Coddling of The American Mind - Modern Parenting Solutions

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

How This Book Benefits Modern Parents

While this is not a traditional parenting book, this book contains a lot of information that I believe Modern Parents need to know to raise confident and wise young adults.

These authors argue that once kids enter college, they are not prepared to consider new and/or differing ideas, which is a cornerstone to higher education. We have to be able to consider ideas critically before we can adopt them or reject them, but college kids are increasingly asking for “safe spaces” that protect them from different points of view and posting online complains regarding professors who introduce controversial ideas in the classroom for debate (creating a “call out culture”).

Their recommended solution is that Modern Parents need to raise kids that are anti-fragile (what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger), trust reason over feelings, and who are not afraid to adopt a point of view and respectfully enter into debates regarding this point of view.

A very fascinating read for sure!

Do I recommend this book? YES!

To read more book reviews, click HERE.

My Notes/Thoughts About The Book

This is my book summary of The Coddling of The American Mind. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

“Most concerning to Greg, however, and the reason he wanted to talk to Jon, was the shift in the justifications for these new reactions to course materials and speakers.

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: 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.”

“The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”

“The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”

“Extremists have proliferated on the far right and the far left, provoking one another to ever deeper levels of hatred. Social media has channeled partisan passions into the creation of a “callout culture”; anyone can be publicly shamed for saying something well-intentioned that someone else interprets uncharitably. New-media platforms and outlets allow citizens to retreat into self-confirmatory bubbles, where their worst fears about the evils of the other side can be confirmed and amplified by extremists and cyber trolls intent on sowing discord and division.”

“Throughout Greg’s career, the calls for campus censorship had generally come from administrators. Students, on the other hand, had always been the one group that consistently supported free speech—in fact, demanded it. But now something was changing; on some campuses, words were increasingly seen as sources of danger. In the fall of 2013, Greg began hearing about students asking for “triggering” material to be removed from courses. By the spring of 2014, The New Republic5 and The New York Times6 were reporting on this”

Trigger warnings

“What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label “triggering.” (This is the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.)”

“We are saying that even when students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely than previous generations to engage in thought patterns that make those problems seem more threatening, which makes them harder to solve”

“Based on Greg’s personal and professional experience, his theory was this: Students were beginning to demand protection from speech because they had unwittingly learned to employ the very cognitive distortions that CBT tries to correct. Stated simply: Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt”

“At some schools, a culture of defensive self-censorship seemed to be emerging, partly in response to students who were quick to “call out” or shame others for small things that they deemed to be insensitive—either to the student doing the calling out or to members of a group that the student was standing up for. We called this pattern vindictive protectiveness and argued that such behavior made it more difficult for all students to have open discussions in which they could practice the essential skills of critical thinking and civil disagreement.”

“Meanwhile, all teens face new forms of harassment, insult, and social competition from social media”

“But as we’ll show in this book, adults are doing far more these days to protect children, and their overreach might be having some negative effects”

“But 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”

“We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk. 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. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress.”

“To repeat, we are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or “all in their heads.” We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them”

“Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised. That means 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).”

“Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience”

“It is vital that people who have survived violence become habituated to ordinary cues and reminders woven into the fabric of daily life. Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.”

“According to Richard McNally, the director of clinical training in Harvard’s Department of Psychology: Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.”

“This is the underlying rationale for what is called the hygiene hypothesis, the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner—another example of a problem of progress”

“Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate”

“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, which we’ll explore in chapter 7”

“The Alison Gopnik essay quoted above was titled “Should We Let Toddlers Play With Saws and Knives?” Her answer was: maybe.”

“To understand how an Oberlin administrator could have used the word “safety,” we turn to an article published in 2016 by the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam, titled “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Haslam examined a variety of key concepts in clinical and social psychology—including abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice—to determine how their usage had changed since the 1980s. He found that their scope had expanded in two directions: the concepts had crept “downward,” to apply to less severe situations, and “outward,” to encompass new but conceptually related phenomena.”

“Research on “post-traumatic growth” shows that most people report becoming stronger, or better in some way, after suffering through a traumatic experience”

“This is what we mean when we talk about safetyism. Safety is good, of course, and keeping others safe from harm is virtuous, but virtues can become vices when carried to extremes”

“we are proposing that today’s college students were raised by parents and teachers who had children’s best interests at heart but who often did not give them the freedom to develop their antifragility”

“Hanna Holborn Gray, the president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, once offered this principle: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think”

“the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy. Call-out culture requires an easy way to reach an audience that can award status to people who shame or punish alleged offenders. This is one reason social media has been so transformative: there is always an audience eager to watch people being shamed, particularly when it is so easy for spectators to join in and pile on.”

“Almost one in five students surveyed in a 2017 Brookings Institution study agreed that using violence to prevent a speaker from speaking was sometimes “acceptable.” While some critics challenged the sampling used in that study, findings in a second study by McLaughlin and Associates were similar; 30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “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 that sounds reasonable to you, just think about what the statement implies after concept creep and emotional reasoning expand the meaning of “hate speech” and “racially charged.”

“But if some students now think it’s OK to punch a fascist or white supremacist, and if anyone who disagrees with them can be labeled a fascist or white supremacist, well, you can see how this rhetorical move might make people hesitant to voice dissenting views on campus.”

“But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been”

“A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the “speech is violence” view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger”

“This is why viewpoint diversity is so essential in any group of scholars. Each professor is—like all human beings—a flawed thinker with a strong preference for believing that his or her own ideas are right. Each scholar suffers from the confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes. One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws. The community of scholars then judges which ideas survive the debate. We can call this process institutionalized disconfirmation.”

“The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students, too, in three ways. First, there’s the problem that many college students have little or no exposure to professors from half of the political spectrum. Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States”

“But if we step back and look at American universities as complex institutions nested within a larger society that has been growing steadily more divided, angry, and polarized, we begin to see the left and the right locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage that is an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve in this book”

“Applying labels to people can create what is called a looping effect: it can change the behavior of the person being labeled and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is part of why labeling is such a powerful cognitive distortion. 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”

“Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework”

“When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevated risk of depression. But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking”

“Of course, social media makes it easier than ever to create large groups, but those “virtual” groups are not the same as in-person connections; they do not satisfy the need for belonging in the same way”

“Social media vastly increases the frequency with which teenagers see people they know having fun and doing things together—including things to which they themselves were not invited. While this can increase FOMO (fear of missing out), which affects both boys and girls, scrolling through hundreds of such photos, girls may be more pained than boys by what Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen calls “FOBLO”—fear of being left out.29 When a girl sees images of her friends doing something she was invited to do but couldn’t attend (missed out), it produces a different psychological effect than when she is intentionally not invited (left out)”

“The number of teens of all ages who feel left out, whether boys or girls, is at an all-time high, according to Twenge, but the increase has been larger for girls. From 2010 to 2015, the percentage of teen boys who said they often felt left out increased from 21 to 27. For girls, the percentage jumped from 27 to 40.30”

“The second reason that social media may be harder on girls is that girls and boys are aggressive in different ways. Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive—more likely to shove and hit one another, and they show a greater interest in stories and movies about physical aggression. Girls, in contrast, are more “relationally” aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals’ relationships, reputations, and social status—for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out.33 When you add it all up, there’s no overall sex difference in total aggression, but there’s a large and consistent sex difference in the preferred ways of harming others”

“Plus, if boys’ aggression is generally delivered in person, then the targets of boys’ aggression can escape from it when they go home. On social media, girls can never escape”

“A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, using data from 139 colleges, found that by the 2015–2016 school year, half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns.35 The report notes that the only mental health concerns that were increasing in recent years were anxiety and depression. Confirming these upward trends with a different dataset,36 Figure 7.3 shows the percentage of college students who describe themselves as having a mental disorder. That number increased from 2.7 to 6.1 for male college students between 2012 and 2016 (that’s an increase of 126%). For female college students, it rose even more: from 5.8 to 14.5 (an increase of 150%). Regardless of whether all these students would meet rigorous diagnostic criteria, it is clear that iGen college students think about themselves very differently than did Millennials. The change is greatest for women: One out of every seven women at U.S. universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials”

