The View‘s Whoopi Goldberg offers blunt advice against ‘coddling children’ through life: ‘Sometimes you get beat up’

Goldberg told the audience that kids have “gotta grow” from hard experiences.

Whoopi Goldberg and Sara Haines on ‘The View’.Credit: ABC

Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t want to raise a generation of wimps, thank you very much.

The View moderator and Oscar-winning actress pushed back against growing sentiments about parental involvement in their adult children’s lives, after introducing a Hot Topics discussion about recent reports that college students were “sending no-contact orders to deal with disagreements with roommates” to avoid interpersonal conflicts.

Cohost Sara Haines put it bluntly when she urged people in similar situations to “figure it out,” and posed a scenario in which she speculated how her own mother might react if she attempted to bring her parents in on a minor point of tension in her adult years.

“If I had called my mom and said, ‘Someone’s being mean,’ [she’d say], ‘Ae you okay? Do you have food? Good. Bye,” Haines speculated as the audience laughed.

The cohosts of ‘The View’ discuss ‘coddling children’.ABC

Conservative panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin stressed that learning conflict resolution “is a key part of life,” while legal expert Sunny Hostin brought up several instances where adult children are “bullied” and might have difficulties in resolving conflict because “people are really cruel in this world.”

She later advocated for kids to have their parents step in if needed — an assertion Goldberg balked at.

“When you had an issue [in the past], your mother said, ‘Listen, go down there and tell them you are not doing that,’” the Ghost star said, while Hostin admitted, “My mother came with me” to resolve such issues.

“Coddling children? It’s not a good thing, because when they get into these conflicts, it’s the things you’ve been talking about. ‘We had our kids because we had COVID, the kids didn’t get out, they didn’t learn how to do this or that,’ so, you had to hep them get through all those phases that they missed,” Goldberg observed. “It doesn’t mean you do it for them. Remember y’all used to say, why does every kid have to win every day? People lose.”

She continued, “And sometimes, and I know it’s terrible, sometimes you get beat up. Sometimes you have to make a decision. You have to say, listen, I didn’t like that. And then you gotta grow, you know?”

Goldberg often scolds those from younger generations from her post on The View, including in a November 2023 segment that saw her take issue with young people who don’t want to work.

“You know what, people pick it up, and they do what they do and they raise themselves,” Goldberg said. “This is what you’ve got to do. It’s called being a good citizen.”