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Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids

Does he ever address the inconsistency of warning for years about "coddling" young people too much then suddenly pivoting into "social media is making our kids mentally unwell". Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?

HopenHeyHi 4y ago
Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either. Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation. In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.
woodruffw 4y ago
This is an excellent point; it’s hard to square Haidt’s precious claims with coddling unless we’re to accept some kind of convoluted “whiplash” argument: children who are first coddled are then “shocked” with social media. But this requires a generational or chronological explanation that isn’t evidenced: we’d expect to see suicide rates level off with more recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who’ve been on the Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by Haidt doesn’t show this.
frostburg 4y ago
The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.
- joenot443 4y ago
  You’ll have to be more specific. What political goals do you think are being accomplished here? For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings don’t align with YOUR politics doesn’t make the research itself politically motivated, it’s more likely your worldview was politically steeped from the beginning.
  - frostburg 4y ago
    I mean in general; I assume you're aware of the jokes on how ancient complaints about the newer generations being weak, disrespectful et. are. I don't see how Haidt identifying as a centrist has any bearing on anything; the idea that "centrism" is apolitical is also untenable.
    - joenot443 4y ago
      I think that's a pretty shaky place to build your foundation. If past generations have been wrong about the younger generation, does that mean we're doomed to be wrong forever? It's nice to imagine that every generation will be a total improvement over the last, but I don't think that's an axiom I can get behind. As far as centrism goes, you're totally right, it's a political ideology like all the others. What I was trying to point out though is that despite being a very vocal American social critic, he's staunchly deciding _not_ to take a public position on American politics. Despite this, I've seen people on either side of the aisle still accuse him of shilling for the other side, a take I've found super exhausting. I'm not in total endorsement of all of Haidt's research or methodologies, but I do think he's operating from a place of scientific earnestness and honesty. Framing him as politically motivated is inaccurate.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Being centrist IS a political position. The one that status quo is good and those who challenge it are doing something inherently wrong.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Wait, what? Centrism makes it easier to propose changes to the status quo, because most effective and feasible improvements to the status quo are essentially orthogonal wrt. the whole left vs. right political spectrum.
      - watwut 4y ago
        First, actual real world political spectrum is not even on the neat left right scale. Second, the actual role centrist do is to actively work against improvements. They do not say "I think it is infeasible, but good luck". They say "trying to do this is wrong".
- voldacar 4y ago
  What political objective is accomplished by not coddling children?
  - frostburg 4y ago
    That's the point; children would die otherwise, by the very biological nature of our species. What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is determining the details of what should be allowed to traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.
    - somedude895 4y ago
      > is determining the details of what should be allowed As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove the boundaries that have been established over the past couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at here that are part of that supposed plan to shape society?
      - frostburg 4y ago
        Apparently social media is a step too far but other things that he likes should be common again. He might not even be specifically wrong about some practices being harmful, but the given arguments are weak and incidentally they map to a certain kind of reactionary wishlish. More generally, the discourse tends to boil down to "I was spanked and I turned out fine!".
        PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I don't think that fairly represents Haidt's position at all. Yes, there is an inconsistency in his writing regarding why social media specifically is something we should protect children from. But Haidt is not suggesting that a return to a corporal punishment regime, or anything like it, is desirable. His concerns are things like free play, independent movement, negative (not only positive) interactions and so on.
ThomPete 4y ago
Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?
- frostburg 4y ago
  I think that coddling weakens middle aged social psychologists.
  - pawelmurias 4y ago
    Psychologists are notoriously ridden with mental illness. As they rarely gather enough hard evidence for evidence, if the overall mental state of the population their research turns into complete bullshit.
knallfrosch 4y ago
Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.
- zzbzq 4y ago
  Seems perfectly contradictory to me, "We need to shelter our kids from the big bad social media because they are too fragile to handle it"
  - kelipso 4y ago
    Right and "We need to shelter our kids from crack cocaine because they are too fragile to handle it" is perfectly contradictory too.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      If the person saying that had been previously famous for calling for the legalisation of cannabis, and wrote a whole book about how the war on drugs was misguided and led to terrible outcomes and then never addressed the obvious overlap between the two stances, that would also be strange.
spacephysics 4y ago
“Anti” coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning. Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you. Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back. Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc. Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point. It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.
- frostburg 4y ago
  Your model of a nuclear "stable household" is very recent, very untested compared to standard practice during most of human history and societes. Putting is on a pedestal without any quantitative evidence isn't wise.
  - cmilton 4y ago
    What do you think it is?
    - frostburg 4y ago
      I'm not sure about what you're asking, but taking a guess: I think that it's safer to have children raised by a larger amount of figures (primarily the parents, but also grandparents in a multi-generational household, other relatives if they exist, family friends - this would have been other people in the tribe or village traditionally - etc.). Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly unsupervised, inexperienced people is fragile and "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.
MrYellowP 4y ago
You make no sense. "Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences which form and harden their characters. You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking about.
- dang 4y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this, please. We've had to warn you at least once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537) about breaking the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
js8 4y ago
As others have explained, there is a middle ground. You won't make people tougher by throwing them to lions, but by creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  > creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation. He literally wrote a book calling for Universities to stop creating "safe spaces".
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    I think the more people are coddled the more that fairly tame environments look like lions. When the expected university environment is considered too hostile (considered to be too lion -like) you get safe spaces (more coddling)
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Haidt considers safe spaces to be a step too far beyond "don't throw them to the lions". You can disagree with that, but please do understand and represent his position accurately.
lr4444lr 4y ago
It's not inconsistent. Social media feeds distortion, and has no conquerable obstacle. "Toughening up" means facing reasonable challenges - they are not equipped yet to habdle algorithmically designed cocaine.
walrus01 4y ago
What's funny is that it's the baby boomer generation that created the concept of giving out participation awards to their kids and overly helicopter parenting them, and then 25, 30 years later complains "all these young people are so coddled and soft and wants recognition for the smallest thing!"
- stametseater 4y ago
  A 'generation' isn't a person, it's a massive slice of population. It would be very bizarre if they all had consistent beliefs. There's no shortage of boomers who've been ridiculing participation trophies from the day they first became aware of them.
scythe 4y ago
Being exposed to adversity at 1 PM in the classroom is fundamentally different from being exposed to adversity at 11:30 PM laying in bed. One of those is much closer to the ancestral environment the human mind is naturally equipped to deal with.
- stametseater 4y ago
  I don't understand what you mean. The ancestral environment is one in which danger comes at night; that's when the tigers come for you. That's why people are afraid of the dark, why even grown men run up their basement stairs after turning off the lights. Monsters in the dark will nip at your heels; that's what our genes tell us. But in the modern context, a child who's facing real adversity (not monsters under their bed) at night has serious problems with their home-life which they'll be poorly equipped to deal with. Daytime problems for kids are usually problems with other kids and teachers, but those kinds of problems are much easier for kids to deal with alone. Particularly if their home situation is stable.
- p_j_w 4y ago
  Those situations are both so far removed from "the ancestral environment" that it's borderline comical to even mention them in the same sentence as said environment. You may as well say that someone a mile away from you is further from/closer to the sun.

