The book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, made a big splash when it was first published in 2018.[i] Its implications for mental health professionals are consequential and well worth examining five years down the road. In this newsletter, my intention is not to undertake a comprehensive review of the book. I shall present and try to clarify some of the authors’ ideas, while criticizing both their analysis and their solutions, all in the name of coming to terms with the dismay that I ended up feeling.
The authors’ main worry is that American parenting has evolved to coddle children: our benign intentions to be sensitive to children has served to hinder their development toward mature adulthood. Lukianoff and Haidt understand this parenting style as based on cognitive distortions (like catastrophizing), and they ask us to consider how cognitive behavioral theory might help us to resolve the distortions and come to more accurate and more successful reality testing. On the face of it, it is hard to get around the fact that Lukianoff and Haidt seem to be implicating young people as pathological and in need of help, if not therapy. They are particularly scathing about college age kids who entered college from the year 2013 onward.
The emphasis on CBT as critical to understanding American children and parents is inspired by the fact that Lukianoff himself benefitted from CBT, when he was depressed. I wonder how CBT advocates might react to using theory in this way, as it is more speculative than scientific. Associating CBT as a philosophy with values that reflect American culture has plausibility in that CBT was born and has thrived here; however, such a reading also suggests that CBT mirrors aspects of American society that make it dubious that it could help solve the problems that Lukianoff and Haidt enumerate. They make the solemn suggestion that CBT bears a connection to “ancient wisdom,” a bit of superficial posturing: there might be a parallel between CBT and Stoic philosophy, but certainly not to Aristotelian philosophy, which is friendlier to emotions, valuing how emotions are amenable to cultivation.[ii] A more apt association is the not-so-incidental connection between CBT and insurance companies.
Let’s address the substance of Lukianoff and Haidt’s argument. “Safetyism” is the term that they introduce to capture the parenting style that has become dominant, wherein parents strive to protect children from danger at all costs. One such example that they cite is research that suggests that nut allergies might be better served by minimal exposure, which produces immunity, rather than by the total bans that have become widely accepted. It is intriguing to consider whether our fears have spurred an emotional reaction that produces a solution that backfires, thus worsening the original problem. If we think about attachment as serving both the functions of providing security as well as promoting exploration of the environment, there must be an ideal ratio of security/exploration, where there is some flexibility, without one outweighing the other. Lukianoff and Haidt argue that parents are responsible for “well-intentioned overprotectiveness,” which has harmed children by making them fragile and less autonomous. They specifically claim that the mental health of young people has been damaged by this parenting style. The kids are not alright, a point that we have heard before from generations of conservative social critics.[iii]
Lukianoff and Haidt move to shaky and more controversial ground in addressing the changes they have witnessed on college campuses. They detect a shift away from fearing danger about things that might be threatening to fearing the opinions of people whose views differ from their own. They are suspicious of ideas that inspire people to place trust in their emotional reactions as the only justification that is needed. Indeed, Lukianoff and Haidt rely upon a conventional juxtaposition between reasonableness (which they admire) versus emotions (which they are wary of). If they aspire to be rational, how do we understand their use of the term “coddle” in the title, which they acknowledge is questionable, and certainly seems derogatory, charged with a negative connotation. Not only do their emotions leak out, but their suspicion of emotional reasoning weakens their analyses. For example, they interpret microaggressions as automatic beliefs that are based upon the unwarranted assumptions that someone’s intentions are bad. In my opinion, this completely misses the point that microaggressions often carry an emotional charge that is disavowed. There is nothing inherent about a microaggression that prevents one from questioning whether the intention of the other that one senses is accurate or not. Lukianoff and Haidt assert that there should be room for someone to commit a faux pas. OK, but don’t some mistakes come from the unconscious, betraying what the person really feels?