“Depression and anxiety tend to go together.39 Both conditions create strong negative emotions, which feed emotional reasoning. Anxiety changes the brain in pervasive ways such that threats seem to jump out at the person, even in ambiguous or harmless circumstances.40 Compared to their nonanxious peers, anxious students are therefore more likely to perceive danger in innocent questions (leading them to embrace the concept of microaggressions) or in a passage of a novel (leading them to ask for a trigger warning) or in a lecture given by a guest speaker (leading them to want the lecturer disinvited or for someone to create a safe space as an alternative to the lecture). Depression distorts cognition, too, and gives people much more negative views than are warranted about themselves, other people, the world, and the future.41 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,42 all of which discourages efforts to act vigorously to solve problems”

“One conclusion that future research is almost certain to reach is that the effects of smartphones and social media are complicated, involving mixtures of benefits and harms depending on which kinds of kids are doing which kinds of online activities instead of doing which kinds of offline activities. One factor that is already emerging as a central variable for study is the quality of a teenager’s relationships and how technology is impacting it. In a recent review of research on the effects of social media, social psychologists Jenna Clark, Sara Algoe, and Melanie Green offer this principle: “Social network sites benefit their users when they are used to make meaningful social connections and harm their users through pitfalls such as isolation and social comparison when they are not”

“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”

“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”

“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.”

“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, clinical director, NW Anxiety Institute in Portland, Oregon”

“These experts all came to the conclusion that modern parenting is preventing kids from growing strong and independent, but each arrived at this conclusion via a different path: Skenazy through the experiences we described above, Christakis through her work as a preschool teacher and her research on early childhood education, and Lythcott-Haims through her experience as the dean of freshmen at Stanford University for more than a decade”

“The abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is among the most horrific crimes one can imagine. It is also, thankfully, among the rarest. 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,6 and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home.7 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.8 And since the 1990s, the rates of all crimes against children have gone down,9 while the chances of a kidnapped child surviving the ordeal have gone up.”

“The cities and towns in which the parents of iGen were raised were far more dangerous than they are today. Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers grew up with rising rates of crime and mayhem”

“We can understand a mother’s fear that her son might encounter a pervert in a public restroom. But 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”

“We believe that efforts to protect children from environmental hazards and vehicular accidents have been very good for children. Exposure to lead and cigarette smoke confer no benefits; being in a car crash without a seat belt does not make kids more resilient in future car crashes. But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience—such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors—are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out”

“In fact, even though mothers today have fewer children and spend far more time working outside the home than they did in 1965, they are spending more total time taking care of their children.31 Fathers’ time with kids has increased even more”

“Parents spending time with their kids is generally a good thing, but too much close supervision and protection can morph into safetyism. Safetyism takes children who are antifragile by nature and turns them into young adults who are more fragile and anxious, and therefore more receptive to the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”

“Skenazy says that societal pressures often prompt parents to engage in “worst-first thinking.”32 Unless parents prepare for the worst possible outcomes, they are looked down on by other parents and by teachers for being bad parents (or even “America’s Worst Mom”

“When the police endorse safetyism, it forces parents to overprotect. The police chief of New Albany, Ohio, advises that children should not be allowed outside without supervision until the age of 16.35 When you combine peer pressure, shaming, and the threat of arrest, it’s no wonder that so many American parents simply don’t let their kids out of their sight anymore, even though many of those same parents report that their fondest memories of childhood were unsupervised outdoor adventures with friends”

“first kind of family is very common in the upper third of the socioeconomic spectrum, in which marriage rates are high and divorce rates are low”

