Your Child Is More Resilient Than You Think: New at Reason

Taken literally, Nietzsche’s famous aphorism—”What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”—is not entirely correct. Some things that don’t kill you can still leave you permanently damaged and diminished.

Yet in recent years, far too many parents, teachers, school administrators, and students themselves have become taken with the opposite idea—that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. They have bought into a myth that students and children are inherently fragile. For the most part, this represents an understandable desire to protect children from emotional trauma. But overwhelming evidence suggests that this approach makes kids less psychologically stable. By over-sheltering kids, we end up exposing them to more serious harm, write Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

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