By Dr. Corinne Masur

For those of you who have children in middle school, Jr. High and High School, what do you think about trigger warnings?

Should kids be warned before they are assigned a book with content that might cause them some upset?

Or is it the role of schools (and colleges) to expose kids to all kinds of ideas and descriptions of all sorts of events?

And for that matter, is teaching the history of various wars worthy of a trigger warning (violence! death!) any less than teaching The Scarlet Letter or Madam Bovary (adultery!) or The Kite Runner (sexual violence!).

Is it the job of educational institutions to help kids to learn how to think about even upsetting subjects?

This brings us to the subject of trauma.  

Trauma is a word that is used carelessly these days. Almost anything can be called a trauma. But what trauma really is is an event that is utterly overwhelming to an individual, the effects of which can be lasting. 

So what do we do for kids who have been exposed to truly traumatic events in their own lives? Do we owe them a trigger warning so that they are not surprised – or triggered –  when material comes up in class or in an assignment that reminds them of their own experience? 

These are very difficult questions. 

And it is easy to see each side:

We do not want to intentionally re-traumatize kids.  

At the same time we DO want to teach them how to think about and talk about the upsetting things that have happened over the history of the world, that are written about in world literature and that are continuing to happen every day in our current world.

There are no trigger warnings in life, after all.

Recently, this issue was taken up by Cornell University when a group of students asked for trigger warnings to be routinely provided in class. The results of the debate may surprise you.

See below for an excellent article on the topic from The New York times:

Should College Come With Trigger Warnings? At Cornell, It’s a ‘Hard No.’

When the student assembly voted to require faculty to alert students to upsetting educational materials, administrators pushed back.

At Cornell University, the undergraduate student government wanted to require instructors to warn students about potentially traumatic course material. (Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times)

By Katherine Rosman | April 12, 2023

Last month, a Cornell University sophomore, Claire Ting, was studying with friends when one of them became visibly upset and was unable to continue her work.

For a Korean American literature class, the woman was reading “The Surrendered,” a novel by Chang-rae Lee about a Korean girl orphaned by the Korean War that includes a graphic rape scene. Ms. Ting’s friend had recently testified at a campus hearing against a student who she said sexually assaulted her, the woman said in an interview. Reading the passage so soon afterward left her feeling unmoored.

Ms. Ting, a member of Cornell’s undergraduate student assembly, believed her friend deserved a heads-up about the upsetting material. That day, she drafted a resolution urging instructors to provide warnings on the syllabus about “traumatic content” that might be discussed in class, including sexual assault, self-harm and transphobic violence.

The resolution was unanimously approved by the assembly late last month. Less than a week after it was submitted to the administration for approval, Martha E. Pollack, the university president, vetoed it.

“We cannot accept this resolution as the actions it recommends would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education,” Ms. Pollack wrote in a letter with the university provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff.

To some, the conflict illustrates a stark divide in how different generations define free speech and how much value they place on its absolute protection, especially at a time of increased sensitivity toward mental health concerns.

After decades of university battles over tinderbox issues of students’ rights, speech codes and how best to grapple with unpopular speakers and ideas, proponents of free speech are lauding Ms. Pollack’s quick and unequivocal action. They characterize it as part of a larger national shift, marked by university leadership more forcefully pushing back against efforts to shut down speakers and topics that might offend.

“What was unique about the Cornell situation is they rapidly turned in a response that was a ‘hard no,’” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan organization focused on issues of free speech. “There was no level of kowtowing. It was a very firm defense of what it means to get an education.”

Martha E. Pollack, the president of Cornell University, said the student resolution concerned her because it could impinge upon the freedom of faculty to select material and present it as they think is most beneficial. (Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times)

Ms. Morey called it the “Stanford Effect,” referring to a 10-page open letter written in March by Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford University Law School, in which she affirmed her decision to apologize to Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Donald J. Trump-appointed federal appeals judge, after hecklers interrupted his speech.

Earlier this month, Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Pennsylvania State University, released a four-minute video explaining why she believed a public university like Penn State had a legal and moral obligation to host speakers who espouse views that many may find abhorrent. “For centuries, higher education has fought against censorship and for the principle that the best way to combat speech is with more speech,” she said.

The current free speech issue at Cornell is one that has been debated on campuses across the country. “Content warnings” or “trigger warnings” refer to verbal or written alerts that assigned material, including academic writing or artistic expression, may involve sensitive or upsetting themes or details that may cause a student to have an emotional response tied to a personal experience.

Professors on some campuses use such warnings, though mandates are rare.

At Cornell, the students’ proposal suggested that the warnings be issued when course readings and discussions involved topics “including but not limited to: sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment, xenophobia.”

