Thanks, another excellent article. I spent many years running a weekly student mental health clinic. I think that the influences set out by Mary Harrington are very important but that the list of causes needs to be extended.

A major cause of the problems that I dealt with was sexual traumatisation. This could take different forms e.g. rape (often occurring around puberty), intimate partner violence and abuse, and childhood sexual abuse. One factor that increases the exposure of girls and young women to experiences such as these is the withdrawal from their lives of their fathers.

An obvious paternal role is the care and protection of children. In the absence of a father, this falls on the mother, who may be a harassed, economically-impoverished single parent, who has to work full-time. The absence of a father creates a gap, which may be filled by a step-father or a series of maternal boyfriends. While the majority of these cause no harm or can be a positive influence, many are indifferent, hostile or frankly abusive. The young woman without a caring father will often seek a substitute in the arms of a boyfriend, who uses her emotional dependence to exploit and harm her. 
 
The consequences of sexual abuse include all of the features described by Mary Harrington. It may also explain the flight of many young women from the female identity. The sense of betrayal and abandonment by fathers perhaps explains some of the rage directed against the ‘patriarchy’.

The ‘snowflake’ generation is the product of a social culture that has devalued parenting (especially in fathers) in favour of self-indulgence and hedonism. There is a real concern that we have a younger generation that will struggle to provide stable parenting to their own children.

(if anyone is interested, more information here: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/improving-care/better-mh-policy/college-reports/mental-health-of-higher-education-students-(cr231).pdf) 

As is often the case a very interesting article from Mary Harrington. Clearly something useful for further research.
The important question is how should authorities treat these outbreaks of meltdown when students meet others that have upsetting ideas. Simply to accede to the hysterical demands does no favour to the regressed students in meltdown instead they should set up sessions where students can try to discuss conflicting ideas rationally while being encouraged to accept different ideas do not in fact affect their safety.
At the moment authorities all too often act like inadequate parents that instantly agree to the demands of their children so fostering a generation of intolerant brats that can’t stand any contradiction. Institutions are like bad parents that fail to control their children to the detriment of those around them.
Confidence is built by facing your fears. Students need to be able to tolerate differences of opinion if we are not to descend into a dystopian world where dissent is suppressed. Unfortunately perhaps there are all too many who would welcome such an authoritarian world.

My experience is precisely the opposite: the more molly-coddled and protected the child the more woke they are likely to be.
Maybe wokeness is less of a reaction to something (or a lack of something) than it is the continuation of a trend. All must have prizes, parents deferring to their 9 year old on important life decisions, the lionisation of ‘lived experiences’. the worship of feelings, two decades of political correctness. All those things and more have led us to where we are today.

“she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she disagrees politically or philosophically”.”
I’m increasingly not in a position to be judgemental about this. There are times when I simply can’t bring myself to read the Guardian, and whenever I encounter the capitalisation of “black” and the non-capitalisation of “white”, I immediately stop reading.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement address –
“ Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”

I think Mary is on to something (including being a bit more sympathetic towards the wokesters, perhaps). My second-earliest memory is of learning that my mom was going to die some day. She told me. I must have been asking questions, as kids eventually do, that she could not get easily around anymore. I was only three or four, but I clearly remember where we were, me on the floor, her on the couch, the color of the carpet and couch, the size of the windows in the room. It was a moment that clearly affected me. It’s still with me 50+ years on. Not in a bad way. More as a bit of evidence that, as a young child, moments of learning unsettling things about life may stick with you. She still remembers a year or so later when I asked her to walk behind me as she was taking me to kindergarten because I was a ‘big boy’ and was kind of embarrassed. We laugh about it, but, yikes… I don’t remember that one, but it clearly stuck with her! I used to wonder if it bothered the career couples that I’ve known that someone else was likely seeing their child’s ‘firsts’ – first steps, first words, etc. But, I never really thought about it the other way around. It’s probably impossible to know how moments of discovery that are truly unsettling or frightening or deeply saddening for a child (let alone any abuse which I never experienced) may affect them. I can’t claim that moment had a specific effect on me. But, I sure do remember it.

