2. Free play and freedom. The adolescent mental health crisis has finally caught the attention of the public. As more parents and educators come to see that overprotection is harming children, and as we move further and further away from the crime wave of the 1970s and 1980s, more parents will try harder to let their kids play outside, with one another, and without adult supervision.
Green shoots: In March 2018, Utah became the first state to pass into law a “free-range parenting” bill—and with unanimous bipartisan support.5 As we noted in chapter 8, parents in some localities currently run the risk of arrest for letting their children out without supervision. The Utah law affirms children’s right to some unsupervised time, and parents’ right to not be arrested when they give it to them. As more states pass laws like these, parents and schools will be more willing to try out policies and practices that give kids more autonomy and responsibility.
3. Better identity politics. With the rise of the alt-right and white nationalism since 2016, more scholars are writing about the ways in which emphasizing racial identity leads to bad outcomes in a multiracial society. It has become increasingly clear that identitarian extremists on both sides rely on the most outrageous acts of the other side to unite their group around its common enemy. This process is not unique to the United States, a fact that can be seen in Julia Ebner’s new book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism. Ebner, an Austrian researcher at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, did harrowing fieldwork befriending members of ISIS and members of far-right groups, such as the English Defense League. In an interview, she summarized her conclusions:
What we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire West. As the extremes [pull more people from] the political center, these ideas become mainstream, and the result is a clash-of-civilizations narrative turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.6
Green shoots: More writers from many backgrounds are calling for a rethinking of identity politics. Turkish American political scientist Timur Kuran,7 Chinese American law professor Amy Chua,8 and gay author and activist Jonathan Rauch9 (among many others) have been sounding the alarm about how the common-enemy identity politics of the far right and far left feed off one another. These authors are looking for ways to short-circuit the process and shift to a common-humanity perspective; they generally arrive at some version of the basic social psychology principles we’ve discussed in this book. Here is Rauch, reviewing and praising Chua’s recent book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations:
Psychological research shows that tribalism can be countered and overcome by teamwork: by projects that join individuals in a common task on an equal footing. One such task, it turns out, can be to reduce tribalism. In other words, with conscious effort, humans can break the tribal spiral, and many are trying. “You’d never know it from cable news or social media,” Chua writes, “but all over the country there are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes.”10
The Dalai Lama has long urged such an approach, based on the same social psychology. In May 2018, he tweeted this:
I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.11
4. Universities committing to truth as a process. The University of Chicago has long been an outlier in the intensity of its academic culture. (It proudly embraces the unofficial motto “Where fun goes to die.”12) When safetyism was sweeping through many other top American universities, it had less effect at Chicago. It is no coincidence that the best recent statement on freedom of expression was drafted there (see Appendix 2).
Green shoots: Many universities are adopting the Chicago Statement and are beginning to push back against the creep of safetyism. If that stance works out well for them and if those schools move up on various rankings and lists, then many more universities will follow suit.
Putting this all together: We predict that things will improve, and the change may happen quite suddenly at some point in the next few years. As far as we can tell from private conversations, most university presidents reject the culture of safetyism. They know it is bad for students and bad for free inquiry, but they find it politically difficult to say so publicly. From our conversations with students, we believe that most high school and college students despise call-out culture and would prefer to be at a school that had little of it. Most students are not fragile, they are not “snowflakes,” and they are not afraid of ideas. So if a small group of universities is able to develop a different sort of academic culture—one that finds ways to make students from all identity groups feel welcome without using the divisive methods that seem to be backfiring on so many campuses—we think that market forces will take care of the rest. Applications and enrollment at those schools will surge. Alumni donations will increase. More high schools will prepare students to compete for slots at those schools, and more parents will prepare their kids to gain admission to those schools. This will mean less test prep, less overprotection, more free play, and more independence. Entire towns and school districts will organize themselves to enable and encourage more free-range parenting. They will do this not primarily to help their students get into college but to reverse the epidemic of depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide that is afflicting our children. There will be a growing recognition across the country that safetyism is dangerous and that it is stunting our children’s development.
* * *
• • • • •
Some of the earliest colleges in Britain’s American colonies were founded to train clergy. But as a more distinctively practical American culture developed, schools were increasingly founded to train young people in the skills and virtues that were essential for a self-governing civil society. In 1750, as he was founding the school that later became the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin wrote this to Samuel Johnson:
Nothing is of more importance to the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: much more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people.13
This is a book about education and wisdom. If we can educate the next generation more wisely, they will be stronger, richer, more virtuous, and even safer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An unstated premise of this book is that thinking is social. As lone individuals, each of us is not terribly smart, for we are all prone to cognitive distortions and the confirmation bias. But if you put people into the right sorts of groups and networks, where ideas can be shared, criticized, and improved, something better and truer can emerge. We would like to thank the many people in our groups and networks who made this book better and truer.
