This focus on college as a “home,” some have noted, might be part of iGen’s slow developmental track. As Yale faculty Douglas Stone and May Schwab-Stone wrote in the New York Times, “Instead of promoting the idea of college as a transition from the shelter of the family to adult autonomy and responsibility, universities like Yale have given in to the implicit notion that they should provide the equivalent of the home environment.” In other words, all of this focus on protection, safety, comfort, and home is the downside of teens growing up more slowly: they are unprepared to be independent and thus want college to be home. They love the idea of adult freedom that college offers (no curfew!) but still want to feel “safe” at all times.
It’s Your Job to Protect Us and Keep Us Safe
A recurring theme in many campus incidents is the appeal to a higher authority to fix the situation rather than students’ doing something about it themselves. That was the case at Yale, where the students were offended by the very idea that they work out the issues for themselves. The question is: Why are such issues now considered the purview of the administration instead of the students? The obvious answer is iGen’ers’ long childhood: they want college administrators to be like their parents, seen by children as all powerful. But there may be other cultural shifts at work as well. In their article “Microaggressions and Changing Moral Cultures,” the sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argued that the United States has shifted from a culture of honor, in which people respond to a perceived slight themselves, to a culture of victimization, in which people avoid direct confrontation and instead appeal to third parties and/or public shaming to address conflict.
For example, when two students at Dartmouth College were insulted by a third student who said they were “speaking gibberish,” the students did not confront the offender themselves. Instead, they reported the incident to Dartmouth’s Office of Pluralism and Leadership. The Department of Safety and Security and Bias Incident Response Team then launched an investigation. “In other social settings, the same offense might have met with an aggressive response, whether a direct complaint to the offender, a retaliatory insult, or physical violence,” note Campbell and Manning. “But in a setting where a powerful organization metes out justice, the aggrieved relied on complaint rather than action. In sum, the availability of social superiors—especially hierarchical superiors such as legal or private administrators—is conducive to reliance on third parties. . . . Even if no authoritative action is taken, gossip and public shaming can be powerful sanctions.” This type of culture, the authors argue, is especially likely to arise among relatively high-status individuals who are not strongly connected to one another yet see one another as equals—virtually the definition of an iGen college campus.
iGen’ers’ focus on safety also plays a role here. I asked Georgia college student Darnell what he would do if another student said something racially offensive to him. Would he confront the person or go to a staff member? He said he would go to a staff member. “Confronting somebody is never a good idea because you don’t know what can happen or where that conversation’s going to lead to,” he said. “I think it’s unsafe for other students and people in the general area. A fight could break out and next thing you know other people are popping in just for the ride, or maybe they have a knife on them—you just never know, and I don’t like being in situations where I don’t have control. So I’d take a step back and bring in the third party.”
Darnell said he’d want to have a discussion with the other person and the staff member. “I’d want them to understand that I didn’t like what they did, that it was offensive to me and I’d rather them not do it again, but because I can’t tell them not to do it, they can do whatever they want, I’d rather they not do it in my presence. Or in the presence of people like me. If it was something racist and I feel like it was offensive, there are probably other people who look like me who would think it’s offensive.”
Darnell’s point about the harm inherent in racist speech is a good one, and his concern about fights is shared by many iGen’ers. But there are also clear downsides to reporting to an authority. Appealing to the administration usually escalates rather than resolves the conflict, often leading the offender to react with defensive hostility. It also can make people afraid to say anything, silencing discussion about important issues. In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf argued that reporting microaggressions (comments unintentionally harmful to women or minorities) to authority figures infantilizes students because they don’t learn how to deal with such situations on their own “in an environment where the stakes are lower than a first job or group-house or marriage.”
In March 2016, students at Emory University woke up one morning to find that someone had written “Trump 2016” in chalk on the sidewalks around campus. Some students said the messages made them feel unsafe, and protestors shouted at campus administrators, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!” The incident prompted widespread ridicule, including Larry Wilmore’s show parodying one of the protesting students as saying “I had no idea I went to school with people who had different opinions from me. It’s terrifying.”
The iGen focus on appealing to a greater authority has resulted in several campus protests against the university administration when the offense was committed by others—even others not directly associated with the campus. That was the situation at the University of Missouri in fall 2015, where the university president eventually resigned even though he’d had no role in the incidents that had sparked the protests (which included racial epithets yelled at a student by men passing by in a truck). The students said that the president was not creating a safe environment for them.
Another incident occurred on my own campus of SDSU. In April 2016, students were upset when an off-campus pro-Israel organization posted flyers around campus naming specific students and staff members who “have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetuate . . . Jew Hatred on this campus.” The university president’s first response to the flyers was an email statement supporting free speech but noting that the flyer should not have identified individuals.
