Listen to your elders, not the "experts"

Several years ago my wife and I attended a party composed mostly of DINK (dual incomes, no kids) urbanites. We acknowledged to a pregnant woman and her husband that we had two children at home under the age of three. The wife, an expectant first-time mother, expressed her grave fears about crying babies, and confessed that she had spent hours searching for all the right videos she could show her newborn on her iPad to entertain or distract. Jokingly, I responded: “Well, what else can one do?” She, misunderstanding, nodded in solemn agreement.

Call me late to the party, but I just got around to reading Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 best-seller The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, based on the authors’ viral 2015 Atlantic article. It is a decent book, identifying three terrible ideas popular among young Americans: we are fragile human beings who need to be protected from all pain or discomfort; that we should unequivocally trust our emotions; and that life is a battle between categorically good and evil people. Lukianoff and Haidt even offer some solid practical solutions to address these problems.

But as I read Coddling of the American Mind, I kept thinking of that nervous millennial couple clutching their electronic devices, trusting that technology and technocratic expertise, and not inherited wisdom, was the key to perfect parenting.