Transcript: Jonathan Haidt on Gen Z Fragility, Social Media, and the Cult of Safety

And so those of us who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, there was a lot of crime. Kids in New York City often got mugged. I just talked to somebody about this yesterday. He said he got mugged seven times when he was a kid.

But nobody would ever say, “Well, therefore we have to lock the kids up. We can’t let them out.” It was just understood that there were risks. But you went out and you learned how to deal with them.

Just as the crime wave ends in the early 1990s, Americans freak out about child abduction. We got this idea, it was a media panic that if you take your eyes off your kid, because there were one or two cases like this, if you take your eyes off your kid in a department store—and this happened in a Sears in Florida in the early 1980s—the kid could be abducted and then murdered and you’ll never see your child again. Therefore, you have to always be watching your kid.

Now, this was insane. This was never true. But Americans panicked and started locking up their kids. Locking up, just meaning no more unsupervised play. I can show that this is the case in this way.

When I speak around the country about this issue, I always do a demonstration where I ask everybody to think, in what year were you let out? How old were you? So if it was first grade, you should say six. If it was fifth grade, you should say 10. And I put up all the different grades and everybody think of your number.

And then I say, “If you were born in 1982 or earlier,” i.e., you’re Gen X or Baby Boom, “what’s your year? Call it out.” When I point to you and I just sweep my finger around the room and you hear a chorus of six, seven, eight. That’s it. It’s always six, seven and eight.

And then I say, “Okay, now, if you’re born in 1995 or later,” so this is basically Gen Z, 1995 or ’96 is the beginning of it, “put your hand up. Okay, just you people. When were you let out?” And you hear a chorus of 10, 11, 12.

Now you still get a few eights here and there, but it’s overwhelmingly fifth to seventh grade is when we began letting kids out. In other words, just as it got incredibly safe to go outside, that’s when we chose to lock up our kids.

You can also look at it this way. When I was a kid, kids would go out and play in the afternoons after school or on weekends. And suppose there was a kid who was in fourth grade, a nine-year-old, who said, “I can’t come out. My parents think it’s not safe.” We would all say, “What’s the matter with those parents? Should we be reporting them for child abuse? This is really weird.”

And now if there’s a nine-year-old who’s sent out to play, everyone’s going to be like, “What’s wrong with those parents? Should we report them for child abuse?” So something really changed and it had nothing to do with actual levels of danger in our world.

The Perfect Storm for Gen Z

We can’t know what caused what because so many things happened in a row for Gen Z. So suppose you were born in 1995. So what happens is already we’re beginning to crack down on kids going outside. So already for the late millennials, but especially for Gen Z, they don’t get to go outside and play unsupervised. That’s the first thing.

They also, the oldest Gen Z kids are about six years old when 9/11 happens. Now that doesn’t affect kids but it does begin to add to sort of the national paranoia. I don’t know that this had an influence, but it may be a piece of it.

The Columbine shooting happens in 1999 and it’s interpreted as a response to the kids being bullied and excluded. And so America imposes state by state, but over the next few years, between 2001 and 2006 or 2007, most states impose anti-bullying programs, anti-bullying training.

They’re generally not very effective programs, but one thing that they do is they make schools and adults responsible to stop teasing and conflict on the playground. They’re often over-interpreted. Now here the research, I don’t want to go too far in this because it’s hard. Greg Lukianoff and I looked for research on whether bullying programs work or backfire. We couldn’t really get clarity on that.

But I want to just trace this out as all of a piece. Rising fear of abduction, 9/11 and paranoia, anti-bullying policies. And so by the time you get up to about 2006 or so, you already have kids who have been deprived of the normal experiences that would allow them to get stronger and tougher from playing and having normal conflict.

That’s just when social media arrives. So in 2006, Facebook opens up to the world. Anyone can have an account, you have to be 13, but you can lie at any age and get an account in those early years. Social media is not particularly toxic. It’s just look at me, here are my friends, here are the bands that I like.

Between 2009 and 2012, that’s when social media changes and becomes much more addictive and much more evaluative. That is you get the Like button in 2009, you get retweeting, you get sharing. It becomes much more viral and much better at shaming people, much, much better at canceling people.

So Gen Z, they’re just hitting their teen years as social media becomes much more toxic. So all we know for sure is that Gen Z shows an enormous increase in depression, anxiety. But because so many things happen to them, we can’t point to anyone and say, “Well, this is what caused it.”

JOHN PAPOLA: Why should parents be worried about an over-scheduled childhood?

