How to raise antifragile kids

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know - or at least suspect - that mental health among children and adolescents has been declining over the past 20 years.  Well, it's not just in your head. It really is getting worse. Jonathan Haidt, psychology professor at NYU, has been leading the research into causes of this and recently published a sensational book (all his books are great really) titled 'The Anxious Generation: How the Great rewiring of Childhood is causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness' (March 2024). He notes that something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

Why has this happened?

There are obviously many factors involved but Jonathan Haidt puts forward three factors (although the book focuses only on the first two) that he believes are central, and I’ll add a fourth here, which I'm getting in part from Haidt's work in other areas:

1.     The decline of free-play.  This began in the 1980’s and accelerated in the 1990’s. Parents in Western countries became increasingly scared to let their kids roam free, ride bikes around the neighbourhood etc. This was mainly due to media pushing more and more stories of rape, murder and other violent crimes. So even while things (in the USA) were actually getting safer during this period, parents were becoming more cautious, and kids were given less freedom to go out and do things and playgrounds in school were also becoming a lot safer. This loss of free play and the rise of continual adult supervision deprived children of an essential skill they need to develop while young. Jonathan Haidt says it this way: ‘All mammals need free play, and lots of it, to wire up their brains during childhood, to prepare them for adulthood...children [need] the chance to explore, test and expand their limits, build close friendship through shared adventure, and learn how to judge risks of themselves.’

2.     Phone-based childhood. Especially harmful to girls, phone-based childhood harms our kids in many ways that are only just starting to be understood. Exposure to harmful and inappropriate content such as bullying, pornography, unrealistic beauty standards, 24/7 ‘comparisons’, and various other content, causes anxiety and depression. In the graph below you can clearly see that both anxiety and depression sky-rocket around 2012, just as the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous (2012 is when the iPhone 5 came out).  And this is not just a correlation, there is causation here.

3.     Economic factors, including the global financial crisis and the rise of inequality which has fostered more competitive parenting in countries that have high inequality. (This argument is made in Love, Money, & Parenting, by Doepke & Zilibotti. See a summary of the argument here.)

4.     A reduction in critical thinking skills, and corresponding increase in emotional reasoning and victim culture.  This is a very complex area and I’ll probably need to write a whole other blog on this, but essentially, I think young people these days put too much emphasis on their feelings and its hurting them. This might sound crazy coming from a psychologist – aren’t I meant to be all about feelings and validating feelings!? Well, yes and no. The spectacular rise in psychology – and what Philip Rieff termed ‘The Triumph of the Therapeutic’ - over the last 50 years has in some ways become a victim of its own success. From not enough attention being placed on feelings 50 years ago, to an almost obsessive amount of attention being placed on feelings in some quarters today. And like anything, you can have too much of a good thing and we might be due for a correction to the correction. 

What’s wrong with being too emotional? Well, essentially you are going completely against one of the most evidence-based treatments used in psychology, Cognitive Behavioural therapy (CBT).  CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various “cognitive distortions” such as “catastrophizing” (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job…) and “negative filtering” (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well).  An important discovery by early CBT researchers was that if people learn to stop thinking this way, their depression and anxiety usually subside. 

What we are seeing today is many children and teenagers being taught the exact opposite. They are being taught that their feelings are the most important thing. That they should always trust their feelings.  That feeling hurt emotionally is just as bad as being physically hurt. These ideas are propped up by other ideas such as ‘fragility’ and practises like having ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’ (these are more a thing on American Universities). These types of practices – beyond the fact there’s no evidence they are effective and may actually be harmful – send a clear signal to students: ‘You are fragile. You are weak. You cannot tolerate emotional discomfort.’ This is a terrible message to send to people.  Not only is it not true, it actually makes them weaker by way of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Human’s aren’t fragile. We are in fact, ‘antifragile’ as Nassim Taleb famously says. Being ‘antifragile’ is different to being tough or resilient. It means that we actually get stronger through trial and testing. The classic example is our bones. If bones don’t receive stress and strain they become weak and eventually crack or crumble. This is why astronauts in space need to pay special attention to their bones and ensure they are putting stress on them regularly (before they did this they would come back to earth after several months and experience bone breakage).  Our immune systems are another example - a complex adaptive system, which becomes ‘stronger’ through exposure to germs and pathogens. This is the underlying rationale for what is called the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner — another example of a problem of progress.  Thanks to hygiene, antibiotics and too little outdoor play, children don’t get exposed to microbes as they once did. This may lead them to develop immune systems that overreact to substances that aren’t actually threatening — causing allergies (See another book written by Jonathan Haidt ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ to learn more about this).

So, here’s what you can do as a parent in response to each of these four things:

1. Let your kids play! Unsupervised. Get them outdoors. Let them fall off the monkey bars. Let them scrap their knee. Let them get a flat tire and have to walk home with their bike. Let them swim in the lake. Let them get a bit hurt. If you live in a relatively safe neighbourhood, let your kid/s roam around with their friends. If kids are arguing, don’t step in right away, wait a bit and see if they can work it out themselves (usually they can and this is a very important skill to learn).

2. Don’t give a smartphone as the first phone. Give a phone or watch that is specialized for communication, not for internet-based apps. Don’t give a smartphone until high school.  This is easy to do, if many of your child’s friends’ parents are doing the same thing.Delay the opening of accounts on nearly all social media platforms until the beginning of high school (at least). This will become easier to do if we can support legislators who are trying to raise the age of “internet adulthood” from today’s 13 (with no verification) to 16 (with mandatory age verification).

3. This is a big topic – leave it for another day!

4. Teach your kids how to think critically and teach them that emotions are information not instructions.  Take their emotions seriously, but not too seriously. Remember, emotions are evolved mechanisms that helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce. So they contain a lot of useful information. But they are not always correct. There is a balance you can struck here between invalidating a child’s feelings, and coddling a child. Either extreme is obviously damaging.

One last thing: Remember not to stress too much about parenting. Kid’s are anti-fragile. Lean into good enough parenting, which is actually great parenting.