The Exchanges

Q You mentioned there's a difference between boys and girls. What accounts for that difference in terms of how it's impacting their mental health?

A Yeah. So, um, rates of depression and anxiety before puberty are fairly similar. Um, but at puberty there's a big divergence and depression and anxiety generally go up for girls. Um, so that's been, that's been long known. Um, girls have more of what are called internalizing disorders. That is disorders, emotional disorders where they, they make themselves miserable. Uh, they ruminate more than boys do. Um, boys have higher rates of what are known as externalizing disorders, uh, which is they make other people miserable. And so that's especially conduct disorder and alcoholism, criminality, things like that. Um, so those gender differences have long been there. Um, and, um, now bring in social media and look what happens. So if, uh, suppose you go back to around 2009 to 2011, Which is the period when iPhones and, and, uh, you know, Android phones were getting so cheap, uh, and accessible that most teenagers had them. So if you drop a whole bunch of smartphones into the pockets of kids, uh, the boys basically just play video games with them. They don't, and video games try to not be all that harmful, actually. Um, if you're addicted to them, you're deprived of other things, so that's bad. But, you know, an hour or two of video games a day doesn't seem to really do much. But, uh, but the girls are very differently affected. Girls, um, girls hire, so boys hierarchy is based on be …

AI assessment note: “Girls have more of what are called internalizing disorders... their aggression is relational”

Q And there's nobody consciously sort of doing this, but it sounds like these things maybe are innate in us, and we awaken them through culture. And the reason that culture would do that is to get a group of people to behave in a certain way, or?

A Uh, I wouldn't quite say that culture wants people to behave in a certain way. Evolution proceeds with no necessary direction. Now, cultural evolution sometimes does have direction. So for example, I spoke to, um, Somebody was active in the gay rights campaigns in the, you know, around 2008 and 2012, and she told me that in 2008, a lot of the arguments were made based on rights, like people should have rights. Why don't people have the same rights to marry? And that generally didn't work so well. Um, and in 2012, they focused more on compassion. They're, they're just wonderful moving videos. If you Google, um, Mainers United from the state of Maine, they put on these Beautiful, 32nd ads in which people would basically testify, you know, I'm a, I'm a reverend, I'm a minister at this church, and, you know, um, you know, when I found out that my son or nephew was gay, it was hard for me at first, but Jesus told us to love, love everyone, and that means everyone, and, and so they were able to use, they were able to basically, um, appeal to other moral foundations and, and make really morally and emotionally elevating pitches. So that was an example of, I would say, Deliberate cultural evolution. I mean, people, you know, in, in biological evolution, there's no guide, but in cultural evolution, there can be political movements that can be more or less skillful. Um, so yeah, I think …

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't quite say that culture wants people to behave in a certain way.”

Q And we see this around the world, or is this very sort of like US-centric?

A That I don't know. I know in the US and UK things are very, very similar. I was just in the UK. They're doing the same thing about restricting kids' mobility, although not as much as we do. They're having exactly the same gigantic increase in girls' depression, anxiety, and self-harm and suicide in the US and UK and Canada. We're all at record high levels for teenage, for female teenage suicide. So this is throughout the Anglosphere. Um, I don't know about the continent of Europe yet or East Asia or South Asia. Um, I'll be looking at that next. Again, this all just emerges in the last few years, and so countries that don't have great statistics might not know it until a year or two from now.

AI assessment note: “I know in the US and UK things are very, very similar.”

Q Is it just an education issue? Like if you're educated, you should be able to make informed decisions, sort of like the, or having or experiencing with nutrition, right?

A Well, that's right. Nutrition or smoking, um, that back when it wasn't clear whether, you know, these things were bad. Now, with junk food, I think people always knew, and with cigarettes, they, they kind of always knew even before the Surgeon General said anything. Um, so now I think, I think, um, any conversation that parents have with kids or that's had in schools, start by asking the kids, what do you think? Um, I gave a talk at Auburn University, and I met with about 30 students afterwards, um, um, and I asked them, How many of you had a device and had, you know, had, uh, were on, on your devices from the time you were in middle school? And almost every hand goes up. Um, cause these are, these are kids who are about, you know, 18 to 22. This was just a few months ago. And then I say, you know, how many of you had any restrictions? Like your parents, you know, put limits, hardly any hands went up. I said, how many of you, when you have kids, uh, will let your kids use devices without restrictions? Not a single hand went up. They all said no. This was wrong. I wish my parents hadn't done this. So I think we can, we can talk with kids now and work with them to develop some healthier practices and norms.