It stipulated that “students who choose to opt out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content.”

To Ms. Ting and other proponents of the measure, including the woman in the Korean American literature class, the administration’s swift rebuke was frustrating. “We have been characterized as triggered snowflakes,” said Shelby L. Williams, a sophomore who co-sponsored the resolution. “What we are asking for is greater context.”

The concept of trigger warnings first entered the cultural dialogue in the post-Vietnam War era, after post-traumatic stress distress disorder became a recognized health condition. PTSD episodes, which include rage and anxiety, are generally triggered by places, people, sounds or smells reminiscent of a traumatic experience, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Integrating trigger warnings into academia first took root in the 1990s but gained urgency after the #MeToo movement opened a dialogue about trauma. A study published in 2019 in the Journal of American College Health said 70 percent of college students report that they have been exposed to at least one traumatic event.

Students with diagnosed PTSD are entitled to care from universities and should be treated by trained professionals, said Amna Khalid, a professor of history at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., who has been writing and speaking about campus culture since 2016.

But, Professor Khalid said, addressing students’ mental health issues through trigger warnings is ineffective. It disempowers people by reducing their identities to traumatic events and “infantilizes” students whom professors should be preparing for adult life, she said.

“Life happens to you while you are driving, while you are walking, while you are in the supermarket,” she said. “The most challenging moments in life rarely come with warning.”

Professor Khalid called trigger-warning mandates an infringement on the academic freedom of professors whose role is to help students develop critical thinking skills.

“Sometimes that requires surprising them and challenging them in ways that are uncomfortable,” she said. “It diminishes the learning experience for students if professors hedge themselves.”

Some professors support the use of trigger warnings. “When used correctly,” said Connor Strobel, a professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago, “trigger warnings can open up a conversation” with students, enabling professors to alert them to available resources.

Professor Strobel recently asked students to read “The Second Sex,” by Simone de Beauvoir, and alerted them that the book included themes of “menstruation and menopause, and things that women are shamed for,” he said.

One student approached him and said that because of a family issue, she was concerned about reading it. He was willing to create an alternate assignment for her but first encouraged her to start the book and see if she found it more compelling than upsetting. “She found it very salient,” he said, and completed the assignment.

“At a university, there is no topic that should be off the table, but trigger warnings are a preview of coming attractions that treat students with humanity,” he added.

When Professor Strobel was a graduate student at University of California Irvine in 2016, he wrote a proposal asking a faculty government association to endorse the use of trigger warnings on campus.

That document became an inspiration for Ms. Ting’s Cornell resolution.

The Cornell measure was publicized by The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, and kicked up a conversation on Twitter. Normally, Ms. Pollack, the university president, takes about a month to weigh in on student assembly proposals. But in this case, she responded in just a few days.

The resolution concerned her, she said in an interview, because it could impinge upon the freedom of faculty to select material and present it as they think is most beneficial.

She also believes a rule that codifies the avoidance of upsetting topics runs contrary to the role of a university.

“Our students are coming at this with good intentions,” Ms. Pollack said, “but I think it’s a critical part of higher education to learn how to engage with challenging and difficult ideas. It teaches you to listen, compromise and advocate.”

It was the first assembly measure of more than 30 this academic year that the president has rejected.

Lee Humphreys, chair of the communication department at Cornell, was pleased by Ms. Pollack’s response.

In the past, she has presented her classes with violent, sexual and distasteful content to push students to consider who might be drawn to the programming and who might financially benefit from it.

“If I was really concerned about making sure I was covering all of my bases in terms of trigger warnings, it would make my life easier to not show the kind of content in the class that I would otherwise show, just in case there was something that I was overlooking,” Professor Humphreys said. “I think that’s doing a disservice to the class and the students, to avoid things that are difficult.”

Professor Humphreys often previews for students what is to come in a lesson, as a part of “reinforcing pedagogical goals,” she said, and aims to be sensitive to students.

“Just because you don’t support a mandate doesn’t mean that you don’t support an inclusive learning environment,” she said.

Students had a mixed reaction to the resolution, with the conservative student newspaper, The Cornell Review, calling it “an embarrassment” in an editorial published last week. “Hiding from ideas is no less than intellectual cowardice. It’s exactly the opposite of what this country needs,” the paper said.

Cullen O’Hara, a Cornell University senior, is the co-editor-in-chief of the Cornell Review, a conservative student paper, which has editorialized against the content warning proposal. (Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times)

Cullen O’Hara, co-editor-in-chief of The Review, said that the editorial board did not believe the student assembly represented a majority of students and saw the resolution as endemic of broader free speech issues.

