SNEAKO - July 18, 2022The Reason EVERYBODY is So Sensitive Today
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the overprotective parenting epidemic that plagues the millennial generation, and why it s a symptom of a larger, more fundamental problem: we don t have very many children. We have one or two. And that makes them very precious. And no wonder we re so eager to protect them.
Transcript
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In his piece, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt outlines why millennials today
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are so fragile and lacking resilience in life and in relationships, in university courses in the
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workplace, and what has led to this overwhelming push to be protected from anything difficult or
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uncomfortable or offensive. And he calls it the flight to safety. Tragically unprepared.
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A lot of school really perpetuates a lot of this bot shit. They all make you tell the right
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opinions. They all have safe spaces. Every school is left leaning. Every school perpetuates this woke
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idea. For life and relationships. Would you comment on that? Well, I think it's good to take a step
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back from that and think about it in the broadest possible terms. There is definitely an epidemic of
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overprotective parenting. But it's useful to ask why. And my suspicions are is that this is driven by
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very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren't generally considered in relationship to
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this issue. We don't have very many children. We don't have 12, you know, six of whom die.
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We have one or two. And that makes them very precious, right? We're special, unwilling to take risks with
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them. And no wonder. And then we also have the much later in life. And so like, if you have a kid when
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you're 18, you're still a kid, you know, you're gonna go out and have your life, right? Because you're so
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well, you're in the height of your exploratory, you're in the height of the exploratory part of
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your life. You're not going to overprotect your kid because you're still a kid. But if you're 40
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and you have one child, it's like all your eggs are in one basket. And the probability that you're
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going to take undue risks with that precious person is very, very low. Now, obviously, there's some
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advantages to that because great, you devote resources to your child, you know, and foster their
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development. But the downside is that you have every motivation to hover. And maybe you're also
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extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you've struggled
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so long to achieve it. It's highly, highly valuable. You can't take a risk. Well, so I want to have four
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kids. Young Don said he wants to have five. Maybe that's why I think the strongest people do come
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in big litters. Because when you get the runts, you could just, you know, donate them to someone
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else. So these, so we might say, well, perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and
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unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later
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in life. Could easily be. You know, if you have six kids, it's like, what are you going to do?
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Helicopter parent them? It's like, no, you're so tired, you can't even get off the couch if you have
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six kids. And they're, they outnumber you, right? They're raising each other. They're competing and
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they're taking each other down a peg. They're not, there's no overprotection there. But with a,
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with a single child landscape or dual child landscape, mostly a single child landscape, then
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you're going to overprotect. And then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to
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permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature. And then that all reinforces it.
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It's not good. It's not obvious what to do about it either, because if it is driven by demographics
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in that, in that sense, it's a much more intractable problem than we think. So I did some of that in
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12 rules for life. You know, I said, look, you, what you have to understand is that you're a danger
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to your children, no matter what, right? You can let them go out in the world and be hurt
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or you can overprotect them and hurt them that way. So here's your choice. Can make over,
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being an overprotective parent is actually, can be more detrimental than being an absent parent.
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Loving your kid too much hurts them. Giving them too much love, telling them they're special too
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much. You can always tell. I always knew when I was a kid, ah, your parents have never said no to you.
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Those kids in the grocery store, throwing huge tantrums, usually white people for the most part.
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Stupid bitch Karen, bring me a, I want a Gatorade. And I'd be like hanging out at my friend's house
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playing Call of Duty. Oh my God. Jennifer, get me fucking Doritos, bitch mom. Whoa, holy shit.
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Okay, sweet little Timmy, of course. I'm sorry, here. That kid's going to grow up to be an asshole.
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Make your children competent and courageous, or you can make them safe. But you can't make them safe
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because life isn't safe. So if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety,
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then you disarm them completely. And all they can do is pray to be protected.