I very much enjoy Mary’s articles and respect her analyses and insights but I feel I must comment for the first time on this one. As a general principle I believe that psychological explanations of social phenomena are inappropriate: we are in Margaret Mead territory here. The current culture of victimhood and all the other various aspects of “woke” culture seems to me to represent a response to the intensification of competitive individualism in the wider culture resulting in the retreat into what would have been small egalitarian enclave groups but with the advent of the internet these small groups have now become extensive. They still police their boundaries assiduously while resisting any attempt to form internal hierarchies resulting in an inherent factionalism. My model for this derives from the ideas of the anthropologist Mary Douglas around cultural bias originally known as grid/group theory. One of the most succinct expositions of this in her occasional paper for the Royal Anthropological Institute entitled “Cultural Bias”. She is probably better known to a wider audience for books such as “Natural Symbols”.

Again an other example of Chesterton’s fence. As brain development is to be considered critical, 80% of neuronal connections before the age of 4, there has to be some long term influence in the way we treat young human beings. Yet I am afraid our societies tend to treat them as things. Children are however considered as obstacles and costs.
Anyway an other great article by Mary Harrington that should have consequences.

Fascinating. There is reason for optimism though. I wonder what happens when these kids collide with the brick wall of reality: They will have to recalibrate I suppose.

I usually like Mary Harrington’s work but I find the theory she proposes here very unconvincing. I don’t have children, but many of my friends do – now in an age range of late teens to young graduates, and some are shocked by the illiberal “woke” political opinions of these children, especially knowing they never got them from parents! Among these mostly rather affluent, and highly educated young people, I see no correlation whatsoever been some emotional deprivation – in the sense of early institutional care – in childhood and their views now…Some of the most “snow flakey” had devoted stay at home Mums in first years, or even Dads. From a historical point of view, if the theory is right then the whole of the British upper-class should for centuries have been “snowflakes”, and much of the working-class too, in families where women had too much domestic work and too many children to offer undivided care, and quite often worked long hours too.
If I had to characterise anything distinctive about trends in parenting and childcare in the last few decades, at least in the middle-class, it would not be parental neglect – but the rise of childcare doctrines (in parallel with educational doctrines) that stress the imperative of child-centred upbringing and schooling, and the terrible potential consequences of frustrating or thwarting the child’s expressed needs in any way, or of any kind of authoritarianism. And it would be a well-intentioned but maybe unfortunate double tendency arising from it. First, compared to my own upbringing by what were fairly liberal parents in the Sixties and Seventies, more recent liberal parents (as soon as is safely possible), treat their children as sort of pals and equals and don’t like to pull adult rank. But second, rather paradoxically, they are far more protective and anxious and do the helluva lot more for their older as well as younger children – organising activities, making sure they are safe, ferrying around, checking where they are via phones etc, and now expecting to accommodate and help children well into adulthood…than earlier parents. One result of this is a lack of personal rebelliousness…(my generation was terribly keen to gain freedom from adult authority, but when parents are chums, always helpful, not disapproving of a sex life, trying to like the same music etc…and also offering help and protection, why rebel?). Another result is a very much enlarged expectation of continuing support and protection and a lack of experience of being challenged. A desire for all the privileges of adulthood as well as the (unacknowledged) privileges of the child. I fear a lot of these kids simply don’t know how to grow up, because they have never needed to do so and are decreasingly encouraged to do so…and so their rage – where it is genuine and not politically stylised and merely fashionable – is an adolescent rage, and not based on any infant experience.

Sorry this is nonsense. Many children had far harsher upbringings in days gone by. Upper classes handing care to wet nurses and nannies from birth. Lower classes having to survive enormous families where adequate care was impossible or having mothers die
In childbirth and seeing brothers and sisters sicken and die of a huge variety of infant diseases. Think of all those sent to be raised in workhouses. I put it meltdown culture down to the disintegration of a shared system of values and beliefs. Human beings have religions because they can’t function without them. We threw ours away. I understand why. We wrongly assumed it was meant to be believed literally and of course scientific advancements made that impossible. Climate worship, self worship etc unfortunately turn out to be a less comprehensive and meaningful philosophies than teachings evolved over thousands of years.