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 replac...