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

Co-author Greg Lukianoff credits cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with saving his life. He turns from planning his suicide to learning how to recognize distorted thoughts and let them go: “[M]y mind is now in the habit of hearing my worst thoughts as if they are speaking in silly cartoon voices” (144). Lukianoff elaborates on his ineffective ways of thinking: “Once you are accustomed to looking for them, it’s not very hard to identify catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, labeling, and all the rest” (144).

Lukianoff notices in 2008 that college administrators “often acted in ways that gave the impression that students were in constant danger and in need of protection from a variety of risks and discomforts” (145). In 2013, he notes that the students themselves begin to echo these anxieties. One possible cause is that the iPhone, which brings a new form of social interaction, is introduced in 2007 “and was widely adopted over the next few years,” and during the next several years, “the social life of the average American teen changed substantially” (147).

Social psychologist Jean Twenge conducts surveys that show teenage behavior and attitudes suddenly changing between 2005 and 2012. Teens grow up slower; they wait longer before “having a job, driving a car, drinking alcohol, going out on a date, and having sex” (148). Twenge believes these teens are “Completely Unprepared for Adulthood” (148).

More screen time and less social engagement means “members of iGen [Generation Z] spend much less time than previous generations did going out with friends while unsupervised by an adult” (148). Among college students, “18-year-olds now act like [how] 15-year-olds used to” (148) act. Twenge posits that “[t]his might explain why college students are suddenly asking for more protection” (148).

Teen depression rates rise after 2011, especially among girls, whose rate climbs from 12 to 19 percent. Teen suicides and rates of self-harm also climb for both sexes, but overall, “[t]he years since 2010 have been very hard on girls” (151).

Depression is positively correlated with more than two hours per day of TV watching and other forms of screen time, while sports and exercise, religious services, reading, socializing, and homework correlate to less depression: “Part of what’s going on may be that devices take us away from people” (153).

Girls may suffer more, says Twenge, because they “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” (154). Also, the internet presents girls with artificially enhanced images of their acquaintances, which leads to more insecurity. Phones and social media have become “the greatest enabler of relational aggression since the invention of language” (155).

By 2016, “half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns” (156), especially for anxiety and depression. The number who self-report mental disorders more than doubles between 2012 and 2016: “Clearly universities were not causing a national mental health crisis; they were responding to one” (158). The resulting campus culture of “safetyism,” however, makes things worse: Its cognitive distortions may harm “students who already struggle with mood disorders,” and “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” (158).

For children born after 1995, “parents and elementary schools may unknowingly work together to induct children into the culture of safetyism” (165). During the 1980s, a crime wave peaks; abducted children make the news and their faces showed up on milk cartons. Parents fret over their kids’ safety. Crime plummets in the 1990s, but parents remain anxious. Some refuse to let their teenage children ride their bikes to friends’ houses or to use a public bathroom alone: “American parenting is now wildly out of sync with the actual risk that strangers pose to children” (167).

Inadvertent deaths among children 5 to 14 drop by about half between 1960 and 1990 due to seat belt use, bicycle helmets, less second-hand smoke, and removal of health-harming lead from gasoline. Many parents decide “if focusing on big threats produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible” (169).

Overprotection, however, can make problems worse, as when governments bail out companies that later get into bigger trouble, or when forest fires are quickly extinguished, leading to a buildup of deadwood and, later, uncontrollable conflagrations. Thus, “efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors” mean that “kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment” (169).

Parents also feel social pressure if they don’t conform to overparenting standards: “Unless parents prepare for the worst possible outcomes, they are looked down on by other parents and by teachers for being bad parents” (171). They also face arrest or having their children taken from them, if they leave their kids alone for too long.

Class differences influence parenting styles. Working-class parents tend to exercise “natural growth parenting” that gives their kids a lot of unstructured free time, while “middle-class iGen (and late Millennial) students were overscheduled and overparented as children” (175) in a process called “concerted cultivation” (173). Middle-class children do receive better preparation for college, while working-class children suffer from more adversity that limits their “health and success in adulthood” (175), meaning that “there are two very different ways to damage children’s development. One is to neglect and underprotect them […] The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them” (176).

