Are the Kids Alright?
Three books on how we can help our kids be resilient in these changing times.
We recorded a new podcast last week! Listen to Episode 54 here or any podcast player.
On the podcast, we discuss three notable books on the state of kids and families that came out recently. They each grapple with the same societal problems of record rates of anxiety, depression, medication, teen suicide, and loneliness. They also discuss the decline of the “play-based childhood” since the 1980s. Each provides a set of solutions, all so parents have less anxiety and children have more resilience.
The books are:
In “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” Jonathan Haidt explains the current troubling trends as a result of a decline in free, unstructured play and a rise in use of smartphones and social media. As he puts it: “We have over-protected children in the real word and underprotected them in the digital world.”
His solutions are mostly a call for changing norms and culture in schools and for parents. He suggests no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, and phone-free schools. These measures all in conjunction with more independence for children and teens, free play, and opportunities for them to build responsibility in the real world.
Tim Carney, in his book, “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be,” addresses community and culture-based issues that have perhaps disincentived child rearing, especially for more than 2 children per family. Carney says that those who can should have more kids, that parents and families should encourage children to be children. His arguments also strike against the Type-A modern parents who enroll their 1 to 2 children in every activity, especially time intensive sports like youth travel leagues. Carney argues that there is a high opportunity cost to traveling and intensive extra-curricular that take away the free play opportunity and time as a family.
The most novel and maybe controversial approach and theory of the three comes from Abigail Shrier in, “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up.” She connects the troubling rise in negative mental health statistics to an over-reliance on therapy for kids. Along with the other authors, she condemns the overprotection of children and the limiting of free play and exploration. As she argues in the book, talk therapy for children can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression, and actually make a problem out of something that wasn’t.
Her critique goes wider than just “more children are in therapy than should be.” She also critiques the therapeutic mindset that pervades not just the offices of psychologists and counselors, but elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, best-seller lists, middle-class homes, and government agencies. It has become a pernicious development because a therapeutic mindset easily paralyzes kids’ natural defenses and resilience, fearful of difficult changes or scenarios. Children and teens pick up on this attitude from adults as well.
There are two takeaways from all the books that we think are key:
The first is that the physical world is indeed much safer than assumed. This quote from Jonathan Haidt’s previous book coauthored with Greg Lukianoff, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” stopped us in our tracks:
“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.”
The second takeaway is that all these authors highlight the need for building resiliency or anti-fragility. However, these traits are not brought about through control or safety but rather through a form of suffering. They all express the desperate need that children and teens have to explore on their own and overcome obstacles. Of course, none of the authors nor do we suggest causing suffering or pain intentionally. The examples are more in the realm of letting our children make new friends on their own, realizing they can survive the fears and unknowns of new social situations; for exploring a park and perhaps injuring themselves in order to experience freedom of movement and what healing looks and feels like; and exercising their decision-making skills in low-stake, yet meaningful, decisions so those traits have a chance to be trained before becoming an adult paralyzed by choices with higher stakes. All this is best done within the context of a safe, nurturing family environment. Of course, this is far from the norm for many children on this planet. Yet for more economically advanced societies like the US, we are realizing that too much safety can actually be a bad thing, causing harms of its own. Human beings want to avoid all suffering and in most cases that’s good and right. What these authors are pointing us to though is the right kind of trial and error that’s key to helping kids develop into healthy adults.
As parents at the beginning of our parenting journey, these were all helpful reads as we think through the best ways to raise our kids. Listen to the podcast to hear more of our takes and what our faith says about all this!