“These families generally employ a parenting style that Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” Parents using this style see their task as cultivating their children’s talents while stimulating the development of their cognitive and social skills. They fill their children’s calendars with adult-guided activities, lessons, and experiences, and they closely monitor what happens in school. They talk with their children a great deal, using reasoning and persuasion, and they hardly ever use physical force or physical punishment”

“The second kind of family is very common in the bottom third of the socioeconomic spectrum, where most children are born to unmarried mothers. These families generally employ a parenting style that Lareau calls

“natural growth parenting.” Working-class parents tend to believe that children will reach maturity without needing much guidance or interference from adults. Children therefore experience “long stretches of leisure time, child-initiated play, clear boundaries between adults and children, and daily interactions with kin.”36 Parents spend less time talking with their children, and reason with them far less, compared with middle-class parents; they also give more orders and directives, and they sometimes use spanking or physical discipline”

“The genes get the ball rolling on the first draft of the brain, but the brain is “expecting” the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop. Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults”

“Research on play has increased rapidly since 1980. Evidence for the benefits of play is now strong, and there’s a growing body of scholarship—suggestive though not conclusive—linking play deprivation to later anxiety and depression.8 As stated in one review of this literature: Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child’s perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety. Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society. We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development [emphasis added]”

“Peter Gray, a leading researcher of play, defines “free play” as “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”

“Gray notes the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings: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.”

“The genes get the ball rolling on the first draft of the brain, but the brain is “expecting” the child to engage in thousands of hours of play—including thousands of falls, scrapes, conflicts, insults, alliances, betrayals, status competitions, and acts of exclusion—in order to develop. Children who are deprived of play are less likely to develop into physically and socially competent teens and adults”

“Research on play has increased rapidly since 1980. Evidence for the benefits of play is now strong, and there’s a growing body of scholarship—suggestive though not conclusive—linking play deprivation to later anxiety and depression.8 As stated in one review of this literature: Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child’s perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety. Overprotection through governmental control of playgrounds and exaggerated fear of playground accidents might thus result in an increase of anxiety in society. We might need to provide more stimulating environments for children, rather than hamper their development [emphasis added]”

“The study that offers the clearest picture of the relevant trends was carried out in 1981 by sociologists at the University of Michigan, who asked parents of children under thirteen to keep detailed records of how their kids spent their time on several randomly chosen days. They repeated the study in 1997, and found that time spent in any kind of play went down 16% overall, and much of the play had shifted to indoor activities, often involving a computer and no other children.”

“Twenge’s analysis of iGen, the current generation of kids, shows that the drop in free play has accelerated”

“They have been systematically deprived of opportunities to “dose themselves” with risk. Instead of enjoying a healthy amount of risk, this generation is more likely than earlier ones to avoid it.”

“In contrast to the decreased time spent in play between 1981 and 1997, that same time-use study found that time spent in school went up 18%, and time spent doing homework went up 145%.16 Research by Duke University psychologist Harris Cooper indicates that while there are benefits to homework in middle school and high school, provided it’s relevant and in the right amount, achievement benefits in elementary school are smaller, and homework that isn’t realistic in length and difficulty can even decrease achievement.17 Yet elementary school students have seen an increase in homework over the past twenty years”

“It has become much more difficult to gain admission to the top U.S. universities. For example, in the 1980s and ’90s, Yale’s acceptance rate hovered around 20%. By 2003, the admission rate was down to 11% and in 2017 it was 7%.36 So it makes sense that parents have increasingly teamed up with their children to help them pack their resumes with extracurricular activities. It’s what former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz calls “the resume arms race,” and any family that doesn’t come together to play the game puts their child at a disadvantage. “The only point of having more,” Deresiewicz explains in his book Excellent Sheep, “is having more than everybody else. Nobody needed 20,000 atomic warheads until the other side had 19,000. Nobody needs eleven extracurriculars, either—what purpose does having them actually serve?—unless the other guy has ten”

“So it isn’t surprising that so many parents are hovering and oversupervising, not just to ensure safety but to ensure that children do homework and prepare for tests”

