When graduates of New York University booed Jonathan Haidt at Yankee Stadium on May 14, and a smaller group walked out during his commencement address, they offered a rather generous public demonstration of the exact civic immaturity he has spent years describing. Reporting from Forbes described the above actions, and People reported that student leaders had already objected to his selection, calling it “deeply unsettling,” before he stepped to the podium.

The spectacle was revealing because Haidt and Greg Lukianoff had diagnosed the habits on display in their book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), in which they argue that many institutions teach young people three damaging ideas: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” “Always trust your feelings,” “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.” Those three errors now function like a secular catechism for the anxious elite, and the NYU protest showed how deeply it has entered the emotional bloodstream of students who experience disagreement as injury. The NYU protestors reportedly complained that students felt “feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment” during Haidt’s address, which is a magnificent little museum exhibit of therapeutic politics. A commencement speaker was assessed by emotional reaction rather than adult inquiry into whether his claims were true. The campus mind increasingly confuses internal distress with external harm; once that confusion becomes normal, the university ceases to train reason because it must manage moods.

This is why the sociological vocabulary matters. Fragile generations rarely become fragile by accident; they are produced through a dense formation of safetyism, therapeutic moralism, expressive individualism, helicopter parenting, concept creep, emotional reasoning, and what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call “victimhood culture.” Safetyism teaches the child that protection is the highest good. Therapeutic moralism teaches him that his feelings possess moral authority. Expressive individualism teaches him that identity begins in interior preference. Concept creep expands the language of harm until ordinary frustration is treated with the moral vocabulary once reserved for actual violence.

The result is a young adult who can navigate elite credentialing while remaining oddly primitive in the face of ordinary disagreement, which is an impressive educational achievement if the goal of education is to produce people with advanced degrees and kindergarten nerves. Jean Twenge has written that the post-2012 adolescent mental-health collapse coincided with the rise of the smartphone age, and Haidt’s later work, The Anxious Generation (2024), argues that ordinary childhood is reshaped by a “phone-based childhood” that displaces embodied play and durable friendship. When the child is overprotected in the world and overexposed online, he becomes trained for panic rather than prudence.

The problem is deeper than one commencement protest, because the broader culture has created an anthropology of fragility, and that anthropology teaches the young person to regard discomfort as an emergency while regarding self-command as repression. Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave us the useful term “antifragile,” by which he means people and systems are strengthened by stress and testing. Haidt reportedly invoked that very idea in his commencement address by urging students to “do hard things,” which is now controversial advice in a civilization that confuses resilience with cruelty.

A sane society understands that children require friction because human character grows through disciplined contact with reality, while a decadent society removes friction and then hires administrators to explain why everyone is anxious. Aristotle knew this long before the diversity office discovered feelings. He wrote in Nicomachean Ethics that “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” Virtue is acquired through repeated action under reason; therefore, a parent who shields a child from difficulty deprives him of training in courage.

Moreover, moral formation requires authority, because authority demands the death of the tyrannical self. Parents who refuse discipline often claim compassion, yet their refusal usually abandons the child to his own impulses, which then become his first dictators. Thomas Aquinas explained that virtue is a “good habit bearing on activity,” and that definition should terrify every parent who has allowed screens and peer approval to become his child’s actual tutors.

The civic consequences are obvious because the emotionally fragile citizen is easily manipulated by political entrepreneurs who promise safety through control. Once fear becomes the governing passion, freedom begins to look irresponsible.

The irony at NYU is almost too perfect to invent, because students at an elite university protested a speaker who warned that elite universities are training students into precisely this posture of fragility. An open letter asked whether Haidt was the “safest option,” which means the students had already accepted the premise that commencement should be psychologically curated rather than intellectually serious. Safety is necessary when a bridge is collapsing or a violent man enters a room, but it is childish when it means insulation from a speaker who asks young adults to become stronger.

The Christian tradition has no patience for this manufactured delicacy. Biblical anthropology begins with the truth that man is made in the image of God and then wounded by sin. Therefore, man needs grace, discipline, repentance, instruction, sacrifice, and the lifelong correction of his disordered desire. Scripture says, “Train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22:6), and the Letter to the Hebrews teaches that discipline is painful at first yet later “yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (12:11). Catholic theology treats formation as an act of love, because by it the child is destined for holiness rather than emotional comfort.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that parents have the “first responsibility for the education of their children,” and they bear witness chiefly by creating a home where “tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule” (no. 2223). That vision is tender without being soft, as Catholic tenderness never means surrendering the child to every passing feeling. It means forming him for truth, fortitude, temperance, justice, and charity through an ordered household where love has enough backbone to say no.

The natural law reaches the same conclusion because the human person flourishes through habits that conform appetite to reason, and reason to truth. A child who cannot endure correction does not become a free adult, because freedom is the power to choose the good rather than permission to obey impulse.

The Catholic answer to our anxious age is neither cruelty nor indulgence, as the Gospel forms sons and daughters who can suffer without despair because Christ has conquered sin and death. Parents must recover discipline, schools must recover truth, universities must recover intellectual courage, and pastors must recover the ancient Christian confidence that grace perfects nature rather than pampering its disorders. The child who is trained in virtue will still suffer, since every human life meets sorrow, yet he will possess the interior resources to suffer fruitfully because his life has been ordered toward God rather than toward the endless protection of his own emotions.

There is no holiness in raising emotionally brittle children who become psychologically brittle adults, and there is no charity in pretending that fragility is virtue simply because it speaks with institutional permission. The Church calls parents to form saints rather than consumers of affirmation, and this task begins with the hard mercy of discipline under the lordship of Jesus Christ. A covenantal worldview understands that children belong first to God, that parents are stewards rather than owners, and that education must train the whole person for truth. Amid a culture that flatters weakness and then wonders why its graduates boo correction from the cheap seats, Christian parents must lovingly raise children who can kneel before Christ, face the world, and endure reality with courage.