← The Coddling of the American Mind How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 8. Paranoid Parenting

Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2019-8-20 Review Date: Status:💥

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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, Oregon1

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1. Denizet-Lewis, B. (2017, October 11). Why are more American teenagers than ever suffering from severe anxiety? The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html

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On May 25, 1979, a few blocks south of New York University, a six-year-old boy named Etan Patz persuaded his parents to let him walk the two blocks from their apartment to his school bus stop. He never came home, and his body was never found.4 Anyone who lived in New York at the time probably remembers seeing signs all over the city and the distraught parents on the evening news, pleading for anyone with information to come forward.

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4. The main suspect in the case was not convicted until 2017. For a summary, see: McKinley, J. C. (2017, April 18). Pedro Hernandez gets 25 years to life in murder of Etan Patz. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/nyregion/pedro-hernandez-etan-patz-sentencing.html

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But it was a second highly publicized murder, in 1981, that changed the course of American childhood by initiating a sustained movement to protect children from strangers. Adam Walsh was six years old. His mother took him shopping at a Sears in Hollywood, Florida, and let him play at a kiosk promoting a new Atari video game system. The kiosk had attracted a gaggle of older boys, so Adam’s mom let him stay there to watch while she went off to the lamp department for a few minutes. A scuffle broke out among the boys over whose turn was next, and the Sears security guards kicked all the boys out of the store. It seems that the other boys then left the scene, and Adam was too shy to speak up and say that his mother was inside. Standing alone outside the store, he was lured into a car by a drifter and serial murderer, who promised him toys and candy. Two weeks later, Adam’s severed head was found in a canal 130 miles away.

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Adam’s father, John Walsh, has devoted his life to trying to save other children from suffering a similar fate. He created the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, which advocated for legislative reform and succeeded in prodding the U.S. government to create the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 1984. He worked with producers to create the made-for-TV movie Adam, which was seen by 38 million viewers when it first aired. In 1988, Walsh launched a true-crime TV show, America’s Most Wanted, which presented cases of unsolved crimes, including child abductions, and asked the public for help. Walsh was instrumental in a novel method of disseminating photographs of missing children: printing them on milk cartons, under the big all-caps word MISSING.5 The first such cartons appeared in 1984, and one of the first photos was of Etan Patz. By the early 1990s, the program had spread, and photos of missing children were reproduced on grocery bags, billboards, pizza boxes, even utility bills. Norms changed, fears grew, and many parents came to believe that if they took their eyes off their children for an instant in any public venue, their kid might be snatched. It no longer felt safe to let kids roam around their neighborhoods unsupervised.

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5. Lafrance, A. (2017, February 14). When bad news was printed on milk cartons. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/when-bad-news-was-printed-on-milk-cartons/516675

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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.10

Note: kind of reminds me of how the news will exacerbate issues that aren’t happen very as often as they let on like crime 

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6. National Crime Information Center. (n.d.) 2016 NCIC missing person and unidentified person statistics. Retrieved from https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2016-ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics.pdf/view

7. Polly Klaas Foundation. (n.d.). National child kidnapping facts. Retrieved from http://www.pollyklaas.org/about/national-child-kidnapping.html

8. ChildStats.gov. (n.d.). POP1 Child population: Number of children (in millions) ages 0–17 in the United States by age, 1950–2016 and projected 2017–2050. Retrieved from https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp

9. Simpson, K. (2010, November 27). Dispelled kidnap myths do little to allay parents’ fears. The Denver Post. Retrieved from http://www.denverpost.com/2010/11/27/dispelled-kidnap-myths-do-little-to-allay-parents-fears

10. For more on kidnapping trends, see: U.S. Department of Justice. (2016, June 14). Number of child abductions by strangers unchanged over past decade and a half; Fewer end in homicide. Retrieved from http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/Presspacket/Stereotypical%20Kidnapping%20.pdf. Three interesting points: (1) Ninety-two percent of kidnapped children were returned safely to their families in 2011, compared with just 57% in 1997. (Technology, such as cell phone tracking, has been a big help to law enforcement.) (2) Four out of five children abducted by a stranger in 2011 did not live in a home with two parents (biological or adoptive). (3) One third of the children abducted were never reported missing. No adult was taking responsibility for them; they were kids who fell through the cracks. See: Flores, J. R. (2002, October). Nonfamily abducted children: National estimates and characteristics. Retrieved from http://www.pollyklaas.org/media/pdf/NISMARTIInonfamily.pdf

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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.11 Muggings were a normal part of urban life, and city dwellers sometimes carried “muggers’ money” in a cheap wallet so they would not have to hand over their real wallet.12 Heroin syringes and later crack vials became common city sights. When you combine the giant crime wave that began in the 1960s with the rapid spread of cable TV in the 1980s, including news channels that offered round-the-clock coverage of missing-child cases,13 you can see why American parents grew fearful and defensive by the 1990s.

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11. FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division. (n.d.). Preliminary semiannual uniform crime report, January–June, 2015. Retrieved from https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2015

12. Kurutz, S. (2004, October 24). The age of the mugger. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/nyregion/thecity/the-age-of-the-mugger.html

13. At least, of missing white children. From 1979 to 1981, there was a horrific cluster of more than twenty-five fatal kidnappings of black children in Atlanta that became known as the Atlanta Child Murders. This killing spree garnered less national attention than the murders of Patz and Walsh, which occurred during those years.

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The crime wave ended rather abruptly in the early 1990s, when rates of nearly all crimes began to plummet all over the United States.14 In 2013, for example, the murder rate dropped to the same level it had been at sixty years earlier.15 Nevertheless, the fear of crime did not diminish along with the crime rate, and the new habits of fearful parenting seem to have become new national norms. American parenting is now wildly out of sync with the actual risk that strangers pose to children.

Note: look over fear tactics from Hate Inc.

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14. There is no consensus among criminologists as to why crime went down so quickly all across America. Jon believes that the phaseout of leaded gasoline in the late 1970s and early 1980s is one major factor. See: Drum, K. (2016, February 11). Lead: America’s real criminal element. Mother Jones. Retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health

15. Infoplease. (n.d.) Homicide rate per 100,000, 1950–2015. Retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/us/crime/homicide-rate-1950-2014

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Lythcott-Haims and Skenazy both shared stories with us about parents who are afraid to let their teenagers ride their bikes to neighbors’ houses. A psychologist who writes for HealthyChildren.org reported that “the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children feels that children of any age should not be permitted to use public restrooms alone.”17 While referencing her own nine-year-old son, the psychologist offered these tips:

Never send a child into a public restroom alone.

Instruct your child to use a private bathroom stall rather than a urinal.

Avoid restrooms with more than one entrance.

Stand in the door and talk to your child throughout their time in the bathroom.

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16. Stapleton, A. C. (2015, February 6). Police: 6-year-old boy “kidnapped” for being too nice to strangers. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/05/us/missouri-fake-kidnapping/index.html

17. Berchelmann, K. (2017, May 4). When can my child use the public restroom alone? HealthyChildren.org. Retrieved from https://www.healthychildren.org/English/tips-tools/ask-the-pediatrician/Pages/When-can-my-child-use-the-public-restroom-alone.aspx

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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?

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If you spend time on Facebook, you’ve probably seen posts with titles like: “8 Reasons Children of the 1970s Should All Be Dead.”18 (Reason #1: Lawn darts. Reason #4: Tanning oil instead of sunscreen.) Such posts are shared widely by children of the 1970s (like us), because they allow our generation to laugh at the safety concerns of today’s parents and to point out that when we grew up, nobody wore seat belts or bike helmets, most of the adults smoked (even around children), paint and gasoline were leaded, and children were encouraged to go—on their own—to parks and playgrounds, where anyone could kidnap them.

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18. Lowbrow, Y. (2014, June 9). 8 reasons children of the 1970s should all be dead. Retrieved from https://flashbak.com/8-reasons-children-of-the-1970s-should-all-be-dead-323

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While the tone is frequently mocking and dismissive, these posts also highlight some important successes in the pursuit of child safety. Increased use of seat belts has saved many lives,19 bicycle helmets lower the risk of traumatic brain injuries,20 not smoking around children confers many health benefits on the kids,21 and removing lead from paint and gasoline has prevented untold numbers of medical problems and deaths.22 Putting it all together, from 1960 to 1990, there was a 48% reduction in deaths from unintended injuries and accidents among kids between five and fourteen years of age, and a 57% drop in deaths of younger kids (ages one to four).23 The success of childhood safety campaigns helps explain why modern parents often take a concern about safety to the extreme of safetyism. After all, if focusing on big threats produces such dividends, why not go further and make childhood as close to perfectly safe as possible?

