Summary The Coddling of the American Mind

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is a psychology book written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and published in 2018. The nonfiction work, which expounds upon an essay the authors wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, became a bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. The book argues that parents and schools, in an overabundance of caution, have taught children to fear and reject ideas that upset them. As a result, this learned fear explains the recent spate of college students protesting against professors and speakers whose ideas students consider offensive.Haidt, a social psychologist, and Lukianoff, a free-speech campaigner, believe that modern children have been inoculated with three Great Untruths: "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker," "Always trust your feelings," and "Life is a battle between good people and evil people." These three ideas are based on cognitive distortions-overgeneralizing, emotional reasoning, black-and-white thinking, and others-that are common among people who suffer from depression and anxiety. This may explain why today's students display historically high levels of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide...