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

by Jonathan Haidt

Of course, Nietzsche’s original aphorism—“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—is not entirely correct if taken literally; some things that don’t kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished. But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate. For example, muscles and joints need stressors to develop properly. Too much rest causes muscles to atrophy, joints to lose range of motion, heart and lung function to decline, and blood clots to form. Without the challenges imposed by gravity, astronauts develop muscle weakness and joint degeneration.

He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles and not to turn our children into candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”

As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts Haslam examined was the shift to a subjective standard.22 It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic (or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder (as we’ll see in chapter 7), then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them.

Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience.

Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.

Twenge shows that iGen suffers from far higher rates of anxiety and depression than did Millennials at the same age—and higher rates of suicide.

For now, we simply note two things. First, members of iGen are “obsessed with safety,” as Twenge puts it, and define safety as including “emotional safety.”35 Their focus on “emotional safety” leads many of them to believe that, as Twenge describes, “one should be safe not just from car accidents and sexual assault but from people who disagree with you.”36

Most people understand concepts related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry in this way—they focus on intent. If, on the basis of group membership, you dislike people, wish them ill, or intend to do them harm, you are a bigot, even if you say or do something that inadvertently or unintentionally helps members of that group. Conversely, if you accidentally say or do something that a member of a group finds offensive, but harbor no dislike or ill will on the basis of group membership, then you are not a bigot, even if you have said something clumsy or insensitive for which an apology is appropriate. A faux pas does not make someone an evil person or an aggressor.

“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”

There is a principle in philosophy and rhetoric called the principle of charity, which says that one should interpret other people’s statements in their best, most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible.

Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.29 When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways. The human mind contains many evolved cognitive “tools.” We don’t use all of them all the time; we draw on our toolbox as needed. Local conditions can turn the tribalism up, down, or off. Any kind of intergroup conflict (real or perceived) immediately turns tribalism up, making people highly attentive to signs that reveal which team another person is on. Traitors are punished, and fraternizing with the enemy is, too. Conditions of peace and prosperity, in contrast, generally turn down the tribalism.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., epitomized what we’ll call common-humanity identity politics.

There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common-enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler’s use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich.

As Twenge puts it, “18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.”9 Most of these trends are showing up across social classes, races, and ethnicities.10 Members of iGen, therefore, may not (on average) be as ready for college as were eighteen-year-olds of previous generations. This might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection and adult intervention in their affairs and interpersonal conflicts.

One large survey of university counseling centers found that only 37% of students who came through their doors in 2009 and prior years had complained about problems with anxiety—roughly on a par with the two other leading concerns, depression and relationships.37 But beginning in 2010, the percentage of students with anxiety complaints began to increase. It reached 46% in 2013 and continued climbing to 51% in 2016. It is now by far the leading problem for which college students seek treatment.

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.

Anxiety changes the brain in pervasive ways such that threats seem to jump out at the person, even in ambiguous or harmless circumstances.

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.

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 adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interaction.

These experts all came to the conclusion that modern parenting is preventing kids from growing strong and independent, but each arrived at this conclusion via a different path: Skenazy through the experiences we described above, Christakis through her work as a preschool teacher and her research on early childhood education, and Lythcott-Haims through her experience as the dean of freshmen at Stanford University for more than a decade. All three have also raised children of their own.

We believe that efforts to protect children from environmental hazards and vehicular accidents have been very good for children. Exposure to lead and cigarette smoke confer no benefits; being in a car crash without a seat belt does not make kids more resilient in future car crashes. 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

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.

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.50

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.55

It was NMU’s policy that students could be disciplined (and even expelled) for revealing these kinds of thoughts to other students. 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. What could compel a university—and, in particular, its associate dean of students—to be so callous? This kind of administrative overkill was what first got Greg thinking about the ways in which universities teach cognitive distortions.

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Today’s college students are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety and depression than did the Millennials or any other generation. They are cutting and killing themselves in higher numbers. Many are embracing safetyism and are objecting to books and ideas that gave Millennials little trouble. Whatever we are doing, it is not working.