Principal Stacey Bobo sent an email on Thursday to parents of students at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private pre-K-12th grade school in New York City, detailing what school officials were doing to protect children from Election Day.
“No matter the election outcome,” Bobo wrote, the school will “create space to provide students with the support they may need.”
To create a safe space for children, the school was not giving out homework on Election Day, the email said. Nor would students be counted absent if they chose not to attend school on Wednesday (or whichever day results are announced).
Many people took issue with the school’s decision, including comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who had previously pulled his youngest son from Fieldston over his displeasure with the school’s culture.
“This is why the kids hated it,” Seinfeld told the New York Times. “What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people? To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing, for ungodly sums of money.”
The media were quick to mock the comedian, including Vanity Fair, which dubbed the former sitcom star the “spokesperson for the world’s cranky old men” and said that “Seinfeld doesn’t understand why kids might find this election upsetting.”
This last line is silly, however, and shoddy journalism.
Nowhere in his comments to the Gray Lady does Seinfeld say he can’t understand why people might be upset by election results. Nor does he suggest it. In fact, his statement implies the opposite: that children should go to school even if they feel upset because their candidate lost.
The reality is, there will be a lot of people, children and adults, who are unhappy when the dust from Election Day settles.
People are deeply invested in this election, for better and worse. Some high-profile people say they’ll consider leaving the country if former President Donald Trump wins, while others say red states should consider secession if Vice President Kamala Harris wins.
These are, many would agree, extreme responses to a presidential election. And they are likely to turn out to be the typical idle threats people make during election season.
That said, the data indicate that America is experiencing historical levels of election anxiety. A new survey from the American Psychological Association found that 77% of respondents say they feel a “significant source of stress in their lives” over the future of the nation.
“We are seeing the highest levels of election-related stress,” Vaile Wright, the senior director of the office of healthcare innovation at the American Psychological Association, told NBC News.
The data show the stress is affecting Democrats (79%), Republicans (80%), and independents (73%) roughly equally.
Bryan Sexton, a psychologist and the director of the Duke Center for the Advancement of Well-Being Science, offered a simple explanation for the high numbers.
“Our brains are basically threat detectors,” he told NBC.
This implies that a higher percentage of the country now sees the political opposition as a threatening force, which is no doubt why tens of millions are going to feel crushed when this election is over and they see that threatening force in power.
Seinfeld’s point, however, wasn’t that people shouldn’t feel upset. His point was that we shouldn’t be teaching children to “buckle” when adversity strikes or stay home and wallow when they are upset.
This is no small matter. Learning to power through, even when we don’t feel up to it, is one of the keys to success in life.
Going to practice when you’re sick, going to the audition when you’re terrified, getting up and going to work when you’re tired or hungover, having the courage to have that difficult conversation you’re terrified of having — these are the habits and choices that develop our mental fortitude or destroy it, and by teaching children to stay home if “their” candidate loses, we’re teaching them emotional fragility.
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It’s very much an example of what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the culture of “safetyism” that is now plaguing young people, which he defines as “an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
No matter who wins the presidency, there will be anger, tears, and outrage. That’s unfortunate but inevitable in a country as divided as the U.S. in 2024. What we should strive to avoid are the emotional meltdowns witnessed in 2020 and 2016, which resulted in widespread election denialism, protests, riots, and mass counseling for “traumatized” students.
Jon Miltimore is a senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.