“Some of these parents may think that making sure their children do whatever it takes to succeed in advanced courses helps their children develop “grit.” But “grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that’s tragic,” psychology professor Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit, told us. “Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.” She wants young people to “devote themselves to pursuits that are intrinsically fulfilling”

“The college admissions process nowadays makes it harder for high school students to enjoy school and pursue intrinsic fulfillment. The process “warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy” and “jeopardizes their mental health,”41 says Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist and author of Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania”

“Nowhere is that more apparent than in suicide clusters at highly competitive high schools, such as those in Palo Alto, California, and the suburbs of Boston, which have been profiled in The Atlantic42 and The New York Times.43 In a 2015 survey, 95% of students at Lexington High School in Massachusetts reported “a lot of stress” or “extreme stress” about their classes, and in a 2016 study, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the teen suicide rate in Palo Alto, California, was more than four times the national average”

“Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life,” says Gray, “which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems”

“One paradox of upper-middle-class American life is that some of the things parents and schools do to help kids get admitted to college may make them less able to thrive once they’re there”

“It takes many years to cultivate these skills, which overlap with the ones that Peter Gray maintains are learned during free play. Of greatest importance in free play is that it is always voluntary; anyone can quit at any time and disrupt the activity, so children must pay close attention to the needs and concerns of others if they want to keep the game going. They must work out conflicts over fairness on their own; no adult can be called upon to side with one child against another”

“In June 2017, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, was invited to be the commencement speaker at his son’s graduation from middle school”

“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[…]”

“Always trust your feelings. “If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t,” says the sign. But that can’t really be true. 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,36 so in almost every case, the feeling is wrong. Of course, passengers on New Jersey Transit should alert someone if they see an abandoned backpack or suitcase, but that doesn’t mean that their feelings are “probably” right.”

“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”

“Young people have come to believe that danger lurks everywhere, even in the classroom, and even in private conversations. Everyone must be vigilant and report threats to the authorities”

“Under these statutes, the bar for what counts as harassment is high: a pattern of severe behavior that

“effectively denies access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”48 The pattern of behavior must also be discriminatory—that is, directed at someone who belongs to a protected class named in the statute, such as gender, race, or religion.49 In practice, however, the bar has been lowered; many universities use the concept of harassment to justify punishing one-time utterances that could be construed as offensive but don’t really look anything like harassment—and some don’t have anything to do with race or gender”

“In 2013, Campbell and Manning began noticing the same changes on campus that Greg had been noticing—the interlocking set of new ideas about microaggressions, trigger warnings, and safe spaces”

“They defined a victimhood culture as having three distinct attributes: First, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight”; second, they “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties”; and third, they “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”

“Campbell and Manning pointed out that the presence of administrators or legal authorities who can be persuaded to take one’s side and intervene is a prerequisite for the emergence of victimhood culture. 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”

“You can see this for yourself, and play with one of the best interactive political infographics ever, by searching the internet for “How Birth Year Influences Political Views”

“The political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman examined voting patterns of Americans to see whether political events or the political climate in childhood left some kind of mark on people’s later political orientation.4 They found that there is a window of higher impressionability running from about age fourteen to twenty-four, with its peak right around age eighteen. Political events—or perhaps the overall zeitgeist as people perceive it—are more likely to “stick” during that period than outside that age range”

“Combining the two forms of justice, we can say this: Intuitive justice involves perceptions of distributive justice (as given by equity theory) and procedural justice”

“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”

“In that spirit, here are some specific suggestions for parents, teachers, and all who care for children: Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month”

“Let your kids take more small risks, and let them learn from getting some bumps and bruises”

“That is the epitome of safetyism: If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of slightly risky play.”

“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”

“Learn about Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids movement, and incorporate her lessons into your family’s life”
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”

“Grant offers the following four rules for productive disagreement: Encourage your children to engage in a lot of “productive disagreement”

“Left to their own devices, as it were, many children would spend most of their free time staring into a screen. According to the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, teens spend on average about nine hours per day on screens, and eight- to twelve-year-olds spend about six hours; that is in addition to whatever they are doing on screens for school”

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