introduction

Speaking to the nation on the occasion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster,* President Ronald Reagan said that the tragedy reminded us that:

All human progress is a struggle against the odds. We learned again that this America, which Abraham Lincoln called the last best hope of man on Earth, was built on heroism and noble sacrifice.… We think back to the pioneers of an earlier century, and the sturdy souls who took their families and their belongings and set out into the frontier of the American West. Often, they met with terrible hardship. Along the Oregon Trail you can still see the grave markers of those who fell on the way. But grief only steeled them to the journey ahead.

Heroism? Sacrifice? Struggle? Hardship? Grief? What could Reagan have been thinking?

What about self-esteem? Self-actualization? The power of a group hug?

Somebody call child-protection services. Bring in the grief counselors, because obviously we have to protect the kids from this sort of thing.

*   *   *

Things have changed in America.

Somehow a nation of confident, self-reliant adults has been replaced by one run by people who think we need to shield children from such evils as dodgeball and tag.

“A child with a rare disease may have to be put in a bubble,” Jonathan Yardley once wrote, “but putting the entire American system of elementary and secondary education into one borders on insanity. Yet that is precisely what has happened.”5

The symbol of our time, however, is not so much a bubble (which has a certain romantic science-fiction appeal) but the more mundane bubble wrap. Instead of preparing children to deal with the inevitable scratches, bumps, and bruises of growing up, our modern-day nannies insist that we should swaddle them in bubble wrap—and not even the kind that you can have fun with by popping.

The modern bubble-wrap mentality assumes that children are so frail and easily bruised that they have to be insulated from … life. No losing, no disappointments, no harsh reality checks. But like a child who grows up in a bubble without developing any immunities to the outside world, a child raised in bubble wrap is not prepared for the symptoms of life: failure, frustration, and having to make choices tougher than the color of their new iPod sleeve.

In many ways these are the best of times to be an American child: an age of prosperity, choice, technological plenty, and parental indulgence. When have young people ever been more cared for, deferred to, or pampered? But these also are one of the worst of times, because seldom if ever has a generation been less well prepared to cope with the world they will face. We aren’t just failing to make “rugged individuals.” We aren’t even making competent adults.

In a 2004 Psychology Today article, Hara Estroff Marano noted that these frantic efforts to cushion children from bumps may explain the rise of depression and other psychological disorders in what Jean Twenge calls “Generation Me.” Marano wrote:

With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they’re robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we’re on our way to creating a nation of wimps.6

Author-commentator Michael Barone suggests that the country today is divided between what he calls “Hard America,” which stresses competition and results, and “Soft America,” which coddles and protects its children.7 And indeed, there seems to be an ever-widening gap between those two Americas.

One America teaches their kids responsibility, self-control, and accountability. The other America files lawsuits claiming their children suffer from “emotional distress” if they get kicked off the basketball team.

One America overcomes adversity and recognizes that we are all tested by bad times. The other America thinks kids could be traumatized by having their papers marked with red pens.

Where the earliest settlers saw America as a shining city on the hill, the other America sees the potential for a lot of slip-and-fall cases.

*   *   *

In his classic The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis wrote:

We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood.… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism.…8

I suspect that Lewis would easily recognize public education today. Even as evidence mounts that we have created a generation of smug, self-satisfied, entitled wimps, disconnected from reality and unprepared for the tests that the world has in store for them, legions of educationists, therapists, counselors, victimologists, bureaucrats, and parents continue to obsess about how to pump up the self-esteem and bubble-wrap the feelings of the younger generation.

This book is dedicated to the proposition that precisely the opposite is needed: that what young people need today is not more vague, sappy nostrums about “being yourself” or “following your bliss,” but a reality check that tells them that life isn’t fair, they aren’t entitled, and the world won’t be caring about their feelings quite as much as Mommy and Daddy do. In other words, it is intended as an antidote to our culture of complacency and indulgence.

Given all of our anxieties and assorted panics involving child rearing, it may seem contradictory, even perverse, to suggest that we have become complacent about raising our children. But a culture has to be awfully smug about the big things to devote as much time as we do to issues like the weight of backpacks, the onerous burden of homework, and self-esteem-destroying class rankings. The very triviality of our concerns is evidence that we think we have the big stuff pretty much in hand.

Despite the gold stars and happy faces, there is growing evidence that we are falling further behind in preparing young people for the challenges of the emerging world. American children continue to lag much of the industrialized world in both math and science, while the results of recent surveys of their literacy and knowledge of history, civics, and geography hover between embarrassing and “Oh, my God!”