The authors review several widely publicized incidents at universities, where students have objected to speakers or chose to interrupt them or attempted to cancel their engagements because of difference in opinions. Lukianoff and Haidt worry about how these situations quickly devolve into good guys and bad guys, locating blame in our evolutionary history of tribalism. A worldview that organizes itself around victims and oppressor is simplistic, so it was disappointing to find that that the authors fail to represent student activism and university life in more complex terms
At the center of Lukianoff and Haidt’s argument is that the violent protests at UC Berkeley, in response to a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017 served as a turning point, where speech becomes construed as a form of violence. To be clear, Lukianoff and Haidt are no fans of Yiannopoulos and refer to him as a “skilled provocateur—a master of the art of triggering outrage and then using that outrage to embarrass his opponents and advance his goals” (p. 81). They mention that just prior to his talk at Berkeley, Yiannopoulos held up a picture and mocked a trans woman (shades of Trump himself). The “Milo riot” was notable, according to the authors, because it purportedly served to justify violence as a legitimate response. Lukianoff and Haidt note that it was uncertain whether the perpetrators of violence were Berkeley students; nonetheless they end up bemoaning that more students were not punished.
A crucial development in the aftermath of the Milo riot was an Op-Ed from the Daily Californian, the Berkeley student newspaper, titled “Violence as Self-Defense.” My impression of the piece is that it was rhetorical, not “catastrophizing” as Lukianoff and Haidt suggest. The editorial states that if people condone Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on campus, they care more about broken windows than broken bodies, and that they are failing to take sides. Lukianoff and Haidt are appalled that violence is attributed to speech, a category mistake as well as cognitive distortion, and they also reject the validity of the assertion about the stakes being high. They cite other incidents at Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, and the infamous one at Charlottesville, the latter of which is the most extreme example of one-sided violence from the right. Perhaps it is the wisdom of hindsight, but Lukianoff and Haidt claim that Charlottesville brought Republican and Democrats in leadership together to condemn the violence, while singling out Trump for blame. We now know that even after the January 6 insurrection, the Republican leadership remained shockingly subordinate to Trump.
It is important to keep in mind that the Milo riot took place shortly after the election of Donald Trump. Partisan divisiveness had reached a boiling point, fanned by Trump himself. Lukianoff and Haidt observe that Trump’s election was “particularly disillusioning to black student and left-leaning women” (p. 140). Gee, and I thought Trump’s election was disillusioning to any thinking human being who cared about democracy. To be fair, the authors’ book was published in 2018; thus, they could not have known of the combination of broken windows and broken bodies at the Capital building, again orchestrated by Trump. If the issue of choosing sides turns on whether to defend democracy or not, don’t we have to face up to that choice? Who was more prescient about what would happen—the Berkeley Op-Ed or Lukianoff and Haidt? And by the way, if you are wondering whatever happened to Milo Yiannopoulos? Last I heard he was working on Kanye West’s presidential campaign (no joke)!
According to Lukianoff and Haidt, it is a mistake to imagine that speech can be the violent. Free speech is precious, but this does not mean that words cannot be used in a way that is meant to create a violent effect, intentionally or not. Words can express emotions that are designed to harm others—to terrify them, to revivify trauma, and to provoke extreme reactions. The authors reject the notion that harm can be equated with violence, endorsing that it is a better choice to strive not to be reactive if one feels injured. Would I agree that college age kids these days can be too sensitive to perceived slights? Probably, although I was, too, at that age. And I would not pathologize them; nor would I minimize the uphill battle that minoritized students face in finding places for themselves at elite institutions of higher learning. So, not all harm is violence, but it is mistaken and concerning not to recognize that some forms of harm can be violent.
Lukianoff and Haidt express little appreciation of the palpable sense of danger that affects students today, due to staggering price of education, the proliferation of gun violence in the US, the exportation of violence for more than 20 years from 9/11 onward, and the mounting threat of environmental disaster. The authors fail to try to put themselves in the shoes of students today; instead, they rest content with judging them using with the quasi-scientific language of CBT. How is it possible that they completely ignore that different generations inevitably have different priorities?
It is not just parents who are blameworthy in Lukianoff and Haidt’s account. They see universities as dominated by academics who were influenced by the 60s and thus bring a political agenda to their teaching. According to the authors, “Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics and much of the United States” (p. 112). This sentence is revealing, as it manages to smuggle in an association of understanding of conservatives with the more general subjects of understanding politics and the US. It highlights that the while the authors aim to present themselves as moderates, ultimately, they lean to the right.