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

Nobody can really endure clockwork orange style viewing of anything for very long. That's not moly coddling. Banning cigarettes and amphetamines is not coddling either. Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation. In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.

woodruffw 4y ago

This is an excellent point; it’s hard to square Haidt’s precious claims with coddling unless we’re to accept some kind of convoluted “whiplash” argument: children who are first coddled are then “shocked” with social media. But this requires a generational or chronological explanation that isn’t evidenced: we’d expect to see suicide rates level off with more recent cohorts of teenagers (i.e., the ones who’ve been on the Internet their entire lives), but the evidence presented by Haidt doesn’t show this.

frostburg 4y ago

The "coddling" one has always been a bad faith argument; a post hoc rationalization for political goals.

joenot443 4y ago
You’ll have to be more specific. What political goals do you think are being accomplished here? For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings don’t align with YOUR politics doesn’t make the research itself politically motivated, it’s more likely your worldview was politically steeped from the beginning.
- frostburg 4y ago
  I mean in general; I assume you're aware of the jokes on how ancient complaints about the newer generations being weak, disrespectful et. are. I don't see how Haidt identifying as a centrist has any bearing on anything; the idea that "centrism" is apolitical is also untenable.
  - joenot443 4y ago
    I think that's a pretty shaky place to build your foundation. If past generations have been wrong about the younger generation, does that mean we're doomed to be wrong forever? It's nice to imagine that every generation will be a total improvement over the last, but I don't think that's an axiom I can get behind. As far as centrism goes, you're totally right, it's a political ideology like all the others. What I was trying to point out though is that despite being a very vocal American social critic, he's staunchly deciding _not_ to take a public position on American politics. Despite this, I've seen people on either side of the aisle still accuse him of shilling for the other side, a take I've found super exhausting. I'm not in total endorsement of all of Haidt's research or methodologies, but I do think he's operating from a place of scientific earnestness and honesty. Framing him as politically motivated is inaccurate.
- watwut 4y ago
  Being centrist IS a political position. The one that status quo is good and those who challenge it are doing something inherently wrong.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Wait, what? Centrism makes it easier to propose changes to the status quo, because most effective and feasible improvements to the status quo are essentially orthogonal wrt. the whole left vs. right political spectrum.
    - watwut 4y ago
      First, actual real world political spectrum is not even on the neat left right scale. Second, the actual role centrist do is to actively work against improvements. They do not say "I think it is infeasible, but good luck". They say "trying to do this is wrong".
voldacar 4y ago
What political objective is accomplished by not coddling children?
- frostburg 4y ago
  That's the point; children would die otherwise, by the very biological nature of our species. What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is determining the details of what should be allowed to traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.
  - somedude895 4y ago
    > is determining the details of what should be allowed As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove the boundaries that have been established over the past couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at here that are part of that supposed plan to shape society?
    - frostburg 4y ago
      Apparently social media is a step too far but other things that he likes should be common again. He might not even be specifically wrong about some practices being harmful, but the given arguments are weak and incidentally they map to a certain kind of reactionary wishlish. More generally, the discourse tends to boil down to "I was spanked and I turned out fine!".
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I don't think that fairly represents Haidt's position at all. Yes, there is an inconsistency in his writing regarding why social media specifically is something we should protect children from. But Haidt is not suggesting that a return to a corporal punishment regime, or anything like it, is desirable. His concerns are things like free play, independent movement, negative (not only positive) interactions and so on.