Most students at elite colleges, however, come from middle- and upper-class families: “This means that overparenting is probably a much greater cause of fragility on such campuses than is underparenting” (176). Children of overprotective parents learn the Three Great Untruths: that the world is unsafe because “[l]ife is a battle between good people and evil people” who lurk nearby and want to hurt them; that they should “[a]lways trust your feelings,” especially that, if they feel unsafe, they must certainly be in danger; and that “[w]hat doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” (177), including feelings of stress.

These beliefs may cause them to see college as a source of emotional danger instead of a place that can “produce well-educated, bold, and open-minded college graduates” (178). Thus, entering students “are psychologically primed to join a culture of safetyism” (179).

When children play “Tag,” they practice escaping from predatory animals. In general, play helps kids prepare for adulthood: “Play is essential for wiring a mammal’s brain to create a functioning adult. Mammals that are deprived of play won’t develop to their full capacity” (181). Without play, children miss an important developmental window for their brains’ proper functioning: “Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults” (183).

Vigorous outdoor play is one of the best forms of childhood learning, but it has declined significantly since 1981: “[M]uch of the play had shifted to indoor activities, often involving a computer and no other children” (184). Meanwhile, adolescents who check “I get a real kick out of doing things that are a little dangerous” (185) on surveys drops from 50% to 43% between 1994 and 2015. It’s likely that “members of iGen have been risk-deprived and are therefore more risk averse” (185).

Students are assigned more homework in elementary school; even kindergarten requires more formal deskwork: “There is growing evidence that with young children, these methods can backfire and produce negative effects on creativity as well as on social and emotional development” (188). Emphasis on academic achievement and state testing means that “children’s days are now more rigidly structured” (189).

Parents channel their kids into activities that will help them get into a good university: “What eight-year-old has the foresight to play the tuba or girls’ golf—activities that might make them more attractive to colleges?” (189). Elite schools are getting more competitive, and kids must accumulate more extracurricular activities in a “resume arms race” (189); this process “warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy” and “jeopardizes their mental health” (190).

Supervised overpreparation for college, combined with a lack of unstructured play, means “children are less likely to develop the art of association” (191) that helps them resolve disputes. This may explain why, since 2013, there have been “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” (192).

In 2015, the University of Northern Michigan warns students not to discuss suicidal thoughts with each other on penalty of discipline or expulsion. The associate dean of students explains that “relying on your friends can be very disruptive to them,” and “[t]he dean seemed to believe that if students talked about their suffering, it would harm their friends” (196). This exemplifies the new forms of collegiate administrative overkill.

Money has poured into higher education; student amenities have increased, as have administrative and support staff at a rate “several times higher than the rate of faculty hiring” (198). Administrators in 2015 accept student disruptions and ultimatums and impose few penalties: “[T]his is the way organizations respond when their governing ethos is one of ‘customer service’” (198). University of Maryland classics professor Eric Adler comments:

‘If the customers can determine the curriculum and select all their desired amenities, it stands to reason that they should also determine which speakers ought to be invited to campus and what opinions can be articulated in their midst’ (199).

Overreaction and overregulation characterize campus administrative responses to perceived threats and potential liability. Examples of overreaction include the suspension of an art professor who posts a picture of his daughter wearing a t-shirt with the words “I will take what is mine with fire & blood” (201), a reference to a TV show, and a cease-and-desist letter to a professor whose email celebrating May Day references the Haymarket Riot, which is perceived as a veiled threat against the college president.

Overregulation is mainly “about preventing potential offense” (201). Speech codes are common, though often overruled when challenged. They include vague and overbroad codes against such offenses as “inappropriately directed laughter,” “no student shall offend anyone on University property,” and no “harsh text messages or emails” (202). The thinking seems to be that “[i]f you feel offended, then a punishable offense must have occurred” and that offensive language or behavior “might be so damaging that administrators must step in to protect vulnerable and fragile students” (202).

Another example of overregulation is Free Speech Zones, which limit controversial speech to restricted corners of schools, in one case to an area less than 0.1 percent of campus that must be reserved on 10 days’ notice. Also, student handbooks limit what students “can post on social media, what they can say in the dormitories to one another, and what they can do off campus—including what organizations they can join” (203).

Administrators urge students to report anything that makes them feel uncomfortable: “Everyone must be vigilant and report threats to the authorities” (204). In this way, inadvertent comments are punished, even though “bias alone is not harassment or discrimination [...] to be human is to have biases” (205). Students can report professors; many teachers “now say that they are ‘teaching on tenterhooks’ or ‘walking on eggshells’” (205). Controversial material is censored, and “students miss out on opportunities to develop intellectual antifragility” (206).

