I have been thinking about the difference between accommodations and coddling. On one side, there are a lot of people who claim that all accommodations are coddling: that giving someone extra time on a test, or allowing them to work from home, or providing them medications that allow them to function better, is keeping them from developing the essential moral fiber to participate in society. On the other hand, there are a lot of people that claim that coddling isn’t a thing that happens, that no one ever infantilizes neurodivergent people, treating them like children who need to be protected from things that are too hard and scary for them.
I think both sides are untrue. Accommodations exist, coddling exists, they are often difficult to tell apart, and one must pay careful attention to figure out which one is which.
[ETA: I have listed two fundamental differences between accommodations and coddling here. I think that they are two clusters; however, it is possible that a proposed way of coping with neurodivergence fits one category and not another, and in that case we must be even more careful to figure out which one it is. I apologize that in the previous version of the post this was not clear.]
One of the fundamental differences between accommodations and coddling, I think, is this: coddling makes you weaker, but accommodations make you stronger.
Consider the dyslexic person who gets access to audiobooks. Suddenly they can read much more easily. They can experience great works of literature and poetry, learn about history and science. They are better informed than they would otherwise be and more capable in their studies, at work, and as citizens. They can do more than they could without the audiobooks.
On the other hand, when I’m depressed, I usually don’t want to do anything; I want to lie around on the couch under a blanket making sad noises. It does not actually help to say “it’s okay, Ozy, I will do everything for you and you will just lie under a blanket making sad noises.” If I tidy my room, I will get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment; if someone else tidies my room, I will just feel worse, because I can’t even do that. And it can be self-perpetuating: the longer other people do everything for me, instead of helping me do things for myself, the more I end up under a blanket being sad and the less I am capable of doing.
It can require a lot of discernment to figure out whether something is strengthening you or making you weaker. For instance, imagine that you’re an agoraphobe who uses Instacart to buy your groceries. It’s possible that not having to go outside in order to eat means that you go hungry less, which gives you a lot more ability to do things; because you spend less energy and time working up the nerve to go grocery shopping, you can do more things that matter to you. On the other hand, it’s also possible you’re using Instacart as a way to avoid doing things which frighten you. Instead of practicing courage, you’re giving in to fear. For the same person, the same thing can be accommodations in some circumstances and coddling in others; it can be really hard to figure out.
Another fundamental difference is that accommodations are something you decide, and coddling is something other people decide.
There is a really important difference between saying “I can’t do this” and someone else saying “you can’t do this.” There is a difference between saying “ugh, I can’t handle making this phone call, can you make it?” and someone else saying “every time you make a phone call, you have a panic attack; I’m going to make it for you.” There is a difference between saying “given my executive functioning issues, college is too hard for me, so I’m going to drop out” and someone else saying “you’re probably going to fail a class if you take one, so I’m not going to let you.”
People have a right to struggle, to make mistakes, to take risks, to do things that scare us, and to fail. Neurodivergent people have that right just as much as neurotypicals do. I think the most pernicious part of coddling is when– often from the highest of motives, distressed at the pain we cause ourselves– people take away this right from us. When they wrap us up inside a cotton-ball world where there are no sharp edges we might cut ourselves on.
When you don’t do things that are hard for you, your achievements aren’t meaningful: if you didn’t work or struggle, how can you take pride in what you’ve accomplished? You might as well skip playing a video game and instead stare at a screen that says YOU WON. When you aren’t allowed to fail, you aren’t allowed to try new things. Your world can get very small. And when someone else is making decisions for you– even for your own good– they are substituting their values for yours, and instead of having a life that is full of things you want, it’s full of things that other people think you ought to want.
An interesting outcome of defining the words the way I define them is that many anti-trigger-warning people– the ones who say that if you have strong negative reactions when exposed to certain material you should be in therapy, rather than in the classroom– are the ones who are really coddling rape survivors. The decision of whether a rape survivor should go to college should be made by the individual rape survivor, not by thinkpiece writers. And in many cases allowing a person to avoid or prepare themselves for certain material allows them to be educated when they otherwise wouldn’t. Imagine a veteran with PTSD who has flashbacks when she hears loud noises but who wants to learn physics; she is clearly stronger as a physicist who occasionally skips loud demonstrations than as someone who never takes a class where there might be a noise.
Thing of Things 
I’m sure anyone can pull a few nutters from the Twitter firehose, but is there really have a large faction of the population who think that antipsychotics or antidepressants weaken the moral fiber of those who use them?
I would dispute that the “moral fiber” argument is held by most people who are against the most controversial forms of “coddling,” like trigger warnings and things like setting up a room with Play-Doh and puppy videos when a speaker comes to campus.
The strongest arguments, in my opinion, are that it imposes unreasonable costs on everybody else and it can amount to a heckler’s veto.
