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

by Jonathan Haidt

The barrage of vitriol and the threats of violence have had a lasting effect on Durden. “I still get knots in my stomach whenever I think about it or talk about it,” she told us in an email. “People say that things will get better because that’s the politically correct thing to say to someone in my position. But things don’t always get better, they sometimes get worse. And that’s how I am feeling.”

Maybe dont throw political dynamite into a hper polarized political environment?

in 2006, when iGen’s oldest were turning eleven, Facebook changed its membership requirement. No longer did you have to prove enrollment in a college; now any thirteen-year-old—or any younger child willing to claim to be thirteen—could join. But Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t really draw many middle school students until after the iPhone was introduced (in 2007) and was widely adopted over the next few years. It’s best, then, to think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially.

In short, iGen is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?

Given the difference in preferred forms of aggression, what would happen if a malevolent demon put a loaded handgun into the pocket of every adolescent in the United States? Which sex would suffer more? Boys, most likely, because they would find gunplay more appealing and would use guns more often to settle conflicts. On the other hand, what would happen if, instead of guns, that same malevolent demon put a smartphone, loaded up with social media apps, into the pocket of every adolescent?

Skenazy’s journey to infamy began in 2008, when she permitted her nine-year-old son, Izzy, to ride the New York City subway by himself. Izzy had been begging her for weeks to take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home. So, one sunny Sunday, Skenazy decided the time was right. She took him along on a trip to Bloomingdale’s. Confident that Izzy would find his way home and could ask a stranger for help if he needed it, she armed him with a subway map, a MetroCard, a twenty-dollar bill, and several quarters in case he needed to make a call, and then sent him on his way. Forty-five minutes later (right on time), Izzy arrived home (where his father was waiting for him) and was ecstatic about his success—and eager to do it again. Skenazy published a column about this little experiment in childhood independence in The New York Sun,2 describing both Izzy’s joy and the horrified reactions she received from other parents who heard what she had allowed Izzy to do. Two days later, she was on the Today show, and then MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. Online message boards were flooded with posts, mostly condemning her decision, though some applauded it. Soon, Skenazy was decried as “America’s Worst Mom.”3

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.

To see how far into safetyism some parents have gone, consider the Missouri family that staged a kidnapping of their own six-year-old son in 2015. They wanted to “teach him a lesson” about how dangerous it is to be friendly to strangers. After getting off his school bus, the boy was lured into a pickup truck by his aunt’s coworker. The man then told the little boy that he would never “see his mommy again,” according to the sheriff’s statement. The police also reported that the man covered the boy’s face with a jacket so he couldn’t tell he was being taken into his own basement. The boy was tied up, threatened with a gun, and told he would be sold into sex slavery.

In Bristol, Connecticut, in 2014, a woman left her daughter alone in her car while she went into a CVS pharmacy. This might sound bad to you, especially when you learn that it was summertime and the car windows were all closed. An alert passerby called the police, who were able to open the car door. The police reported that the child was “responsive” and not in distress. But here’s the thing: the girl was eleven years old. She had told her mother that she preferred to wait in the car rather than come into the store.34