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So in the very act of trying to do the right thing by them, although often with a selfish motive,
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often with a selfish motive, we strip away the tools and the equipment, the understanding they really
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need to make life work. No, that's the, that's the Oedipal mother, right? The dark mother. And the dark
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mother is the person, she's the witch in Hensel and Gretel. Gingerbread house, lost children, too good
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to be true. It's like a house of candy. Wow. Who could want anything better? What lives inside the
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house of candy? The witch that wants to fatten you up and eat you. Right. A cautionary tale about
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overprotective parents, overprotective mothers, about the overprotective feminine. It's like the
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psychoanalysts, they were so smart. You got to abandon your kid a little bit. You got to let
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him cry it out. Leave him alone one day. Let him figure it out. Don't get a babysitter. Just leave
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him. Let him fuck up and like put their hand on the stove. Let him figure it out. Said the good
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mother necessarily fails. That's such a brilliant phrase. It's like you can't, as you, as your child
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matures. You have to fail more and more as a mother, right? Until by the time you're 30,
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your child's 30, let's say 25 for that matter, you're not their mother anymore. I mean, obviously
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you are, but the relationship has hit something like quasi-peer status. Not entirely, obviously,
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but the child's independent, able to stand up on their own. They even say like when you get to 12
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years old that you even stop listening to your parents and the only people that you really start
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listening to are your peers, that there's really not much raising you can do past the age of like
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right around puberty. And take on the world. So now we see this thing where the university
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student runs into some difficulties with study or whatever and brings their parents in to talk
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to the faculty. Yeah, or they go off in color. I mean, when I went to Queen's University a week ago
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and there was a lot of noise and horror around that, you know, that the people who were decrying my visit
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set up coloring book stations so that people could be comforted because, you know, the evil
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professor was coming to talk. It's like, and you know, as a clinician. We had that at my school
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and high school and in college, we had therapy dogs. When Trump won, they brought in dogs so that
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people, the kids could pet the dog and feel better. There were literally, like they skipped class so that
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the whole class could go around and pet the dog. Specific, and they called it therapy. It's a fucking dog
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and they turned it into a mental health issue. And Haidt knows this as well. All the clinicians
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worth their salt know this. The worst thing you can do for someone who's anxious is overprotect them.
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Because you don't teach them how to learn. They just get to be anxious and trigger warning
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their whole life. Makes them worse. The clinical literature on that is crystal clear. What you do
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for people who are hyper anxious is gradually expose them with their voluntary consent to increase
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increasingly threatening situations. That cures them. It's exactly the opposite of what all the
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mental health professionals. So, and I've used that term extraordinarily lightly, are trying to do to
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produce safe spaces on the university campus. Like if a safe space. And my school was on every single
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door. They had a rainbow triangle where you could, you could go skip class. If you were like a soft boy
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or a girl, you could be like, I'm not feeling safe. And then you just get to sit there and be mental
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health and skip class. And then be like, what the fuck? If I'm in there, they didn't take it
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seriously. But if you were a pussy, they did take it seriously. If a space needs to be, but I'm a
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stoic strong man. Nah, but they never took it. I tried to do it sometimes and they just laughed it
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off because they knew that I was bullshitting. But if I would like, I don't feel safe. You could
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really like get past the test. I know people who skipped exams because they cried about fucking
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abortion, Trump, something. It's so easy. You could be a victim and they'll always validate it now.
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It's defined as safe. You can be sure that's the one thing it is not.
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Jordan, this has been fascinating. Let me pay you a compliment. In some ways, I think the most
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valuable thing you can do for us is to model the courage to speak your mind. You do it forcefully.
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And that's why they hate him. That's why he goes to schools and they set up coloring books.
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Because when you speak the truth, you're not even supposed to handle the truth anymore. There's
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protection for everything. In the West, at least.
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You do it courageously. You do it compassionately. Because the reality is you only have to spend a bit
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of time with you to realize that you actually care, especially about our young people and what
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they're experiencing. And especially for our young men, because we know boys model themselves
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You're doing a great job of modeling courage in the face of fire.
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Well, there's something I'd like to say, maybe in closing, about courage. People say that to me,
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There's a line in the Old Testament, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
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And I think it's more like that. It's not that I'm courageous. It's that I'm afraid of the right
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things. So when I made my videos, it wasn't like that didn't make me nervous. But I was less nervous
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about going back to bed and not saying what I had to say than I was about making the videos.
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Because I know where this is going. I don't want to go there. And so it's not so much courage. It's that
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it's a matter of... It's less risky to say something than to remain silent when you know
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there's something to be said. I know that to be the case. And so lots of times in life, it's like
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there's no pathway forward that's going to shield you from risk. You get to pick this risk,
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or you get to pick this risk. And I think I picked the lesser risk. And that might be wise,
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but I'm not so sure it's courageous. Good guy. And they want him to fail. He's too confident.