids like to be “it”? Why, at the start of a game of tag, do they each call out, “Not it!” and then point to the loser, the last one to reject the role? A provocative answer can be found by looking at the play of other mammals, most of which have some version of chasing games. In species that are predators, such as wolves, their pups seem to prefer to be the chasers. In species that are prey, such as rats, the pups prefer to be chased.1 Our primate ancestors were both prey and predator, but they were prey for much longer. That may be why human children particularly enjoy practicing their fleeing and hiding skills.2

Play is essential for wiring a mammal’s brain to create a functioning adult. Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity.

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.

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. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety. Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society. We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development

Gray notes the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings: They seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate. . . . All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose.13

Given the fierce competition, parents in some social circles convey a sense of panic about children’s grades, even in middle school—as if not getting an A will determine the course of a child’s life. This would normally be a clear example of catastrophizing, but in some highly competitive school districts, it may not be entirely unrealistic.

But “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.”40

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.

The effects of play deprivation and oversupervision may extend far beyond college. Steven Horwitz, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana, took the same research on play that we have reviewed in this chapter and worked out some possible consequences for the future of liberal democracies.47 He drew on the work of political scientists Elinor Ostrom48 and Vincent Ostrom,49 both of whom studied how self-governing communities resolve conflicts peacefully. Successful democracies do this by developing a variety of institutions and norms that enable people with different goals and conflicting desires to resolve their problems while rarely appealing to the police or the state to coerce their fellow citizens. This is the “art of association” that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville when he traveled through the United States in 1831. Citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their 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.

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.

The decline of unsupervised free play is our fourth explanatory thread. Children, like other mammals, need free play in order to finish the intricate wiring process of neural development. Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent—physically and socially—as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders. Free play, according to Peter Gray, is “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.” This is the kind of play that play experts say is most valuable for children, yet it is also the kind of play that has declined most sharply in the lives of American children.

The decline in free play was likely driven by several factors, including an unrealistic fear of strangers and kidnapping (since the 1980s); the rising competitiveness for admission to top universities (over many decades); a rising emphasis on testing, test preparation, and homework; and a corresponding deemphasis on physical and social skills (since the early 2000s).

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.

Today, an estimated 20 million students are enrolled in American higher education, including roughly 40% of all eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.