Student protestors believed that the email was not critical enough of the group that posted the flyers, and put up a large banner reading “SDSU thinks we are terrorists.” Later, students surrounded the police car in which the university president was riding and kept him from leaving for over two hours. They demanded that he apologize. “I wanted you to defend me,” one student told the president. “They called us terrorists, and you didn’t defend us.” The incident left many wondering why the protests focused not on the group who had posted the flyers but instead on the administration.
Our survey of SDSU students—conducted just two weeks before that incident—presaged the protesters’ focus on the university president. Two out of three students agreed that “If negative racial incidents occur on a college campus, the president of the university needs to apologize even if he/she did not take part in the incidents.” Thus the clear majority of students agreed with the protesters that the apology should come from the administration, not the person or group responsible. SDSU students also strongly felt that creating a positive racial climate was up to the administration. Four out of five agreed that “If minority students feel unwelcome on campus, it is the responsibility of the university administration to do something about it.”
In their Atlantic piece, Lukianoff and Haidt argued that the focus on safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions has things backward: the emphasis on protecting the emotions of students might actually be damaging their mental health. Cognitive behavioral therapy, the most common and empirically supported talk therapy for depression, teaches people to try to see things more objectively. Yet the language of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions encourages the opposite—letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.
Others have argued that this climate ill prepares students for the workplace, where th
ey will encounter people with beliefs different from their own—and will not be received kindly if they complain to their boss that someone hurt their feelings. In a New York Times op-ed critiquing safe spaces, Judith Shulevitz wrote, “While keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. . . . Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and . . . [t]hey’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled.” Some iGen’ers agree. College student James believes that people who are sensitive to certain issues need to make careful choices. “If you are constantly getting triggered by courses that are required for your major,” he says, maybe that’s not the right major for you. “My brother majors in criminal justice—those courses have trigger warnings since they’re talking about murder cases. Well, sorry, police in the real world don’t get to skate by on those kinds of things. You might have police officers who are not trained in all kinds of situations because they were triggered in college. That’s where things go too far.”
Ben, the 18-year-old entering college student we met earlier, sees the movement toward safe spaces and trigger warnings as a simple matter of mental health. “The perception seems to be that our generation is coddled and whiny and we don’t have any kind of thick skin at all. But I think they are misrepresenting things,” he says. “The trend is toward greater understanding for people’s feelings and people’s health. That looks like coddling because when my parents were kids lots of people were oppressed. It was really dangerous to be gay. People didn’t recognize PTSD as a real disorder. Anxiety wasn’t well understood. The fact that we are trying to be more understanding of that kind of stuff isn’t bad.” It’s about safety and helping those who are vulnerable, he says: “We believe in PTSD as a medical condition that people need to be treated for, and we believe that people with anxiety need to be understood and not just called thin skinned.” To Ben, and I suspect many other iGen’ers, they are being sensitive to the needs of others when they support trigger warnings and safe spaces, and it seems cruel not to.
How Did We Get Here?
iGen’ers’ interest in safety may be at least partially rooted in their long childhoods. When parents treat children as younger, they protect them more; generally, the younger the child, the less we let him out of our sight, the bigger her car seat, and the more responsibility we feel for his safety. As 10-year-olds are treated like 6-year-olds, 14-year-olds like 10-year-olds, and 18-year-olds like 14-year-olds, children and teens spend more years fully aware that they are safe and protected in the cocoon of childhood. When they go to college, they suddenly feel unprotected and vulnerable and go about trying to recreate that feeling of home and safety that they were in just a few months before. Boomers and GenX’ers, more likely to have experienced freedom before they went to college, had a less jarring adjustment to make. Now they are the faculty and administrators who scratch their heads when iGen young adults want to be treated like children and flinch at the prospect of being emotionally upset.
Overall, children are much more carefully protected than they once were. As Hanna Rosin observed in The Atlantic, “Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting.” These are not just perceptions. In 1969, 48% of elementary and middle school students walked or rode a bicycle to school. By 2009, only 13% did. Even among those who lived less than a mile from school, only 35% walked or bicycled in 2009, down from 89% in 1969. School policies often codify these choices. At my children’s school, only 4th and 5th graders are allowed to ride bikes to school, and their parents must sign a form giving them permission and saying they will take responsibility for their child’s safety. Rules like this, and the forms that accompany them, were unheard of during Boomers’ and GenX’ers’ childhoods.