Mental health professionals will be especially curious to hear what Lukianoff and Haidt have to say about the increase in anxiety and depression rates in young people. They attribute this to the decline of unsupervised time and the rise of social media. Their chapter on the decline of play is valuable, as it articulates how imagination comes into being and how resiliency is built.[iv] In linking the decline of play to unrealistic paranoia about strangers on the part of parents, I part company with their analysis. All I can say is that, in New York where I live, I escort my kid two stops on the subway, and more mornings than not we encounter people in bad shape on the platform or on riding the train who are scary and potentially dangerous. Fear, yes; paranoia, no. Also, sadness that a wealthy society can be so neglectful.
Lukianoff and Haidt extend their concern about safetyism to universities, where they believe that it serves less to protect students who are struggling mentally, than to reinforce their fragility. They insightfully reflect on how universities have become more corporate, with administrators, rather than academics calling the shots. Concerning mental health, they go so far as to claim that “the language of therapy and mental illness” can create “a looping effect,” where being labelled becomes “a self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 150). And they take this one step further—indulging in labelling themselves—that mental illness becomes a “powerful cognition distortion” (p. 150). There is, I would agree, an issue to reckon with concerning the medicalization of normal human states and emotions through diagnostic language, but it is remarkably tone deaf to miss that young people are suffering and that criticizing them with tough love lite is no solution. The authors overlook compelling issues that are related to their concerns but are challenging to fathom: that there has been a sea change from stigma about mental health with the phenomenon of young people displaying their disorders with little hesitation, sometimes reveling in their diagnoses (thanks to my daughter for her TikTok expertise on this subject). Lukianoff and Haidt might see this as evidence for self-fulfilling prophecy but in my opinion, we should refrain from assessing it as a manifestation of cognitive distortion. Surely, it says something about our society that so many people embrace the language of mental disorders.
In the last part of the book, the authors turn to where they discern hope, wowing us with such “green shoots” that Twitter and Facebook are moving to promote civility by hiring social psychologists. In 2023, this looks rather embarrassing, given that Elon Musk is at the helm of Twitter, and Trump recently received the green light to unreturn to Facebook. Lukianoff and Haidt are trustworthy guides because they underestimate the threat to democracy from the right that has emerged and is not contained.
Lukianoff and Haidt make little room for appreciating the challenge of being a good parent and raising resilient kids at this moment in time, especially after the pandemic. They do not consider ways to encourage better communication between parents and children by tuning into parents, as my co-authors, Norka Malberg, Jordan Bate and Mark Dangerfield, and I advocate in a forthcoming book, Working with Parents in Therapy: A Mentalization-Based Approach (APA Publications, 2023). They fail to empathize with parents as well as with young adults.
The valorization of pure reasoning over emotional reasoning makes the authors’ analysis thin and flat. Their commitment to CBT dooms them to overemphasize cognition and behavior and to characterize emotions in an unduly negative way. There is no attempt to acknowledge a positive value to emotions or to reflect upon how cognition and emotion might be profitably integrated. My negative response to reading the book is, I realize, because Lukianoff and Haidt purport to present rational arguments, while their emotions leak out in unrecognized ways. Coddling is an unnecessarily hyperbolic term, an accusation that is conjured to grab attention, overlooking the effort by beleaguered parents to guide their children in difficult times.
As a society, we are poised in a perilous state, potentially headed into in even worse state. We must contend with hypocrisy, and dishonest communication, along with the threat of violence. To have hope for a better future must begin with a frank acknowledgement of our current state. Assaying the present unfavorably in relation to the past is neither new nor a path forward.
[i] G. Lukianoff and J. Haidt (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin. The book is an expansion of an article by the authors in the Atlantic (2015): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
[ii] For a thorough look at Stoic philosophy as the source of CBT, see D. Robertson (2020). The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy Second Edition. New York and London: Routledge.
[iii] This point is well-illustrated in Moira Weigel’s review of Lukianoff and Haidt in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review
[iv] For a recent article on the value of unstructured play in schools, see Parrott and Cohen (2020): https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1276879.pdf. For a general piece on the value of play, see: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/31/642567651/5-proven-benefits-of-play