Have over-protective parents set up a generation of young people to fail?
Jonathan Haidt is co-author, with Greg Lukianoff, of The Coddling Of The American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
He joined us to explain more about the concept behind the book.
Jonathan says that students are now asking for trigger warnings for anything that they find upsetting, even though there is "no empirical evidence that PTSD is reactivated simply by a discussion" of a past trauma.
He believes that panic over the idea of child abduction in the 1980s and 1990s led to American parents becoming over-protective.
"We stopped letting our kids out. This is a really good way to teach kids that the world is dangerous and other people are dangerous."
"The most important thing they need to learn is dispute resolution and co-operation, and so free play is the most important thing kids need. Our kids are over-scheduled and over-supervised, therefore they have not faced risks and mastered them, so by the time they get to college they're not as prepared to deal with things that are upsetting."
Jonathan says we need to start by "understanding that children need to be exposed to some risks and stress, and they need to be able to manage it themselves."
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