Has coddling destroyed a generation?

One of the most common conversations among educators these days is the rising tide of anxiety and depression among young people. This disturbing trend comes at a time when schools are already being asked to do more and more academically, and these two factors are creating a perfect storm that we are having difficulty navigating. And so we are seeing ideas like grit, resilience, social-emotional learning, and trauma-sensitivity being offered up as possible solutions, and this new book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The basic premise of the book is that by protecting our children and students from everything from peanuts to opposing viewpoints, we have crippled our college campuses and created a mental health crisis among teens and young adults. The book is definitely worth a read. The increasing prevalence of anxiety and depression among young people is something I deal with every day, and it's clear that something has gone wrong on college campuses when speakers are being "disinvited" simply for holding opposing political viewpoints.

I also see overparenting as a major issue. It's a constant struggle as a parent to keep from overprotecting your kids from failures and consequences, and the same goes for running a school. What is needed is an authoritative approach, with clear rules and consequences and a focus on support, rather than a permissive or authoritarian approach. Coddling is a good reminder that we do damage by not allowing our kids to experience difficulty. I always viewed parenting as repeatedly casting my kids out and reeling them back in. 

But while I think the book makes important contributions to the discussion, I also think it muddies the waters a bit. The authors are huge fans of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and they noticed that some of the cognitive errors targeted by CBT are similar to logical errors being made, in their opinions, by parents, schools, students and universities that are overprotecting kids. From there, they built their case that overzealous censorship at universities and the mental health crisis were symptoms of the same cause--what they call the "3 Great Untruths."

1. What doesn't kill me makes me weaker
2. Always trust your feelings
3. Us vs. them

While I agree that these are dangerous errors, I think this greatly oversimplifies the problem. From my perspective as an administrator, overzealous protectionism at schools has little to do with ideology or philosophy and everything to to with protecting ourselves from litigation. But that is a minor issue compared to the question of what is causing the mental health crisis.

The authors themselves mention some other possible causes of rising anxiety and depression, such as screen time (citing Jean Twenge's book, iGen). Sarah Rose Cavanagh has questioned the role of screen time, but suggested several other possible causes, including the decline of "face-to-face social communities" and economic inequality, just to name a few.

Human psychology is complex, and the changes taking place in our society are profound. Take, for example, the massive cultural shift that has been under way in our whole worldview as a society. I just finished listening to The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. This classic lays out Becker's theory of what happens when you strip the dominant religious worldview from a culture. Who knows but that we are also seeing those types of effects today among young people?

We live in a world that has become a whitewater rapid of change--technologically, culturally, economically, you name it. Anyone growing up in such a world as this would be understandably prone to anxiety, just as much as they would if they were born in the midst of a river rafting trip.

I think our best bet in supporting them is to do just that--support them with research based practices and provide high expectations backed up by high levels of relational and academic supports. Allowing them to experience consequences is part of this, but my concern with this book is that is reflects a movement to discount the massive changes taking place today and their impact on kids. Kids today have to be tougher, in my opinion, than I had to be growing up. It means we have to be there for them even more than ever, casting them out into the whitewater and reeling them back in again, again and again.

"All my life, I was never good enough"

Probably the most peaceful moment of my life was lying flat on my back in my family's old gravel bank, my hand applying pressure to where the chain saw had cut into my shoulder, watching the clouds pass by in a clear blue sky.

I didn't know the extent of the damage, and it seems like I should have panicked instead of soaking in the feeling of the stones beneath my back and feeling at one everything.

It was as if, with nothing I could do but wait for help, I could finally just relax and not worry about striving for whatever it is I'm always striving for.

For just a little while that day, I was free from what Tara Brach, in her book, Radical Acceptance, calls the "trance of unworthiness." Like many people, all my life I've been walking around believing there's something wrong with me--that I am never good enough, that I have to prove something to the world, and always fall short somehow. And I find myself pushing my wife, kids, and students in the same way I push myself, always seeing deficiencies and room for improvement, sending the message that I don't accept them for who they are right now.

Improvement is good, but judgement and lack of acceptance is not. It keeps us from enjoying our moments, trapped in anxiety, resentment, and discouragement. It causes us to hide, pretend, and react to things in unhealthy ways, and keeps us from seeing clearly enough to bring about the change we need.

Radical acceptance, on the other hand, means facing and embracing everything about ourselves just as we are right now: weakness, anger, mistakes, envy, flaws, lust, frustration, fear, and failure. It means opening up to everything about our circumstances as they really are right now, denying nothing, hiding from nothing, feeling everything. It means seeing these self-imposed requirements and judgements and the suffering they cause to us and others. It means accepting ourselves without judgement.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to prove. What I am and what I have, right now, is enough.

Wait, is that true?

If not, then enough will be impossible for me. I know myself well enough. It's either enough now, or it never will be. I don't know if I'll have another minute on this planet, and I don't want to be like the woman in Brach's story who woke only long enough to say to her daughter, "All my life, I was never good enough," and then slipped back into her coma.

Accepting allows us to experience "enough" even in the midst of pain. Like the Buddha of legend, we can say to shame, fear and anger, "I see you Mara," and invite him to tea. Instead of being swept away in cascades of negative thoughts, we can defuse the chain reaction and experience the good around and within us, even in the bad.

But accepting doesn't mean being content with staying where you are. Like Tim Ferriss, whose interview with Tara Brach introduced me to her, I worry that accepting myself will mean I stop improving. I've struggled in the past on this blog about the balance between contentment and improvement. Tara Brach's answer is that honest and non-judgemental awareness of where you are (radical acceptance) is the only first step to real change.

My trance of unworthiness manifests itself in high achieving, never satisfied obsession, but I have students who are not high achievers, yet struggle more than I with self-condemnation and the trance of unworthiness. The outcomes may look different: me, enslaved to stressful striving, they, paralyzed in fear of failure. In both cases, we suffer.

For all of us, radical acceptance means being free: free to be enough, just as you are, to just lay there, feeling the grit through your shirt, maybe even bleeding, and just watch all those self-imposed requirements float by in a blue sky.

And then it means being free to act mindfully, and change.

So this is what I'm working on these days: practicing radical acceptance. 

Thoughts on Gravity and humanity

Can't believe it took me this long to see this mind-blowing movie full of (not perfect) physics and plenty of hard-core survivalism, but I'm glad I did (thanks to my son's request). The survival-in-space theme reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books (The Martian by Andy Weir--soon to be a movie--can't wait--def. see that one in theatre--should have seen Gravity in theatre, too), and it made me think of a few things:

1. It's amazing how adaptable humans are. I mean, they're floating around in space, for goodness sake. Simply amazing. I can't wait till humans get to Mars (2023, hopefully). Can't imagine setting foot in that red dust. To adapt and expand our horizons is part of what makes us human, I think.
2. The drive to survive is powerful, but it's really not just about surviving, it's about really living. In fact, the drive to survive is trumped by the need to enjoy life, I think. As Viktor Frankl wrote in that life-changing book: “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”

Encouragement from Seth Godin

“How was your day? If your answer was "fine," then I don't think you were leading.”

― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us 

Well, that's a good sign, I guess. Maybe I am leading.

Godin said this in the midst of a powerhouse section on criticism. The gist of it is that if you're not being criticized, you're doing it wrong--you're probably not doing anything remarkable.

Make it your goal to do something worth criticizing--something remarkable enough, different enough, status quo-challenging enough, to be noticed by the critics.

I sometimes worry that I'm a change addict, a sort of compulsive status-quo challenger.

But Seth G. encourages me.

The status quo is boring, after all. Especially in education. :-)

Change for change's sake is fun (though maybe a bit stressful at times). But that's not (I hope) why (or the only reason) I'm all for it. We need it (as far as I can tell). Until every single student gets whatever they need to succeed, change is needed.

And after all, ours is not a static universe. Our species has had to change again and again and again. What makes us think we've arrived?

Grit and Mastery

What's more important, that my students learn skills like perseverance, self-control, and reflection, or that they learn the names and functions of the cell organelles? The answer seems obvious to me, which is why I am excited about the mastery model of education, which allows students as many attempts and as much time as they need to master a concept or skill.

It seems to me this is the ideal way to teach grit, and according to Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, grit is one of the keys to success.

It seems to me that just handing out zeros when students fail to turn work in, or Fs when they do poorly on tests, is not the best way to teach perseverance. Those are just punishments, and I don't think punishment is a very good teacher or motivator.

In fact, according to Daniel Pink, author of Drive, the best motivators of human beings are these:

Autonomy

Purpose

Mastery

Interesting how that works.

The way I'm seeing it right now, give a student the chance to master the material, and that in itself will motivate him or her. And in the process, how can he or she not learn perseverance? Isn't that how we all learn it, by trying again and again until we finally master a skill or achieve our goal? But how can you learn that if you are not given the chance.

And if sports are mastery based, why not academics? Michael Jordan said in his awesome Nike commercial, "I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Unfortunately, the way we run academics right now, it doesn't work that way. Fail again and again in school, and you just fail, period. Unless, that is, you are in a mastery-based  (or competency-based) system. As Forbes writer Michael Horn says, "A competency-based learning system on the other hand literally embeds grit—sticking with things until you master them—in its DNA."

No, my guess is many of us don't remember what the endoplasmic reticulum or lysosomes do for the cell (unless we are biology teachers or professional biologists), but we're all motivated by the desire for mastery of skills, and we all need grit every day.

Students are no different.

Becoming indifferent to myself

"Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection." -Bertrand Russell

I came upon this quote in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow, and I think it may be the key element in reducing stress while increasing happiness and success. It ties together other books I've been reading, like Mindfulness, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Joy of Living, Why Zebras Don't get Ulcers, The Happiness Hypothesis, Who Moved My Cheese, Switch, and Drive, and distils out one of the key elements of them all:

The more I can forget myself and really focus my attention on other people, greater purposes, tasks I can master, sounds, tastes, smells, images, experiences around me, the happier I'll be, and the more successful I'll be at teaching, leading, and everything else.