AI assessment note: “Well, that's right. Nutrition or smoking”

Q How does this relate to cognitive behavioral therapy?

A So, um, CBT is a, is a central feature of our book, of the coddling of the American mind, um, and that's because the origin story of the book, um, is very much about CBT. It is that, uh, Greg Lukianoff, the first author, is prone to depression, and he had the worst depression of his life in 2007. He made very specific plans for how to kill himself. Um, I don't, actually, I should ask him whether he actually bought the materials to suffocate himself and, and take pills, or whether it was just the plan. But somehow or other, a ray of light broke through or something, and he, he called nine one one and, and broke down crying and, and got himself to a hospital. And, um, when he was let out, he, uh, enrolled in cognitive behavioral therapy, and he credits that with, with saving his life, with, um, with beating back the depression, and, uh, with largely immunizing himself. He's still Has some, nothing like that has ever happened again. Um, and so he learned these techniques of catching your mind in action. You know, some little thing happens, you say, oh my God, I always do that, and now I'll never get a job, and now I'll never, you know, the, the, the overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, black and white thinking. Um, and so he, um, he, uh, learns how to recognize these cognitive distortions, and then he goes back to his job as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in E…

AI assessment note: “CBT is a, is a central feature of our book, of the coddling”

Q One of the things that seems to be going on in society today is the coddling of children. Is that something that's new, or is it something that every generation feels about the generation that comes after them?

A I think it's something that every generation feels. I, I, some people have sent me quotes from ancient Greece, I wish I had them at hand, where they complain about the kids today and how they, you know, don't respect their elders and things like that. So, uh, partly Um, it is a kind of a constant generational thing, but the reason why Greg Lukianoff and I think that this is so different is because never before have the mental health statistics just gone haywire for generations so quickly. Um, so whatever, whatever we're doing, and we'll, we'll talk about how that happened, but whatever we're doing, um, kids born after 1995 have really high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. So this isn't just a question of, you know, we each have different goals. This is a question of, Something's going wrong, and we need to figure out why.

AI assessment note: “I think it's something that every generation feels.”

Q What else do you do other than sort of like give them errands and, and more unsupervised time?

A Um, so my wife and I, um, I mean, look, we both backslide a lot, and we often do help them out and solve problems for them, but then we'll sort of catch each other and say, you know, let them. My, my parents, so my, you know, my, my, My parents spoke a little bit of Yiddish, as most American Jews of their generation did. And one thing that my mother would constantly say to my father is, Harald, l'azam zayn, which I believe means let him be. Just, you know, my dad would say, have you done your homework? You know, are you ready? You know, and my mother would say, let him, let him be, let him make his mistakes, let him suffer the consequences. Um, so, uh, we just try a little harder to let our kids learn in the most effective possible way. And learning from feedback from experience is 10 or a hundred times more effective than telling kids a fact.

AI assessment note: “let him be, let him make his mistakes, let him suffer the consequences”

Q Can you walk me through a little bit about, like, what does it mean to coddle, uh, and how is this manifesting itself today, and is that getting better or worse in your mind?

A Yes. So coddling just means overprotecting. Um, it's a word that we didn't want to use. Um, Greg and I had the original title, Arguing Towards Misery. That's what we titled our article when we submitted it to The Atlantic. And nearing the end of the process, uh, the editors came up with The Coddling of the American Mind, hearkening back to Alan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind. And we argued against it, and we said, we don't like it, and we don't want it to insult kids. Um, but, you know, we, we tried to find other titles, and we couldn't. It's a, it was nothing that was catchy. It was a really good title in terms of getting people to read the article, certainly. And once you realize that coddling just means overprotection, we had to admit, Yeah, that's what our argument is, that we've overprotected kids. Um, and so the key thing to keep your eye on is this, that human beings learn from experience. You can lecture your kids about the dangers of, uh, touching a hot stove. You can lecture them about the importance of, uh, dressing warmly to go to school. Um, but until they touch a hot stove, um, it doesn't become an automatic reflex to avoid, uh, avoid or be careful around stoves. And until they go to school wearing too thin a jacket and are cold, They don't learn that they need to look out for themselves. So kids learn best from feedback, from experience. And, uh, …

AI assessment note: “So coddling just means overprotecting.”

Q How do you use this research? You're a parent of two kids. How do you use it raising your kids who are nine and 12?

