The Coddling of the American Mind How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

He wrote about those changes with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, first in The Atlantic and then in a book called The Coddling of the American Mind.

Jonathan hates books on that

He wrote a book called the Coddling of the American mind and part of the book was about the influence of social media

Well his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. I'm in that right now. I just finished his other one and I'm working on that one and a lot of it has to do with social media and a lot of it has to do with the impact that it has on young people.

I'm into that now.

It's fantastic and he covers us quite a bit.

Jonathan's onto something good there with the Heterodox Academy which I'm a member.

Jonathan's point is that it's more of a sort of East Coast, West Coast public university thing or maybe Harvard that kind of thing.

Universities are now at this divide between are we here for social justice or are we here for truth?

His book The Coddling of the American Mind is exactly about that, and he believes that you should let your kids roam around and find their own way.

the book Jonathan Hate wrote called the Coddling of the American Mind that discusses the issue that kids are having today with cell phones and depression and that especially girls so many girls are cutting themselves and selfharm suicides way up dude and there's a direct correlation between the invention of the smartphone and social media

they said it was a really important look at how our generation is being shaped by technology and how it might be harming their mental health

Jonathan Haidt wrote a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind, great book; it's really good, great book.

I read the Coddling of the American Mind. It's an incredibly important book.

Modern Americans are endlessly told to quote celebrate diversity, but are also hectored to treat other people as if they are interchangeable and all behave in the same ways and want the same things.

the few who dared quickly learn not to. The rest did not dare or else were true believers from the get-go.

I want every single one of them to either purchase themselves or have purchased for them a copy of Coddling the American Mind, where we put all the evidence to make the point that in the last 50 years, we have not seen a threat to academic freedom like of the likes of counsel culture.

This led to a discussion I had with Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind on my show yesterday where I said, you know, it needs to be done.

I love The Coddling of the American Mind, which just had such great insights and it covered a lot of stuff that I'd been covering on the news for the previous 10 years because I lived it.

My colleague at NYU, Jonathan Haidt, wrote this fantastic book called The Coddling of the American Mind.

And we have an epidemic or an emerging epidemic of unhappiness. And I think that's a really important thing to talk about.

And that is our concierge or bulldozer parenting has led to this sort of this this approach where we use so many sanitary wipes on our children's lives that they don't develop their own immunities.

And we developed this princess in the pea generation where they show up to college and get their heart broken or get their first C and literally freak out.

The two individuals who wrote the book about this are Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, you know, the calling of the American mind, um, really brilliant guys.

He just buzzed through the anxious generation book by the author of The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Hyatt. He read it before I did, right?

Greg Lukianoff, one of the authors of "The Coddling of the American Mind", which is a pretty good book, a very important book.

"The Coddling of the American Mind" is this book that really talks about what you're talking about.

The book is about, it's written by a lawyer and a psychologist, they're both involved in higher education, they say that kids today are being harmed by overprotective parenting, by overly safe spaces, by the kind of "trigger warning" culture that really inhibits the development of resilience.

They argue that this overprotectiveness is leading to an increase in anxiety, depression, and an inability to cope with the difficulties of life.

And they go through these really interesting historical parallels between the way kids are being raised today and the way kids were raised in the Victorian era.

There's a very formative book a couple of years ago called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Height and Greg Lukyanov and Ricky and Greg have worked on this, which is the canceling of the American Mind, which is their new book.

And it's interesting to see kind of how the two are related and how a victimhood culture and an over a degree of cuddling for children results in a society and a culture which is hyper concerned about dangerous speech, dangerous actions.

And it's very interesting, especially when they've dug into the data and actually looked at this from a statistical standpoint too.

And my co author um his previous book is The Coddling of the American Mind which um concentrated quite a lot on parenting and its impact on politics and Gen Z um and so we think that there's a lot about leading by example as a parent and raising kids who will not be cancelers and understand their own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of their friends um and I I do find a tremendous amount of hope in the fact that young people are so put off by cancel culture that if they were just given the positive restorative framework to fight back against it and um kind of a social pact that would be mutually protective that there's there's some hope they're going forward um we also think that divesting away from the elite university system just being the only way that people end up in in positions of power in society is a healthy thing um and that people who were hiring should consider kids coming from large state schools and kids from different backgrounds are people who didn't finish college or people who went down a different path in that we shouldn't just have this funnel of kids coming from consistently the most elite schools or the schools but the worst attitudes towards free speech which I think it's no surprise that we're seeing uh absolute chaos erupting on campuses like Harvard right now because if you abdicate free speech and you suppress students and send bad ideas underground for decades on end all of a sudden in a moment of cultural unrest they're going to explode and that's precisely what we're seeing right now um and so we believe that you know opening our minds to alternative education systems and not allowing these schools that seem to breed cancel culture and cancillers to you know take the reins of society consistently with every graduating class that's a positive um and also even people who are running corporations uh can I think take one note out of Netflix's book after the jade de chappelle controversy where they said you know if you can't tolerate the fact that we are going to publish viewpoint set you disagree with as as a platform for ideas and expression then you can leave um I think that's that was a remarkably unique and brave stance to take and actually coin based did that um a while ago their CEO Brian Armstrong was like we're just not going to make any institutional statements and if that's a problem for you you can go and like 10% of their employee base did actually go but like that's not the 10% of people that you want to work for you so I think um on the the level of corporations we can um I think there are a lot of we hear frequently Greg and I both from corporate leaders who are terrified of their like 23 year old hires and that's just such a bizarre power imbalance and it's very fixable if you just create a free speech culture from the get go but I also think weirdly um after october 7th there's a lot of people rediscovering the importance of institutional neutrality and of free speech and free expression and you know it's I think it's a really revealing moment for schools to suddenly say oh you know we had a statement about Kyle written house is acquittal and BLM and all these completely irrelevant things to the interworking of a university but we can't make a statement on this of course I think it's it's shocking that this is the moment that they've finally discovered that institutions are full of people with viewpoints and do not have viewpoints themselves but maybe there's a silver lining that this moment of just absolute chaos in an institutions free speech was not valued for so long where they're suddenly hiding behind the valence of free speech like maybe this is where we actually buy in and we realize that we're all vulnerable in a world where a liberalism is allowed to rein supreme

It's like treating adults like infants, incapable infants who couldn't cope with a different opinion and if they have the misfortune of coming into contact with an opinion that makes them uncomfortable then they need a safe space with puppies and coloring books.

But this to me sounds a lot like the concern over protectionism strategies, especially on college campuses, especially in liberal arts colleges and stuff around America and maybe creeping into the UK as well.

That's right yeah that's a great book yeah fantastic and then he wrote this uh great essay for the washington post I think called the tower of babel and it's kind of a development on from where he was coddling of the american mind he's sort of big into this anti social media thing he's concerned about what it's doing to especially young girls sense of self and anxiety and so on and so forth however what he's doing on his maybe sub stack maybe something else he's writing the book chapter by chapter publishing it maybe just to paying members or maybe for free to everybody what they're just getting feedback on getting feedback and iterating so he will have released every single chapter of his books first draft for largely free over the space of a euro 18 months great idea

I love Coddling of the American Mind, too.

And she actually dropped out of NYU in 2020, also during COVID, which I think is exactly the right move. Once you're unlocked down, drop out, the defeats of major point of college.

And originally what we were planning to do was write a book or what I was considering doing, was writing a book that was a follow-up to Coddling, even though Canceling is a follow-up in a sense,

And originally what we were planning to do was write a book or what I was considering doing, was writing a book that was a follow-up to Coddling, even though Canceling is a follow-up in a sense, something that was much more directly a follow-up because the book was written by me and Jonathan Hyte, like 48 and 60-year-old Jen-Exers. But a lot of it's concerned about the terrible injustice we do to young women, teaching them the mental habits of anxious and depressed people.

So she wrote me in Hyte to talk about if we thought maybe COVID could uncoddle young people by presenting challenges that they could then overcome. It's a little optimistic.

Well, first thing is that we took this head on in coddling of the American mind.

I thought I'd be cardling of the American mind as well and that hadn't come out until I think the next year or the year after okay

There's in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind with my dear friend, Greg Lukianoff, was really important.

He's the author of a number of books, The Coddling of the American Mind, The Righteous Mind, The Happiness Hypothesis, and most recently, the anxious generation...

We turned that into a book in 2017. We went much deeper. And writing that book in 2017, we have a page where we say, you know, the timing is right for social media.

