Over-Coddled?

Every generation feels the next generation is too soft, too over-protected. Now add a new term to that list: “coddled”, from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind. I wasn’t sure if the book was too US-specific, so I heard his podcast with Shane Parrish instead.

In the US, Haidt believes the coddling started at least a generation back, as the instances of child kidnapping and molestation increased. Kids who used to go to play on their own at 6 were now allowed to do that only at 14. Plus, in the US suburbs, kids have to be ferried to play areas. That in turn meant play was rarely unsupervised. Kids no longer got to evolve and come up with the rules of engagement on their own, instead adults told them the sanitized rules.

After kids became “economically worthless but emotionally priceless”, they have increasingly become “academic projects”, says Haidt. And that in turn means parents deprive kids of the very childhood experiences they need most and replaced them with (far too many) after-school activities.

Another reason for the over-coddled kid that enters college is, surprisingly, social media. Wait a minute… isn’t social media a forum where people lash out at other in ways they’d never do face-to-face? Shouldn’t exposure to social media from a young age make kids tougher and thick-skinned, not coddled?

Well yes, over-the-top reactions and criticisms are all too common on social media, but then again, kids learn to dismiss much of it. Further, because of the nature of social media, kids never get exposed to nuanced arguments, or shades of grey. Worse, social media has this “callout culture”, where people are just waiting to latch onto one mistimed word or phrase, if not to deliberately quote things out of context, and to ignore the tone of an utterance (sarcasm etc). As Haidt puts it, “we live in a minefield” of no forgiveness, no tolerance, no willingness to let people change their mind. This results in kids always being on the alert, gradually becoming too afraid to be different, says Haidt. And it’s then a short path from not speaking up to conformity to the death of any new ideas.

Conversely, kids don’t hear opposing views either. Which means that when these kids enter college and the workplace, they can’t deal with conflict, and always crave for “emotional safety”. And no, says Haidt, these characteristics don’t change once they enter the workplace either. They’re too deeply ingrained.

And the last problem is that today’s world doesn’t celebrate achievements or beauty; instead, it celebrates the culture of victimhood, the spectrum for which ranges from survivors of brutal bullying to the “survivors of math trauma”!

So it sounds like all the stars are aligned in the worst possible way to create the over-coddled next generation. What’s the solution then? Haidt doesn’t provide any, but maybe the first step is to just understand the extent of the problem.