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

Alexis de Tocqueville visits America in 1831 and notices that the citizens tend to work out problems and conflicts without resorting to the police or other authorities. He calls this the “art of association,” the capability of people to resolve issues spontaneously. It is a learned art that requires years of practice, particularly when growing up during unstructured playtime, where kids often disagree or argue and must resolve conflicts without running to their parents.

Modern children tend to have their free time programmed by their parents, so they don’t have much opportunity to learn for themselves how to negotiate with others. One result is that college students, confronted with intellectual and political controversies, lately demand that college administrators step in to protect them from uncomfortable mental situations. This is a failure in the art of association that students should have learned before college.

Recently on college campuses, “anyone can be publicly shamed for saying something well-intentioned that someone else interprets uncharitably” (5). This is a call-out culture, meant to stifle debate and disagreement about political and other controversies, so that students can avoid having to listen to ideas they don’t like. The call-out culture is an outgrowth of the overprotective safetyism of modern child rearing combined with the increase in political polarization that has swept America.

CBT is a technique that trains patients, especially those suffering from anxiety and depression, to replace extreme thoughts and distorted thinking with more rational mental responses to stressful situations. Central to CBT is the concept that people sometimes exaggerate the problems they face through black-and-white thinking, catastrophizing, mind-reading, overgeneralizing, and other overwrought styles of thought.

Authors Haidt and Lukianoff believe that widespread application of CBT training would reduce the kinds of extreme thinking that stymie depressives, people suffering from anxiety, and college students confronted with new and troubling ideas.

Members of the working class often raise their children in a somewhat neglectful style called “natural growth parenting” (174), in which the kids find themselves with lots of free time to explore their world and try new things. Although the neglect has negative consequences, the unstructured playtime is good for enhancing children’s skill sets, especially their social abilities.

Modern middle- and upper-class families, on the other hand, tend to engage in “concerted cultivation” of their children, in which they “fill their children’s calendars with adult-guided activities, lessons, and experiences, and they closely monitor what happens in school” (173). This parenting style neglects kids’ need to play spontaneously, explore their world, and learn how to negotiate with their peers.

Parents engage in concerted cultivation partly from a desire to reduce childhood risks and partly to help prepare their kids for acceptance into high-quality colleges and universities. The unfortunate result is a cohort of young college students with minimal social skills, low tolerance for new ideas and controversy, and over-dependence on authority to resolve conflicts. Concerted cultivation is a symptom of the culture of safetyism.

Three Great Untruths dominate the thinking styles of children raised by overprotective parents and schools: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “Always trust your feelings,” and “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.” These ideas arise from distorted thinking, especially overgeneralization, catastrophizing, emotional reasoning, and black-and-white thinking. The painful emotional symptoms that result can be eased through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Identity politics involve “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality” (59). This is a common and normal form of political activity, but sometimes it can become destructive, as when groups begin to think in terms of “common-enemy identity politics” (63) that treats outsiders as having no rights or dignity.

By contrast, “common-humanity identity politics” considers outsiders to be part of the shared human community, not enemies to be defeated but simply people who can work together to solve problems. Martin Luther King uses common-humanity politics in the 1960s when he leads marches and non-violent demonstrations to stress the common humanity of blacks and whites.

iGen, or Generation Z, is the cohort of people born after 1995 who begin to enter college in 2013. This group is raised under a system of “concerted cultivation” within a culture of safetyism. Members tend to have had inadequate amounts of the unstructured playtime that would allow them to explore and experiment with the real world and, most importantly, learn how to resolve disputes with their peers in the “art of association.” iGen members therefore often lack basic social skills and suffer from fear of novelty and discomfort, which prevent them from engaging constructively with controversial ideas and speakers at college.

When parents and schools become overly protective of children, they tend to limit activities that might carry risk. Thus, parents restrict kids from walking or biking across town, and schools work with parents to program children’s afternoon schedules so that nothing risky might occur. This creates a culture of safetyism that prevents children from exploring the world and growing wiser and more capable as they learn lessons from the cuts and bruises of real life. Safetyism’s culminating symptom is the iGen cohort of college students who panic when presented with controversial ideas they don’t like or understand, and who demand, sometimes violently, that such ideas be restricted so the students don’t have to suffer discomfort or worry that they might be endangered.

Humans share an intuitive sense of what is just. This sense comes in two parts, “distributive justice,” or “the perception that people are getting what is deserved,” and “procedural justice,” or “the perception that the process by which things are distributed and rules are enforced is fair and trustworthy” (217). People tend to approve of “equality of opportunity,” which gives everyone a fair shake at success, and they approve of procedures for determining fairness that are unbiased and respect the dignity of all participants.

Recent campaigns in favor of fairness for minorities fall under the rubric of “social justice” and tend to stress equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. The federal government, for example, has established rules that encourage equality of outcome in college athletic programs for women, insisting on proportions of female and male participants that match the school’s population. These policies have created odd distortions in opportunities and lead to procedural unfairness, both of which conflict with the human sense of intuitive justice.