A distinguished professor of Classics recently told me that a fifth of his Ivy-League undergraduate students now claim a psychological or psychiatric reason for their tardiness in submitting their (often plagiarized and second-rate) work. The stress is also purportedly too great for them to take examinations in the time-honored way. This affliction, moreover, was spreading to ever more students. The professor dared not question, much less disregard, the excuses: if he even tried to do so he would become the administration’s marked man. The student, after all, is a customer, and the customer is never wrong. No university can afford to alienate its clientele merely for the sake of upholding its standards.

But what is the explanation of this growing fragility among highly privileged young adults? Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt give answers that differ in emphasis but overlap in ways that are neither entirely coincident nor entirely contradictory. In Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Shrier—an intelligent and educated layman, and former opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal—largely blames the psychologization of childhood, such that children are now subject to constant professional or semi-professional inquiry regarding their emotional state. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic