A worthwhile book on raising children

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A worthwhile book on raising children

Much is made these days of “snowflakes,” slang for some of our young people. One online source defines snowflakes as individuals with “an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, or are over-emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions.” Some commentators even speak of a “Snowflake Generation.”

Yet in my 20 years of teaching seminars in literature, composition, history, and Latin to homeschoolers in the Asheville area, I encountered only a few students who might fit this description. Overall, the young people in my seminars kept their egos in check, respected their classmates, disagreed with some of their opinions without rousing rancor, and though hurt on occasion by some comment, shook off the barb and moved on.

In The Coddling Of The American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin Press, 2018, 338 pages), authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt reveal part of the reason why I remember so few snowflakes in my classes. According to them, this phenomenon swept through many college campuses between 2013 and 2017, and has, we may assume, now entered our secondary schools. By that time, my teaching days were coming to a close.

Lukianoff and Haidt begin The Coddling of the American Mind with what they call Three Bad Ideas. “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “Always trust your feelings,” and “Life is a battle between good people and evil people” are, according to the authors, “the three Great Untruths … they have their roots in earlier education and childhood experiences, and they now extend from the campus into the corporate world and the public square, including national politics … These Great Untruths are bad for everyone. Anyone who cares about young people, education, or democracy should be concerned about these trends.”

We then read of actual incidents spawned by these Bad Ideas: university administrators disinviting speakers because some students and faculty members fear hearing opinions with which they disagree; riots in places like Berkeley and Charlottesville; incidents in which radical students attack their schools for teaching courses in Western Civilization. We read of “witch hunts” against professors who make innocuous statements or commit micro-aggressions, and subsequently find themselves protested in their classrooms and on social media. We hear of students attacked by faculty members and classmates for thinking that runs counter to a university’s politically correct atmosphere.

At the same time, America in the last 10 years has witnessed a surge in mental illness, suicide, anxiety, and depression among its young people. In examining this development, The Coddling of the American Mind looks not only at such the influence of the Bad Ideas, but also at such factors as engagement in social media, the amount of screen time spent on various devices, the decline of play, and “paranoid parenting,” which also goes under the name of “helicopter parenting.”

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Some of this helicopter parenting does come from over-zealous parents, but as Lukianoff and Haidt point out, it also derives from the pressures of society and the fear of being thought a bad parent for allowing children the independence that only 40 years ago was a given of adolescence and youth. Here is just one example:

“In Bristol, Connecticut, in 2014, a woman left her daughter alone in her car while she went into a CVS pharmacy. This might sound bad to you, especially when you learn that it was summertime and the car windows were rolled up. An alert passerby notified the police, who were able to open the car door. The police reported that the child was responsive and in distress. But here’s the thing: the child was eleven years old. She had told her mother that she preferred to wait in the car rather than come into the store.”

An 11-year-old can’t roll down a car window if she becomes too warm?

Near the end of their book, Lukianoff and Haidt propose three psychological principles to counter the three Bad Ideas. First up is “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” They next reject Bad Idea No. 2 with “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.” Finally, they throw away the idea of “bad people” and “good people”, and instead go to a line from Solzhenitsyn: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

In addition, The Coddling of the American Mind offers dozens of practical tips for parents and mentors, promoting, among many other things, moderate risk-taking for children, unsupervised play time, summer camps, and mindfulness toward others.

The writers of this fine book know their subject both from research and from personal experience. Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

In closing The Coddling of the American Mind, this team offers a quote from Benjamin Franklin from a letter he wrote to Samuel Johnson:

“Northing is more important 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 and arms, which under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people.”

The Coddling of the American Mind reminds us of the importance of raising young people in wisdom and virtue. As the authors tell us, “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.”

(Jeff Minick can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

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