“We are very opposed to trigger warnings which we think would chill the discussion in classrooms, which we already believe are one-sided,” said Mr. O’Hara, a senior.

The student assembly will discuss the trigger-warning resolution with the administration on Thursday, at a previously scheduled meeting between Ms. Pollack and the assembly.

“I think the response is purposeful in focusing on the wrong part of the resolution,” said Valeria Valencia, a senior and the Cornell University Student Assembly president, “turning it into an issue of academic freedom and not one of protecting students, when both things can coexist.”

Valeria Valencia, a Cornell University senior and president of the student assembly, supported the resolution on content warnings. (Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times)

Ms. Ting, the writer of the resolution, said she is considering amending the proposal. “But first I want to do more due diligence and reach out to faculty and administration to see how we can find the right balance,” she said.

Recently while talking to Dr. Pauline Boss (author of Ambiguous Loss and The Myth of Closure), she said something remarkable. Although we were not really talking about parenting, as an aside, she said, “I think parenting, the way it’s done today, is unsustainable”.

And then, just today I saw an article in The Atlantic on the same topic (copied below because it’s important to read in its entirety).

Parenting today is SO intensive that it is exhausting parents and making them feel ever guilty that they are not doing enough. And it is not necessarily benefitting children.

I noticed a trend in the parent-baby groups I run, starting about twenty years ago.  Parents were suddenly feeling that they had to make their own baby food, they had to be “present” with their babies and children at all times, they had to get down on the floor and play as often as possible and they had to sign their children up for music and language classes starting in early toddlerhood.

But why?

In previous generations, parents were too busy to get down on the floor to play – children were sent outside to play or expected to play on their own in the house. One meal was made for breakfast, lunch and dinner and children were expected to eat it.  

You know what I’m talking about here – every child was not the focus of attention every minute. 

But somehow the demands of parenting have escalated exponentially.  To consider themselves good parents, parents now have to exhaust themselves all day, every day, meeting every need of every child.

And this IS unsustainable. 

Read the below and see what YOU think.

From The Atlantic:

How to Quit Intensive Parenting

It’s the prevailing American child-rearing model across class lines. But there’s a better way.

By Elliot Haspel, May 10, 2022

Intensive parenting—the dominant model of modern American child-rearing—is a bit like smoking: The evidence shows that it’s unhealthy, yet the addiction can be hard to kick. I’d like to suggest strategies that could help society quit overparenting, and they require parents, policy makers, and even the childless to pitch in. But first, we need to understand why intensive parenting—whereby mothers and fathers overextend their time and money curating their child’s life in hopes of maximizing the child’s future success—prevails.

Often used interchangeably with more derisive terms such as helicopter parenting, bulldozer parenting, and snowplow parenting, intensive parenting has its appeals. Scholars suggest that it first arose among middle-class families in the mid-to-late 20th century, amid shrinking manufacturing jobs, globalization, growing wealth inequality, a sense that children were both “vulnerable and moldable,” and a general feeling that American triumphalism was perhaps not a guarantee. In response to this anxiety, parents started pushing harder to ensure their kids’ future stability. Throughout the 2010s, as precarity continued to increase, the intensive-parenting ideology stretched its tendrils across class lines.

Rafts of research prove that intensive parenting mainly serves to burn out parents while harming children’s competence and mental health. But the facts are losing. In a 2018 survey, 75 percent of respondents rated various intensive-parenting scenarios as “very good” or “excellent,” and less than 40 percent said the same about scenarios showing a non-intensive approach. (An example that respondents grappled with: When a child says they’re bored, should a parent find an activity to sign them up for or suggest they go outside and play?)

What parents need, then, is not another bromide against micromanaging their kids, but pragmatic steps to alter course and still feel good about it. This is where the idea of “good enough” parenting comes in. The phrase was coined in 1953 by the British pediatrician and psychologist Donald Winnicott, and we can now update his work. Winnicott pushed back strongly against the idea that children require perfection from their parents, or that children should be perfectible. “There is room for all kinds of [parents] in the world,” Winnicott wrote. “And some will be good at one thing, and some good at another. Or shall I say, some will be bad at one thing, and some bad at another.” He added another idea too: That no one-size-fits-all parenting model exists. “You are specialists in this particular matter of the care of your own children. I want to encourage you to keep and defend this specialist knowledge. It cannot be taught.”

“Good enough” does not mean mediocre or apathetic (the not-good-enough parent is real), but requires acknowledging the point beyond which attempts at further optimization cause more harm than good. Given reasonable conditions and plenty of love, there are many ways in which kids can have happy childhoods and emerge as healthy, conscientious, successful adults. The developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik likens this approach to gardening. Where intensive parents are carpenters, hammering children into a particular shape one stroke at a time, gardening parents pour their labor into creating preconditions of “love, safety, and stability” for their kids to grow in potentially unpredictable ways.

