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The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff

by Parker · 262 things on Twos

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” - Unknown
“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.” - Buddha
“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For our mothers, who did their best to prepare us for the road.
Introduction: The Search for Wisdom
First: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain, avoid discomfort, avoid all potentially bad experiences.
Bad experiences are terrible, who would want one?
How much wisdom can you dispense when you're thinking about your aches and pains all the time?
Second: Always trust your feelings. Never question them.
Feelings so often mislead us that you can’t achieve mental health until you learn to question them and free yourself from some common distortions of reality.
Third: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
There is so much evil in the world. Where does it come from? From evil people! It is up to you and the rest of the good people in the world to fight them. You must be warriors for virtue and goodness. You can see how bad and wrong some people are. You must call them out! Assemble a coalition of the righteous, and shame the evil ones until they change their ways.
Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various “cognitive distortions,” such as “catastrophizing” (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job . . .) and “negative filtering” (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well). These distorted and irrational thought patterns are hallmarks of depression and anxiety disorders.
Students were beginning to demand protection from speech because they had unwittingly learned to employ the very cognitive distortions that CBT tries to correct.
Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.
“Coddling” means “overprotecting”
Adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects.
Overprotection is just one part of a larger trend that we call problems of progress. This term refers to bad consequences produced by otherwise good social changes. It’s great that our economic system produces an abundance of food at low prices, but the flip side is an epidemic of obesity. It’s great that we can connect and communicate with people instantly and for free, but this hyperconnection may be damaging the mental health of young people. It’s great that we have refrigerators, antidepressants, air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and the ability to escape from most of the physical hardships that were woven into the daily lives of our ancestors back to the dawn of our species.
By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled.
Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience.
Seeking out challenges (rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”), freeing yourself from cognitive distortions (rather than always trusting your initial feelings), and taking a generous view of other people, and looking for nuance (rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality).
Part 1: Three Bad Ideas
Chapter 1: The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Weaker
“When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent.” - Meng Tzu
“For decades allergists have been recommending that young infants avoid consuming allergenic foods such as peanut to prevent food allergies. Our findings suggest that this advice was incorrect and may have contributed to the rise in the peanut and other food allergies.”
Thanks to hygiene, antibiotics and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening—causing allergies. In the same way, by shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master.
Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.
In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences. Life has a way of creating completely unexpected events—events Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white.
Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously.
There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” But these days, we seem to be doing precisely the opposite: we’re trying to clear away anything that might upset children, not realizing that in doing so, we’re repeating the peanut-allergy mistake. If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide.
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.
Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.
Cognitive behavioral therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting (at first in small ways, such as imagining them or looking at pictures), activating their fear, and helping them habituate (grow accustomed) to the stimuli.
The reactivation of anxiety is so important to recovery that some therapists advise their patients to avoid using antianxiety medication while undertaking exposure therapy.
For a student who truly suffers from PTSD, appropriate treatment is necessary. But well-meaning friends and professors who work together to hide potential reminders of painful experiences, or who repeatedly warn the student about the possible reminders he or she might encounter, could be impeding the person’s recovery.
Safety is good, of course, and keeping others safe from harm is virtuous, but virtues can become vices when carried to extremes.
Members of iGen are “obsessed with safety,” as Twenge puts it, and define safety as including “emotional safety.” 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.”
Like the immune system, children must be exposed to challenges and stressors (within limits, and in age-appropriate ways), or they will fail to mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions.
Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.
Safetyism is the cult of safety—an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.
Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.
Chapter 2: The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings
“What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” - Epictetus
“Our life is the creation of our mind” - Buddha
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” - William Shakespeare
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” - John Milton
“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.” - Boethius
Sages in many societies have converged on the insight that feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships.
Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure.
The most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT:
EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
A great deal of research shows that having an internal locus of control leads to greater health, happiness, effort expended, success in school, and success at work. An internal locus of control has even been found to make many kinds of adversity less painful.
“Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.” - Hanna Holborn Gray
CBT is a method anyone can learn for identifying common cognitive distortions and then changing their habitual patterns of thinking. CBT helps the rider (controlled processing) to train the elephant (automatic processing), resulting in better critical thinking and mental health.
