As Julian notes, a staggering number of doctor visits now end with a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax or Valium.īut there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection - medical training. Suicide rates are way up, depression rates have skyrocketed, especially for girls. This overprotective impulse doesn’t shelter people from fear it makes them unprepared to deal with the fear that inevitably comes. in affluent high schools has risen from about 2.75 to 3.0 so everybody can feel affirmed. Meanwhile schools ban dodge ball and inflate grades. As Kate Julian reports in “The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Modern Parenting” in The Atlantic, parents are now more likely to accommodate their child’s fears: accompanying a 9-year-old to the toilet because he’s afraid to be alone, preparing different food for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.
Parents have cut back on their children’s unsupervised outdoor play because their kids might do something unsafe. So we’ve seen a wave of overprotective parenting. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “ The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society.
0 kommentar(er)
