I’ve read this book and it has nothing to do with the issues of white males as victims or toxic masculinity that others have mentioned. The focus of the book is not political and they aren’t pointing the finger of blame at liberals or conservatives, but rather looking at societal changes and how those have affected the generation that started arriving on campus around 2013 (which they refer to as iGen or Gen Z). And by “coddled” they don’t mean spoiled, but rather that students are treated as though they are extremely fragile and in need of constant protection. Their main thesis is that students are actually “antifragile” and that challenges make you stronger and more resilient. The book’s subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”
They point out that the iGen students were the first to have lived most of their lives with smartphones and social media. The book looks at how this generation was parented – not just helicopter but safety obsessed. They contend that parents’ behavior has been shaped by (1) exaggerated fears of the dangers lurking in the everyday world, and (2) anxiety about the competition for college admissions. They contend that this, combined with the amount of “screen time” for kids today, has resulted in a generation deprived of the chance to engage in unsupervised play and learn to problem solve, deal with risks/mistakes and to negotiate conflicts with peers face-to-face. This generation is much more likely to have delayed doing things like getting a driver’s license, getting a part-time job, traveled independently, etc. This is also the generation with a huge spike in diagnoses of anxiety and depression and with greater rates of suicide or self-harm. I should add that the book looks at a wide range of influences, not just parenting but broader societal issues.
The book also gives some interesting background about how they came to write the 2015 Atlantic article. Lukianoff has been with FIRE since 2001. Around 2013 he started to notice a change in the kind of censorship cases that were coming to FIRE’s attention. In the past, the censorship almost always originated from the administration, often based on outside pressure, in a top down fashion. Students were almost always the ones opposing censorship. But around 2013-2014 he noticed a surge in calls from students FOR censorship. And the justifications for censorship changed, with calls being based on notions of “safety” and equating speech with “violence” and “trauma.” The expanded use of the concept of “safety” is a big theme in the book.
Lukianoff reveals that he has suffered from depression for most of his life and was hospitalized for suicidal intentions in 2007. He credits cognitive behavioral therapy for saving his life. And he began to be concerned that the campus speech conflicts showed a lot of evidence of cognitive distortions – catastrophizing, dichotomous thinking, emotional reasoning, blaming/labeling, mind reading, etc. He believes the administrative responses were often the opposite of what CBT would tell you to do and actually reinforced cognitive distortions. That was when he teamed up with Haidt and they wrote their 2015 Atlantic article.
I found the book very thoughtful. For example, they say that instead of dismissively calling someone a “social justice warrior” we should actually discuss what justice means. Justice has procedural aspects as well as what they call “distributive.” And they talk about frameworks for having useful discussions about what is justice and how to achieve it. And they make various suggestions about how to integrate the concepts of CBT, especially into freshman orientation activities to facilitate healthy dialogue.