The Coddling of the American Mind: 3 Takeaways
Back in 2014, Greg Lukianoff asked Jonathan Haidt to help him solve a riddle. For as long as Lukianoff had worked in academia, it was college administrators who were the ones initiating the call for campus censorship, however, in the last couple of years the pendulum had swung and now it was the students demanding more censorship. Campuses now use "safe spaces" and "bias response teams" and they're hyperfocused on things like "microaggressions" and "trigger warnings."
What happened?
They partnered up to write one of the most popular articles ever to be published by The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind. They seized the opportunity to expand on this idea and wrote The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure.
I was intrigued by every door they opened up throughout this book. While I pull some more interesting points related to parents as takeaways below, there are plenty of other actionable takeaways for those who aren’t parents as well.
I highly recommend reading this.
The Cause For More Anxiety And Depression
Those born in and after 1995 are different. This generation is coined '“iGen,” a term taken from Jean Twengeand her book with the never-ending subtitle, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us.
More than just growing up with the internet this generation is unique compared to other generations. While iGens drink less, smoke less, they wait later to have sex, they are also less happy, less resilient, and have more anxiety and depression.
One thought is that this uniqueness is there as a byproduct of iGen’s increased interactions with screens and less interaction with humans. This translates into taking longer to do basically anything that means being an adult: go on a date, drive a car, drink, get a job, hold that job, and marry.
Compared to other generations the iGen also has an increased risk of psychological concerns, even when taking into account changes in diagnostic criteria.
The iGen has:
Increased risk of suicide (steadily rising since 2007)
Increased reports of psychological disorders such as depression (rising from 2.7% to 6.1% in males from 2012-2016 and 5.8% to 14.5% for females)
More depressive episodes
While it's easy to just say "screens" is the reason, helicopter parenting, fear for children's safety are other variables all have a negative impact on social interaction and psychological resilience. Twenge emphasizes the importance of socialization and the stark contrast between this generation and the ones before it.
"It is worth remembering that humans neural architecture evolved under conditions of close, mostly continuous face -to-face contact with others including non-visual and non-auditory contact (i.e. touch, olfaction) and that a decrease in, or a removal of, a systems key inputs may risk destabilization of the system."
The good news is that there seems to be a threshold for screen time and its impact on mental health. The authors report that: "When kids use screens for 2 hours or less a day there is no elevated risk of depression but above 2 hours a day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time." They also note that "Time spent using electronic devices was not generally harmful for highly sociable kids, the ones who spent more time than the average kid in face-to-face social interactions."
As the authors write, "Teens are safer than ever physically but they are more mentally vulnerable."
Taken from www.thecoddling.com.
2. Paranoid Parenting
One of the main reasons, the authors argue, for the coddling of the American mind is parenting. Our parents lived in a time of where "be home by dinner” was shouted as they ran out the door to see a friend blocks away. We live in a time where parents get arrested for letting their kids walk outside. How did the pendulum swing?
It can be pinpointed to the early 80's when the infamous missing children campaigns began appearing on milk cartons (and plenty of other products). This created societal pressures for parents to think in "worst-first thinking," meaning that parents (and teachers) are "bad parents" if they don't prepare for the worst possible outcomes and they're "good parents" if they constantly supervise their child to avoid a hint of danger. Through fear and societal pressures, parents adopted three main distortions in thinking:
Dichotomous thinking: if something isn't 100% safe then it's dangerous
Negative filtering: "Look at all the things that can hurt you" instead of "I'm grateful that we have a life free of famine, polio, etc."
Discounting positives: The benefits of the happiness, problem-solving, and independence of unsupervised play and free time pales in comparison to the risk.
Safetyism is when safety is put ahead of everything else, no matter how unlikely or insignificant the danger is. Since the 80's, and especially in more recent years, this use of safetyism has become more common despite many parents saying that unsupervised outdoor fun with friends were their favorite childhood memories.
While there is always a risk of danger, today's parenting mindset is out of sync with the actual risk. According to the FBI, "90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated or plans, misunderstood directions, or run away from home or foster care. And 99.8% of the time missing children come home." When a child is abducted it's typically by a biological parent who doesn't have custody. In a country of about 70 million minors, about 100 of them are abducted by a stranger, which comes to 0.000142857143%.
A paranoid parenting style instills a feedback loop where children become less resilient. This cues the adult to step in to provide assistance or protection which then makes them more fragile. Children, who are naturally anti-fragile, need minor risks, negative experiences, and failure to grow. Overprotection simply leads to harm (the same scenario that led to the sudden rise in peanut allergies).
At the end of the book they provide many examples of how you can "prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child." One such example is to tell that it's okay to talk to strangers. (Gasp!) Teach your child how to approach a stranger for help as needed, such as directions when they're lost while still teaching them to never go off with a stranger.
3. The Decline Of Play
The purpose of play is to learn, develop, and socialize. Play is so important that it's the occupation for children. In the field of OT, the use of "occupations" (e.g. self-care skills, health management) is the way to improve independence, facilitate engagement, and achieve goals. Children evolved to learn and grow through play and OTs take advantage of this enjoyable skill to foster growth (while unfortunately, modern schooling doesn't).
This behavior is so vital to development that there's a code, of sorts, built into the software of the brain, from the time we're born, to urge us to play. As the authors state, it encourages us 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." The authors go on to explain the 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.”
While there are a number of types of play, the one that is declining the most in America is the most critical for the development of these skills: vigorous and physical free play outdoors with other kids. As mentioned above, this is the type of play that elicits the happiest memories of childhood. It's impossible to point to one reason for this decline in play but there is a direct correlation with the rise in screen use, safetyism, and academic test preparation and homework.
When children don't engage in enough of this type of play, their development is stifled. Children who do not get enough play are at risk of having:
Worse conflict resolution skills
Less cooperation with others
Psychological fragility
Less social competence
More avoidance of risk
Higher likelihood of anxiety disorders
The solution: encourage kids to engage in physical free play outdoors with other kids.
Interesting side note: They started the chapter with an interesting point. Why doesn't anyone want to be "it" in the game of tag? It turns out that most mammals play some version of the human's version of tag. In species that are prey (e.g. rats), the animals prefer to be chased. In species that are predators (e.g. wolves), the animals prefer to be chasers. Tag then is a way of developing our natural survival skills. Humans have been on both sides of that coin but we've been prey for a longer period which explains why the last one to say "not it!" ends up being the predator.
Bonus
This is an excerpt from the commencement speech delivered by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to his son’s middle school class in 2017.
“Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. 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.”
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