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

The Coddling co-author Greg Lukianoff, a Stanford law school graduate, is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which campaigns for freedom of speech on college campuses. Lukianoff has suffered from depression and benefits greatly from practicing CBT. Both he and co-author Haidt believe strongly that CBT can help reduce anxiety and depression in students and help them cope with controversy and disagreement on campus and in life.

In 2008, Ms. Skenazy “permitted her nine-year-old son, Izzy, to ride the New York City subway by himself” (163). This causes controversy, and the public derides her as the “America’s worst mom” (163). Skenazy takes this as a badge of honor, starts the Free-Range Kids movement that advocates for more freedom and playtime for children, hosts a TV show, America’s Worst Mom, and manages a blog, LetGrow.org.

Durkheim, an early-20th-century sociologist, argues that humans have two social aspects, the individual “profane” level, and the group or collective “sacred” level. The group level generates emotions and experiences distinct from an individual’s private life, feelings Durkheim calls “collective effervescence” (100), which people today often feel during religious and sporting events. Rituals such as chanting or dancing bind people together and can help to explain “sudden outbreaks of moralistic violence that are mystifying to outsiders” (100), as during recent campus protests. Durkheim is one of Haidt’s favorite thinkers; Durkheim has influenced Albert Bergesen’s work as well.

Sociologist Bergesen uses insights about group bonding by Emile Durkheim to explain witch hunts, especially the madness of the 1966 Cultural Revolution in China. Haidt believes Bergesen’s ideas apply to the recent spate of campus protests and the associated call-out culture that ferrets out minor political differences and ridicules them publicly.

Professor Beck develops cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the 1960s. Beck teaches that many painful emotions are caused by unrealistically negative beliefs, and that replacing these beliefs with more rational ones can improve mental wellbeing. CBT becomes “the therapy with the strongest evidence that it is both safe and effective” (37). Authors Haidt and Lukianoff believe Beck’s CBT can reduce anxiety and depression among students and improve their ability to deal constructively with disagreements and controversy at college and beyond.

San Diego State psychologist Twenge believes that iGen, or Generation Z, students are obsessed with safety and tend to reject as unsafe any ideas that make them feel uncomfortable. This leads to the recent angry confrontations between students and campus speakers who present ideas the students dislike and therefore believe are dangerous to their safety.