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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. It explains how parents, teachers, and students have become overly sensitive to different opinions; this has led to an increase in college protests against professors who present ideas that are considered offensive. The authors believe that these actions stem from bad parenting techniques and overprotective schools.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff believe that modern children have been taught three lies: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”, “Always trust your feelings”, and “Life is a battle between good people and evil people”. These ideas are based on cognitive distortions, which are common among those who suffer from depression or anxiety. This may explain why today’s students display historically high levels of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide.

College campuses have been beset by protests against controversial speakers and people are calling out others on campus for being hurtful. This is because in this day and age a lot of people take offense to speech if it offends them, frequently wrapping it up under the guise that they don’t feel safe.

Haidt and Lukianoff suggest that parents and schools should instead teach their children how to question the flawed assumptions they make in stressful situations. They can use cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a way to do this, especially when training these concepts. CBT helps patients learn to change their thoughts about things so that they don’t react emotionally or irrationally, but rather calmly consider the situation at hand.

Part 1 explores the Great Untruths in detail. The first one, that children are fragile, is false because kids can take risks and experiment to learn about society and the world. The second untruth, that strong emotions are accurate judges of people and things causes distrustful confrontations when simple conversations would do instead. Part 3 discusses tribalism which generates common enemy identity politics and hostility towards other groups.

Part 2 discusses recent protests on college campuses where students and faculty have been threatened with violence for their beliefs. These protestors claim that the speakers are making them feel physically unsafe, which is a threat to their physical safety.

In the third section, the authors describe six reasons why there is an intolerance for controversial ideas. First, society has become more polarized. Second, there’s a greater prevalence of anxiety and depression among young people. Third, parents have become overprotective of their children by not allowing them to play unsupervised or learn how to get along with others. Fourth, school administrators are too restrictive about anything deemed risky (e.g., field trips). Fifth, social-justice movements demand equality of outcomes rather than just opportunity for all. Finally—and this is my favorite reason—the Internet allows everyone to express themselves anonymously without any accountability and that leads to trolling behavior where people say mean things online just because they can.

Part 4 suggests ways that schools can change their perspective by believing in the resiliency of students. Schools should be challenging and accepting of different viewpoints. The Appendix explains how to learn CBT, as well as a few pages on diversity and tolerance for other people’s beliefs. There are 38 pages of Notes, References, and an Index in the book.