Lessons From The Coddling Of The American Mind
In my opinion the book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure should be required reading for every parent, teacher, coach, or anyone who works with the youth of today. Here is a summary of the book along with a few of my favorite quotes/excerpts. Because there are so many thoughts that I like from this book, I will do a couple of more posts in the future to include them all.
About the book
Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. How did this happen?
First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education:
1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker;
2. Always trust your feelings; and
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for young people to become autonomous adults who can navigate the bumpy road of life.
Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade.
They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction.
This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.
A few excerpts.
So many teens have lost the ability to tolerate distress and uncertainty and a big reason for that is the way we parent them.
We should all take reasonable precautions to protect children’s physical safety--for example, by owning a fire extinguisher--but we should not submit to the pull of “safetyism” which is overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risks--which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.
Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyper-concern has the net effect of making kids more fragile.
Paranoid parenting--over protecting children--harms them.
Children in the US and other prosperous countries are safer today than at any other point in history. Yet for a variety of historical reasons fear of abduction is still very high among American parents, many of whom have come to believe that children should never be without adult supervision.
When children are repeatedly led to believe that the world is dangerous and that they cannot face it alone, we should not be surprised if many of them believe it.
Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.
—Dan