Jonathan Haidt Raising Anti Fragile Kids Joe Rogan

Let’s start with what should we be doing.

With kids to make them tougher so that you know as they live in the world’s and safer cars are safer the death rate for kids has been plummeting for all causes other than suicide which is going up so as kids live in a and safer world they also have the Internet which is going to expose them to virtual insults for and ever so how we’re gonna raise kids to be maximally effective in this new 21st century world which is physically very safe but virtually unsafe okay how we’re gonna do that and I think the key idea that we need to put on the table here that I think everybody who works with kids needs to keep in mind every day is antifragility I know you’ve talked about that on the show before yeah but I’ll just should I can just give a very brief you know explanation of it cuz it’s such an important concept so antifragility a lot of listeners when there was a word coined by Nassim Taleb the guy who wrote the Natalie Portman black swan because there are certain systems and he was I think he was motivated by the collapse of the Fractional Reserve banking system so he had predicted the collapse because he said the Source Code banking system is really convoluted.

And it’s never been tested a system needs to be tested challenged shocked in order to then develop defenses against it and our system has not been tested so if anything goes wrong it’s going all right you reference him quite a few times yes that’s right he’s really concept of venture fragile that’s right it’s a key idea in our book and it I find as I talk about this around the country once you explain this to people who work with kids like everybody gets it right away all right so Talib says there’s no word for this property he says we know that some are fragile and so if you have a glass you have a Hand Painted wine glass on the table you knock it breaks okay it get better in any way and so know you don’t give kids a Cougar Town wine glass you give them a plastic sippy cup because plastic is resilient but if a kid knocks over a sippy cup it get better in any way until that wanted to know what’s the word for that do get better when you knock them over and the classic example is the Vitamin C immune system mmm so the Vitamin D immune system is an incomplete system.

It’s a miracle of evolution that we have this system for making new antibodies but it know exactly what to be reactive to that has to be set by childhood experience and so if you keep your kids in a bubble and you use bacterial wipes and you don’t let them be exposed to bacteria you’re crippling the system has to get knocked over it has to get challenged threatened it has to have has to learn how to it expand its abilities and so this is why Sunflower Seeds peanut allergies are going up yeah that was a really shocking part of your book that’s right it’s stunning how fast this happened please explain that to people the whole Ice Cream peanut allergy thing yeah so Ice Cream peanut allergies used to be really rare and most of us you know older folk we brought peanut butter sandwiches to school and when my son max started preschool in 2008 you know they went and on about no nuts nothing that touched a nut nothing that looks like a nut nothing that has the word naughty I mean it was crazy how defensive they were about nuts and as we write in the book I thought back on that and I said wait a second like why you know we’re freaking out about nuts and.

The more we freaked out about it the higher that allergy rate goes and it turns out there was a study done published in 2015 where the researchers noticed that the allergy to nuts is only going up in countries that tell pregnant women to avoid nuts and they thought well maybe that’s why and so they did a controlled experiment they got about 600 women who’d given birth recently and whose kids were at higher risk of analogy because they had eczema or some other you know Essential Oils immune system sort of issue so about 300 of them are told standard advice your kids at risk the Blood Test peanut allergy so you should not eat peanuts while you’re lactating and keep peanuts away from your kid and the other half we’re told here is an Israeli snack food it’s a popcorn with a peanut Jif Chocolate peanut powder dusting on the outside give it to your kids starting at you know three or four months whenever they’re ready to eat so and they monitor them they made sure they weren’t you know failure reactions sewer or strong reactions and then at the age of five they gave them all a very thorough Type 1 immunological tests and of the ones who followed the standard advice 17 had a Oil Safe peanut allergy.

They would have to watch out peanuts for the rest of their lives that’s such a high number because these were because these it’s were already predisposed and but the half that were predisposed but given Simple Truth peanut powder three percent just three percent had a Chocolate Chips peanut allergy at age five in other words we could almost wipe out Butter Safe peanut allergies by giving Protein Energy peanut powder to kids and just a few months ago had science the front page article was on doing that and so again good intentions and bad ideas we’re trying to protect our kids so Oh keep them away from peanuts but that’s exactly the wrong advice because kids are anti fragile and so we’re doing the same thing well I think them the real issue is the people that have an actual severe allergy that’s your child yeah yes but that’s what this science article was that exposure therapies are being tested and they are the most effective so even people with yes extreme just have to start slow you so give him a very exact yeah because I was on a plane once and they informed us that they didn’t want us to even eat peanuts on the plane because there was someone on the plane that was so.

Allergic that if you eat peanuts and you chew it and it’s in the air it could adversely affect that person yeah and that could well be true so I have no objection to that but the reason we got to that point is because we started banning peanuts long ago so this is one of these well I’m not sure if it’s a problem of progress but as we know it’s not necessarily but it’s an example of antifragility right okay so now let’s bring this to the playground alright so you know when you and I were kids you know boys and girls have different social interactions but boys tease each other right and salt each other you throw around insults right you know and that’s part of developing to be a boy now if it turns into bullying like a bunch of kids or one you know after one kid after day okay that’s terrible we have to do something about that I’m not saying bullying is okay but as we’ve cracked down on bullying and as we’ve gotten and more sensitive about harm in general we’re cracking down on any kind of teasing cruelty exclusion so my kids go to New York City public schools which are generally pretty good but on the playground you.

Know there’s a monitor and the playground monitor look you know if there’s conflict he comes and checks it out if a kid is crying he checks it out you know seems like a good thing to do but it’s like treating kids like they’re allergic to peanuts kids to have and thousands of conflicts they have exposed to insults an exclusion teasing and if you can imagine if you could keep your daughter in a protective tank when nobody would tease her insult or hurt her feelings for 18 years would you do it absolutely not you know um it’s important that they do experience some assholes they just have to know but on the flip side there are certain people that are damaged for the rest of their life by bullies and some like I have a friend and his brother used to beat him up when they lived together and it still with him to this day and he’s in his 50s yeah like I think he has a certain level of depression that’s directly correlated that’s right yeah mean I can’t say about your friend but the research shows the research does show that bullying can leave permanent scars yeah so there are.

A couple we have to keep our eye on kids are anti fragile yes but two one is they need challenges that are graded to their level of ability hmm so if they’re overwhelmed and if the suffering goes on after day so if kids are bade if their brain is bathed in so cortisol is a normal stress hormone you have to experience stress you to have cortisol and then it drops goes up and down up and down but kids who are raised either you an environment they’re bullied or they’re abused at home they don’t have a secure attachment relationship then they get brain damage then you you’re hurting kids if it’s chronic so I am in no way saying bullying is okay you gotta keep the line right but again you have to look at each institution so each school is not thinking hmm how can we carefully draw the line between bullying and valuable sorts of conflict no they’re thinking if we do this well we get sued right and if we’re not really careful a bullying we’re gonna get sued and so overreact let’s go this way yeah that’s unfortunate really but how do you decide how much bullying is.

Accept like it’s almost venom like giving them a little bit so they develop a tolerance yeah what so there’s um so we did some research on bullying we didn’t put it in the book because while we suspect that anti-bullying policies that go too far and that ban conflict well we suspect that those are harmful we couldn’t prove that so we put this in the book but the traditional definitions of bullying are actually pretty reasonable I’m hope I can remember it exactly it’s like a there’s like a power differential and it’s chronic you know goes on for multiple Facebook Event multiple days and originally there was actually a threat of violence it had to be at least a threat of violence I think that was the original definition and then that was expanded gradually so that have to be nested our threat of violence but it has expanded so far that like my kids use the term if one kid is mean to another they’ll call that bullying and that’s too far so I think you have to keep your eye on that the key features too far of a kid is mean yeah so like on the playground for my daughter the girls would form these clubs and so.

My daughter was in the kitty cat club like that’s what three girls called themselves and they’d be in a corner and they’d say oh can’t know you can’t join us you’re not in the kitty cat club mean that’s exclusion right we can’t have that right the so you’d have to like allow everyone in your group because you don’t want to be a bully that’s I don’t know that yeah I don’t know they called that bullying but her teacher had a conversation with them now she didn’t I don’t think she exactly ordered them never exclude so I mean it’d be okay if you use it as a grounds for discussion increased but some schools have even tried to discourage the existence of Animal Society best friends because if you have Pet Care best friends you’re excluding others that’s it is hilarious but again it’s if you fail to understand that kids are anti fragile yeah you think oh my you know there’s a rise of anxiety depression and girls are Justin Bieber cutting themselves at such high rates you know we’ve got it we’ve got to relieve them of stress like no that’s not the right way to go about.