First is Pamela Paresky, who joined us during the early stages of the project as Greg’s chief research officer at FIRE. An accomplished writer with an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Development, Pamela came to the project having written, taught, and spoken about themes similar to those in this book. A regular online contributor to Psychology Today, Pamela became our subject matter expert on many areas of research, and her extensive editing of the entire book helped us blend our two writing styles into one. We are extraordinarily grateful for the depth of her knowledge and expertise. She played devil’s advocate, pressed us to sharpen our points, and contributed many of the important ideas in this book—including coining the term “safetyism.”
Greg would like to thank many other people at FIRE, beginning with the board of directors for allowing him to undertake this project. In particular, G
reg thanks FIRE’s current chairman, Daniel Shuchman, who read multiple drafts of this book and offered advice throughout the process. Greg also wants to single out his remarkably unflappable executive assistant, Eli Feldman, and extraordinary former research assistant, Haley Hudler. Eli is a 2016 Yale graduate with a degree in psychology and was endlessly helpful from outline to completion, with keen insight about psychology and iGen, his own generation. Haley was with us as we wrote the original article for The Atlantic and the book proposal, and she performed several months of research for the book before she left FIRE to attend the University of Georgia School of Law. We would also like to thank FIRE attorney Adam Goldstein for his fast and thorough research in the last few months of the editing process, and FIRE’s staff on the whole. Everyone from executive director Robert Shibley (and his wife, Araz Shibley, who helped us research several cases) and the most senior employees to our newest student “co-ops” (Alyssa Bennett, Kelli Kushner, and Matthew Williams) helped along the way. While we can’t list everyone at FIRE who pitched in, we must thank Sarah McLaughlin and Ryne Weiss for their incisive feedback and their insights about the climate on campus today, and Will Creeley, whose expert writing skills helped us fine-tune the manuscript. In addition, we are grateful for research support given by Laura Beltz and Cynthia Meyersburg, and for the feedback and advice from Peter Bonilla, Nico Perrino, Bonnie Snyder and FIRE attorney (and unofficial FIRE copy editor-in-chief) Samantha Harris, whose keen eye and unparalleled attention to detail during the final stages of production were invaluable.
Jon’s acknowledgments begin with Caroline Mehl, a recent graduate of Yale and Oxford whom he hired as a research assistant well before this project began. Caroline contributed many ideas and most of the graphs. She pushed us to take multiple perspectives and, in a move that John Stuart Mill would have praised, she found us five readers who viewed campus events very differently from the way we did. We thank those readers, who were masters of constructive and nuanced criticism: Travis Gidado, Madeline High, Ittai Orr, Danielle Tomson, and one who wishes to remain anonymous. We also thank these readers who gave us detailed and very valuable comments on the entire manuscript, critiquing it from the left: Helen Kramer, Shuli Passow, and Khalil Smith; critiquing it from the right: Steve Messenger and William Modahl; and critiquing it from an unidentified location: Larry Amsel, Heather Heying, and Daniel Shuchman.
Jon owes special thanks to Valerie Purdie-Greenaway, whose deep critique of our first draft marked a turning point for the project. He is always grateful to the team at Heterodox Academy, particularly Raffi Grinberg, Nick Phillips, and Jeremy Willinger, who all read the whole manuscript; Sean Stevens, who helped with research; and Deb Mashek, who came aboard to lead the organization in a new direction that will make universities wiser.
Some of the scholars and experts whose work underlies the core arguments of the book helped us frequently along the way. We thank Erika Christakis, Peter Gray, Stephen Holland, Robert Leahy, Julie Lythcott-Haims, Hara Estroff Marano, Lenore Skenazy, and Jean Twenge.
We are grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who gave us valuable comments on one or more chapters, helped us analyze data, or provided their professional expertise: Jason Baehr, Andrew Becker, Caleb Bernard, Paul Bloom, Samantha Boardman, Bradley Campbell, Dennis Dalton, Clark Freshman, Brian Gallagher, Andrew Gates, Christopher Gates, Benjamin Ginsberg, Jesse Graham, Dan Griswold, Benjamin Haidt, Rebecca Haidt, Terry Hartle, Ravi Iyer, Robb Jones, Christina King, Susan Kresnicka, Calvin Lai, Marcella Larsen, Harry Lewis, Vanessa Lobue, Brian Lowe, Jason Manning, Ian McCready-Flora, John McWhorter, John Palfrey, Mike Paros, Nando Pelusi, Steven Pinker, Anne Rasmussen, Bradly Reed, Fabio Rojas, Kathleen Santora, Sally Satel, Steve Schultz, Mark Shulman, Nadine Strossen, Joshua Sullivan, Marianne Toldalagi, John Tomasi, Tracy Tomasso, Rebecca Tuvel, Lee Tyner, Steve Vaisey, Robert Von Hallberg, Zach Wood, and Jared Zuker. We thank Omar Mahmood for volunteering to create our website, TheCoddling.com.
We thank Don Peck, at The Atlantic, for seeing the potential of this project back in 2014 and launching it, transformed, in 2015. We thank our agent, John Brockman, along with his team at Brockman, Inc., for guiding us to Penguin Press and to our brilliant editor, Virginia “Ginny” Smith. Ginny refined our ideas and our prose, working harder with each deadline we missed.
And last, we thank our families. Greg thanks his wife, Michelle LaBlanc, for her unending patience, flexibility, and support in this intense process—during which she gave birth to Maxwell (born November 2017) and continued to be an amazing mother to rambunctious two-year-old Benjamin while Daddy was kind of swamped.
Jon thanks his wife, Jayne Riew, who improves all that he writes, sees so many things that he misses—in writing and in life—and does the unpublished work in the shared adventure of raising Max and Francesca. Jon ends with an appreciation of his mother, Elaine Haidt, who passed away in May of 2017, while we were writing this book. She took parenting classes in the 1960s from the psychologist Haim Ginott, who taught her the maxim “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Jon and his sisters, Rebecca and Samantha, were so blessed to have a mother who knew what to do, and what not to do.
APPENDIX 1
How to Do CBT
Sometimes people who wish to practice CBT find therapists who train them in techniques for diagnosing and then altering their distorted thought patterns. In other cases, they simply read books about how to practice CBT. A book that American mental health professionals frequently recommend for treating depression is David Burns’s best-seller, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Several studies have found that reading the book—yes, just reading the book—is an effective treatment for depression.1 We also recommend Dr. Robert Leahy’s excellent book The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You, which is more focused on anxiety, and is updated with the latest CBT techniques.
The beauty of CBT is how easy it is to learn: All you need is pen and paper (or a laptop, or a device with an app that lets you take notes). The specific details for practicing CBT differ from book to book and therapist to therapist, but the basic process is something like this:
When you are feeling anxious, depressed, or otherwise distressed, take a moment to write down what you are feeling.
Write down your level of distress. (For example, you could score it on a scale of 1 to 100.)
Write down what happened and what your automatic thoughts were when you felt the pang of anxiety or despair. (For example, “Someone I was interested in canceled our date. I said to myself, ‘This always happens. No one will ever want to go out with me. I’m a total loser.’”)
Look at the categories of distorted automatic thoughts below, and ask yourself: Is this thought a cognitive distortion? Write down the cognitive distortions you notice. (For example, looking at the automatic thoughts in number 3 above, you might write, “personalizing, overgeneralizing, labeling, and catastrophizing.”)
Look at the evidence for and against your thought.
Ask yourself what someone might say who disagreed with you. Is there any merit in that opinion?
Consider again what happened, and reevaluate the situation without the cognitive distortions.
Write down your new thoughts and feelings. (For example, “I am sad and disappointed that a date I was excited about got canceled.”)
Write down again, using the same scale as before, how anxious, depressed, or otherwise distressed you feel. Chances are the number will be lower—perhaps a lot lower.
CBT takes discipline, work, and commitment. Many therapists recommend doing this type of exercise at least once or twice a day. With time and practice, you are likely to find that your distorted negative thoughts no longer have the grip on you that they once did. (Note that in some cases, your initial automatic thoughts may not be distorted. Sometimes they turn out to be entirely reasonable.)
As
we’ve argued in this book, the practice of CBT and its principles are useful even for people who do not experience depression or anxiety. We encourage all readers to learn more about CBT. If you are interested in working with a CBT therapist, you can find a list of doctors near you at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (http://www.findcbt.org) and the Academy of Cognitive Therapy (http://www.academyofct.org).
Of course, anyone who is suffering from severe psychological distress should seek professional help.
On the next pages we reprint the full list of cognitive distortions from Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, Second Edition, by Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J. F. Holland, and Lata K. McGinn (reprinted with permission).
Categories of Distorted Automatic Thoughts
MIND READING: You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 29