The 'Fragile Millennial' Epidemic | Dr. Jordan Peterson #CLIP

in his piece the coddling of the american mind jonathan height outlines why millennials today are so fragile and lacking resilience in life and in relationships in university courses in the workplace and what has led to this overwhelming push to be protected from anything difficult or uncomfortable or offensive and he calls it the flight to safety and i think you've used that expression um he outlines the core reason for this fragility of mind and emotion he says it stems firstly from over-functioning and over-protective parents then schools now reaches into our universities of course more people than ever go to universities in the west so they form a much bigger bulk in our community afterwards and it leaves them tragically unprepared and unarmed for life and relationships would you comment on well i i think it's good to take a step back from that and think about it in the broadest possible terms there is definitely an epidemic of overprotective parenting but it's useful to ask why and my suspicions are is that this is driven by very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren't generally considered in relationship to this issue we don't have very many children we don't have 12 you know six of whom die we have one or two and that makes them very precious right we're unwilling to take risks with them and no wonder and then we also have them much later in life and so like if you have a kid when you're 18 you're still a kid you know you're gonna go out and have your life right because you're so well you're in the in the height of your exploratory you're in the height of the exploratory part of your life you're not going to over protect your kid because you're still a kid but if you're 40 and you have one child it's like all your eggs are in one basket and the probability that you're going to take undue risks with that precious person is very very low now obviously there's some advantages to that because great you devote resources to your child you know and foster their development but the downside is that you have every motivation to hover and maybe you're also extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you've struggled so long to achieve it it's highly highly valuable you can't take a risk well so these so we might say well perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later in life could easily be you know if you have six kids like what are you gonna do helicopter parent them it's like no you're so tired you can't even get off the couch if you have six kids and they're they outnumber you right they're raising each other they're competing and they're taking each other down a peg they're not there's no overprotection there but with it with a single child landscape or dual child landscape mostly a single child landscape then you're going to over protect and then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature and then that all reinforces it it's not good it's not obvious what to do about it either because if it is driven by demographics in that in that sense it's a much more intractable problem than we think so i did some of that in 12 rules for life you know i said look what you have to understand is that you're a danger to your children no matter what right you can let them go out in the world and be hurt or you can over protect them and hurt them that way so here's your choice can make your children competent and courageous or you can make them safe but you can't make them safe because life isn't safe so if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety then you disarm them completely and all they can do is pray to be protected yes so in the very act of trying to do the right thing by them although often with a selfish motive right often with a selfish motive we strip away the tools and the equipment the understanding they really need to make life work well that's the that's the edible mother right that was freud's great discovery of the dark mother and the dark mother is the person she's the witch in hensel and gretel gingerbread house lost children too good to be true it's like a house of candy wow who could want anything better what lives inside the house of candy the witch that wants to fatten you up and eat you right a cautionary tale about overprotective parents overprotective mothers about the overprotective feminine it's like the psychoanalysts they were so smart said the good mother necessarily fails that's such a brilliant phrase it's like you can't as you as your child matures you have to fail more and more as a mother right until by the time you're 30 your child's 30 let's say 25 for that matter you're not their mother anymore i mean obviously you are but the relationship has hit something like quasi-peer status not entirely obviously but the child's independent able to stand up on their own two feet and take on the world so now we see this thing a university student runs into some difficulties with study or whatever and brings their parents in to talk to the faculty yeah or they go off in color i mean when i went to queens university a week ago and there was a lot of noise and horror around that you know that the people who were decrying my visit set up coloring book stations so that people could be comforted because you know the evil professor was coming to talk it's like and you know as a clinician and height knows this as well and all the clinicians worth their salt know this the worst thing you can do for someone who's anxious is over protect them it makes them worse the clinical literature on that is crystal clear what you do for people who are hyper anxious is gradually expose them with their voluntary consent to increasingly threatening situations that cures them it's exactly the opposite of what all the mental health professionals so and i've used that term extraordinarily lightly are trying to do to produce safe spaces on the university campus like if as safe as if a space needs to be dis defined as safe you can be sure that's the one thing it is not jordan this has been fascinating let me pay you a compliment in some ways i think the most valuable thing you can do for us is to model the courage to speak your mind you do it forcefully you do it courageously you do it compassionately because the reality is you only have to spend a bit of time with you to realize that you actually care especially about our young people and what they're experiencing and especially for our young men because we know boys model themselves on men who they respect you're doing a great job of modeling courage in the face of fire well there's something i'd like to say maybe in closing about courage people say that to me and you know i don't think it's exactly right there's a there's a line in the old testament the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom and i think it's more like that it's not that i'm courageous it's that i'm afraid of the right things so when i made my videos it wasn't like that didn't make me nervous but i was less nervous about going back to bed and not saying what i had to say than i was about making the videos 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 it's a matter of i it's it's it's less risky to say something than to remain silent when you know there's something to be said i know that to be the case and so lots of times in life it's like there's no pathway forward that's going to shield you from risk you get to pick this risk or you get to pick this risk and i think i picked the lesser risk and that might be wise but i'm not so sure it's courageous you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 623,826

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: b-9VMf5GGs0

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Pistonenvy]

man who was nearly killed by a glass of apple cider calls entire generation of people growing up in some of the most difficult conditions since the great depression "fragile"

[u/jkilley]

No, no, YOU'RE fragile not me! (Collapses)