"People don't get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless."
"Life on the platforms forces young people to become their own brand managers, always thinking ahead about the social consequences of each photo, video, comment, and emoji they choose."
"Social media platforms are the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent's mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don't get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socializing power of social media."
"Social learning occurs throughout childhood, but there may be a sensitive period for cultural learning that spans roughly ages 9 to 15. Lessons learned and identities formed in these years are likely to imprint, or stick, more than at other ages. These are crucial sensitive years of puberty. Unfortunately, these are also the years in which most adolescents in developed countries get their own phones and move their social lives online."
"The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it tugs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In response, the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor where it is needed, and the compressed wood cells change their structure to become stronger and firmer. This altered cell structure is called reaction wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full-grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity. Stress is a perfect metaphor for children, who also need to experience frequent stressors in order to become strong adults."
"As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all 'triggers' from life; rather, happiness comes from learning to deprive external events of the power to trigger negative emotions in you."
"In the process, they develop a broad set of competencies including the ability to judge risks for themselves, take appropriate action when faced with risks, and learn that when things go wrong, even if they get hurt, they can usually handle it without calling in an adult."
"Researchers who study children at play have concluded that the risk of minor injuries should be a feature, not a bug, in playground design. Brussoni is on a campaign to encourage risky outdoor play because in the long run it produces the healthiest children. Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible."
"Play researchers help us see that antifragile children need play that involves some risk to develop competence and overcome their childhood anxieties. Conversely, children who are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes become incapacitated by anxiety before they reach maturity."
"We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world than delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly non-existent."
"Furedi says that there is one factor above all others that created the conditions for the 1990s turn to paranoid parenting: the breakdown of adult solidarity. As Furedi explains, across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their child got into trouble, other adults or strangers would help out. In many societies, adults feel duty-bound to reprimand other people's children who misbehave in public."
"This is the world in which Gen Z was raised. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children the world is dangerous and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to Discover Mode."
"In 'The Coddling of the American Mind,' Greg and I found that the concept of safety had undergone such extensive concept creep among Gen Z and many of the educators and therapists around them that it had become a pervasive and unquestionable value. We use the term 'safetyism' to refer to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns. Safety trumps everything else, no matter how unlikely or trivial the potential danger. Students who had been raised with safetyism on the playground sometimes expect it to govern their classrooms, dorms, and campus events."
"Studies show that lower-income Black and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives on average than children from wealthy families and white families. Across the board, children in single-parent households have more unsupervised screen time. This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race. The digital divide is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from it."
"Gopnik urges us to embrace the messiness and unpredictability of raising children: 'Our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children's minds; it's to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it's to give them the toys and pick up the pieces. We can't make children learn, but we can let them learn.'"
"The human brain contains two subsystems that put it into two common modes: Discover Mode for approaching opportunities and Defend Mode for defending against threats. Young people born after 1995 are more likely to be stuck in Defend Mode compared to those born earlier. They are on permanent alert for threats rather than being hungry for new experiences; they're anxious."
"All children are by nature antifragile. Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs and trees must be exposed to wind, children require exposure to setbacks, failures, shocks, and stumbles in order to develop strength and self-resilience. Overprotection interferes with this development and renders young people more likely to be fragile and fearful as adults."
"The worship of safety above all else is called safetyism. It is dangerous because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration."
