To raise resilient children, encourage their independence

Caryn Lipson

August 7, 2024

College students no longer prepared for life

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt states, in his video "Want antifragile kids? Get out of their way," that Gen-Zers, those born from 1995 onward, are much more fragile and dependent than children and young adults of previous generations.

Children of this generation have been kept at home longer, denied the free play and independence that children have traditionally had until shortly before they are to go to college or work, and they aren't prepared to be independent and make decisions on their own. They are very fragile, weak, and easily traumatized, by their own admission.

Beginning with kids born in 1995, they spend a lot less time going out with friends. They don't get a driver's license as often. They don't drink as much. They don't go out on dates. They don't work for money as much. What are they doing? They're spending a lot more time sitting on their beds with their devices interacting that way. These are the first kids who got social media when they were 13, roughly. They were subjected to much more anti-bullying content in their schools, much more adult supervision. They were raised in the years after 9/11. They were given much less recess and free play. With No Child Left Behind, there was much more testing pushed down into earlier grades.

So in a lot of ways, Gen Z has been denied the independence, the independent play that previous generations got. Gen Z has been raised with what's called 'moral dependency.' There's always been an adult there for them to go to, and so we don't know if this is for sure the reason, but they seem to have more difficulty working out problems on their own. When we protect children from unpleasantness, from conflicts, from insults, from teasing, from exclusion, we are setting them up to be weak, to be more easily damaged, to be more easily discouraged. (Emphasis added.)

When they get to college they are not prepared to fend for themselves, Haidt explains.

They're just not used to being independent. When they get to college, they need more help. They're asking adults for more help. Protect me from this. Punish him for saying that. Protect me from that book. Students are thinking in terms of safety and danger. Students say, by their own admission, they are more fragile. They use a language of fragility, weakness, trauma, triggering. They see triggers all over the world.

Trump wins, college students crumble

This fragility may have been responsible for many college students' immature reactions to President Trump's election in 2016; that colleges and professors in a show of partisan politics, actually coddled them is shocking. WSJ (Wall Street Journal) reported at the time that, among other colleges, Cornell University students had a cry-in at a major campus thoroughfare; Tufts University held an event, planned before the election results were known, to let students write and draw about their election reactions; University of Kansas reminded students that therapy dogs are available every other Wednesday for comfort; a teacher of multi-ethnic studies at University of Michigan allowed students into her office to play with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books to comfort and distract themselves.

“People are frustrated, people are just really sad and shocked,” said Trey Boynton, the director of multi-ethnic student affairs at the University of Michigan. “A lot of people are feeling like there has been a loss. We talked about grief today and about the loss of hope that this election would solidify the progress that was being made.”

There was a steady flow of students entering Ms. Boynton’s office Wednesday. They spent the day sprawled around the center, playing with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books, as they sought comfort and distraction.

Strikingly, students in Ph.D. level courses weren't expected to be able to handle the election results, either. Students in Morgan Polikoff's Ph.D. statistics course were told that they didn't have to attend the class after the election if they didn't want to and six said they weren't up to it.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, also canceled his Wednesday class. He told the 11 students in his Ph.D. statistics course on election night that they didn’t have to come if they didn’t want to; by the time he woke up, six said they weren’t up for meeting.

It is no wonder, perhaps, that they were called "snowflakes."

The touchy-feely approach won some catty comments from skeptics, calling students “snow-flakes” for their inability to handle the result. But schools said the concerns were real for many students.‍

Practicing independence is too risky for parents

Haidt sees children's loss of independence as having begun in the 1990s after 1980s programming showed it to be too risky to leave children out on their own, for fear of being kidnapped.

In the 1990s, as the crime rate was plummeting, as American life was getting safer and safer, Americans freaked out and thought that if they take their eyes off their children, the children will be abducted. The fear was stoked by cable TV in the 1980s; there were a few high-profile abductions.

But it's not until the 1990s that we really start locking kids up and saying, "You cannot be outside until you're 14 or 15." Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book, "Free Range Kids." She became famous as "America's worst mom" because in 2009, she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway. Not only did he survive, he was thrilled. He felt he'd learned something. He felt he could go out into the world.

We took this essential period of childhood from about 8 to 12, when kids throughout history have practiced independence, have gotten into adventures, have made rafts and floated down the Mississippi River- we took that period and said, "You don't get to practice independence," until it's too late, until that period is over.

On college campuses students are being taught to follow, rather than question their feelings, Haidt continues. But being able to look for and approach things from different perspectives is needed for critical thinking and mental health.

What we've begun seeing on campus is that students are encouraged to follow their feelings. If they feel offended by something, then they have been attacked. They're supposed to not question those feelings. But part of wisdom is the ability to say, "Now, wait a second. Are there other ways to look at this?" These are crucial skills for critical thinking. These are crucial skills for mental health. And we need to be teaching young people at all stages to question their first interpretations, look for evidence, and improve the way they interpret the world.

Teaching kids to deal with diversity is key

According to Haidt, educational systems must help children to handle divergent opinions, not coddle them.

The bottom line is that if we want to raise a generation of kids who can deal with diversity of all kinds, who can go out into a world that's physically actually quite safe but yet full of offensive, offensive content, we need to get our educational practices in line with some very basic, important psychological principles. They are: We are all prone to motivated reasoning and the confirmation bias, and we're all prone to tribalism, and black-and-white thinking. We need to be educating kids so that they do less of this stuff.

Can CBT help?

One solution he believes, is CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) which he says is an easy way to teach high school and college students to examine and break up negative beliefs.

CBT is just a way of teaching people skills to do exactly that, to question their feelings, to look for evidence. So in CBT, you learn the names of these distortions, about 15 or so distortions. You can guess what they mean: Catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, labeling, mind reading. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist in the 1960s, noticed that depressed and anxious people have a way of constructing these beliefs that, "I'm bad. The future is bad. My future- the world is a bad place," and they're mutually reinforcing. And this is the way the world feels to them. And if you can improve their thinking and break up those beliefs, they're released from the depression. Cognitive behavioral therapy is not more effective than several other treatments. There are-most treatments are about equally effective- but it's so easy to learn!

View the entire video below: