coddling of the american mind the atlantic

When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. This is generally accompanied by the tendency to equate emotional discomfort with physical danger. Safety is transformed into a sacred value, which means no tradeoffs can be made, no risks can be taken. Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety is prioritized above all other values, which means that people are unwilling to make tradeoffs demanded by other practical or moral concerns. By accommodating your child’s anxieties, we actually empower those anxieties, which can stunt or stop the natural coping responses that children must develop in order to overcome them. Antifragility is a term coined by Nassim Taleb and refers to the fact that many systems (such as the immune system) need stressors in order to grow strong. The problem of parental accommodation is tightly related to two key concepts we explored in COTAM: antifragility and safetyism. For example, letting your child sleep in your bed because she is afraid of the dark might provide short-term relief to your child, but it prevents her from learning how to overcome her fear of the dark and can lead her to believe that she is powerless to overcome that fear. “Accommodation” here refers to the accommodating behaviors that parents engage in to decrease their children’s anxiety, but which may make the long-term problem worse. One term Julian discusses is especially crucial to our work: accommodation. It’s full of important information and insight focusing on what we called “paranoid parenting” in the book.

If you care about the decline in mental health among young people, which Jonathan Haidt and I discuss in “ The Coddling of the American Mind” (COTAM), be sure to check out this month’s cover story for The Atlantic magazine, “ The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Parenting ,” by Kate Julian - a deep dive into what is causing the spike in anxiety among children.

Special thanks to Jonathan Haidt for his feedback and edits. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second part of a multi-part series updating developments since the publication of “ The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure” (2018).

Coddling of the american mind the atlantic