The Crowding Out of Play

JONATHAN HAIDT: So if we think about human children as mammals who basically need lots and lots of play, this is the main business of childhood. This is the main thing they’re supposed to do. They have homework too. And you know, when I was a kid, you had homework, but you also would play every day.

Well, as the homework goes up, that crowds things out. Although actually amount of homework hasn’t changed so much. It’s not the homework per se which is the problem. It’s all the extracurricular activities that now we began doing in order, especially middle class and above families are concerned about getting the kid into college. So there’s just a lot more stuff they have to do beyond school that crowds out play.

In more recent years as kids have gotten devices, they are so connected. They have so much other stuff coming in that also takes up a lot of time. And one thing I’ve learned from talking with a lot of middle school and high school administrators in recent months is that the kids are also hyper-connected to their teachers and to each other for class projects.

So the total amount of incoming stuff that they have to attend to, you know, a lot of us adults who are busy professionals, we feel like, “I can’t take it anymore, I’ve got too much email, too many texts, I can’t live this way.” Well, guess what? That’s now kind of what it feels like to be a seventh or eighth grader.

So for all these reasons, all these different factors are coming in and just pushing out time for play, substituting electronic connections, homework, after-school activities, all done with this overarching feeling of anxiety, of will this be enough? Will I keep up? Will I be in the top of the class? Will I get into a good college?

So it’s really tough to be a kid today. There are all these factors changing childhood. But if you keep your eye on play and you say this is the most nutritious thing kids need to consume, this is the thing they most need to develop, and this is the thing we’re most taking away from them.

JOHN PAPOLA: Are kids these days really different than previous generations?

The Historical Pattern of Generational Criticism

JONATHAN HAIDT: One thing that is consistent across thousands of years of history is that each generation looks at the one or two behind it and says they’re weak, they’re over emotional, they’re lazy, whatever it is. Part of this is that there are real differences between generation and losses loom larger than gains. Whatever their doing, we don’t value. And the things that we did that they don’t do, we do value. That’s a piece of it.

Another piece is just the developmental piece. Older people have a dim view of younger people whose brains aren’t fully developed with self control, let’s say just for example. So you have normal intergenerational misunderstandings. And you see this in writings from ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

Maybe that’s all that it is today. Maybe it’s just parents today or the older generation today is saying why can’t they be like we were perfect in every way. But then you look at the mental health stats, you look at rates of depression and anxiety which were fairly stable until around 2011, 2012, teen mental health, the lines for depression anxiety were pretty flat.

The Alarming Rise in Teen Mental Health Issues

And then suddenly in 2012, plus or minus a year, the boys go up and the girls go way up. It’s the kind of hockey stick pattern like you know, as people have seen with global carbon dioxide or whatever, you know, whatever stat you want to get people worried about. You show a graph like this, well that’s what happened to depression and anxiety for girls.

Some experts have said, oh come on, it’s just changes in self report. It’s just Gen Z is so comfortable talking about mental health. This is a good thing, nothing to be worried about. But that is not true and you can see that it’s not true when you look at behaviors.

So if it was just self report depression, that’s a reasonable hypothesis. But if you look at self harm, it’s the exact same thing. There are several studies in the US and the UK and Canada where they plot the number of teen girls out of 100,000 in the population that are admitted to hospitals every year because they cut themselves. It’s called non surgical self injury. It’s related to anxiety.

And the lines were pretty stable until about 2009, 2010. Then they start rising very fast. Interestingly, this was a study published in 2015. The oldest teen girls rise about 70%. It’s a gigantic increase. But the youngest teen girls start very low. They are up 189%. Nearly triple, nearly triple just since about 2010.

The Gender Divide in Mental Health Trends

So something big is happening, especially to younger teen girls. The boys data is perfectly flat. Boys are not self harming more. But there’s also a line on that graph in this 2015 study for young women in their 20s and that line is actually pretty flat. Now those are millennials. In 2015 those young women were still millennials. It wasn’t Gen Z yet.

So I think this is very revealing that it’s not that all women started self harming, it’s that Gen Z started self harming and that it’s the middle school girls especially whose lives changed.

We also see the same patterns in suicide is down around the world. Overall, it’s up in the United States for almost all age groups, both sexes typically something like 10 to 30% for different age groups. Except for young women there, it’s up a lot more, more than 100%. For the preteen girls it’s actually up 150%.

So something big is happening. It’s not just oh, why can’t they be like we were? No, it’s that their mental health has fallen off a cliff and it is showing up in self harm. It’s showing up in. So this is not just a cross generational misunderstanding.

JOHN PAPOLA: Does social media really hurt kids mental health?

