A Review for You: The Coddling of the American Mind

A Review for You (4 Minute read)

Do you remember the first time you started a story with “When I was a kid…”? I love hearing other generations' coming-of-age stories. Even at 31, I have uttered this quite a few times. Youth have very different childhoods than I did 13+ years ago. Each generation has virtues and vices that the former did not. The Coddling of the American Mind shares some of the lies believed by youth and parents today, then tries to replace them with truths for their better. This is not a Christian book, but much of it will help Christian parents understand themselves and their children so they can parent well. I think the book is worth your time, so I will summarize and share highlights about the first “untruth” (aka, “lie”), how we came to believe it, and then a few recommended solutions.

Three Lies

Greg and Jonathan share three “untruths” that have formed many modern parents and kids. At first glance, you may not believe the authors, but they argue compellingly that many parents and students are unsuspecting devotees. I started in disbelief, but then concluded they have a prophetic insight. Though I will only dwell on the first, the three lies are: 

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. 
2. Always trust your feelings. 
3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

The first lie is illustrated with the anecdote of peanut allergies; in the 1990’s parents were avoiding peanuts to prevent allergic reactions, but then doctors noted an increase in peanut allergies. As it turns out, parents should have been actively exposing their kids to allergens at young ages so that their bodies learn to adapt and overcome early on. Greg & Jonathan’s point is that kids are not fragile – they are Antifragile. This means kids are designed to grow physically, emotionally, and morally through healthy doses of adversity. The problem is that since the early 1990’s safety has become an American obsession, so that parents and educators try to prevent the very “danger” which provides opportunity to mature. The basic outlook has become “If something isn’t 100% safe, it is dangerous.” Hard evidence of this is how the concepts of abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice have transformed. The authors document how these definitions have expanded to include less severe and new situations.[1]

How did we get here? 6 Factors

Greg and Jonathan argue that six factors have reinforced these three lies in modern minds. You will have to pick up the book for all six, but I will describe three which particularly resonated with me: paranoid parenting, the decline of play, and safetyism. Paranoid parenting is the overprotection of children which makes them weaker and less resilient later (aka helicopter parenting). Many middle- and upper-class parents give their kids substantially less freedom than they had as kids; they insist their kids must constantly be supervised. Unfortunately, these restrictions take away essential life lessons in which children take minor risks that prepare them to evaluate and take larger risks as adults.

The second factor, the decline of play, flows from the first. On average, kids have much less unsupervised “free play” today.[2] What does free play look like? Playing house or starting a pickup game with friends in the neighborhood. This is vital because this hones a person’s “art of association,” where they learn to voluntarily cooperate and clash with others. Greg and Jonathan also write that where free play is lacking, anxiety and risk intolerance are common. They argue lack of free play stems from the isolation of technology, unrealistic fears about kidnapping, increases in homework and test-prep, and a de-emphasis on physical and social skills by educators.[3]

The third factor, safetyism, is a culture in education where administrators believe and teach that students are fragile, so they create rules to prevent anyone from experiencing any emotional discomfort. They document this especially in universities, where students are considered customers, so administrator seek to please students and deflect any stress, even if that means restricting free speech.[4] This has the unfortunate effect of withholding opportunities to develop intellectual clarity, moral independence, and to practice conflict resolution. Instead, it leaves students practicing unhealthy emotional reasoning that psychologists call “cognitive distortions.” [5]

Family Solutions

Do your kids have as much freedom as you did as a child? Are they more anxious? What can you do about it? Greg and Jonathan make a strong case that parents have stopped trying to prepare students for the road and instead have tried to prepare the road for the students. This is backwards though; the book's greatest takeaway is that children need to be prepared for the road. Here are my eight favorite solutions for parents:

• Give the gift of experience. It is not something you can download over one week or month into your kids. They need thousands of smaller experiences handling frustration, stress, boredom, and conflict to become resilient, autonomous adults. You can start curating these experiences by talking with them about what they can handle in situations and assume they can do more each month!
• Encourage biking around the neighborhood and to school, if possible.
• Help them find neighborhood kids to play with for unstructured free play.
• Send them to overnight summer camps.
• Train them to think without distortions about people and situations. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) offers simple strategies parents can use, some of which are touched on in this book. There is a lot of overlap between CBT and what the Bible describes as “renewing your mind.” (Romans 12:1-2) [6]
• Teach them to notice and manage their own emotional reactions, choosing to respond appropriately in situations.
• Encourage kids to have healthy disagreements with the 4 rules of productive disagreement. [7]
• Look carefully at how your child’s school handles identity politics.

Some Christian Critiques

I have three concerns with the book: First, the authors write from an evolutionary perspective. Fortunately, many of their judgements and conclusions are not dependent upon this, so Christians can see the Creator’s design where Greg and Jonathan suppose naturalistic evolution. Second, although they don’t use categories of “sin,” they do have some judgements about actions and attitudes that are “wrong” – and many are congruent with Christian morality. The final concern is that they offer no spiritual solutions; this is an issue because some of the problems are clearly identified as spiritual, heart-depth problems by Jesus and the Apostles – such as anxiety and assuming the worst about others. If this book is a watermelon, Christians have some seeds to spit out, but overall, Greg and Jonathan offer helpful verdicts and strategies to train families in critical thinking and fostering resilient adults.

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[1] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Illustrated edition (New York City: Penguin Books, 2019), 25.

[2] Lukianoff and Haidt, 193. Free play is “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.”

[3] Lukianoff and Haidt, 194.

[4] Lukianoff and Haidt, 212.

[5] Lukianoff and Haidt, 212. Two common cognitive distortions are “catastrophizing” and “mind reading.”

[6] Lukianoff and Haidt, 241. See this page for some recommendations of CBT resources about anxiety.

[7] Lukianoff and Haidt, 240. The suggested rules are 1) Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict. 2) Argue as if you are right, but listen as if you are wrong (and be willing to change your mind). 3) Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective. 4) Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.