The term “microaggressions” refers to a way of thinking about brief and commonplace indignities and slights communicated to people of color (and others). Small acts of aggression are real, so the term could be useful, but because the definition includes accidental and unintentional offenses, the word “aggression” is misleading. Using the lens of microaggressions may amplify the pain experienced and the conflict that ensues. (On the other hand, there is nothing “micro” about intentional acts of aggression and bigotry.)
The number of efforts to “disinvite” speakers from giving talks on campus has increased in the last few years; such efforts are often justified by the claim that the speaker in question will cause harm to students. But discomfort is not danger. Students, professors, and administrators should understand the concept of antifragility and keep in mind Hanna Holborn Gray’s principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.”
Chapter 3: The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People
Identity politics is political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.
Politics is all about groups forming coalitions to achieve their goals.
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend” and “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“For hate is not conquered by hate; hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.” - Buddha
“I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. . . .When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.” - Pauli Murray
Identifying a common enemy is an effective way to enlarge and motivate your tribe.
Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways. . . . Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.
The human mind readily does dichotomous, us-versus-them thinking. If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity.
Life in a call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship. Many in the audience may feel sympathy for the person being shamed but are afraid to speak up, yielding the false impression that the audience is unanimous in its condemnation.
Students at many colleges today are walking on eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing, liking the wrong post, or coming to the defense of someone whom they know to be innocent, out of fear that they themselves will be called out by a mob on social media.
Anonymity fosters deindividuation—the loss of an individual sense of self—which lessens self-restraint and increases one’s willingness to go along with the mob.
Part 2: Bad Ideas in Action
Chapter 4: Intimidation and Violence
“When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.” - Nelson Mandela
“If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”
“If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.” - Lisa Feldman Barrett
“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” - Marcus Aurelius
The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels.
The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful.
“I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.” - Van Jones
The “Milo Riot” at UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017, marked a major shift in campus protests. Violence was used successfully to stop a speaker; people were injured, and there were (as far as we can tell) no costs to those who were violent. Some students later justified the violence as a legitimate form of “self-defense” to prevent speech that they said was violent.
Chapter 5: Witch Hunts
Three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated.
One is not supposed to say that a dominant culture is superior to a nondominant one in any way. But anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members, and it can’t possibly be true that all cultures prepare children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.
Research shows that reviewers go easy on articles and grant proposals that support their political team, and they are more critical of articles and proposals that contradict their team’s values or beliefs.
It is no surprise that, on the whole, professors lean left. So do artists, poets, and people who love to watch foreign movies. One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements. On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-than-chance levels just from photographs of their desks.) Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are more likely to see the value of traditional arrangements.
Humans are tribal creatures who readily form groups to compete with other groups.
Cohesive and morally homogeneous groups are prone to witch hunts, particularly when they experience a threat, whether from outside or from within.
Witch hunts generally have four properties: they seem to come out of nowhere; they involve charges of crimes against the collective; the offenses that lead to those charges are often trivial or fabricated; and people who know that the accused is innocent keep quiet, or in extreme cases, they join the mob.
Part 3: How Did We Get Here?
Chapter 6: The Polarization Cycle
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” - Isaac Newton
The loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.
Subsequent research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block.
Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate.
Chapter 7: Anxiety and Depression
“Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.” - Andrew Soloman
College students are antifragile, not fragile. Some well-intended protections may backfire and make things worse in the long run for the very students we are trying to help.
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.
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. Instead of engaging in these activities (which usually involve interacting with other people face-to-face), teens today are spending much more time alone, interacting with screens.
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.
Studies of mental illness have long shown that girls have higher rates of depression and anxiety than boys do.
By 2016, roughly one out of every five girls reported symptoms that met the criteria for having experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year. The rate for boys went up, too, but more slowly (from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.4% in 2016).
If depression becomes part of your identity, then over time you’ll develop corresponding schemas about yourself and your prospects (I’m no good and my future is hopeless). These schemas will make it harder for you to marshal the energy and focus to take on challenges that, if you were to master them, would weaken the grip of depression.
Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
It’s not just fashion models whose images are altered nowadays; platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram provide “filters” that girls use to enhance the selfies they pose for and edit, so even their friends now seem to be more beautiful.
Depression distorts cognition, too, and gives people much more negative views than are warranted about themselves, other people, the world, and the future. 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, all of which discourages efforts to act vigorously to solve problems.
There is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.
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 adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interaction.
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 harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.
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 cognition, including a tendency to see the world as more dangerous and hostile than it really is.
