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

by Greg Lukianoff

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.

Safetyism takes children who are antifragile by nature and turns them into young adults who are more fragile and and anxious, and therefore more receptive to the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

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.

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.

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.

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. We teach children to monitor themselves for the degree to which they “feel unsafe” and then talk about how unsafe they feel. They may come to believe that feeling “unsafe” (the feeling of being uncomfortable or anxious) is a reliable sign that they are unsafe (the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings). Finally, feeling these emotions is unpleasant; therefore, children may conclude, the feelings are dangerous in and of themselves—stress will harm them if it doesn’t kill them (the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker).

In this chapter, we investigate why the most beneficial forms of play have declined sharply since the 1970s, and we ask what effects this change in childhood might have on teens and college students. The decline of unsupervised free play—including ample opportunities to take small risks—is our fourth explanatory thread.

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. Instead of enjoying a healthy amount of risk, this generation is more likely than earlier ones to avoid it.

Why have we deprived kids of the healthiest forms of play and given them more homework and more supervision instead? 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.

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.

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.

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.

Resolve conflicts

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.

Magnificent point! Never thought of something like this before but it makes so much sense - being able to resolve disputes without authority intervention is probably exactly why the childhood stigma against 'telling' is likely a good thing too.

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.”

Can't agree more, letting kids muddy through things themselves is essential!

The consequences for democracies could be dire, particularly for a democracy such as the United States, which is already suffering from ever-rising cross-party hostility51 and declining trust in institutions.52 Here is what Horwitz fears could be in store: A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which people’s first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.

This is what Greg began to see around 2013: increasing calls from students for administrators and professors to regulate who can say what, who gets to speak on campus, and how students should interact with one another, even in private settings.

Brilliant stuff, this is a great insight. Civil institutions as anti-coercive mechanisms for conflict resolution, beginning to be understood and applied in childhood free play.

Some administrative growth is necessary and sensible, but when the rate of that expansion is several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring,15 there are significant downsides, most obviously the increase in the cost of a college degree.16 A less immediately obvious downside is that goals other than academic excellence begin to take priority as universities come to resemble large corporations—a trend often bemoaned as “corporatization.”

For most of Greg’s career, students were consistently the most tolerant and pro–free speech constituency on campus—even more so than the faculty. Around 2013, however, Greg began to notice a change. More students seemed to be in agreement with administrators that they were unsafe, that many aspects of students’ lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults, and that it was far better to overreact to potential risks and threats than to underreact. In this way, campus administrators—usually with the best of intentions—were modeling distorted thinking.

Overreaction and overregulation are usually the work of people within bureaucratic structures who have developed a mindset commonly known as CYA (Cover Your Ass). They know they can be held responsible for any problem that arises on their watch, especially if they took no action to prevent it, so they often adopt a defensive stance. In their minds, overreacting is better than underreacting, overregulating is better than underregulating, and caution is better than courage. This attitude reinforces the safetyism mindset that many students learn in childhood.

The bureaucratic innovation of “bias response” tools may be well intended,46 but they can have the unintended negative effect of creating an “us versus them” campus climate that results in hypervigilance and reduced trust. Some professors end up concluding that it isn’t worth the risk of having to appear before a bureaucratic panel, so it’s better to just eliminate any material from the syllabus or lecture that could lead to a complaint. Then, as more and more professors shy away from potentially provocative materials and discussion topics, their students miss out on opportunities to develop intellectual antifragility. As a result, they may come to find even more material offensive and require even more protection.

In a prescient essay in 2014, two sociologists—Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning—explained where this new culture of vulnerability came from and how administrative actions helped it to grow.64 They called it “victimhood culture,” and they interpreted it as a new moral order that was in conflict with the older “dignity culture,” which is still dominant in most parts of the United States and other Western democracies.

In an optimally functioning dignity culture, people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them, so they are not expected to react too strongly to minor slights.

This is in contrast to the older “honor cultures,” in which men were so obsessed with guarding their reputations that they were expected to react violently to minor insults made against them or those close to them—perhaps with a challenge to a duel. In a dignity culture, however, dueling seems ridiculous. People are expected to have enough self-control to shrug off irritations, slights, and minor conflicts as they pursue their own projects.

Perspective is a key element of a dignity culture; people don’t view disagreements, unintentional slights, or even direct insults as threats to their dignity that must always be met with a response.

the emerging morality of victimhood culture was radically different from dignity culture. 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.”

Campbell and Manning pointed out that the presence of administrators or legal authorities who can be persuaded to take one’s side and intervene is a prerequisite for the emergence of victimhood culture. They noted that when administrative remedies are easily available and there is no shame in calling on them, it can lead to a condition known as “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.”

A university that encourages moral dependence is a university that is likely to experience chronic conflict, which may then lead to more demands for administrative remedies and protections, which may then lead to more moral dependence.

This also seems to be true of any institution - a thick skin and the ability to self-mediate is key to having fewer situations that demand them. I wonder too does social media fuel this phenomenon - people responding to trolls and abusers with demands for reprimand, rather that a block or mute?

Intuitive justice is the combination of 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). We’ll show where claims about social justice fit well with intuitive justice and where they don’t.

Proportionality is the heart of “equity theory,” the major theory of distributive justice in social psychology.10 Its core assertion is that when the ratio of outcomes to inputs is equal for all participants, people perceive that to be equitable, or fair.

The social psychologist Tom Tyler is one of the pioneers of research on “procedural justice.”14 His central finding is that people are much more willing to accept a decision or action, even one that goes against themselves, when they perceive that the process that led to the decision was fair.

There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments of procedural justice. The first is how the decision is being made. This includes whether the decision-makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and are therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. It also includes transparency—is it clear to all how the process works? The second basic concern is how a person is being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice—do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?

Using that definition of social justice, we’ll define proportional-procedural social justice as the effort to find and fix cases where distributive or procedural justice is denied to people because they were born into poverty or belong to a socially disadvantaged category.

I'm sympathetic to this understanding of social justice.

The civil rights campaign was a long struggle for proportional-procedural social justice. Not everyone could see the injustice early on, and many white people were motivated to not see it.

This is a good point and holds true today - this is why people who'll tell others that injustices don't actually exist when they do are so popular.

It is among the most important requirements of a democratic society that it provide a way for people and groups to make new claims about justice. An open democratic society considers such claims, debates them, and then acts on claims that combine compelling arguments with effective political pressure. If the outcome is new laws that are supported by widely shared new norms, as happened in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, that’s pretty much the definition of moral and social progress in a democracy.

When social justice is about searching for and ending violations of human or civil rights, particularly when those violations are related to membership in social identity groups, then it is about removing obstacles and creating equality of opportunity. It is exactly what those social workers called for when they defined social justice as the quest to “open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.”

the implementation of Title IX was changed over the years. From its original goal of providing equal access to educational opportunities for women and men, the program morphed into one that pushes universities to obtain equal outcomes regardless of inputs.

If this is true—if boys and men are more interested, on average, in playing team sports—then universities cannot achieve the equal-outcome target just by offering equal opportunity. They must work harder to recruit women and, perhaps, discourage men.

Yes, this is the issue. Shooting for equal outcomes very often means destroying equal opportunity.

Most people want individuals to be treated well, and they recoil from cases where individuals are treated unfairly in order to bring about some kind of group-level equality.

And rightly so!

To be clear: Departures from equality sometimes do indicate that some kind of bias or injustice is operating. Some institutions or companies make it harder for members of one group to succeed, as can be seen in recent books and articles about the toxic “bro culture” of Silicon Valley,37 which violates the dignity and rights of women (procedural injustice) while denying them the status, promotions, and pay that they deserve based on the quality of their work (distributive injustice). When you see a situation in which some groups are underrepresented, it is an invitation to investigate and find out whether there are obstacles, a hostile climate, or systemic factors that have a disparate impact on members of those groups.

Very important point and I'm glad they included it.

If professors and students are hesitant to raise alternative explanations for outcome gaps, then theories about those gaps may harden into orthodoxy. 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.

Unfortunately, when reformers try to intervene in complex institutions using theories that are based on a flawed or incomplete understanding of the causal forces at work, their reform efforts are unlikely to do any good—and might even make things worse.

Instead, we urge students to treat deviations from population norms as invitations to investigate further.

Yes - exactly! It's a reason to see what's going on, for sure, just not evidence in itself.

Focus as much on procedural justice as on distributive: Are people in all identity groups treated with equal dignity? The answer to that question might be no in an organization that has achieved statistical equality, and it might be yes in an organization in which some groups are underrepresented. Be clear about what end states matter and why. As long as activists keep their eyes on the two components of intuitive justice that all of us carry in our minds—distributive and procedural—they will apply their efforts where they are likely to do the most good, and they will win more widespread support along the way.

Great advice

Correlation does not imply causation. Yet in many discussions in universities these days, the correlation of a demographic trait or identity group membership with an outcome gap is taken as evidence that discrimination (structural or individual) caused the outcome gap. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, but if people can’t raise alternative possible causal explanations without eliciting negative consequences, then the community is unlikely to arrive at an accurate understanding of the problem. And without understanding the true nature of a problem, there is little chance of solving it.

Something is going badly wrong for American teenagers, as we can see in the statistics on depression, anxiety, and suicide. Something is going very wrong on many college campuses, as we can see in the growth of call-out culture, in the rise in efforts to disinvite or shout down visiting speakers, and in changing norms about speech,1 including a recent tendency to evaluate speech in terms of safety and danger. This new culture of safetyism and vindictive protectiveness is bad for students and bad for universities.

That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.

Some students and faculty today seem to think that the purpose of scholarship is to bring about social change, and the purpose of education is to train students to more effectively bring about such change.4 We disagree. The truth is powerful, yet the process by which we arrive at truth is easily corrupted by the desires of the seekers and the social dynamics of the community. If a university is united around a telos of change or social progress, scholars will be motivated to reach conclusions that are consistent with that vision, and the community will impose social costs on those who reach different conclusions—or who merely ask the wrong questions,

Agree with the authors entirely

With the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism since 2016, more scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multiracial society. 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.

Turkish American political scientist Timur Kuran,7 Chinese American law professor Amy Chua,8 and gay author and activist Jonathan Rauch9 (among many others) have been sounding the alarm about how the common-enemy identity politics of the far right and far left feed off one another. These authors are looking for ways to short-circuit the process and shift to a common-humanity perspective; they generally arrive at some version of the basic social psychology principles we’ve discussed in this book.

Yes, exactly! Their mutual antagonism only strengthens them, you need to try and subvert that vicious cycle.