So how do we move away from the cult of intensive parenting? Very carefully and intentionally. We have to start thinking of parenting not as a set of instructions but as several dials. Research suggests that certain dials, such as “display love,” “validate feelings,” and “set aside some regular quality time,” should absolutely be turned up to 10. Others, such as “solve your child’s (nonserious) problem for them,” should be pretty low. And many, such as “provide educational support” and “offer enrichment activities,” should be somewhere in the center. Your exact dial settings will depend on your values and your family situation, of course. All 10s and all ones are almost always a bad idea.

We can’t calibrate those dials correctly, however, without unraveling some societal myths that perpetuate intensive parenting. For instance, many parents overestimate the extent to which their day-to-day parenting choices influence child development, fueling unnecessary pressure. Similarly, the perception that kids face enormous physical dangers outside the home, which is often not reflective of reality, influences limits on many children’s autonomy. And perhaps no myth has done more damage than the idea that one must attend an elite college to secure financial stability. Matt Feeney, the author of the book Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, has called the college-admissions process “truly one of the most influential forces for the steering of human behaviors and the formation of human attitudes in the United States.”

The “wage premium” for those who graduate college versus those who don’t continues to be very real (although it has narrowed in recent years, and elite-college access remains hugely inequitable). But the differences among college-completers are much more modest, particularly if the goal is middle-class security as opposed to extreme wealth. The Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that by age 33, people of any income bracket who attended Ivy League and other top schools ended up earning more, on average, than nearly 80 percent of their birth-year peers. Yet those who attended non-elite four-year colleges still ended up earning more than nearly 70 percent of their similarly aged peers. In other words, parents should be reassured—and reassuring one another—that their kid attending a mid-tier university instead of an Ivy, or even taking a track toward a well-paying trade, is an equal cause for celebration.

Moving away from intensive parenting will also require a culture in which parents’ needs outweigh child optimizations. We need to normalize not adding more extracurriculars (and all the attendant time and money) to our schedule; not spending hours completing our children’s homework with (or for) them. To be sure, parental intervention is necessary at times—securing a tutor for a struggling reader, ensuring college financial-aid applications are completed—but those times are limited in scope and merely require attentive, rather than intensive, efforts.

At the same time, we need to normalize saying yes to prioritizing adult friendships and an adequate amount of sleep. We need to reassure one another—explicitly, publicly—that being a whole person is being a good parent. Generally, content parents are less prone to conflict and more prone to listening, and the opposite also holds true. Small, everyday parenting decisions may not have a massive impact on kids, but the causal link between parental well-being and child well-being is quite strong. Anxiety-driven intensive parenting has even been implicated as one factor in the rising youth mental-health crisis. Freedom from intensive methods provides both parents and their children with the ability to fashion a healthier life.

This is neither a purely individual problem nor an endeavor for parents alone: American public policy encourages intensive parenting. The United States lacks affordable child care and paid family leave, tolerates massive income inequality, and enshrines few employee protections, such as fair workweek laws. This setup generates tremendous stress and insecurity, and many parents respond by clenching tighter around their children’s lives. The “free-market family” system, as the author Maxine Eichner fashions it—in which families are largely on their own to meet child-rearing needs with limited public options—leaves parents competing against one another for resources kept artificially scarce. Those same competitive forces that isolate and exhaust parents are a barrier to them rallying together and demanding that lawmakers pass pro-family policies. A conscious effort will be necessary to see that, as Dana Suskind and Lydia Denworth put it in Parent Nation, “the fate of each child, no matter how well nurtured, is, ultimately, intimately intertwined with the fates of all children.”

Changing the nation’s dominant parenting model might feel daunting. But in seeking a replacement for intensive parenting, we shouldn’t harken back to a mythical yesteryear: Steven Mintz, the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, writes that “there has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic.” Instead, we need a model that meets the current context while rejecting false premises. Intensive parenting, for now, has the momentum of a surging river. By replacing mindsets and policies of scarcity with mindsets and policies of abundance, carpentry with gardening, competition with solidarity, we can erect a dam. And a new, healthier way forward can emerge: not more, not perfect, but good enough.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/intensive-helicopter-parent-anxiety/629813/

Our hearts go out to the grieving parents, children and community of the Robb School in Uvalde, Texas, a town we would not have known much about were it not for an 18 year old gunman. It is time to work toward better gun control laws in the U. S. to protect our children and to make all of us safer.