While curmudgeonly complaining about “kids these days” is nothing new, it’s hard to deny that there’s cause for genuine concern about America’s youngest generations. The combination of radicalism and ignorance displayed in campus protests may be a variation on an old theme in higher education, but the fragility and emotional instability of these Gen Z students is notable. And even among their younger peers the effects of pandemic learning loss and years of screen addiction are evident in the aimlessness and prevalence of mental health issues in America’s children. Underneath all of these trends are a set of ideas and attitudes toward parenting that have grown in their prevalence in recent decades.
In their excellent 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, first amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt connect the campus chaos we see on the news and other problems plaguing Gen Z and younger Americans to childhood coddling and a pernicious culture of “safetyism.” What can be done to reverse these troubling trends? Two impressive organizations working on exactly that issue stand out.
Peter learns more about the efforts of these two groups—Let Grow and Heterodox Academy—in a recent Giving Ventures interview.
Let Grow promotes childhood independence and pushes back against the notion that children are fragile and must be protected from ever-present dangers. In this episode, Let Grow co-founder and president Lenore Skenazy and executive director Andrea Keith explain how overbearing parenting is affecting children and what parents can do to promote their kids’ healthy development into independent adults.
John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, rounds out the conversation with his perspective on how these issues are playing out in higher education settings. Under his leadership, Heterodox Academy works to revitalize academic culture to make room for viewpoint diversity and respectful disagreement.
America’s Worst Mom
When Lenore Skenazy let her 9-year-old son ride the Subway home all by himself and then chronicled the experience back in 2008, she quickly earned the title “America’s Worst Mom” from a variety of critics. (Some even charged her with being the world’s worst mom!) But the beaming pride on her son’s face when he arrived home showed Lenore she was on to something.
In the years since, she has written about the benefits of raising “Free-Range Kids” and in 2018 co-founded Let Grow to point out the harmful side effects of overparenting and overprotecting children. “I want my kids to be safe, too,” Lenore explains in the episode. “I believe in helmets and car seats and seatbelts. I just don’t think they need a security detail every time they leave the house.”
Lenore’s work shows that coddling our kids makes them more fragile and habituates them to look to adults for direction and problem resolution rather than learning to tackle their own challenges. Stifling parenting styles are depriving kids of the freedom they need and undermining their development into mature, independent adults.
Raising Anti-Fragile Children
Andrea Keith works with Lenore at Let Grow, where she serves as executive director. Under her direction, Let Grow offers programs to promote healthy childhood development and to help parents ease up with the bubble wrap. “Helping parents break the cycle of overparenting or treating kids as fragile is the key,” Andrea tells Peter.
Let Grow operates a robust program called the Let Grow Experience that reaches kids and their parents through their local schools. With simple homework assignments like doing something you’ve never done before without adult supervision—though with parental permission, of course—kids learn to self-direct, problem solve, and experience the pride of growing and developing independently. And parents see their kids thrive, reinforcing healthier dynamics at home.
By facing and overcoming challenges, children develop not just the resilience to withstand stressors but the antifragility to grow and thrive when they meet obstacles. Something as simple as walking the dog around the block or making a sandwich for herself can make a world of difference in a child’s life.
Promoting Robust Debate on Campus
When overparented children leave the home and take up residence on a college campus, their lack of independence shows itself in intolerance toward others’ ideas and the inability to resolve interpersonal conflicts without invoking authorities.
Hence the epidemic in recent years of mental health challenges, violent and disruptive campus activism, and cancel culture that’s thrown a wet blanket on academic debate. Strained wellness centers, viral videos of masked students shouting down lecturers, and eerily quiet seminars full of students reluctant to voice their viewpoints for fear of social ostracism are the result.
Under John Tomasi’s leadership, Heterodox Academy works to push back against these trends and promote an academic culture that’s welcoming to disagreement and civil debate, emphasizing the academic pursuit of truth over and above political agendas on campus.
Teaching at Brown University for nearly 30 years, John began to notice that students were becoming more concerned with considerations given to them by administrators—such as unpacking the privilege of their backgrounds—than they were with the scholarly and intellectual pursuits that should define the college experience.
As budgets for administrators concerned with making the university feel more like family began to rise, so too did a “therapeutic impulse” in campus culture that’s come at the cost of academic values. “Students start thinking about their experience in a more therapeutic way rather than a scholarly way,” John warns. Heterodox Academy’s student surveys reveal that students are self-censoring in the classroom out of fear of reprisal on social media, which chokes out intellectual dialogue.
To combat these trends, John and his team promote policies like the Chatham House Rule, which stipulates that ideas shared in the classroom can be discussed in outside settings but participants must remain anonymous. Heterodox Academy also helps to put on campus conversations—not winner-take-all debates—that host opposing viewpoints and model constructive disagreement.
Returning to the core of what a university is supposed to be, these programs help to create an environment of free exchange of ideas and channels the disagreements behind harmful behaviors like cancel culture and shout-down protests into intellectual outlets.
If you’re interested in learning more about these groups and the important work they are doing, give the episode a listen using the player above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