Chapter 8: Paranoid Parenting
“So many teens have lost the ability to tolerate distress and uncertainty, and a big reason for that is the way we parent them.” - Kevin Ashworth
According to the FBI, almost 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated their plans, misunderstood directions, or run away from home or foster care, and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home. The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing—roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors. And since the 1990s, the rates of all crimes against children have gone down, while the chances of a kidnapped child surviving the ordeal have gone up.
Never send a child into a public restroom alone.
Instruct your child to use a private bathroom stall rather than a urinal.
Avoid restrooms with more than one entrance.
Stand in the door and talk to your child throughout their time in the bathroom.
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?
As Taleb showed us in Antifragile, by placing a protective shield over our children, we inadvertently stunt their growth and deprive them of the experiences they need to become successful and functional adults.
When the police endorse safetyism, it forces parents to overprotect.
Children should be permitted to develop at their own pace, not pushed to meet the schedules and rules of adult life.
Moderate stress buffered by supportive adults is not necessarily harmful, and may even be helpful, in that it can promote the development of coping skills. On the other hand, severe and chronic stress, especially if unbuffered by supportive adults, can disrupt the basic executive functions that govern how various parts of the brain work together to address challenges and solve problems. Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.
Skenazy sees discounting positives when parents overmonitor. “Any upside to free, unsupervised time (joy, independence, problem-solving, resilience) is seen as trivial, compared to the infinite harm the child could suffer without you there. There is nothing positive but safety.” Parents also use negative filtering frequently, Skenazy says. “Parents are saying, ‘Look at all the foods/activities/words/people that could harm our kids!’ rather than ‘I’m so glad we’ve finally overcome diphtheria, polio, and famine!’” She also points out the ways that parents use dichotomous thinking: “If something isn’t 100% safe, it’s dangerous.”
When we overprotect children, we harm them. Children are naturally antifragile, so overprotection makes them weaker and less resilient later on.
Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults.
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.
Chapter 9: The Decline of Play
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” - Proverb
Vigorous physical free play—outdoors, and with other kids—is a crucial kind of play, one that our evolved minds are “expecting.” It also happens to be the kind of play that kids generally say they like the most.
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.
Grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that’s tragic. Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery. Young people should devote themselves to pursuits that are intrinsically fulfilling.
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.”
“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.” - John Roberts
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.
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.
Chapter 10: The Bureaucracy of Safetyism
“The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” - Alexis de Tocqueville
It certainly did not help that today’s college students were raised in the fearful years after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Ever since that awful day, the U.S. government has been telling us: “If you see something, say something.”
In all likelihood, there are millions of moments each year when some American somewhere thinks that something “doesn’t feel right” and worries about an attack. However, there are only a few terrorist attacks of any kind each year in the United States, so in almost every case, the feeling is wrong.
Bias alone is not harassment or discrimination.
“My sense was that all of these protections were not making people less vulnerable, they were making people more vulnerable. . . . [Students are] going to be impeded when they leave university and go out into the world, and nobody is going to protect them from the multitudes of injuries and slights and that kind of thing that we all have to deal with in the course of daily life.” - Laura Kipnis
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.
Chapter 11: The Quest for Justice
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” - John Rawls
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).
Americans seem to have a common intuition that money inherited from a deceased parent should be divided equally among siblings, rather than trying to assess who did more for the parent or who needs the money more.
Even toddlers seem to recognize the importance of proportionality. In one experiment, two-year-olds showed signs of being surprised when two people were rewarded equally if only one of them did any work. By the age of six, kids show a clear preference for rewarding the hard worker in a group, even if equal pay is an option.
When everyone perceives that all the proportions are equal, then everyone perceives that things are fair, and harmony is far more likely. When people believe that someone else’s ratio is too high, they are likely to feel resentful toward that person, whose rewards are disproportionate to their contributions. They may also feel resentment toward the boss, company, or system that allows such inequities to persist. People are not just being greedy. An early study testing equity theory found that when people were led to believe that they were being overpaid for a job, they worked harder in order to deserve the pay—to get their ratio back into line.
When people perceive that the police are following fair procedures and treating them and people like them with dignity, they are much more willing to support the police, help them to fight crime, and even accept occasionally being stopped and frisked by the police, whom they see as working to keep their neighborhood safe. But if people think that the way the police select people to frisk is racially biased and that people like them are treated disrespectfully, with hostility, or, even worse, with violence, they will understandably be angry and will see the police as the enemy.
