Over the past decades, a tide of “safetyism” has crept over American society. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put it in their book “
The Coddling of the American Mind,” this is the mentality that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The goal is to eliminate any stress or hardship a child might encounter, so he or she won’t be wounded by it.
So we’ve seen a wave of overprotective parenting. Parents have cut back on their children’s unsupervised outdoor play because their kids might do something unsafe. As Kate Julian reports in “The Anxious Child and the Crisis of Modern Parenting”
in The Atlantic, parents are now more likely to accommodate their child’s fears: accompanying a 9-year-old to the toilet because he’s afraid to be alone, preparing different food for a child because she won’t eat what everyone else eats.
Meanwhile schools ban dodge ball and inflate grades. Since 2005 the average G.P.A. in affluent high schools has risen from about 2.75 to 3.0 so everybody can feel affirmed.
It’s been a disaster. This overprotective impulse doesn’t shelter people from fear; it makes them unprepared to deal with the fear that inevitably comes. Suicide rates are way up, depression rates have skyrocketed, especially for girls. As Julian notes, a staggering number of doctor visits now end with a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication, like Xanax or Valium.
But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.
While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60 percent of pre-meds never make it through their major.
Debatable: Agree to disagree, or disagree better? Broaden your perspective with sharp arguments on the most pressing issues of the week.
Med school is intrinsically hard and is sometimes harder than it needs to be. But it trains people to work at a very high level amid incredible stress.
“There is tremendous value in knowing they can wake you up in the middle of the night and you can still make a good decision,” says Adina Luba Kalet, director of the Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Med schools also instill a demanding professional ethos, which stretches back thousands of years. “Doctors are taught to run into the fire and not away from it,” Kalet continues. “Today, the young doctors feel free to say, ‘I’m terrified, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ That’s courage. We’re staying. We’re a team.”
It certainly doesn’t always happen, but the professional ideal is clear, she concludes. “You can save lives. And when you can’t save lives you can be in the darkness with patients even if there is nothing to offer. You stay.”
Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training.
This week
The Times Magazine ran a diary by an E.R. doctor named Helen Ouyang. To enter the E.R. with her in this crisis is to enter another world.
Normal procedures crumble under the crush of patients. A man dies unattended, sitting in a chair. A veteran physician feels stripped of his invincibility. The core of Ouyang’s diary is her acceptance that it’s impossible to do her work and still stay safe. “It seems impossible to avoid getting infected.”
Death and talk of death is everywhere. The virus seems to do whatever it wants. “We put our full minds and whole hearts into trying to save them. Then I see their bodies shut down anyway. They are alone.” Wearing the same masks for so long etches lines into her face, but she keeps going back in.
There’s absolutely no self-glorification here, just endurance. I’m reminded of Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s 1931 memoir. When hiring doctors for his hospital in the African jungle, he wrote, he never hired anyone who thought he was doing something grand and heroic. The only doctors who would last are those who thought what they were doing was as ordinary and necessary as doing the dishes: “There are no heroes of action — only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”
I’m also reminded of the maxim that excellence is not an action, it’s a habit. Tenacity is not a spontaneous flowering of good character. It’s doing what you were trained to do. It manifests not in those whose training spared them hardship but in those whose training embraced hardship and taught students to deal with it.
I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard.
The virus is another reminder that hardship is woven into the warp and woof of existence. Training a young person is training her or him to master hardship, to endure suffering and, by building something new from the wreckage, redeem it.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