A Yes. Yeah. So I'm raising two kids. My wife Jane and I are raising two kids in New York City. And fortunately we met Lenore Skenazy like five or six years ago. She's the woman who wrote Free Range Kids. She became famous and infamous because in 2009, she let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone, um, back to their house, uh, from Bloomingdale's on the Upper East Side to their house somewhere else in Manhattan. And, uh, thank God we met her and read her book, Free Range Kids. I recommend it to everybody who has kids. And she completely convinced us that, that overprotection is bad, that kids need more experience. And so we, uh, we're fortunate. I mean, Manhattan's incredibly safe. Um, when I was growing up, it was dangerous. I grew up in, in Scarsdale, a town north of the city, and so we had a real crime wave here in this country, but it ended in the nineties, and now it's so safe. My wife, my kids, they can walk around at night. Um, I don't know anybody who's been mugged in recent years. It's really safe in Manhattan, um, and most of New York City, uh, much of New York City, at least. So, um, so we are fortunate to live near some beautiful parks and playgrounds, and we encouraged our kids to go to them right nearby. So we give my kids errands, uh, and at first it was really scary for us. I mean, that's the thing. Um, I talked to other parents about this, you…

AI assessment note: “she completely convinced us that, that overprotection is bad... So we give my kids errands”

Q So the different roles of, like, everybody involved in this system, right? Not only do we have technology, which doesn't have any sort of, like, moral compass, but we have parents, we have institutions, and we have students, and at what point do students take responsibility for their, their, themselves?

A Yeah. So this is something Greg and I should have done more of in our, in our book. Um, we are so alarmed by the trends that we're mostly hoping to persuade parents, teachers, principals, um, uh, university administrators to change their ways, uh, um, and while setting limits on screen time, otherwise give kids more unsupervised time. So that's what we're mostly doing. I, I think we should have tried to speak more directly to, to kids themselves. Um, One thing I'm finding as I, as I speak about the book around the country, I always ask when I give a talk at a university, you know, I always ask, um, okay, um, members of iGen or Gen Z, you know, those of you under 23, did I basically get this right or wrong? Have I mischaracterized your generation or, or largely gotten it right? And they overwhelmingly say, yes, you, you got it right. That is, they're not defensive. They recognize, they know that they have huge rates of anxiety, that they know that something's wrong, and they know they, they can see that the The social media sites, especially the ones where it's one to many, like Facebook or especially Instagram, um, those are the ones that are bad for the mental health. Uh, so I think that if, um, now that it's clear in the last two or three years, now that it's clear that, that something's going really wrong, um, I think that-

AI assessment note: “this is something Greg and I should have done more of in our, in our book.”

Q Is that because they're following policy, and then if they follow policy, they know they're not going to get in trouble?

A I, I think so. I don't really know, but I think that's the case. So we are in a, we are in a case of change, we're in a time of changing norms, and that's not, not necessarily a bad thing. Um, our student demographics change. We're racially more diverse. There are many more people with mental illness. Um, Uh, you know, the fact that people with Asperger's or autism can, can go to college now, and so those are generally good things, but I think we're so sensitive and careful, um, that I think we might have slipped into norms that, that make it difficult, that make it more likely that students will self-label, even students who don't have diagnoses will self-label, and that's this wonderful, uh, term called concept creep, uh, from my friend, the Australian psychologist, Nick Haslam. Ideas of trauma are important in psychology and psychiatry, but now trauma has expanded to mean just unpleasant experience. I just saw an article the other day online. Somebody wrote an article about for survivors of math trauma. Now, ok, math can be anxiety provoking, and I can believe people have had anxiety attacks, but to say that you're a survivor of math trauma, if you're anxious about math, you know, that It encourages people to self-label, and if you self-label, well, you know, a lot of what we do in the academy is we're very careful about people's use of words. We think that the words student…

AI assessment note: “I think that's the case. So we are in a time of changing norms”

Q to sort of take a sidetrack or maybe a parentheses here, that, um, we're wrapping the notion of intelligence and smarts up into grades more and more. I'd love to hear your thoughts exploring that and what it means to be successful that we're not teaching. Like, what does really, what does it mean to be smart versus academic smart? And it seems like we're narrowing our definition of smart.

A Absolutely. Um, there's a lot of writing recently about Meritocracy. I mean, this is all just such an interesting social science puzzle. What is happening to our society? And in a sense, we're having this conversation on the deck of the Titanic as the Titanic is possibly going down. I mean, the political polarization, you know, the rise of actual Nazis marching. I mean, you know, the, the violence, violent, I mean, there's not a lot of violence yet, but we have a lot more violence now than we did a few years ago. So, um, there are a lot of dark clouds. There are a lot of bad things happening. Um, And, um, let's see, wait, I'm sorry, I lost the thread again. What was your question?

AI assessment note: “I'm sorry, I lost the thread again. What was your question?”