In December 2005, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy concluded that the average college graduate’s reading ability had declined significantly in the previous decade. Fewer than a third of college graduates scored at the “proficient” level in the most recent test.9 The next month, January 2006, saw more bad news: a survey by the American Institutes for Research found that a majority of the students at four-year colleges couldn’t do things like understand the arguments of a newspaper editorial or interpret a table about blood pressure and exercise.10 The same study found that only 20 percent of college students completing a four-year degree had “basic quantitative literacy skills,” which meant they were “unable to estimate if their car had enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.”

Despite warnings from business, educational, and political leaders about lagging math and science skills, both parents and students seem to be snoozing through the alarms. A 2006 poll found that most parents thought that there was nothing wrong with the amount of science and math their children were being taught. Only half of the students in middle and high school thought that understanding science or knowing math was “essential” if they were to succeed in the real world after high school.11

Precisely which world do they think that is? The one where technological innovation won’t matter? Where they won’t need science or math to get good-paying professional jobs? Where they won’t need to worry about competition from countries that emphasize higher math skills? Where they won’t have to understand complex scientific arguments about things like global warming?

There are obvious practical consequences to this tsunami of ignorance: The 2005 “Skills Gap Report” commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers found that the vast majority of American manufacturers—90 percent—are experiencing a shortage of qualified, high-skilled employees, including scientists and engineers. The lack of skills, the report warned, is endangering the “ability of the country as a whole to compete in the global economy.”12

When businesses were asked whether the nation’s K-12 schools were doing a good job preparing students for the workplace, an overwhelming 84 percent said “no.” As global pressure intensifies, the need of American businesses for more qualified and skilled employees will also become more urgent.

In other words, life is about to become even more competitive than it is now.

“You don’t bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences,” observed Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, “especially from three societies (like India, China, and Russia) with rich educational heritages.”13

But the problem is not simply that young people lack the academic skills to compete; there is ample evidence that they also lack the necessary attitudes and values. “Even if schools perform well in their traditional role of increasing math, science and reading comprehension skills,” the report from the National Association of Manufacturers noted, “this would not address the top, pressing concern of employers—the need for attendance, timeliness, and work ethic.”

In other words: showing up, having the right attitude, and being willing to work hard. The lack of those basic assets suggests that schools deserve only part of the blame for dumbing down our kids; parents and the culture as a whole have also had a hand in creating a self-absorbed, sulky generation whose expectations and sense of entitlement are so out of whack with the world they are entering.

So it’s not enough to merely change the education system: we also have to change the culture that created the dumbed-down schools that are putting so many students behind. And just as the problem extends beyond the schools, the damage is not simply economic. Evidence continues to mount that the bubble-wrapped generation is also finding itself badly handicapped in dealing with the other major challenges of life, from relationships and personal responsibility to distinguishing right from wrong without a reliable moral compass. And despite the efforts of grown-ups to keep them endlessly entertained and insulated, there are signs that many young people are increasingly unhappy and dissatisfied. Colleges report that the severity of student mental problems, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, has been rising since the late 1980s.

For many children raised in bubble wrap, life is turning out to be both overwhelming and disappointing. They were sent forth with grossly inflated expectations and with tools that are wholly inadequate to help them cope with life’s inevitable switchbacks and speed-bumps. By definition, expectations can be infinite, especially when they aren’t tempered by reality; so the letdowns and flameouts are almost inevitable.

In other words, by pumping their heads full of feel-good mush, the nanny class has set them up to fail—educationally, economically, and emotionally. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that most eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds thought that getting rich and famous was their generation’s most important life goal. Reality will bite hard for a generation that has been raised with delusions of specialness and unrealistic expectations

If all of this seems unduly harsh, I apologize. My intention is constructive: I want to help prepare young people to be responsible, competent, confident, self-reliant, independent, realistic individuals who are armed with the inner resources and the habits of mind to resist the blather and blandishments of the world they are about to enter. I’ve tried to group the rules somewhat thematically, but they do not need to be read in order, and there is some overlap among them. Some will seem more valuable than others, while others will be downright offensive. (See Rule 21: “You’re offended? So what? No, really. So what?”) Within the rarefied halls of modern educational nannyism, there will undoubtedly be cries of outrage and indignation.

But, as H. L. Mencken once noted, “In all ages there arise protests from tender men against the bitterness of criticism, especially social criticism. They are the same men who, when they come down with malaria, patronize a doctor who prescribes, not quinine, but marshmallows.”14