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Of course there are; that’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s position on antidepressants.
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There really, definitely are people who think psychiatric meds are just a way of “avoiding responsibility” or “coddling”, and way more than you would think. It’s not common among liberals, but is abundant among the conservative factions I’ve been around.
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“Another fundamental difference is that accommodations are something you decide, and coddling is something other people decide.”
So if you ask somebody else to clean your room for you when you’re depressed, it’s an accommodation? Doesn’t it still lead to the whole “OMG I can’t even do that” thought process?
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I think the obvious analogy is to weight-lifting. You won’t get strong if you keep lifting the same weights, but if your new weights are too heavy you can’t lift them at all. You have to figure out what the appropriate level of weight is at your stage of development.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can figure out by sitting and thinking about it, or by following purely meta-level principles. You have to lift weights to figure out the appropriate stress level, and you actually have to research a disability to figure out what’s coddling and what’s accommodation. Obviously there are exceptions for extreme cases (I probably can’t bench-press a ton, and saying the USA is meritocratic probably doesn’t need a trigger warning), but most of the time you can’t figure it out without object-level research. Which sucks because I like meta-level better than object-level.
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What about when meaningful object-level research takes a generation and a complete lack of bias? The line to draw between coddling and accommodation, according to society, has moved wildly in the past 100 years and will continue to do so for thousands more, without converging on a single point.
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One thing about weight training is, if you’re serious about it, you can expect to lift more and more over time. You aren’t just finding the amount of weight that’s right for you and staying there; you’re pushing the envelope and developing your ability.
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I was nodding along with you until this:
“Another fundamental difference is that accommodations are something you decide, and coddling is something other people decide.”
Here, you leapt to an unjustified position, using very selective reasoning. You’re ignoring the class of situations where people choose what’s worse for them, and the class of situations where other people choose what’s better, on the criteria you set forth earlier – whether or not something makes you weaker or stronger. You went from “this is a complex situation” to “and therefore I’m entirely right”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an individualist, I’m all for people making their own choices, even when it hurts them. But you don’t get to ignore the cases where they make the wrong choices to rationalize why the people who you disagree with, ideologically, are wrong. (Your logic also proves too much. White people who fought for black voting rights were coddling black people, by this line of reasoning – and so were the white people who fought against them.)
The situation is, as you begin, complex and difficult to disentangle. If you manage to disentangle a complex situation, and it conveniently comes out that your point of view is entirely correct and your opponents’ points of view are entirely incorrect, you probably haven’t actually managed to disentangle it.
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I am referring to people’s individual lives, not to their political positions. Individual choices have the interesting trait that I can choose one thing, while you choose a different thing. However, it is not possible that black people simultaneously be able to vote and not able to vote.
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The act of taking away someone else’s individual choice – of making their decision for them – is pretty much the nature of politics.
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That seems wrong, especially in this instance, since it was all about making sure that people who couldn’t choose to vote were able to choose to vote. Indeed, people often engage in politics to expand the individual choices available to them. Sometimes this means constraining other peoples’ individual choices, and sometimes it doesn’t.
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Your logic also proves too much. White people who fought for black voting rights were coddling black people, by this line of reasoning – and so were the white people who fought against them.
They almost always were not, in that they were, in the general case, working with and alongside black activists who were interested in having their support and assistance. However, white people who fought against voting rights for black people often really were coddling black people, using Ozy’s definition, and white supremacist arguments often reflect that.
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I have an ordered three-pronged test for determining what medical accommodations are appropriate. Any proposed accommodation that fails even one of these prongs is one I will object to (or turn down, if offered to me).
1: If logistics permitted it, would it be okay to give this accommodation to everyone?
2: Is there a limitation that prevents us from just giving this accommodation to everyone?
3: Is the person asking for this accommodation among the n people who most need it, where n is the number of people we can afford to accommodate?
If the test fails at prong 1, then the “accommodation” is what many people call “coddling” (though this is not always the same as Ozzy’s definition). If the test fails at prong 2, then the “accommodation” is really just an option everyone should have but that is missing for some reason. If the test fails at prong 3, then the accommodation is fine to give out to the people who need it the most, but the person in question is not one of those people.
Example – Elevators. Elevators typically fail prong 2. If you’re going to install an elevator, just let everyone use it. Some exceptions can occur if your location is hugely overcrowded while having time-sensitive events (conventions, I’m looking at you!) or if some of your elevators break down. In such cases you can restrict elevator use to only those who most need it, but it should be recognized that this sucks and that you’d rather just have more elevators.
Example – Extended Time. Extended time for most learning disabilities pass the test in most classrooms, but for some things they fail. The main hurdle is prong 1, which requires us to ask whether an assignment is about ascertaining how much the students know, or ascertaining how quickly they can do something. If the former, extended time is needed for any student who can’t show how much they know in the allotted time (or as many of them as we can manage). If the latter, extended time is not okay for anyone.
