We have three children in our household. Our 11 year old girl and nine year old boy are stepchildren and with us every other week. Our two and a half year old daughter is with us all the time. At this point, I’ve had kids in my life for almost five years. Wow, I’m surprised by that statement and rechecking my math. But yes, that’s accurate. I am providing this context because what I think about has changed drastically from singlehood to parenthood. And of this change in thoughts, coddling is often in the forefront of my mind.
I primarily blame this change on the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) and Greg Lukianoff. You can check out Haidt’s Substack here. Recently, Haidt has been focused on the effects, especially mental health, of social media and smartphones in general on the youth of America. He mentions this in The Coddling of the American Mind, but he paints social media as a piece of a larger web of issues. I appreciate his honing in on social media, but I hope this focus doesn’t cause us to forget about the other issues addressed in the book. A lot of what he talks about is parents’ ever growing concern over their children’s safety. That “safetyism” plus an increased focus on having children do a specific set of highly structured activities rather than free play leads to, they hypothesize, increased issues and less stability in these kids as they become adults.
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
Folk wisdom, origin unknown (quoted in The Coddling of the American Mind)
But as I look back on my past, I realize that The Coddling of the American Mind acted more as the catalyst of epiphany for me rather than teaching me these lessons. As I read the book, I frequently thought back to my childhood, and all the things I was made to do by my parents. There were things they didn’t allow me to do that I think they should have. But then there were many ways that they, especially my father, promoted my independence and autonomy; some of these I liked, but others I hated.
Some of my vivid memories that contrast with today’s child rearing culture were riding my bike or rollerblading around the block without supervision in early elementary school, certainly before the age of 10, spending the night at friend’s houses in elementary school and roaming around their neighborhood, and going to Europe with only my brother (encouraged by my dad) when I was 20 and he was 15.
Along with increased independence in some regards, I feel like my expectations academically and in regards to chores were more than most kids these days (wow, I feel old typing “kids these days”). And again anecdotally, I had real consequences when I didn’t follow rules. I didn’t get spanked, but I had the gamut of sitting in rooms and loss of privileges. While my parents deeply loved me, they didn’t approach my rule-breaking or attitude problems from a lens of “why is he acting this way and how can we remedy it?”. And this is one of the areas that seems to have become a problem - an area where the mental health sphere seems to have crossed into the parenting sphere in an unhealthy way.
There is this saying in mental health, a saying that I like in many ways: It isn’t what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you. This is good because it removes stigma, but it’s also bad because it can remove blame. It can go from a way to understand why people do harmful things to an excuse to allow and justify harmful behavior. I have seen this at work time and time again. One example is a patient who has serious bipolar disorder. This disorder has led to him being hospitalized multiple times. He came in for an appointment one day and told me his wife left him and he is now living with his mom. When I asked him more details, he nonchalantly told me that he choked out his wife when he was manic because he wasn’t on his medication. He had no understanding that the burden of responsibility still was on him even though he takes medication and has a legitimate diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
To a lesser extent, this happens with children. When a child says hateful things to their parents, sometimes there is a lack of response because the parents think they can’t understand what the child could have gone through. Or the parents may think they do understand, saying the child had a really hard week, is going through puberty, or is acting like this because of their parents’ divorce. And all these things could be true! But they don’t negate the need for regular consequences.
Unfortunately, our world has hosts of people who have been through horribly traumatic events. These events often shape who these people become. But contrary to popular opinion, people are not always shaped negatively by trauma. There can be truth to “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Part of this depends on a person’s inherent resilience, but part of it is the framing of the trauma and the mindset going forward. Does the person see themselves as broken and unfixable? Or as someone who always fails or as an addict? There is a choice for people to see themselves as a conqueror of adversity, as one who, full of grit, knows they can do things many others can’t because of what they have already had to overcome in their life.
This concept, which is referenced in The Coddling of the American Mind, “antifragility,” was coined by Nassim Taleb. He differentiates antifragility from resilience: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better." While Taleb uses the term in the context of mathematics and systems, Haidt applies it to humans. So the theory proposed in The Coddling of the American Mind is that children need hardship/suffering to grow into healthy and stable adults.
To me, this idea is revolutionary. I had understood that we lived in a broken world and there will inevitably be hardship and suffering, but I hadn’t imagined that the suffering was the growth factor. That is so counterintuitive. But when I thought more about it (and read more about it), it made sense. How would children learn how to handle conflict as adults if they didn’t have them as children or if they were resolved for them by adults? How would they know that they can’t scream at anyone in authority over them if they were always allowed to do so in their household? Or, a little more extreme, how would they be able to handle the discomforts of being outside if they were never exposed to uncomfortably hot or cold temperatures? How many parents don’t let their kids outside if it is too hot, too cold, or too rainy? Or without a jacket? How many parents stop their child from walking barefoot because they are afraid of splinters or thorns or a stubbed toe? Sometimes this is safetyism in a parent’s fear for a child, other times it is the parent not wanting to deal with a grumpy slightly injured child or not wanting to clean extra clothes later.
“We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
Moby-Dick, published in 1851
So as our world gets increasingly safe and comfortable (see the Moby-Dick quote above and then read Brave New World), we begin to run into the funniest of problems. We now live in a world where we can protect our children from most significant negative experiences. No longer is it commonplace for children to experience the passing of a sibling at a young age. Very few kids walk to school. And many kids graduate high school not even knowing how to manage personal finances or do their own laundry. And if these kids are upset, there are ever-present screens we can place in front of them to lull them back into the stupor associated with easy parenting. What if they aren’t sleeping well? Melatonin and Benadryl are now regularly given to kids to fix that problem.
So I am hesitantly advocating to increase hardship and suffering in our children. I believe that no longer does enough hardship and suffering come naturally to average American kids. If we parent like all of their classmates’ parents are parenting, our kids will have smartphones and fancy lunches and extracurriculars coming out of their ears. The parents will be stressed because they will be coordinating this royal parade while picking up the household chores that the kids won’t be doing. The kids won’t know what they want out of life because their parents have always answered that question for them. They will be fragile, and they won’t have the wherewithal, the gumption, to pull themselves out of the muck of comfort with which they were raised.
Provide for them a harsh love.
wow, extremely insightful, Paul. I know my younger brother and I tried a version of letting our sons strike out on their own and both of mine almost ended up losing a finger. I know as parents we are all trying to find the safe balance.