This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 5th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In an era of helicopter parenting, something been lost the concept of safety has crept so far that it often includes the dubious right of emotional safety and violators better watch out.

What does that mean for young people in the workforce, in

academia, in politics, and the ability of those people to bounce back from failure?

Greg Lucianov is author with Jonathan Hight of The Coddling of the American Mind. We spoke last week.

As we were talking before we began recording about children and this overwhelming desire that parents will recognize to protect their

kids from you know what what seems sometimes feels like in retrospect pretty mundane, not particularly

threatening dangers, it's really hard to combat. And yet we really want to do that. And it seems that

we have institutions now that carry the kind of protection that parents want to

provide their kids for many many years. How did we get here? You know my pet theory on this I talked a little bit about it in a short book called freedom from speech and at the time I called these problems of comfort but in the book we refer to these as problems of progress because we think that's

actually a little bit more accurate and that essentially you know having a society

where we have enough sort of free time and leisure and to move on to second order things like how well

protected my kids are is actually a relatively good problem to have but that

doesn't mean it doesn't create very serious problems of its own and for a long time there was a very

common-sensical rationale that look at all these strides we've made by being

concerned about trial safety very real strides that came to, you know, lower

fatalities due to car accidents to paint to poisons, we actually made a lot of

progress in this way. So you know if a little bit of being concerned with safety is good,

what's the downside of being completely obsessed with it? And there wasn't a lot of people

saying that there were real downsides for a long for at least

you know in the last 10 or 15 years but people like me and my co-author John

...