Harassment against minorities, women, and various genders is prohibited on campus by federal law, but “concept creep” (105) leads to citations against innocuous things. For example, a student is sanctioned for reading a book, “Notre Dame vs. the Klan” (207), because its cover image upsets two people.

Despite routine court rulings against overly zealous anti-harassment codes, in 2013, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issue a new definition of harassment as any “‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,’ including ‘verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct’” (207). Harassment is now “to be defined by the self-reported subjective experience of every member of the university community” (208).

In 2015, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis publishes an essay that criticizes her school for “sexual paranoia” and “the climate of sanctimony about student vulnerability” (208). Students protest, and a Title IX complaint is filed. Kipnis is investigated twice but charges are dropped.

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning publish an article in 2014 that makes note of the new “victimhood culture” (209) in which people report every perceived slight to the authorities. This contrasts with the old “honor cultures,” where men must defend any slight with personal violence, and the dominant present-day “dignity culture” (209), in which individuals brush off small slights and only report major conflicts to the authorities.

In a victimhood culture, people “come to rely on external authorities to resolve their problems” (210), tend to be overly sensitive to slights, and see themselves as victims. Over time, students’ “willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy” (210).

In terms of social upheaval, “the years from 2012 through 2018 seem like the closest we’ve come to the intensity of the stretch from 1968 to 1972” (216). During both periods, concerns about abuse of minorities leads to efforts to enhance social justice. Authors Haidt and Lukianoff believe such justice is important but that some social-justice campaigns, especially on campuses, may be counterproductive.

Justice has two main parts, distributive and procedural. Distributive justice is “the perception that people are getting what is deserved,” and procedural justice is “the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy” (217). Together, these make up “intuitive justice” (217).

People like things to be fairly distributed. If there are four people and a dozen jelly beans, each person should get three, but if the jelly beans are handed out based on how much work each person does, then the person who works hardest should get the most beans. In psychology, equity theory asserts that “people keep close track of how much reward each person is reaping [...] in proportion to how much they are contributing” (218) and that the reward should be equal to the effort. People resent it when someone gets more than they earned; conversely, when people believe “they were being overpaid for a job, they worked harder in order to deserve the pay” (219).

As for the procedure that distributes resources, “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” (219). The first concern is “how the decision is being made” (219): Are the decision makers objective or biased, and is the process clear and open? The second is “how a person is being treated” (219): Are they treated with dignity, and do they have a voice in the matter?

If, for example, the police treat citizens with dignity, they are more willing to cooperate, but if the police are disrespectful and/or violent, people “will understandably be angry and will see the police as the enemy” (220).

Lapses in distributive or procedural justice can cause people to “join a movement in the name of justice” (220). There are two main political movements in support of social justice in America. The first is a proportional-procedural movement that takes “the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities” (220). The second is an equal-outcomes movement that believes the results, and not merely the inputs, should be equal.

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 provides for “equal access to educational opportunities for women and men” (224); thus, on college campuses, women athletes should receive scholarships and other resources on a par with the men. This is a proportional-procedural form of justice. Beginning in 1996, however, the federal government urges schools to balance their athletic programs so that every sport has the same number of women as men on the teams. This is an equal-outcomes policy.

The University of Virginia rowing team, to keep the populations equal, sponsors a varsity women’s squad but only a club squad for men, who must pay extra to participate. This is an example of how equal-outcomes policies violate intuitive justice due to inequalities of inputs.

In the nation, as a whole, the equal-outcomes movement believes that “all institutions and occupations should mirror the overall U.S. population” (225). Thus, every job type should include the same proportion of women and minorities as exist in the population at large: “Any departure from those numbers means that a group is ‘underrepresented,’ and underrepresentation is often taken to be direct evidence of systemic bias or injustice” (225).

Differences nonetheless persist between populations and their preferences. In noncompulsory recreation, “girls and women are often as interested as boys and men in getting physical exercise, but not in playing team sports” (225). This may be related, not to societal pressures, but to testosterone exposure in the womb.

However, suggesting alternative causes for underrepresentation can be risky on campus: “[I]f anyone in the room is displeased by that suggestion, then you may be accused of committing a microaggression” (229). Instead, students should keep an open mind about the causes of unequal representation, and focus “as much on procedural justice as on distributive: Are people in all identity groups treated with equal dignity?” (230).