The Evidence on Social Media’s Impact

JONATHAN HAIDT: So since I’ve been studying and writing about this, the normal processes of academic life kick in, which is great. People say, no, you know, you’re wrong, here’s why. And so to try to get a handle on what all the data is, I mean there are lots of studies and some of them are contradictory.

So I created two Google Documents. They’re open source Google documents. One is just every study I can find on what’s happening to teen mental health in the United States and the UK and the other one is what is the evidence that social media is a contributor. And for both Google Documents I tweeted about them and invited researchers to comment on them. They’re open source, anyone can come, I’ll give them permission to edit it and they can add their ideas and what’s happened.

It’s been really interesting. For the lit review on what’s happening to teen mental health, there’s no dispute, nobody has said, no, you’re wrong. And each year I’ve been doing this for a year and a half now. All the new studies generally show things continue to get worse. I’ve also added in similar documents for Australia, New Zealand. I’m working on one for Spain. We have Canada. They’re all showing similar patterns. Sometimes it’s delayed and sometimes not as sharp. But this is not just the United States, it certainly is all the English speaking countries.

So that’s the story on mental health. It’s bad and it’s always worse for girls than boys.

Screen Time vs. Social Media Use

The other document is what’s the evidence that social media is a cause? And here there is much more debate. However, what I found is that the article saying it’s no problem. They almost always focus on screen time or digital device use. And so there are a lot of correlational studies. And if you look at how much time a kid spends looking at screens, including his laptop, Netflix, video games, everything, and you correlate that with mental health, sometimes you find a relationship, sometimes you don’t, but it’s very small.

So just looking at screens doesn’t seem to be the big problem. But even in those studies, when you can zoom in on social media, the effect size, the correlation with bad mental health outcomes is always much bigger. And then if you can just look at girls as opposed to boys, the effect size is even bigger for girls and often quite small for boys.

So I think what we’re seeing is that in the correlational studies, light use of social media does not seem to be associated with depression and anxiety. But heavy use of social media for teen girls is very consistently associated with a rise, a big rise, usually more than a doubling of depression and anxiety.

Experimental Evidence and Causation

That’s the correlational data. Of course, correlation doesn’t show causation. Maybe depressed kids are the ones who go to social media and spend all their time there. So for that, we look at experiments and we found 10 experiments so far, 10 true experiments where they used random assignment. They didn’t all use teens, so they’re differently important here.

And so if you have correlational evidence and you have experimental evidence, it’s not 100% consistent, but it’s a pretty good story. It seems to me that the evidence is now saying, yes, there is a causal effect. It doesn’t explain most of the variants. It’s not the only thing happening. But if you have something that correlates 0.15 or 0.2 with depression and anxiety, are you going to let your kids do it just because it’s not 100% certain that it’s harmful?

JOHN PAPOLA: I wouldn’t depression and anxiety among our kids and is bad, but do the problems go even deeper?

Beyond Depression: A Generation of Fragility

JONATHAN HAIDT: So I’ve been focused in my research on depression and anxiety as the outcomes, because that’s where we have good data. Those are, they’re, you know, clinically defined. There’s a ton of data from a lot of countries, so I’m focused on that. But the stories that I hear from parents and teachers aren’t just about anxiety and depression. They’re mostly about a kind of a fragility and incompetence.

And so, in fact, just two days ago, I gave a talk back at my old middle school. I grew up in Scarsdale, New York and the principal had read “The Coddling of the American Mind.” She invited me back to give a talk. I spoke with the entire faculty of the school, and the teachers were telling me things like, you know, we have sixth graders coming in. They’ve never used a hammer. They have no idea how to use a hammer. They’ve never used a stove. They’ve never, you know, lit a stove in the home economics class.

So we have kids who have been grossly overprotected from anything that could remotely harm them. But it’s not just that they don’t know how to use those tools. It’s that they haven’t had the thousands of rounds of feedback from life where you do something. Maybe you hit your thumb. Well, then you learn how to not hit your thumb. Maybe you burn your finger. Well, you learn how to not burn your finger.

There’s a kind of a fragility, an incompetence is what they talked about. Because these kids have just been cocooned, protected. They haven’t had the interaction with life that toughens you, makes you willing to accept risk. Small risks at first, larger risks as you get older. And you have to start somewhere. You have to develop the ability to judge risk for yourself. That should be a lifelong process, at least from early elementary school. But for many of our kids, it’s not starting until much later in life, and they seem paralyzed by risk or anxious by small risks.

JOHN PAPOLA: Do fragile kids become failed adults?

