Viswanathan K's Thoughts

After a certain age, some students feel terrified by exams. This goes far beyond the usual nervousness everyone experiences prior to an exam. But, being a subjective experience, how does know what a particular student is feeling? Conversely, has the pendulum of concern/compassion swung a bit too far nowadays?   Lisa Marchiano, a psychoanalyst, describes a student who’d experienced what she (the student) described as a panic attack during the first exam, but “successfully completed the first exam — and did okay on it”. And yet, that student didn’t take the second exam because she was afraid she’d have another panic attack. Marchiano tried telling the student that the fact that she had “pushed through the fear feelings” meant she could deal with it. “But I had a panic attack,” responded the student and did not budge. Marchiano asks the forbidden question: “I found myself wondering where she had learned that she ought not to be expected to tolerate ordinary distress or discomf...

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...