Example – Trigger Warnings. Trigger warnings usually fail prong 2 in a kind of weird way, in that there’s really no reason why we should restrict advanced knowledge of content to specifically stuff people find PTSD-triggering, particularly when such triggers are already so diverse. A better solution would be to implement a widely general dictionary of “content notices” for all sorts of content and make that accessible to everyone. Then students with PTSD can use it to navigate their PTSD while other students can still use it just to figure out which courses they think they’ll like and which ones they’ll hate (without having to claim to be “triggered” by such content). It would also eliminate the “this content is on the list because it’s horrible” connotation that too often comes with trigger warnings.
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Extra time in exams is an interesting case, as exams are a quite artificial technique for judging whether people are likely to be good at a certain job. Thus, the value of an exam is directly related to correlation between score and ability to do well at jobs which require the qualification being tested by the exam.
Three possibilities stand out:
1) Time pressure in an exam decreases its predictive power, as what you can do well is more important than how fast you can do it. Solution is to make exams longer for everyone.
2) Exams with time pressure are more predictive than those without, but, due to the written nature, certain subgroups (dyslexics, visually impaired etc.) are disproportionately slow compared to how well they would perform in the real world. Extra time for certain impairments makes sense, although I doubt the ‘one size fits all’ model of, say, 25% more time for everyone with a condition on the list is optimal.
3) Exams with time pressure are more predictive than those without, including for those who work slower. Extra time reduces predictive power of such exams (Although it may be better for society to sacrifice predictive power for reducing unemployment of the disabled, or something).
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Your suggested “predictive power” metric is a great ideal, but I think it’s often impossible to actually implement in academia. For example, a professor who writes their own exams really can’t know in advance which time allotment is the most predictive for each student. Also, a given test might have its maximum predictive power at different time allotments depending on which job the student ends up in five years down the line, which is almost never known in advance. This is where I’d suggest an approximation like “Am I trying to measure speed, or knowledge content?”
Of course, if you’re an employer crafting a test for a specific position that you routinely need to hire in, then you’re on the other extreme. Predictive power is a readily identifiable thing that you can strive to optimize directly, so forget the “speed vs content” kludge I presented earlier and work more directly with the categories here.
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FYI this quote “You might as well skip playing a video game and instead stare at a screen that says YOU WON” was especially effective at explaining this to me. Thanks for that.
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You’re presuming that the actual people in need of accommodation will only ask for it when it’s healthy. Without that assumption, the latter half of your post doesn’t work.
But more importantly- I have no way to get you this, but you might benefit from getting to know the sorts of things that students request as accommodation. I know several people who work at universities in courses that involve physical activity. I regularly hear stories about students requesting “accommodations” that aren’t actually authorized by the university department that handles disability and accommodation issues. These are often presented by the students alongside an implied threat- “accommodate my outside-normal-channels request or I’ll complain that you’re mistreating me and discriminating against me.” Whether this works depends on the department head and how much they’re willing to back up the faculty when the faculty sticks to rules as written.
With respect to trigger warnings, you phrase things in terms of making college attendable for people with PTSD.
But of course that’s not a fair summary of the issue at all.
If you have PTSD you can already register that fact with the university and request accommodations. If there’s a specific reason to think those aren’t working, let’s hear it.
The trigger warning push is something far different, and reads to people like you’re giving your approval to the mass of pushy and allegedly self diagnosed students who want to not do work but still get course credit.
The trigger warning pushback comes from the implicit assumption that accommodations for PTSD sufferers should be available to everyone regardless of whether they really have PTSD. Because that either implies that we’re intentionally creating an abusable system out of naivite, or that we think the typical student has a similar level of fragility to someone with PTSD. Both are objectionable.
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No, I’m not. I have the right to make decisions that are unhealthy for me, because protecting me from making unhealthy decisions is coddling me. That is probably the most central case of the term! Neurotypicals have the right to make unhealthy decisions; so do neurodivergent people.
College disability services is in the unique position where a lot of the people able to jump through all the hoops necessary to get disability services are, well, not disabled. So naturally they see lots of fakers while actual disabled people don’t get served. This is why I think we should route around disability services as much as possible. (Although in practice I don’t think trigger warnings are a particularly good idea.)
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Scenario-
John Doe says, “I can’t handle X, please handle it for me. My weakness makes it just, or even obligatory, that you accommodate me in this way.”
Jane Roe says, “Ok.”
But actually John Doe could have handled X and it would have been healthy for him to do so; he just prefers that Jane Roe deal with it so he doesn’t have to. So he revels and indulges in his weakness in order to obtain treatment he would not otherwise receive, and Jane coddles him by providing it.
