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“But [social media] is also the greatest enabler of relational aggression since the invention of language, and the evidence available today suggests that girls' mental health has suffered as a result.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“The loss of political diversity among professor, particularly in fields that deal with politicized content, can undermine the quality and rigor of scholarly research... when a field lacks political diversity, researchers tend to congregate around questions and research methods that generally confirm their shared narrative, while ignoring questions and methods that don't offer such support.
The loss of political diversity among the faculty has negative consequences for students, too, in three ways. First, there's the problem that many college students have little or no exposure to professors from half of the political spectrum. Many students graduate with an inaccurate understanding of conservatives, politics, and much of the United States...
Second, the loss of viewpoint diversity among the faculty means that what students learn about politically controversial topics will often be "left shifted" from the truth.
[The third problem] is the risk that some academic communities- particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country- may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university... Politically homogenous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Safetyism is the cult of safety-- an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined)”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages-- even college students”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“The abduction and murder of a child by a stranger is among the most horrific crimes one can imagine. It is also, thankfully, among the rarest. According to the FBI, almost 90% of children who go missing have either miscommunicated their plans, misunderstood directions, or runaway from home or foster care, and 99.8% of the time, missing children come home. The vast majority of those who are abducted are taken by a biological parent who does not have custody; the number abducted by a stranger is a tiny fraction of 1% of children reported missing- roughly one hundred children per year in a nation with more than 70 million minors. And since the 1990s, the rates of all crimes against children have gone down, while the chances of a kidnapped child surviving the ordeal have gone up.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Skenazy sees [cognitive distortion] discounting positives when parents overmonitor. "Any upside to free, unsupervised time (joy, independence, problem-solving, resilience) is seen as trivial, compared to the infinite harm the child could suffer without you there"...”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Research has shown that anxious children may elicit overprotective behavior from others, such as parents and caretakers, and that this reinforces the child's perception of threat and decreases their perception of controlling the danger. Overprotection might thus result in exaggerated levels of anxiety.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Gray notes that the tendency of kids to introduce danger and risk into outdoor free play, such as when they climb walls and trees, or skateboard down staircases and railings:
They seem to be dosing themselves with moderate degrees of fear, as if deliberately learning how to deal with both the physical and emotional challenges of the moderately dangerous conditions they generate... All such activities are fun to the degree that they are moderately frightening. If too little fear is induced, the activity is boring; if too much is induced, it becomes no longer play but terror. Nobody but the child himself or herself knows the right dose.
Unfortunately, outdoor physical play is the kind that has declined the most in the lives of American children.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“If you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. As Marcus Aurelius advised, "Choose not to be harmed- and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed- and you haven't been." The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels... words don't cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Practice the virtue of "intellectual humility." Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“The college admissions process nowadays makes it harder for high school students to enjoy school and pursue intrinsic fulfillment. The process "warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy" and "jeopardizes their mental health”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Research by psychologist Nicki Crick shows that boys are more physically aggressive..... Girls, in contrast, are more "relationally" aggressive; they try to hurt their rivals' relationships, reputations, and social status-- for example, by using social media to make sure other girls know who is intentionally being left out. When you add it all up, there's no overall sex difference in total aggression, but there's a large and consistent sex difference in the preferred ways of harming others.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Beck [a psychiatrist who developed Cognitive behavioral therapy] noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the "cognitive triad" of depression: "I'm no good," "My world is bleak," and "My future is hopeless."
Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Між статями немає різниці в агресивності, але є велика і послідовна різниця у шляхах завдання шкоди одне одному.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“... feelings are always compelling, but not always reliable. Often they distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Los grupos cohesionados y moralmente homogéneos son propensos a las cazas de brujas, en particular cuando experimentan una amenaza, sea externa o interna.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Las cazas de brujas, en general, tienen cuatro atributos: parecen surgir de la nada; incluyen acusaciones de delitos contra el colectivo; las ofensas que dieron lugar a esas acusaciones son a menudo triviales o fabricadas; y las personas que saben que los acusados son inocentes guardan silencio, o en casos extremos, se suman a la multitud.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Some of these [hovering and oversupervising] parents may think that making sure their children do whatever it takes to succeed in advance courses helps their children develop "grit." But grit is often misunderstood as perseverance without passion, and that's tragic... Perseverance without passion is mere drudgery.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group's efforts to find the truth”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“No one should have to pass someone else's ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life- along with civic life- dies without the free exchange of ideas. In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, no shut down. Ours is a position of unique responsibility: We teach people not what to think, but how to think. Realizing and accepting this has made me- an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD- realize that no matter the precariousness of my situation, I have a responsibility to model the appreciation of difference and care of thought I try to foster in my students. If I, like so many colleagues nationwide, am afraid to say what I think, am I not complicit in the problem? [Lucia Martinez Valdivia]”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Las circunstancias locales pueden hacer que aumente el tribalismo, que descienda o que desaparezca. Cualquier tipo de conflicto intergrupal (real o percibido) hace que aumente inmediatamente el tribalismo, y que las personas presten mucha atención a las señales que revelen en qué equipo están las otras.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Pero en el Siglo XXI, en algunos campus universitarios el significado de seguridad ha sufrido un proceso paulatino de -desplazamiento conceptual-, y se ha ampliado para incluir la -seguridad emocional-.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Los seres humanos necesitamos desafíos físicos y mentales y estresores para no deteriorarnos.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Nos adaptamos a nuestras nuevas y mejores circunstancias y después bajamos el listón de los niveles de incomodidad y riesgo que consideramos intolerables.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Los estoicos comprendieron que las palabras no causan estrés directamente; sólo pueden provocar estrés y sufrimiento en una persona que interprete esas palabras como una amenaza. Puedes optar por interpretar a un orador invitado como dañino. Puedes elegir tus batallas, dedicar sus esfuerzos a cambiar las políticas que te importan y a hacerte inmune a los troles.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Las palabras que generan estrés o miedo a los miembros de algunos grupos a menudo se consideran ahora como una forma de violencia.
Las palabras no son violencia. Tratarlas como tal es una decisión interpretativa, y esa elección aumenta el dolor y el sufrimiento mientras que impide otras respuestas más eficaces, como la respuesta estoica (cultivas la no reactividad) y la respuesta antifrágil.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Los estudiantes universitarios de hoy han vivido unos tiempos extraordinarios y, en consecuencia, muchos de ellos han desarrollado una extraordinaria pasión por la justicia social.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Girls may be suffering more than boys [mental illnesses] because they are more adversely affected by social comparisons (especially based on digitally enhanced beauty), by signals that they are being left out, and by relational aggression, all of which became easier to enact and harder to escape when adolescents acquired smartphones and social media.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“... a culture of defensive self-censorship seemed to be emerging, partly in response to students who were quick to "call out" or shame others for small things that they deemed to be insensitive... We called this pattern vindictive protectiveness”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“...there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this:
The thought process that went into building these applications Facebook being the first of them... was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"... And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone like or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you... more likes and comments... It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
Earlier in the interview, he said, "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."
In short, iGen [beginning with those born in 1995] is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Simplemente, no sentimos tanta empatía hacia los que vemos como -los otros-”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“La conclusión es que la mente humana está preparada para el tribalismo. La evolución humana no es sólo la historia de unos individuos que compiten con otros dentro de cada grupo; es también la historia de grupos que compiten contra otros, a veces con violencia.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
“Todos descendemos de personas que pertenecieron a grupos que fueron constantemente mejores para ganar esa competición. El tribalismo es nuestra herencia evolutiva para agruparnos y prepararnos para el conflicto intergrupal.”
Source: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure