Guest post: Teach resilience
Originally a comment by Sastra on Sobwhinesobwhinesobwhine.
@YNNB:
“Prepare the child for the road — not the road for the child.”
In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure Lukianoff and Haidt talk about a sea change in child rearing and education which threw out this idea of instilling resilience and toughness for a more sensitive, concerned, child-centered approach — and as a consequence kids and adolescents became anxious and depressed. The book came out in 2018 and doesn’t really mention transgender issues, but the fragility and sense of entitlement they describe possibly hits its apotheosis there.
I read TCOTAM a couple of years ago, probably on recommendation from commenters here, and I thought it was excellent.
(I was going to ask about the book with the cover shown here, but I saw the comment in the other topic. I’ll have to check it out.)
I’m a sucker for children’s books that have that story arc going from feeble and whiny and unhappy to capable and resilient and happy. I have a feeling there were a lot of Victorian kids kept inside and stifled.
This is a battle I was engaged in where I work, not about trans issues but just coddling in general. They wanted all the teachers to use the same book, teach the exact same way, and everyone…even across disciplines…needed to have the same rules. Why? Because it was a challenge for the student to have to remember which prof has which rules.
I’ll admit, when I was in college, it could be annoying sometimes when you had to adjust how you did things to fit the arbitrary rules of a new professor. Once I got out of college, I understood. Flexibility is an important skill. I have had a number of bosses over the years, and each of them had different personalities and different leadership styles. Learning flexibility might have been the most important thing they taught me.
I am so glad I wasn’t coddled in school.
I agree completely but I fear that should the title of this piece get widespread acceptance, it will turn into a movement for repressive education.
I have lost almost all hope of humans being able to handle complexity. Every time some kind of problem is identified, it seems inevitable that how to handle it, is turned into a slogan and the slogan waltzes over every other concern.
You already have fathers that bully their son some more, because the son was bullied and they want to teach him resilience. Now I know that is not what Sastra is talking about or any of the other members here. It is just that I have little confidence in what other people will make of such advice as: “Teach them resilience”
Aaah – I remember that book though I had forgotten the name. The little girl making up dreams of her own death to impress her aunt. Then learning to do chores with the farming family. Them asking her about laying tarmac – whether there was any kind of crushed gravel base, and she realising she has never noticed this. It’s a charming story about learning practical skills.
The theme of a child, cosseted/spoiled, going to a different environment with other children, and becoming nicer/braver/more resilient is about 50% of the fiction I read. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with Eustace Stubbs being turned into a dragon as a learning process is a classic of its kind. Much nicer as a dragon than a boy.
@1 same – I hadn’t read it before because I thought the title was dumb, but it turns out the authors also thought the title was dumb, and it is an excellent book with a lot of important ideas.
Tangentially related is George Lakoff’s work on ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ conceptions of the world (published under various titles) – in the last chapter (at least of the version I read decades ago) he writes about the idea that in the ‘right wing’ worldview you need to ‘toughen up’ your kids because the world is an awful place that will destroy them if they’re weak, but their form of ‘toughening’ ends up creating adults with low resilience and requirements for external motivations.
KBPlayer @ 7 – sister!
axxyaan – that’s a good point too. The kind of childhood resilience-learning I’m thinking of is based in a kind of Romantic (in the literary sense) love of Nature along with a healthy endowment of empathy. Not Sparta but the Lake District.
axxyaan – that’s one reason I prefer to use ‘flexibility’. I was taught too much toward resilience in my childhood, with the consequence that I have no strength left to be resilient.
Flexibility is sort of the same thing, but doesn’t suggest nuns hitting students with rulers; that sort of teaching was the opposite of flexible. It also doesn’t mean giving them everything they want, which also leads to the opposite of flexible.
Ophelia @ #9
Swallows and Amazons?
Well, that was an extension of “Romantic (in the literary sense) love of Nature” so I was thinking Wordsworth rather than Ransome. The children he writes seem to be born resilient. Remember Father’s telegraphed reply to Mother’s query whether the children should be allowed to go sailing off to the island by themselves? “If not duffers won’t drown; better drowned than duffers.”
Funny thing: I was chatting about Swallows and Amazons on Facebook just yesterday, I forget why, and a friend who’d never heard of it was planning to read it.
I loved those books when I was a kid. Borrowed them from the library and read them over and over.