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19. YOURS News. (2012, February 20). Seatbelts—Saving thousands of lives around the world everyday … [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.youthforroadsafety.org/news-blog/news-blog-item/t/seatbelts_saving_thousands_of_lives_around_the_world_everyday

20. Ganti et al. (2013).

21. DeNoon, D. J. (2003, May 13). Quit smoking so your kids won’t start. Web MD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20030513/quit-smoking-so-your-kids-wont-start

22. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. (n.d.). LEAD: Information for workers—Health problems caused by lead. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/lead/health.html

23. Christakis (2016), p. 131.

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A problem with this kind of thinking is that when we attempt to produce perfectly safe systems, we almost inevitably create new and unforeseen problems. For example, efforts to prevent financial instability by bailing out companies can lead to larger and more destructive crashes later on;24 efforts to protect forests by putting out small fires can allow dead wood to build up, eventually leading to catastrophic fires far worse than the sum of the smaller fires that were prevented.25 Safety rules and programs—like most efforts to change complex systems—often have unintended consequences. Sometimes these consequences are so bad that the intended beneficiaries are worse off than if nothing had been done at all.

Note: (Per https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI 8:20) “nowadays we live in a world that is paradoxical”

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24. Taleb (2007).

25. For more on these backfire effects, see Greg Ip’s perfectly titled book Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe. Ip (2015).

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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 on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment. (Keeping them indoors also raises their risk of obesity.) Skenazy puts the case succinctly: “The problem with this ‘everything is dangerous’ outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself.”26

Lythcott-Haims concurs:

I’ve met parents who won’t let their seventeen-year-old take the subway. And I said to them, “What’s your long-term strategy for her?” … I see it all around me. I see kids afraid to be alone on the sidewalk. They don’t like walking places alone. They don’t like biking places alone. And it’s probably because they’ve been basically made to feel that they can be abducted at any moment.27

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26. Skenazy (2008); see n. 2.

27. J. Lythcott-Haims (personal communication May 26, 2017).

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As Taleb showed us in Antifragile, by placing a protective shield over our children, we inadvertently stunt their growth and deprive them of the experiences they need to become successful and functional adults. Journalist Hara Estroff Marano has been sounding the alarm about this trend for more than fifteen years. “Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children,” she says. “However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile.”28 Most parents know this on some level but still find themselves hovering and overprotecting. Even Lythcott-Haims has caught herself:

So here I was, highly critical of parents who couldn’t let go of their college students. And then one day, when my kid was ten, I leaned over at dinner and began cutting his meat. And I realized in that moment: Holy cow! I’m cutting his meat and he’s ten! I was babysitting other kids when I was ten, but my own kid needs to have his meat cut. What the hell is up with that?29

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28. Estroff Marano, H. (2004, November 1). A nation of wimps. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/nation-wimps

29. J. Lythcott-Haims (personal communication May 26, 2017).

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The blame for creating the culture of safetyism does not fall entirely on individual parents. At a fundamental level, overparenting and safetyism are “problems of progress,” which we mentioned in the introductory chapter. Thankfully, gone are the days when families routinely had five or more children and expected one or more of them to die. When countries attain material prosperity and women gain educational equality, full political rights, and access to good healthcare and contraception, birth rates plunge and most couples have just one or two children. They invest more time in these fewer, healthier children.30 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.

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30. This is called the demographic transition. See: Grover, D. (2014, October 13). What is the Demographic Transition Model? PopEd Blog. Retrieved from https://www.populationeducation.org/content/what-demographic-transition-model

31. Parker, K., & Wang, W. (2013, March 14). Modern parenthood: Roles of moms and dads converge as they balance work and family. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/03/14/modern-parenthood-roles-of-moms-and-dads-converge-as-they-balance-work-and-family

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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 and anxious, and therefore more receptive to the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

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When parents get together and talk about parenting, it is common to hear condemnations of helicopter parenting. Many parents want to do less hovering and give their kids more freedom, but it’s not so easy; there are pressures from other parents, from schools, and even from laws that push parents to be more protective than they would like to be. 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”). Good parents are expected to believe that their children are in danger every moment they are unsupervised.

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32. L. Skenazy (personal communication, May 4, 2017).

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It gets worse. Parents who reject overparenting and give their kids more freedom can actually be arrested. In 2015, two Florida parents were charged with felony child neglect when they were delayed getting home.33 Unable to get into his house, their eleven-year-old son played with a basketball in their yard for ninety minutes. A neighbor called the police. After being handcuffed, strip-searched, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail, the parents were arrested for negligence, and the boy and his four-year-old brother (who had not been left alone) were put in foster care for a month. Even after being returned to their parents, the children were required to attend “play” therapy. The parents, who had no history of neglecting their children, were mandated to get therapy and take parenting classes.

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33. Skenazy, L. (2015, June 11). 11-year-old boy played in his yard. CPS took him, felony charge for parents. Reason. Retrieved from http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-his-yard-cps-t

34. WFSB Staff. (2014, July 9). Bristol mother charged with leaving child unattended in car. Eyewitness News 3. Retrieved from http://wfsb.com/story/25982048/bristol-mother-charged-with-leaving-child-unattendd-in-care. (For more stories like this, visit https://letgrow.org/blog)

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In Bristol, Connecticut, in 2014, a woman left her daughter alone in her car while she went into a CVS pharmacy. This might sound bad to you, especially when you learn that it was summertime and the car windows were all closed. An alert passerby called the police, who were able to open the car door. The police reported that the child was “responsive” and not in distress. But here’s the thing: the girl was eleven years old. She had told her mother that she preferred to wait in the car rather than come into the store.34

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Before the rise of paranoid parenting, eleven-year-olds could earn money and learn responsibility by babysitting for neighbors, as Jon and his sisters did in the 1970s. Now, according to some police departments and local busybodies, eleven-year-olds need babysitters themselves. The mother was issued a misdemeanor summons and forced to appear in court.

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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.

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35. Skenazy, L. (2016, June 17) “16 is the appropriate age to allow children to be outside by themselves”—New Albany, Ohio, police chief. Free-Range Kids. Retrieved from http://www.freerangekids.com/16-is-the-appropriate-age-to-allow-children-to-be-outside-by-themselves-new-albany-ohio-police-chief

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Different explanatory threads matter more for different people, and perhaps the biggest differentiator of life experiences in the United States today is social class. To understand how social class influences parenting practices, we’ll draw on two books that combine in-depth profiles of families with sociological theory and data: Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau, and Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. Both scholars find that, with respect to parenting practices, social class matters far more than race, so we’ll set race aside and focus on the ways that class differences in parenting may be relevant for understanding what is now happening on college campuses. For simplicity, we’ll use Lareau’s terms “middle class” and “working class,” but “middle class” means middle class and above, including the upper class. The term “working class” is used for everyone below middle class, including poor families.

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The big divide in parenting practices is best seen in the contrast between two kinds of families: those in which children are raised by two parents who each have four-year-college degrees and are married to each other throughout their children’s childhood, and those in which children are raised by a single or divorced parent (or other relative) who does not have a four-year-college degree. The 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.

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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.

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36. Lareau (2011), p. 3.

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From these descriptions, it would seem that working-class kids have one advantage: they get more unstructured and unsupervised play time, which, as we’ll say in the next chapter, is very good for developing social skills and a sense of autonomy. In fact, Putnam points to this class difference as something relatively new and very important. He notes that the parents of Baby Boomers were strongly influenced by the writings of childrearing expert Dr. Benjamin Spock, who taught that “children should be permitted to develop at their own pace, not pushed to meet the schedules and rules of adult life.”37 Spock encouraged parents to relax and let children be children, and indeed, Baby Boomers and GenX children were generally given the freedom to roam around their neighborhoods and play without adult supervision.

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37. Putnam (2015), p. 117.

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But Putnam notes that, beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, “the dominant ideas and social norms about good parenting [had] shifted from Spock’s ‘permissive parenting’ to a new model of ‘intensive parenting,’”38 which essentially describes Lareau’s concerted cultivation. This change happened primarily among middle-class parents, who were immersed in news reports about the importance of early stimulation (for example, the erroneous idea that babies who listen to Mozart will become smarter)39 and who wanted to give their children every possible advantage in the increasingly competitive race to get into a good college. This shift did not happen among working-class parents. The change in middle-class parenting norms is crucial for our story. Putnam identifies the shift as kicking in just before iGen was born. To the extent that iGen college students are behaving differently from previous generations of college students, a contributing factor may be that, compared with previous generations, middle-class iGen (and late Millennial) students were overscheduled and overparented as children.

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38. Putnam (2015), p. 117.

39. DeLoache et al. (2010).

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It would be a mistake, however, to think that working-class kids had an overall advantage. Putnam and Lareau both note a variety of factors that make it harder for working-class kids to succeed in general, and in college in particular, even if they are admitted to selective universities. One is that all those organized activities help to familiarize middle-class children with the ways of adults in professional settings and adult-run institutions. Parental modeling gives them a sense that institutions can be made to serve their needs if they can make the right argument to the right person at the right time. Working-class kids, in contrast, have generally had less exposure to adult institutions and have not seen their parents engage with these institutions with the same sense of strength, rights, or entitlement to good treatment. Working-class kids are therefore more likely to feel like “fish out of water” in college. (This may have contributed to the feelings of not belonging that Olivia wrote about, from the Claremont McKenna College story we presented in chapter 3.)