The Long-Term Consequences for Society

JONATHAN HAIDT: So most of us want our kids to be a force in the world. We want them to have an effect on the world. We want them to be leaders. We want them to stand up to injustice. We want them to fix things, build things, innovate, take risks. You know, we don’t just want our kids to get a corporate job and do the same thing for their whole lives and not take any chances. But if they don’t have practice taking risks and taking chances, if they don’t develop the confidence that they can go into the unknown and come back, then they’re not going to lead bold, innovative, or perhaps even important lives.

So I think the implications, even for our economy, are enormous. I teach in a business school. I came here to NYU Stern in 2011. And I’ve developed an enormous respect for entrepreneurs for the way that business people think, for the way they’re always thinking, hey, if we put this with this and we fund it this way, we can create this great new thing. And then they try it, and then they fail. Most of the time, most businesses fail, but they do it again. I’ve developed tremendous respect for this way of thinking and what it does for our world.

The Potential Impact on Gender Equality

But if we have a generation growing up in which they’ll be much less likely to do that, and there is possibly a very concerning sex difference, if it’s the girls who are much more anxious than the boys, then there’s at least the possibility that we’re going to see gender gaps close for the next few years, as there’s a lot of opportunity opening up for women, older women, Gen X and millennial women.

But as Gen Z enters the work world, which they’re just beginning to do, we might even see that those with anxiety disorders are going to be less likely to start businesses, less likely to take risks, they’re going to play it safe, and that could end up increasing the gender divide sometime, let’s say in the 2030s.

JOHN PAPOLA: How can people achieve happiness?

# Positive Psychology and Human Flourishing

JONATHAN HAIDT: There’s a movement in psychology called positive psychology. It looks at the sources and conditions for human flourishing. I’ve been involved with it since the beginning in around 1999. And the research I’ve done and the things I’ve written point to a fairly simple conclusion.

Happiness doesn’t come from getting what you want. That’s very short lived. Happiness does come more from within. That’s a better hypothesis, but even that’s not quite right. The best way to say it is that happiness comes from between. That is, happiness comes from getting the right kind of relationship or embeddedness between yourself and other people, between yourself and your work or something productive, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.

We all need to feel connected, integrated, part of something. Modern life has made that harder to achieve. Western societies are often at risk of a sense of depression, isolation, alienation. People have been writing about this since the late 19th century. But if you keep your eye on this idea that happiness comes from between, and then you look at the lives of kids today, I think you can see where some of the trouble lies.

The Rider and the Elephant

There are a few psychological ideas that might be helpful in understanding what’s happening here. One is the idea that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. This is an idea that has occurred to thinkers in every ancient society. And so a metaphor that I’ve used in my writing is that the mind is divided like a rider and an elephant, where the rider is our conscious reasoning and the elephant is everything else that’s happening, all the automatic and intuitive processes.

So if you look at it this way, you see that school or education is aimed at the rider. We teach kids facts, we teach them to write, we teach them to analyze. But most of development is the elephant. Most of development or maturity is developing the automatic thought processes, the virtues, the social skills that will make you successful in life.

So a good education affects both the rider and the elephant and the integration of the two so that they work well together. We all know people who are neurotic, who seem at war with themselves, who are self contradictory. So if you think about the rider and the elephant, it’s very helpful for thinking about child development.

So now you can see that in school it’s mostly about the rider, but in play it’s mostly about the elephant. Kids learn conflict resolution skills, they learn non-verbal skills, they learn to read each other, they learn teamwork. This is why play is so important and why when we shifted from kids having a lot of free play time in afternoons and weekends to it all being about training for getting into college and learning and cramming and learning Chinese and various other skills, I think we’ve created unbalanced kids who are having a hard time flourishing.

Gen Z’s Failure to Thrive

So if we think about it in terms of the rider and the elephant, teenagers coming to college now are very smart. I mean, they have higher IQs than in the past. They work hard, they know a lot. But they’re often having a failure to thrive. They’re easily discouraged. They’re easily discouraged by a bad grade, by negative feedback, by social rejection. They failed to develop the sort of normal toughness or independence that will take them into new situations, that will take them to a semester abroad, that will lead them to take chances socially or trying new things.

So one thing I can say with confidence from having traveled around the country and other countries too, is that all schools are seeing a rise in depression and anxiety and fragility. Wherever I go, I hear people saying Gen Z kids, it’s like they crumble if they face criticism. You put them in a new situation, they’re not sure what to do.

