3 great untruths to stop telling kids—and ourselves

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Jonathan Haidt on Big Think. Run-time: 5:44

The embedded video didn't work for me but I found it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzGH97DQzA4

Point 1) is that children are antifragile. My understanding of the term is rather different to Haidt's so I probably understood it wrong. I've only read The Black Swan, and indeed it seems Taleb writes more generally in Antifragile. I digress. Anyway, Haidt says that by protecting children from "conflicts, insults, teasing, and exclusion", we are making them weaker - these things are somehow strengthening for children. I think Haidt is probably simplifying for the video. It is plausible that there is a point at which protectiveness becomes counter-productive, but I also think there's probably a point at which it is beneficial - for example, children who are driven to suicide by bullying are in need of extra protectiveness. It's not immediately clear what the optimum level is.

2) is that emotions are not infallible. I don't think this is remotely controversial, at least outside of folk wisdom. Certainly I find Haidt's claim that it is a mainstream belief on college campuses that feelings and beliefs should never be questioned to be rather ridiculous. I mean, isn't there a big outrage on American college campuses because young people are challenging conservative feelings and beliefs that have previously been taken for granted?

3) is that people are not necessarily "good" or "bad". This is a very sensible point. Again, I do think the focus on college campuses is a bit weird, and seems indicative of Haidt pushing an agenda which is not evidence-based, but this is a human tendency which we must all fight against if we are to make sensible decisions.

I wonder sometime... when I was a kid/teenager, my parents "knew" how things worked, and my teachers "knew" how things worked, and when I was angry and called them hypocrits, they would smack me or give me bad grades or called me stupid etc. - all in an effort to civilize me.
Now that I'm older, recorgnize that they knew very little, and only pretended to know/ thought they knew, in order to reproduce the status quo. - well, just how cultures have always reproduced themselves.
Except, by now, parents/teachers/media all disagree on everything, and there really is no proper consesus on how to behave, how the world works (and for the benefit of whom) and how to solve conflicts...

in my example, I mentioned that when I grew up, it was still okay to smack your children to show them their place - which has soon after become unacceptable behaviour. I have no idea how to discipline children, - I do know not to do what my parents did. I think parents and teachers today are lost. They need to figure out how to do things, risking that 5 years from now, they will be called barbaric/selfish/neglectful etc. ... teachers need to navigate the same minefield, or some parent sues them... it's really not clear how to do things anymore...

The way people use the word bullying is such a wide range though, that's the problem. Should they be protected from getting physically assaulted? Sure. Should they be kept safe from insults? I think this is where it's heading into the gray area. There's a point not too much further past this where conflict resolution skills don't get developed because they're sheltered from conflict.

I don't think its anything like an all-or-nothing proposition, it shouldn't be. What I think he is stating is that there is such a thing as over-sheltering kids and that it might indeed happen at an earlier threshold than what a lot of people these days might intuit.