An elementary school in Michigan banned the childhood favorite game of tag, saying it was dangerous. Another school banned cartwheels unless they were supervised by a coach. Many cities have banned street hockey (a game played with sticks and a rubber ball in the street; as demonstrated in Wayne’s World, game play stops for traffic with the announcement “Car!”). One of the few city officials in Toronto who wants to bring back street hockey has set up a protected ring with a long set of rules—a very different game from the 1980s traditions of homemade goals and sticks, no helmets or pads, and rules worked out by the children themselves rather than adults.
In a recent poll, 70% of adults said they thought the world had become less safe for children since they were children—even though all evidence suggests that children are actually safer now. We protect children from danger, real and imaginary, and are then surprised when they go to college and create safe spaces designed to repel the real world.
The Upsides and Downsides of Protection
So: Is the interest in safety a good thing or a bad thing? Like many cultural and generational trends, it’s likely some of both. The interest in safety began with the admirable goal of protecting children and teens from injury or death. The most prominent of those campaigns was car safety, including laws such as mandatory car seat use, mandatory seat belt use, “graduated” driver’s license laws restricting teen drivers’ privileges, and the raising of the nationwide drinking age to 21. Cars also became safer for those of all ages with the addition of air bags, antilock brakes, and softer materials in car interiors. Those measures were tremendously effective: death rates from car accidents have plummeted. The reductions have been the largest for the younger groups; less than a third as many children and teens were killed in car accidents in 2014 as in 1980 (see Appendix G).
This is unquestionably a good thing; fewer children and teens are dying in cars. Car seats, for all of the hassle they cause parents, save lives. So do seat belts and safer driving on the part of teens. This is the clear upside of the interest in safety—which doesn’t really have a downside. It always bothers me when Boomers and GenX’ers observe about car seats and seat belts, “We didn’t have any of that, and we survived.” Sure, you did, but those who didn’t are no longer with us to wax nostalgic about the days when they rolled around in the back of the station wagon.
Other safety measures have met with mixed reviews. For example, today’s playgrounds are plastic, soft-surfaced, and—according to some—boring and not particularly interesting to children. Hanna Rosin argued in The Atlantic that the focus on safety has stifled children’s natural need to explore and learn by making their own decisions. She profiled an alternative playground in the United Kingdom, modeled after the once common abandoned lot or junkyard where children roamed freely. The kids roll tires down hillsides, ride a rope swing that occasionally deposits them in a creek, and set fires in a tin drum. “If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling,” she observed. A documentary about the playground features a shot of a child who looks about 8 sawing a wiggly board by himself. I am guessing I am not alone among modern parents in instantly thinking, “He’s going to cut off his fingers.” But he doesn’t.
Rosin isn’t the first to make the observation that we may have protected our kids into wimpdom. In her book A Nation of Wimps, Psychology Today editor Hara Estroff Marano argued that parental overprotection and hovering have made kids vulnerable because they don’t learn to solve problems on their own. “Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees and the occasional C in history!” she wrote. “Kids need to learn that you need to feel bad sometimes. We learn through experience, and we learn especially through bad experiences.” Lenore Skenazy made the case for the opposite approach to parenting, which she dubbed Free-Range Kids in her book of the same name. As she explains on her website, she’s “fighting the belief that our children a
re in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.” In her view, the safety obsession has meant stifling kids’ creativity and independence. “Society has forced us to always consider the worst case first and proceed as if it’s likely to happen,” she told the Guardian in 2016. “. . . Everything is framed that way and parents are scared to death. In response, they keep their kids in only supervised situations and . . . that’s not fun.” Because of iGen’s fear, caution, and love for safe spaces, one friend of mine says I should instead call this generation “Gen P”—the P, he says, stands for pussy. (I told him I didn’t think it was going to catch on.)
So why hasn’t this increase in safety led to a generation of risk takers—kids who feel safe and thus can take risks? In short, because that’s not how the human mind works. Generally, people overcome fears by confronting them, not by hiding from them. For example, the most effective treatment for phobias is having the phobic person work up to confronting her worst fear. When nothing bad happens, the fear lessens and then disappears. Without such experiences, the fear remains—and that might be iGen’s story, too.
Like many generational trends, the interest in safety has trade-offs. iGen’ers are, by all accounts, the safest generation in US history, partially due to their own choices to drink less, fight less, wear their seat belts, and drive more safely. iGen’ers are markedly more careful, and as a result they are less likely to be killed in car accidents or through homicide. Yet they are more likely to die through suicide, perhaps an indication of their underlying fragility; as we saw in chapter 4, anxiety and depression have skyrocketed in recent years. iGen’ers seem terrified—not just of physical dangers but of the emotional dangers of adult social interaction. Their caution helps keep them safe, but it also makes them vulnerable, because everyone gets hurt eventually. Not all risks can be eliminated all the time, especially for a generation that believes someone disagreeing with you constitutes emotional injury.
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