Now that Gen Z is entering the corporate world, I’m hearing from business people things like it’s like a light bulb burns out and they don’t change the light bulb. They have to tell someone and get permission to change it. Of course, this is not their fault. This is the way we raised them. We told them, always tell an adult. We treated them as though they were incompetent and fragile and in a sense we might have made them that way.

JOHN PAPOLA: What are three examples of bad ideas?

Three Really Bad Ideas

JONATHAN HAIDT: I’m a professor, I’m an academic. I think ideas matter. We live in worlds of ideas, ideas that float around us, ideas we get from others. They shape how we interpret what comes in.

So here are three really 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.

If these are the ideas that young people are exposed to, they’re going to fear new situations, trust the panic or negative feelings that arise in them, and see life as a zero-sum battle between groups. This is pretty much a recipe for anxiety and failure. This is a recipe for fearing new things, for not being able to cooperate with others. And somehow or other we’ve communicated these ideas to members of Gen Z in particular.

JOHN PAPOLA: Why is antifragility so important?

The Concept of Antifragility

JONATHAN HAIDT: So as I’ve been traveling around talking with parents and educators, I found that the most important concept, the concept that they most need, the concept that makes everything else make sense, is the concept of antifragility. That means the opposite of fragile.

If something is fragile, it breaks and so you protect it. So a wine glass is fragile. We don’t give it to a toddler because a toddler is going to play with it and break it. Instead we give them a plastic cup because plastic is resilient. If the kid drops a plastic cup, it doesn’t break, but it doesn’t get better.

Antifragile refers to systems that have to get dropped, have to get stressed, have to get thrown on the ground, and in that way they get stronger. Now that might sound kind of weird, but just think about the immune system. That’s the best example.

The immune system is this amazing open-ended system. It’s this incredible product of evolution that prepares our bodies to fight off all kinds of parasites, bacteria, viruses that are new, that evolution didn’t prepare us for. So evolution gave us this amazing learning system. But in order to learn, it has to have lots of experience.

So kids have to be exposed to dirt and germs and in so doing the immune system tunes up and then it becomes strong. That’s how vaccines work. We expose a kid to a little bit of a virus or a bacterium, sometimes live, although often killed. And the immune system learns, okay, that’s how we deal with that.

The Peanut Allergy Example

And this is the explanation for why peanut allergies are rising. Because the immune system has to be exposed to all kinds of foods, what’s dangerous, what’s not. And peanuts have all kinds of proteins that in some people trigger an allergic response. Well, we started protecting our kids from peanuts in the 1990s. We started banning peanuts in schools, telling pregnant women, don’t eat peanuts. It could give your kid an allergy. And lo and behold, the more we did that, the higher rates of peanut allergy went.

Peanut allergies, the rates have doubled or tripled, but only in countries that told women to avoid peanuts while they’re pregnant or lactating. And so a few years ago, a study was done where they took women who had recently given birth to a child who was at risk of an immune disorder. Half of them were told, follow standard advice. Don’t eat peanuts, it’ll come out in your milk. Avoid peanuts.

The other half were told, here, here’s a snack food that your 3-month-old can eat that has some peanut dust on it. Give it to your kid three times a week. Well, guess what? The mothers who follow standard advice, 17% of their kids at the age of 5 had a peanut allergy, and they would have it for the rest of their lives. For the rest of their lives. Food’s going to be difficult, dangerous, anxiety provoking. I might die.

For the kids who were exposed to this snack food, they were exposed to little bits of peanut dust, 3%. Only 3% of them had a peanut allergy. In other words, the immune system is antifragile. And if we protect kids from possible dangers, we make it weaker, we break it. But if you use the system as it was designed and you expose the kid to a variety of foods and dirt and germs, the system gets stronger.

And so this, I think, is the best analogy. It’s the most important psychological idea for understanding what kids need to grow. We all want to protect our kids. We don’t want them to be teased at school, for example. But if your kid is never teased until they’re 18, they’re going to find any criticism intolerable as an adult. Teasing turns out to be a normal part of childhood. And if you protect kids from it, you’re not helping them.

JOHN PAPOLA: Is it really true that sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will never hurt us?

Sticks and Stones

JONATHAN HAIDT: So as one example of how things have changed for kids, take the phrase, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Most of us who are over a certain age grew up with that. Now, if you think about it closely, of course it’s not true. Of course we get hurt by words, but don’t take it literally. Look how it was used.

Kids would use it when somebody’s insulting you and you would use it. You would just say, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never harm me. I don’t care what you say.” Yeah, it might still hurt, but you learn to use that to say, I don’t care about you. And in this way you develop some toughness, you can push people away. And in the process, you learn how to deal with things yourself, with words, not with violence.