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Compared with middle-class kids, the second major disadvantage plaguing working-class kids is that they are more likely to have been affected by chronic and severe adversity. In the 1990s, a group of researchers developed a survey to standardize the assessment of “Adverse Childhood Experiences” (ACE).40 The survey asked people to report which items, from a list of ten, they had been exposed to in childhood; things like “Parents separated/divorced,” “You lacked food or clothes or your parents were too drunk or high to care for you,” “Felt no one in family loved or supported you,” “Adult sexually abused you.” As the number of yes responses increases beyond two, measures of health and success in adulthood tend to decline, and this introduces an important complication to our story about antifragility: Severe adversity that hits kids early, especially in the absence of secure and loving attachment relationships with adults, does not make them stronger; it makes them weaker. Chronic, severe adversity creates “toxic stress.” It resets children’s stress responses to kick in more readily and for longer periods in the future. Putnam summarizes the findings like this:

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40. The website for the research project is hosted by the Centers for Disease Control, at http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy

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Moderate stress buffered by supportive adults is not necessarily harmful, and may even be helpful, in that it can promote the development of coping skills. On the other hand, severe and chronic stress, especially if unbuffered by supportive adults, can disrupt the basic executive functions that govern how various parts of the brain work together to address challenges and solve problems. Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.41

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41. Putnam (2015), p.112.

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Kids raised in families below the middle class score much higher, on average, on the ACE survey. Their family situations tend to be more unstable; their economic lives are often precarious, and they are much more likely to witness violence or be victims of violence. This means that even if they make it to college, they may still be carrying scars and disadvantages with them, and in order to thrive in college, they may need different kinds of support than are appropriate for their wealthier peers, whose brains were shaped by concerted cultivation.

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The lesson we draw from this brief review of research on social class and parenting is that although kids are naturally antifragile, there are two very different ways to damage their development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity. This has happened to some of today’s college students, particularly those from working-class or poor families. The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.

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America’s selective universities are dominated by children from the upper class and upper-middle class. A recent analysis found that at thirty-eight top schools, including most of the Ivy League, there are more undergraduate students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%.42 This means that overparenting is probably a much greater cause of fragility on such campuses than is underparenting.

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42. Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, & Yagen (2017). See a summary of that paper in this infographic: Some colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60. Find yours. (2017, January 18). The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

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Skenazy sees discounting positives when parents overmonitor. “Any upside to free, unsupervised time (joy, independence, problem-solving, resilience) is seen as trivial, compared to the infinite harm the child could suffer without you there. There is nothing positive but safety.”

Note: That’s how it felt in the special needs classes at school. Even tho it was obviously making me miserable, that wasn’t as important than keeping me safe, especially in the way they were trained. They truly thought that what they were doing was for my own good in the long run. All that was need was for me to commit and except the diagnosis I guess. As far as they new, I was holding myself back, not them.

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Parents also use negative filtering frequently, Skenazy says. “Parents are saying, ‘Look at all the foods/activities/words/people that could harm our kids!’ rather than ‘I’m so glad we’ve finally overcome diphtheria, polio, and famine!’” She also points out the ways that parents use dichotomous thinking: “If something isn’t 100% safe, it’s dangerous.”

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Paranoid parenting is a powerful way to teach kids all three of the Great Untruths. We convince children that the world is full of danger; evil lurks in the shadows, on the streets, and in public parks and restrooms. Kids raised in this way are emotionally prepared to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people—a worldview that makes them fear and suspect strangers. We teach children to monitor themselves for the degree to which they “feel unsafe” and then talk about how unsafe they feel. They may come to believe that feeling “unsafe” (the feeling of being uncomfortable or anxious) is a reliable sign that they are unsafe (the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings). Finally, feeling these emotions is unpleasant; therefore, children may conclude, the feelings are dangerous in and of themselves—stress will harm them if it doesn’t kill them (the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker).

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If children develop the habit of thinking in these ways when they are young, they are likely to develop corresponding schemas that guide the way they interpret new situations in high school and college. They may see more danger in their environment and more hostile intent in the actions of others. They may be more likely than kids in previous generations to believe that they should flee or avoid anything that could be construed as even a minor threat. They may be more likely to interpret words, books, and ideas in terms of safety versus danger, or good versus evil, rather than using dimensions that would promote learning, such as true versus false, or fascinating versus uninteresting. While it is easy to see how this way of thinking, when brought to a college campus, could lead to requests for safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggression training, and bias response teams, it is difficult to see how this way of thinking could produce well-educated, bold, and open-minded college graduates.

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Notes