If parents are increasingly relying on professionals to guide them in shaping their chil-dren, it may be because the parents are not confident they have a normative vision of human life to pass on. The rise of parenting influencers who offer scripts for talking to your child is a response to parents who don’t want to raise their children as they themselves were raised, but don’t possess a positive vision of their own. […]
In my own life as a parent, l already practice some of what Abigail Shrier recommends. I don’t run toward my children when they fall, and I wait for them to tell me if they’re hurt, rather than coaching them into anticipating distress. But resiliency is always an intermediate good, a virtue I want them to have so that they can rush on in pursuit of higher virtues. Parents aren’t called to simply make their children strong, but also to make them sensitive to the right things—to beauty, to sorrow over evil, to wonder. Taking a step back from the present therapeutic culture requires parents and children to take up philosophy instead.