I’ve asked kids today whether they’ve heard that and many have never heard it. In fact, in some cases it is said to be a microaggression. That is, you’re not supposed to say it because if you say that, you are denying the pain that words have caused to other kids. I think some teachers, educators, some well-meaning adults, I think are more of the impression that sticks and stones may break your bones, but those will heal. Words, on the other hand, will traumatize you for life.

JOHN PAPOLA: What is safetyism?

The Cult of Safety

JONATHAN HAIDT: There’s a paradox of prosperity, which is the more comfortable our lives get, the more we can’t tolerate discomfort, the safer our lives get, the more we feel threatened by smaller and smaller risks. We’ve seen an enormous shift in how Americans think about safety and danger.

In part, this is progress. It’s a good thing that our lives are safer and we focus on small risks that we didn’t think about before. Of course that’s a good thing, especially when we’re talking about life-threatening risks. I’m a big fan of seat belts, banning smoking indoors, and banning lead from everything we can.

But when we make safety a value or a virtue, which it is, and then we carry it to extremes, as Aristotle said, any virtue carried to extremes becomes a vice. So if you raise your kids to believe safety comes first, safety is everything. Better that you miss out on any amount of experience than that you take any risk. When we begin to worship safety now we are depriving antifragile kids of the kinds of small risks that they need to get stronger.

It’s as though we said, let’s wrap our kids in a bubble because we don’t want them exposed to dirt, germs or peanut dust. You’re not helping them, you’re harming their development.

The Attachment System Gone Wrong

Another really important psychological idea is the idea of the attachment system that mammals develop. A system that keeps them in proximity with their caretaker, but only until they feel safe enough to now go out and explore. The whole point of having the safety is to give the child the confidence to go away from the safe base and explore where they take risks. They learn to calibrate risks, and if something’s bad, they come running back. But they don’t do their learning at the secure base. They do all their learning away from it.

Something seems to be going wrong with a lot of parents’ attachment systems, because they’re so focused on safety, they don’t want to give the kid the chance to actually go do the learning. When you think that the world is full of dangers, when you tell your kid if you walk to school, you might be kidnapped. If a person comes up to you and asks you what time it is, run away, stranger danger. If you tell kids that the world is dangerous, they should not engage with it. Well, what was the point of them going out into the world?

So safetyism is the cult of safety. It’s using safety as a framework to say safety comes first. Safety is what matters. It trumps everything else. Everything is dangerous. I will keep you safe. This is a terrible way to raise kids. Of course, there are times in the world when that’s true, when it really is incredibly dangerous. But most kids growing up in modern Western societies don’t live in such a world. And for us to treat them as though they are fragile and in danger means we will surround them with restrictions and protections that ensure that they will not grow and develop.

JOHN PAPOLA: What is the locus of control?

The Power of Effectence and Internal Locus of Control

JONATHAN HAIDT: There’s a really interesting human motive called effectence. We want to have an effect on the world. And you can see this in babies and toddlers. When they discover that they can move their arm and make a bell ring, they’re thrilled. We all love this feeling of effect. We want to be a force on the world.

And in a healthy environment, gradually you become ever more a force on the world. You get a sense that I can control what happens out there. That means I have an internal locus of control. I can make things happen.

But if you deprive kids of the chance to affect their world, if you make things happen for them, if you do everything for them, then they have an external locus of control. Things happen around me. I have no control over them. This is associated with depression and weakness.

In general, we certainly want our kids to have an internal locus of control. The best way to do that is to put them in situations where they have the chance to control. Now, they will often fail, but that’s part of the learning. They fine tune, how do I make it come out the way I want? Oh, that didn’t work. What can I do? Let me try it again. That’s the way you develop an internal locus of control.

The Danger of Helicopter Parenting

JOHN PAPOLA: What is the danger in helicopter parenting?

JONATHAN HAIDT: So I think previous generations of parents had the motto, either explicitly or implicitly, that their job was to work themselves out of a job, that they were trying to prepare their kids to do things for themselves so that when the parents step back, when the kids go out, they’re fully functioning adults.

But in the last couple of decades, we’ve developed a model of parenting in America. I think we invented it, and then we are now exporting it to other countries. Sometimes called snowplow parenting or concierge parenting, or most commonly, helicopter parenting, that the parent is always there, always there, looking out, protecting. “Oh, you forgot your lunch. I’ll bring it to school.” Because we wouldn’t want the kid to be hungry. We have to bring the kid food.

Now, of course, if the kid doesn’t have the lunch, the kid’s going to have to figure out, “Well, can I have a bite of your sandwich? And I’ll give you some of mine tomorrow.” Kids can actually figure these things out, but we want to make sure they don’t have to. We want to be there to fix the mistakes.

