In August 2009, Max Haidt, age three, had his first day of preschool in Charlottesville, Virginia. But before he was allowed to take the first step on his eighteen-year journey to a college degree, his parents, Jon and Jayne, had to attend a mandatory orientation session where the rules and procedures were explained by Max’s teacher. The most important rule, judging by the time spent discussing it, was: no nuts. Because of the risk to children with peanut allergies, there was an absolute prohibition on bringing anything containing nuts into the building. Of course, peanuts are legumes, not nuts, but some kids have allergies to tree nuts, too, so along with peanuts and peanut butter, all nuts and nut products were banned. And to be extra safe, the school also banned anything produced in a factory that processes nuts, so many kinds of dried fruits, and other snacks were prohibited, too.
As the list of prohibited substances grew, and as the clock ticked on, Jon asked the assembled group of parents what he thought was a helpful question: “Does anyone here have a child with any kind of nut allergy? If we know about the kids’ actual allergies, I’m sure we’ll all do everything we can to avoid risk. But if there’s no kid in the class with such an allergy, then maybe we can lighten up a bit and instead of banning all those things, just ban peanuts?”
The teacher was visibly annoyed Jon’s question, and she moved rapidly to stop any parent from responding. Don’t put anyone on the spot, she said. Don’t make any parent feel uncomfortable. Regardless of whether anyone in the class is affected, these are the school’s rules.
You can’t blame the school for being so cautious. Peanut allergies were rare among American children up until the mid-1990s, when one study found that only four out of a thousand children under the age of eight had such an allergy. But by 2008, according to the same survey, using the same measures, the rate had more than tripled, to fourteen put of a thousand. Nobody knew why American children were suddenly becoming more allergic to peanuts, but the logical and compassionate response was obvious: Kids are vulnerable. Protect them from peanuts, peanut products, and anything that has been in contact with nuts of any kind. Why not? What’s the harm, other than some inconvenience to parents preparing lunches?
But it turns out that the harm was severe. It was later discovered that peanut allergies were surging precisely because parents and teachers had started protecting children from exposure to peanuts back in the 1990s. In February 2015, an authoritative study was published. The LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study was based on the hypothesis that “regular eating of peanut-containing products, when started during infancy, will elicit a protective immune response instead of an allergic immune reaction.” The researchers recruited the parents of 640 infants (four to eleven months old) who were at high risk of developing a peanut allergy because they had severe eczema or had tested positive for another allergy. The researchers told half the parents to follow the standard advice for high-risk kids, which was to avoid all exposure to peanuts and peanut products. The other half were given a supply of a snack make from peanut butter and puffed corn and were told to give some to their child at least three times a week. The researchers followed all the families carefully, and when the children turned five years old, they were tested for an allergic reaction to peanuts.
The results were stunning. Among the children who had been “protected” from peanuts, 17% had developed a peanut allergy. In the group that had been deliberately exposed to peanut products, only 3% had developed an allergy.
It makes perfect sense. The immune system is a miracle of evolutionary engineering. It can’t possibly anticipate all the pathogens and parasites a child will encounter — especially in a mobile and omnivorous species such as ours — so it is designed (by natural selection) to learn rapidly from early experience. The immune system is a complex adaptive system, which can be defined as a dynamic system that is able to adapt in and evolve with a changing environment. It requires exposure to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasitic worms in order to develop its ability to mount an immune response to real threats while ignoring nonthreats. Vaccination uses the same logic.
This is the underlying rationale for what is called the hygiene hypothesis, the leading explanation for why allergy rates generally go up as countries get wealthier and cleaner. This brings us to the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Of course, Nietzsche’s original aphorism — “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” — is not entirely correct if taken literally. But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate. For example, muscles and joints need stressors to develop properly. Too much rest causes muscles to atrophy, joints to lose a range of motion, heart and lung function to decline, and blood clots to form.
Now, let’s talk about Antifragility.
No one has done a better job of explaining the harm of avoiding stressors, risks, and small doses of pain than Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In his 2007 book, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that most of us think about risk in the wrong way. In complex systems, it is virtually inevitable that unforeseen problems will arise, yet we persist in trying to calculate risk based on past experiences. Taleb likens to the appearance of a black swan when, based on your past experience, you assumed that all swans were white.
In his later book Antifragile, Taleb explains how systems and people can survive the inevitable black swans of life and, like the immune system, grow stronger in response. Taleb asks us to distinguish three kinds of things. Some, like china teacups, are fragile: they break easily and cannot heal themselves, so you must handle them gently and keep them away from toddlers. Other things are resilient: they can withstand shocks. Plastic cups, for instance. But Taleb asks us to look beyond the overused word “resilience” and recognise that some things are antifragile. They benefit from fall. Many of the important systems in our economic and political life are like our immune systems: they require stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow. Systems that are antifragile become rigid, weak, and inefficient when nothing challenges them or pushes them to respond vigorously.
The foolishness of overprotection is apparent as soon as you understand the concept of antifragility. Given that risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life, parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences. There’s an old saying: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.” But these days, we seem to be doing precisely the opposite: we’re trying to clear away anything that might upset children, not realising that in doing so, we’re repeating the peanut-allergy mistake. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is one of the several causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide.
***
The above excerpts are taken from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Kalampedia 