The Coddling of the American Parent
Jonathan Haidt’s new book “The Anxious Generation” blames youth mental health issues on social media in a way that’s easy, wrong, and dangerous.
Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind. In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.
This year, he’s back with a new book, The Anxious Generation, arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.
Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.
In this new book, Haidt is coddling the American parent: providing them with a clear, simple, and wrong solution to what is ailing their children. But—as with historic moral panics—parents, schools, and politicians will embrace it, absolving themselves of their own failings in raising children in our modern world and pointing to an easy villain.
