WORK
The Coddling of the American Mind
The 2018 book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt — drawing on Skenazy's documentation of overprotective parenting — that introduced safetyism to mainstream discourse and provided the intellectual framework through which AI policy debates would be conducted in 2025–2026.
The Coddling of the American Mind originated as a 2015 Atlantic essay by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, expanded into a 2018 book that integrated three explanatory frameworks into a unified cultural diagnosis: the cognitive distortions catalogued by cognitive behavioral therapy, Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, and Skenazy's documentation of overprotective parenting. The book's argument — that American universities and the culture feeding them had produced a generation whose fragility was caused by the very protections meant to help them — became the most influential mainstream account of the safetyism pathology. Its AI-age relevance is structural: every school debate about ChatGPT in 2023–2026 reproduced the book's cultural pattern, and the book's prescriptions provided the template for the scaffolded-autonomy alternative.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's three-foundation structure gave it unusual explanatory range. The CBT framework provided a taxonomy of cognitive distortions — catastrophizing, emotional