This is, of course, a mistake. Helicopter parenting may be driven by the desire to help the kid succeed, but it follows a perverse psychological logic that actually makes it less likely that the kid will succeed.

If a parent really wants their kid to have an external locus of control, to feel that they can’t affect anything, to feel that they’re not a force in the world, be there for them always. Helicopter hover. Fix their problems, cut their meat for them, do their homework for them. That’s a really good way to create a passive, weak child who will think that things happen to him or her.

If you want your kid to have an internal locus of control, you want to provide a secure home base, a home, a stable relationship that they can always come back to, especially if things go bad. But the whole point of that is to send them out into the world where they can try things, master things, and become independent.

The Problem with Always Trusting Your Feelings

JOHN PAPOLA: Should we always trust our feelings?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I would say that the greatest psychological truth of all time, the most widespread one you find in every wisdom tradition, is this. Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.” Epictetus said, “It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.” Shakespeare said, “There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

And sages from around the world and across the millennia have basically counseled, don’t freak out about every little thing. Put it in perspective. Do the internal work. Learn how to reappraise things. So you find examples of people walking other people through reappraisal. You find it in Plato, you find it in Boethius, you find it in Buddhism. This is wisdom. This is a basic skill for how you survive in a world in which people are duplicitous, people are selfish, people are dishonest. And so this is an important life skill.

This is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s basically this ancient insight brought into modern life where you learn a series of distortions, a series of common mistakes people make, like catastrophizing, over generalizing, mind reading.

So if this is ancient wisdom, the opposite of ancient wisdom would be always believe your feelings. What you feel is true, don’t question it. If it feels bad, then you have been attacked. This is a really bad thing to teach kids. They’re going to live for the rest of their lives with real human beings who sometimes will criticize them, sometimes will insult them, and we all have to learn how to live with the arrows of outrageous fortune.

Teaching kids to look within, find their feelings and see them as true always is a disservice to them. It basically makes them less wise, less capable, less thick skinned.

Now where would kids learn to always trust their feelings? In many societies there’s a debate between those who say, toughen up, get over it, ignore it. I was just in New Zealand where they tell kids, “Take a concrete pill, toughen up kid,” versus those who say, “What’s the matter? Tell me your… No, really, tell me your feelings.” And you try to go into detail. You try to find the deep feelings and you valorize them. “Of course you feel that way.”

There’s a time for each of those. But if you shift too far to one, you might… If you shift too far towards toughness, you might be telling kids, especially boys, ignore your feelings. And that’s a mistake. But it’s also a mistake to go too far the other way and to say you should never suffer, nobody should ever make you feel bad. We’re going to try to change things so that you don’t feel bad. Did someone make you feel bad? We’ll act on it.

That feels compassionate, but in the long run it makes the child less equipped to deal with normal exclusion, normal insult, normal teasing and normal failure.

Advice for Parents: Think Long Term

JOHN PAPOLA: What is your advice to parents?

JONATHAN HAIDT: I understand how hard it is to raise a kid today. My kids are 10 and 13. They have to apply for competitive schools. So many other kids are doing so much. Are they going to fall behind? It’s really hard to raise a kid today, but I think it’s really important for parents to think about the long term.

What’s your goal here? Is your goal to just get your kid over the next hurdle? Is your goal to make it so that your kid can get over hurdles herself for the rest of her life?

And once you think about it long term and once you understand anti-fragility, now you can do the hard thing, which is to say, “I want to help you, I can fix that. But I won’t, I won’t.” And sometimes you have to just turn away, close your eyes. Obviously not if it’s a life threatening emergency, but something like cooking.

My daughter is learning to cook and sometimes I have to just move away. I understand that she might have to actually burn her fingers on the stove. I can’t be there always watching her hand because I realize that if she burns her fingers, she learns and then she won’t do it again. That’s really hard to do and it doesn’t feel compassionate. But in the long run, it is the most compassionate thing you can do.

Rethinking Traditional Measures of Success

JOHN PAPOLA: How concerned should parents be with traditional measurements of childhood success?

JONATHAN HAIDT: In America in particular, we have high levels of inequality and they’ve been rising faster than in other European countries. And this does put more pressure on middle class parents to get their kid over the next hurdle, into the next level of the video game, as it were.

Well, there’s actually some reassuring data coming out of a few studies that have looked: Does getting into the top college actually make your kid more successful? And the answer seems to be kids who go to the top colleges are more successful. But that’s because those top colleges simply selected the kids who got high test scores and things like that. The top college doesn’t make them more successful.