It began as an Atlantic article in 2015, and it was one of the top five most read at that time.

What I've come to see after that, it was describing a change in culture that happened first on campus.

I absolutely love this one. It's the coddling of the American mind by our guest today, Jonathan Hyde. Not only talks about social media, but also talks just about raising kids and what it means to have productive, civic-minded children.

I am finishing up Jonathan Heights coddling of the American mind.

You've written a lot of very interesting books. The book you wrote before this, The Coddling of the American Mind, you co-wrote, sort of looked at safetyism, it looked at the college life, the college landscape, and now what we see on college campuses, these protests are breaking out. I wonder, as somebody who looked closely at that and the ways in which students move through it, what you see now on these campuses.

We all agree, on campus, students have a right to protest, constitutionally protected. But two things I see going on. One is the protest. This is what Greg Lukianoff, my co-author, first noticed in 2014. The shouting down of speakers, the activism on campus that was really illiberal and it was intimidating and it was stopping people from speaking. It was based on arguments about fragility, about my mental health or her mental health. Like, we can't let this person on campus because it will be dangerous, it will be harmful, speech is violence.

It's like, I read this book, uh, I want to do this right, how do I helicopter parent my child correctly? Like, what are some tactical things I can take away from this?

The book you wrote before this, The Coddling of the American Mind, you co-wrote, sort of looked at safetyism, it looked at the college, the college landscape, and and now what we see on college campuses these protests are breaking out. I wonder as somebody who look closely at that and the ways in which students kind of move through it what you see now on these campuses?

he's a fairly well-known social psychologist whose works includes the coddling of the american mind and also the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion and his course you know quite honestly was super cool very interesting discussions but he was also extremely brief lasting you know just a few sessions over the course of two weekends which does kind of show the priorities of the curriculum right it like i said i found the discussions to be really interesting but unfortunately the course design itself felt more like i think compliance maybe even call it theater more than anything else

he's a fairly well-known social psychologist whose works includes the coddling of the american mind and also the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion

There's actually a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind about how we're protecting our kids so much.

He wrote a lot of good books. And I read, he wrote Coddling of American Mind, which was like his first really good book that I read.

hate is an NYU business professor whose ideas are really influential in Silicon Valley and beyond his blockbuster book about campus cancel culture.

The coddling of the American mind was praised by Bill Gates and Stripe CEO Patrick call son and he's been brought in by companies like meta to give talks on social media and society.

This book is a follow up to a book that you wrote with Jonathan Haidt back in 2018, The Coddling of the American Mind.

Well, in some ways it's good to read Coddling in the American Mind and Canceling of the American Mind together, or it's helpful to have read Coddling because we in that one we do more of a social science.

And buying on learning liberty and freedom of speech. So, of course, anyway, so Coddling in the American Mind spends more time on figuring out how this happened.

Well, also, when you begin talking about speech in terms of violence and harm, you know, that speech is a harm and that that if this person is allowed to be in that room saying these words, that it makes me feel unsafe. So let's just talk about what's canceled culture and when is it justifiable? Stories in the news today involving the fallout from Gaza. Your organization has jumped headfirst into this. Some of these campus conflicts. We always talk about this NYU law student, Rena Workman, who wrote in a student bulletin that Israel bore full responsibility for the attack on October 7th. I mean, this was got a lot of attention. New York Times reported that she wrote this regime, Israel, of state sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance by which people read Hamas. That same day, major law firm Winston and Strawn withdrew its offer of employment from her. Was that canceled culture? And don't they have the right to do that?

And Charlie, you were actually one of the first people to point this out in your books in the late 80s and early 90s.

This book is a follow up to a book that you wrote with Jonathan Haidt back in 2018, The Coddling of the American Mind.

I'm a parent myself. I am a protective, anxious parent, and I get the instinct to protect your kids no matter what and keep them from harm or difficulty.

Four years ago I had my daughter and at that point in time I did struggle with alcohol a little bit and so I wanted to change my life and I read his books Fail and To You Bel.

You know what the data reflects in this anxious generation the Jonathan Haight book women are having high levels of suicidal ideation 30% of teenage women because of they think social media.

The Coddling of the American Mind which was booked before this and then executive producer of a film I was involved with.