THAT is the most central example of coddling. Or at least that’s the one you seem to be responding to. But your argument is set up to define and contextualize “coddling” so as not to include that.
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Explicitly: Your second definition of coddling versus accommodation directly conflicts with your first. There are situations where somebody -asks- for coddling, as per the definition you provided first, of that which makes you weaker rather than stronger. Saying that you’re permitting to ask for unhealthy things is dodging the criticism.
More fundamentally, there’s a third criteria which isn’t being directly considered, but which underlays the discussion: Need. You more or less acknowledged that people ask for things they don’t need, which is to say, are asking for coddling (fakers), but in doing so, are deciding for them whether or not they need it. You’re making a decision on the part of other people whether or not they need something. (That we’re talking about an abstract class of people doesn’t really matter; you believe this class of people exists.)
I find the position of not-judging other people’s needs, given such a need-oriented society, as untenable. So we’re just moving to the position where, instead of judging whether or not something is good for somebody, instead we’re judging whether or not they need what they’re asking for. Those questions are, in the end, isomorphic; the only difference between you and the anti-trigger-warning people are how you sort people into the “faker” and “not-faker” categories.
Which isn’t to say either of you are evil. It’s a necessary judgment, once you’ve committed to accommodating needs. The implications that the other side are acting in bad faith, however, are not necessary.
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Hmm. It seems like there’s a breakdown in language here, where “coddling” is being used to mean two different things: 1. infantilisation, i.e. taking away someone else’s right to make decisions, and 2. enabling, i.e. encouraging someone’s unhealthy or self-destructive (in a longer-term sense; a momentarily “harmful” action might actually be the best choice for a particular situation) decisions.
Perhaps the term “coddling” would be better replaced with these two terms?
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I’m not so sure this is a good line in the sand.
Some people really really want to be coddled. Some people are quite content to act like children eternally if their parents sit back and let them and they’re quite content to grab anyone who they can use as a pseudo-parent despite being perfectly capable of doing things on their own. Even if they’re asking you to tidy their room for them doing so can be squarely in the domain of coddling.
In colleges it’s not unusual to find a non-trivial number of incoming students who simply turn to the nearest authority figure as a pseudo-parent and try to extract as much coddling as possible because coddling is easy. It’s easier if some pseudo-parent handles all the hard, uncertain, stressful things like bills and paperwork.
The best thing the person being treated as a pseudo-parent can do is to make them sort things out themselves and refuse to be a coddling pseudo-parent.
On the flip side, some people (like those on section) really really need someone to make accommodations for them that they may not want like making sure there’s someone who checks that they’re continuing taking their meds, or making sure that they meet with the college psychiatrist regularly or occasionally putting them in a location where there’s nothing sharp they can slit their own throat with and that isn’t coddling even if it’s something they don’t want at the time, it’s essential to keep them from dying.
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I think both definitions you give in this post are very useful. However, I think it needs to be acknowledged that the two definitions are not the same as each other and may give different results.
For example, you give the example that doing stuff for you when you’re depressed is coddling you because it’s making you weaker, not stronger. But what if you, or someone else who experiences depression the same way you do, ask someone else to do stuff for you? According to the first definition, it’s coddling because it’s not making you stronger; but according to the second definition, it’s not coddling because you chose it yourself.
I think both definitions are useful, for different reasons; they are both fruitful ways of thinking about accommodations, and they can probably be used together as like, separate diagnostic criteria. They’re just quite different from each other. Still, I found this post useful in that it gave me a couple new ways of thinking about things.
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“Coddling” is less of a problem than throwing other values under the bus in order to placate people who are claiming victim status. I want to help people, especially those that claim victim status, but I’m wary of trading that against other values like epistemic hygiene. (Apologies if this was an unwanted topic change.)
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Typo: The title has three ‘m’s in accommodations.
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Great article! I have one quibble with the last paragraph, though. Universities don’t and shouldn’t accept absolutely everyone. When trigger warning critics argue that people with serious triggers aren’t fit for college, they’re speaking out of concern for the prestigious image of American universities, not for mentally ill people.
When they see that a challenging intellectual institution hosting the brightest, most success-bound students in the nation is adjusting its classes to accommodate for people with unfortunate psychological anomalies…it comes as a bit of a shock. Critics frame it in terms of “These prestigious top-tier schools are now letting brainsick people permeate their campus! They need special warnings on things that normal people are unfazed by! What are they, weak little babies? Why are weak little babies getting offered admission over mentally adjusted applicants?” but never consider seeing it in terms of, “People at top-tier colleges have implemented a ridiculously simple accommodation to let these smart, qualified, positive contributors to our campus participate in classes despite their psychological limitations in handling certain subjects.”
So, if we’re going to combat the stigma against mentally ill university students, “respectability politics” would actually go a long way.
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