Ultimately, the kid who learns how to learn, the kid who learns a lot in college, the kid who’s intrinsically motivated, wants to learn things and do things, that’s the kid who’s going to be successful.

So if you focus your kid’s whole childhood on extrinsic motivations, “You’ve got to learn this because there’s a test on it. You’ve got to do this terrible thing that you hate, 10 hours a week to get into Stanford,” that’s a recipe for a kid who might actually get into Stanford and will flounder there. Is that what you want?

I know it’s hard to accept and I have to work on this for myself too, but your kid is better off having a good childhood, developing basic social skills, curiosity about life, and going to a college that is a little below what they could have done if they spent their entire childhood test prepping. Because in that slightly lower college, they’re more likely to thrive, be top of the class, innovate, take risks, try new things. They’ll grow a lot more.

So I think all of us Americans need to chill out here and say, what do we really want? Do we want the line on the CV or do we want our kid to learn, grow, have fun, and develop her own interests?

National Implications and Hope for Change

JOHN PAPOLA: Could problems with American kids lead to bigger problems for America as a whole?

JONATHAN HAIDT: So I’ve been studying political civility and polarization since the early 2000s. I’m very alarmed. We have a lot of problems in this country. Here’s a new one. Kids born after 1995 have been so overprotected, they’re so much more fragile that they may not be able to handle this mess of a country that we’re bequeathing to them. I think it’s a matter of actually national importance that we stop doing what we’re doing, that we stop messing up kids by overprotecting them.

So even though a lot of the long term trends for our country and for child rearing are bad, I’m actually optimistic that they’re going to change. Because we didn’t know about the rise of depression, anxiety and suicide until a few years ago. It takes a while before the data really comes in and becomes public knowledge. Now we know, just since about 2018, 2019. Now we know we didn’t understand that we were making our kids so fragile, but now there’s increasing awareness that we’re doing that.

The phrase “free range kids” or “free range parenting” is catching on. We’re seeing the beginning of communities that are trying to do this themselves. So I actually think that just in the last year or two, we are beginning to see some pushback. We are beginning to see parents in some school districts beginning to say, “Let’s try something different. We’ve got to do something about rising depression, anxiety. Here’s a good idea. Let’s try giving kids more independence.”

Now, it’s hard because school districts are afraid of lawsuits, but I’m hearing a lot more receptivity to it. So I think we will see the beginnings of a kind of a counter revolution or a movement towards free range parenting, towards giving kids the kind of independence that actually makes them strong and happy.

JOHN PAPOLA: Where is America headed if we don’t change course?

The Loss of American Self-Reliance

JONATHAN HAIDT: When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around America in the early 1830s, he observed something that he was amazed by. He observed that Americans, when there’s a problem to be solved, they just get together and figure out how to solve it. Sort of the Ben Franklin spirit.

And he noted in “Democracy in America” that in France, people would just wait for the king or the government to do it, and in Britain, they would wait for the nobles or the royalty to do it. The common people don’t have an internal locus of control. The common people don’t feel that they can solve problems, but in America, they do.

Well, that might be changing. When we raise kids with this level of overprotection, when we tell them, “tell an adult, don’t solve this yourself,” when we raise kids who are afraid to take risks, afraid to put themselves out there, we are raising kids who are losing that distinctive American can-do spirit, the spirit of democracy.

De Tocqueville’s book was called “Democracy in America.” We may be raising kids who will be more receptive to a strongman, to someone who says, “only I can fix it,” to someone who says, “the cause of your problems is something else, and I will take care of it.”

So I am concerned that democracy is fragile. The founding fathers knew that. They warned about that. And I am concerned that the way we’re raising kids is not really preparing them for democracy.

“It’s a Free Country”

For those of us who grew up in the 20th century, there was a common phrase that we’d say on the playground: “it’s a free country. You can’t tell me what to do.” But kids today have such regulated lives. There are so many rules. I think we’ve created a generation of kids that are accustomed to being told what to do on playgrounds.

Now there are signs telling them, “here’s how you play boxball, here are the rules, here’s how you play tag, here are the rules.” Kids are coached. There are so often adults telling them what to do. This is not conducive to the spirit of liberty.

The spirit of liberty is one in which kids learn how to make rules for themselves, enforce them for themselves, make their own choices, and then take responsibility for their actions. I do think that overprotection, helicopter parenting, having too many lawyers, too much of a liability mindset, parents freaking out about safetyism—this is not preparing kids to run their own lives, to value living in a free country.

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