Treat deviations from population norms as invitations to investigate further. Is the deviation present in the pipeline or applicant pool for the job? If so, then look at the beginning of the pipeline more than at the end of it, and be willing to entertain the possibility that people of different genders and people from different cultures may have different preferences.
People’s ordinary, everyday, intuitive notions of justice include two major types: 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).
When social justice efforts aim to achieve equality of outcomes by group, and when social justice activists are willing to violate distributive or procedural fairness for some individuals along the way, these efforts violate many people’s sense of intuitive justice. We call this equal-outcomes social justice.
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.
Part IV: Wising Up
Chapter 12: Wiser Kids
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child
To return to the example of peanut allergies: kids need to develop a normal immune response, rather than an allergic response, to the everyday irritations and provocations of life, including life on the internet.
You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults. The gift begins with the recognition that kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict. The most important thing they can do with that time is to play, especially in free play, outdoors, with other kids. In some situations, there may need to be an adult nearby for children’s physical safety, but that adult should not intervene in general disputes and arguments.
Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month. Each month, ask them what tasks or challenges they think they can do on their own—such as walking to a store a few blocks away, making their own breakfast, or starting a dog-walking business. Resist the urge to jump in and help them when they’re struggling to do things and seem to be doing them the wrong way. Trial and error is a slower but usually better teacher than direct instruction.
Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting some bumps and bruises. Children need opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk.
Start letting your kids walk places and play outside as soon as you think they are able. Send them out with siblings or friends. Tell them it’s OK to talk to strangers and ask for help or directions, just never go off with a stranger. Remember that the crime rate is back down to where it was in the early 1960s.
Encourage your children to walk or ride bicycles to and from school at the earliest ages possible, consistent with local circumstances of distance, traffic, and crime.
Help your kids find a community of kids in the neighborhood who come from families that share your commitment to avoid overprotection. Find ways for kids to get together in nearby parks or in specific backyards. You’ll need to work out boundaries and guidelines with other parents to be sure that the kids are safe from major physical risks, that they know to stick together and help one another, and that they know what to do when someone gets hurt. Kids are likely to develop more maturity and resilience in such groups than in supervised playdates or adult-organized activities.
Send your children to an overnight summer camp in the woods for a few weeks—without devices. “The old-fashioned generalist camps are where we see the most impact in terms of letting children develop their own interests,” Erika Christakis says, “where kids can make choices about what they do and don’t do.”
Learning how to give and take criticism without being hurt is an essential life skill. When serious thinkers respect someone, they are willing to engage them in a thoughtful argument.
Adam Grant's four rules for productive disagreement:
Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.
Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind).
Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.
Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded
Especially now that the internet guarantees that they will have to deal with trash all along the road of life, it is vital that they learn to notice and manage their emotional reactions and choose how to respond.
“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.” - Buddha
Teach children the basics of CBT. CBT stands for “cognitive behavioral therapy,” but in many ways it’s really just “cognitive behavioral techniques,” because the intellectual habits it teaches are good for everyone.
Let’s take this thought that you have and ask some questions about it. Sometimes we have a thought about someone and we think we are absolutely right. But then this way of thinking makes us upset and makes us angry or sad. Thoughts are not always true. I might be thinking it’s raining outside, but then I go outside and it’s not raining. We have to find out what the facts are, don’t we? Sometimes we look at things like we are looking through a dark lens and everything seems dark. Let’s try putting on different glasses.
The Worry Cure by Dr. Robert Leahy
Freeing Your Child From Anxiety by Tamar Chansky
“Mindfulness” means “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” - Jon Kabat-Zinn
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being
“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.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Give people the benefit of the doubt. Use the “principle of charity.” This is the principle in philosophy and rhetoric of making an effort to interpret other people’s statements in their best or most reasonable form, not in the worst or most offensive way possible. Parents can model the principle of charity by using it in family discussions and arguments.
Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.
We are all wrong about many things at every moment, but until we know it, we are often quite certain that we are right. Having people around us who are willing to disagree with us is a gift. So when you realize you are wrong, admit that you are wrong, and thank your critics for helping you see it.
Help schools to oppose the great untruths
Homework in the early grades should be minimal. Other than encouraging reading, minimize or eliminate all homework in kindergarten and first grade.
Give more recess with less supervision.
Discourage the use of the word “safe” or ”safety” for anything other than physical safety.