ZadekpediaThe Coddling of the American Mind is the title of a 2015 Atlantic article and a later book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The Bob Zadek Show discussed the work in two episodes: a February 2018 conversation with Lenore Skenazy, and a September 2018 interview with Haidt himself.
The book and its argument
In the September 2018 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Haidt as a social psychologist and author, and described the book as following up on an Atlantic article. Zadek said the article was “How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus,” and that it had been called the most widely read article in the publication’s history. He said the book concerns students arriving on college campuses ill-prepared to learn, to absorb, and to process adverse points of view, with implications for the mental health of that generation and for the political health of the country. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Haidt gave the article’s official title as “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and said that at the time it was the fourth or fifth most widely circulated article in The Atlantic’s history, at least online. He said the book’s subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and that it shows six trends or causal threads stretching back to the 1980s in how children were raised. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Safetyism and its origins
Haidt dated the campus shift to the 2013–2014 academic year. Lukianoff, he said, had been working since around 2000 pushing back against speech codes and restrictions universities place on students, and was used to administrators being the overprotective party. Then students themselves began saying, “Protect us from this,” calling ideas, books or speakers dangerous and predicting that people would be traumatized. What was new, Haidt said, was the medicalization of it — the idea that students are fragile and that adults must protect them from these threats. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Haidt said the book traces the problem to how children born after 1995 — iGen or Gen Z — were raised, and that when that generation arrived on campus around 2013, new ideas arrived with it. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Social media and the iPhone
Haidt argued that the problems began around 2011–2012, and that the rates are much more closely related to social media than to real threats in the world. He said the world has gotten objectively safer: rates of death for children have plummeted, and rates of bullying are down, with the internet the only exception. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
He offered a chronology: Facebook opened to the public in 2006, when the oldest members of Gen Z were 11; the iPhone came out in 2007; by 2009 and 2010 most teenagers had one, and the oldest members of iGen were around 15 or 16 and immersed in social media. This, he said, exposed girls to more bullying and social comparison, while boys used the phones to play video games — which he said are not actually that harmful and are often quite social. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Call-out culture
Haidt said the key change is not that individuals are so different, though anxiety and depression rates are up, but that the consequences of misspeaking have become very large because of social media: a single wrong word could go viral or reach Fox News. He said professors find it harder to get students to talk in seminars, especially about anything controversial. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
He gave two examples. The woman who runs Heterodox Academy, an organization he co-founded to promote viewpoint diversity, was a professor at Harvey Mudd College when a student stopped himself before saying “kill two birds with one stone,” explaining that it was a violent phrase. Haidt also read from the book a passage by a Smith College sophomore writing in 2014, who described conversations consisting of one person telling another their opinion was wrong, with the word “offensive” almost always included, and said she learned to walk on eggshells for fear of saying something offensive. Haidt said that in 2015 the call-out culture spread much more rapidly around the country. Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)
Across episodes: the parenting thread
The two episodes touch the same subject from different ends. In February 2018, Lenore Skenazy described Let Grow, a new nonprofit she was president of, as an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids, which itself began with letting her son ride the subway. She said the proposal for Let Grow came from Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, Daniel Shuchman, head of the organization FIRE, and Peter Gray, a professor at Boston College who wrote Free to Learn. Skenazy framed the aim as raising children who are resilient enough to engage with unfamiliar ideas on campus rather than feeling unsafe. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
In September 2018, Haidt supplied the campus-side account, dating the shift to 2013–2014 and the underlying trends to the 1980s. The episodes show the two treatments as complementary rather than as a development in the argument: Skenazy cites the book as a source for a parenting project, and Haidt explains the campus phenomenon the book describes.