In Sum
The national rise in adolescent anxiety and depression that began around 2011 is our second explanatory thread.
The generation born between 1995 and 2012, called iGen (or sometimes Gen Z), is very different from the Millennials, the generation that preceded it. According to Jean Twenge, an expert in the study of generational differences, one difference is that iGen is growing up more slowly. On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations.
A second difference is that iGen has far higher rates of anxiety and depression. The increases for girls and young women are generally much larger than for boys and young men. The increases do not just reflect changing definitions or standards; they show up in rising hospital admission rates of self-harm and in rising suicide rates. The suicide rate of adolescent boys is still higher than that of girls, but the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007.
According to Twenge, the primary cause of the increase in mental illness is frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices. Less than two hours a day seems to have no deleterious effects, but adolescents who spend several hours a day interacting with screens, particularly if they start in their early teen years or younger, have worse mental health outcomes than do adolescents who use these devices less and who spend more time in face-to-face social interaction.
Girls may be suffering more than boys because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.
iGen’s arrival at college coincides exactly with the arrival and intensification of the culture of safetyism from 2013 to 2017. Members of iGen may be especially attracted to the overprotection offered by the culture of safetyism on many campuses because of students’ higher levels of anxiety and depression. Both depression and anxiety cause changes in cognition, including a tendency to see the world as more dangerous and hostile than it really is.
CHAPTER 8
Paranoid Parenting
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
A few days after Greg and his wife came home from the hospital with their first child, they received an unusual gift in the mail: a shiny red fire extinguisher. Not a toy fire truck. An actual fire extinguisher. What made the gift especially meaningful was that the sender was Lenore Skenazy, an author, journalist, and New York City mother of two. You may know her as “America’s Worst Mom.”
Skenazy’s journey to infamy began in 2008, when she permitted her nine-year-old son, Izzy, to ride the New York City subway by himself. Izzy had been begging her for weeks to take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home. So, one sunny Sunday, Skenazy decided the time was right. She took him along on a trip to Bloomingdale’s. Confident that Izzy would find his way home and could ask a stranger for help if he needed it, she armed him with a subway map, a MetroCard, a twenty-dollar bill, and several quarters in case he needed to make a call, and then sent him on his way. Forty-five minutes later (right on time), Izzy arrived home (where his father was waiting for him) and was ecstatic about his success—and eager to do it again.
Skenazy published a column about this little experiment in childhood independence in The New York Sun,2 describing both Izzy’s joy and the horrified reactions she received from other parents who heard what she had allowed Izzy to do. Two days later, she was on the Today show, and then MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. Online message boards were flooded with posts, mostly condemning her decision, though some applauded it. Soon, Skenazy was decried as “America’s Worst Mom.”3
Most mothers would probably be mortified by that nickname, but Skenazy embraced the title. She had given her son the kind of independence that she (and most of today’s parents) had enjoyed back in the 1970s, when the crime rate was much higher. So why had her choice generated so much outrage and condemnation? Skenazy realized that something was seriously wrong with modern parenting. In response, she created a blog to explain her philosophy and to call attention to the paranoia and overprotection that have become normal features of American parenting. She called it Free-Range Kids. Since then, Free-Range Kids has grown into a full-fledged movement, including a book of the same name, the reality TV show World’s Worst Mom, and a nonprofit called Let Grow (see LetGrow.org).
The fire extinguisher was such an apt gift coming from Skenazy (who included a note that read, “See, I care about safety!”), because the gift represents her message in a nutshell: We should all take reasonable precautions to protect our children’s physical safety—for example, by owning a fire extinguisher—but we should not submit to the pull of safetyism (overestimating danger, fetishizing safety, and not accepting any risk), which deprives kids of some of the most valuable experiences in childhood.
In chapter 1, we discussed Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility. We explained how the well-intentioned project of keeping kids “safe” from peanuts had backfired; it prevented many kids’ immune systems from learning that peanut proteins are harmless, which ultimately increased the number of kids who are allergic to peanuts and who could actually die from exposure to them. We suggested that this same dynamic might be partially responsible for the rise of safetyism on college campuses, beginning around 2013. In chapter 7, we discussed Jean Twenge’s finding that members of iGen (born in 1995 and later) are having very different childhoods than kids in previous generations had, and are also suffering from much higher levels of anxiety and depression. In this chapter, we look more closely at how American childhood has changed in recent decades. We suggest that modern parenting practices may unwittingly teach children the Great Untruths, and we examine how parents and elementary schools may unknowingly work together to induct children into the culture of safetyism. The shift to this more fearful and overprotective way of treating children, which began in the 1980s and reached high levels in the 1990s—especially among more educated parents—is our third explanatory thread.
To learn more about parenting and childhood, we sought advice from three experts. In addition to Lenore Skenazy, we spoke with Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of the best-selling book for parents How to Raise an Adult, and Erika Christakis, an expert in early-childhood development and author of The Importance of Being Little. (It was Christakis’s professional concerns about the effects of oversupervision that led her to write the email about Halloween costumes at Yale, which we described in chapter 3.) These experts all came to the conclusion that modern parenting is preventing kids from growing strong and independent, but each arrived at this conclusion via a different path: Skenazy through the experiences we described above, Christakis through her work as a preschool teacher and her research on early childhood education, and Lythcott-Haims through her experience as the dean of freshmen at Stanford University for more than a decade. All three have also raised children of their own.
A Parent’s Worst Fear
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.
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.
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.
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
Actual Versus Imagined Risk
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.
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.
To see how far into safetyism some parents have gone, consider the Missouri family that staged a kidnapping of their own six-year-old son in 2015. They wanted to “teach him a lesson” about how dangerous it is to be friendly to strangers. After getting off his school bus, the boy was lured into a pickup truck by his aunt’s coworker. The man then told the little boy that he would never “see his mommy again,” according to the sheriff’s statement. The police also reported that the man covered the boy’s face with a jacket so he couldn’t tell he was being taken into his own basement. The boy was tied up, threatened with a gun, and told he would be sold into sex slavery.16
Of course, few parents would ever terrorize their children in this way, but less extreme forms of safetyism are taught in subtler ways. 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.
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?
The Dangers of Safetyism
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.
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?
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.
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
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
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 18