ThomPete 4y ago

Wasn't his argument that coldding weakens the young? And wouldn't that make it consistent with the social media claims?

frostburg 4y ago
I think that coddling weakens middle aged social psychologists.
- pawelmurias 4y ago
  Psychologists are notoriously ridden with mental illness. As they rarely gather enough hard evidence for evidence, if the overall mental state of the population their research turns into complete bullshit.

knallfrosch 4y ago

Kids are coddled which makes them fragile and kids are addicted to phones which makes them depressed. Can you explain where you see a contradiction? Those concepts seem unrelated.

zzbzq 4y ago
Seems perfectly contradictory to me, "We need to shelter our kids from the big bad social media because they are too fragile to handle it"
- kelipso 4y ago
  Right and "We need to shelter our kids from crack cocaine because they are too fragile to handle it" is perfectly contradictory too.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    If the person saying that had been previously famous for calling for the legalisation of cannabis, and wrote a whole book about how the war on drugs was misguided and led to terrible outcomes and then never addressed the obvious overlap between the two stances, that would also be strange.

spacephysics 4y ago

“Anti” coddling to me is rejecting the notion of participation trophies, emphasizing in a healthy way losing and winning. Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you. Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back. Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc. Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point. It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.

frostburg 4y ago
Your model of a nuclear "stable household" is very recent, very untested compared to standard practice during most of human history and societes. Putting is on a pedestal without any quantitative evidence isn't wise.
- cmilton 4y ago
  What do you think it is?
  - frostburg 4y ago
    I'm not sure about what you're asking, but taking a guess: I think that it's safer to have children raised by a larger amount of figures (primarily the parents, but also grandparents in a multi-generational household, other relatives if they exist, family friends - this would have been other people in the tribe or village traditionally - etc.). Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly unsupervised, inexperienced people is fragile and "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.

MrYellowP 4y ago

You make no sense. "Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences which form and harden their characters. You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking about.

dang 4y ago
Personal attacks will get you banned here. No more of this, please. We've had to warn you at least once before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30472537) about breaking the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

js8 4y ago

As others have explained, there is a middle ground. You won't make people tougher by throwing them to lions, but by creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
> creating a safe environment where they can learn the needed skills that can help them in that situation. He literally wrote a book calling for Universities to stop creating "safe spaces".
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I think the more people are coddled the more that fairly tame environments look like lions. When the expected university environment is considered too hostile (considered to be too lion -like) you get safe spaces (more coddling)
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Haidt considers safe spaces to be a step too far beyond "don't throw them to the lions". You can disagree with that, but please do understand and represent his position accurately.

lr4444lr 4y ago

It's not inconsistent. Social media feeds distortion, and has no conquerable obstacle. "Toughening up" means facing reasonable challenges - they are not equipped yet to habdle algorithmically designed cocaine.

walrus01 4y ago

What's funny is that it's the baby boomer generation that created the concept of giving out participation awards to their kids and overly helicopter parenting them, and then 25, 30 years later complains "all these young people are so coddled and soft and wants recognition for the smallest thing!"

stametseater 4y ago
A 'generation' isn't a person, it's a massive slice of population. It would be very bizarre if they all had consistent beliefs. There's no shortage of boomers who've been ridiculing participation trophies from the day they first became aware of them.

scythe 4y ago

Being exposed to adversity at 1 PM in the classroom is fundamentally different from being exposed to adversity at 11:30 PM laying in bed. One of those is much closer to the ancestral environment the human mind is naturally equipped to deal with.

stametseater 4y ago
I don't understand what you mean. The ancestral environment is one in which danger comes at night; that's when the tigers come for you. That's why people are afraid of the dark, why even grown men run up their basement stairs after turning off the lights. Monsters in the dark will nip at your heels; that's what our genes tell us. But in the modern context, a child who's facing real adversity (not monsters under their bed) at night has serious problems with their home-life which they'll be poorly equipped to deal with. Daytime problems for kids are usually problems with other kids and teachers, but those kinds of problems are much easier for kids to deal with alone. Particularly if their home situation is stable.
p_j_w 4y ago
Those situations are both so far removed from "the ancestral environment" that it's borderline comical to even mention them in the same sentence as said environment. You may as well say that someone a mile away from you is further from/closer to the sun.