From Fragility to Fortitude

Rethinking Crisis, Trauma, and Resilience in a Generation Shaped by Upheaval

My students have grown up amid repeated disruptions and upheavals.

They are the children of crisis: raised amid 9/11 and school lockdown drills, economic recessions and climate dread, mass shootings and political polarization, a racial reckoning and a global pandemic. They belong—justifiably—to what we might call the crisis generation.

The psychological imprint is unmistakable. Anxiety is widespread. Fear of failure runs deep. Requests for accommodations, trigger warnings, and emotionally safe spaces are increasingly common. Many students carry what might be called anticipatory grief—a sense that the future is not just uncertain, but damaged or foreclosed.

But their fragility is not simply individual. It is not because they are weak. It is because they have been shaped by a culture that increasingly interprets suffering through the lens of trauma and vulnerability.

They have inherited a worldview in which adversity is interpreted through the lens of human fragility.

Crisis and Its Cultural Frame

How crisis is understood—how it is named, narrated, and navigated—is not determined by events alone. It is shaped by culture. And the culture into which this generation has come of age offers few frameworks for suffering that move beyond pathology.

Hardship is too often interpreted as harm, challenge as danger, discomfort as trauma. Students are fluent in the language of mental health, emotional injury, and therapeutic care—but often less so in the vocabularies of endurance, transformation, and moral meaning.

This is not a critique of my students. It is a cultural diagnosis. As an educator and researcher, I must ask: How did we get here—and how can we do better?

The meaning of hardship is never dictated by events alone. It is culturally constructed. Psychologist Erik Erikson observed that every generation is shaped by its "defining crisis" but also by the symbolic resources it has to make sense of that crisis. He argued that generational identity is forged at the intersection of historical conditions and cultural interpretation. It’s not just what happens—it’s what we’re told it means.

And what today’s culture tells students, explicitly and implicitly, is that suffering wounds more than it strengthens. In today’s culture, the dominant symbolic system is therapeutic. As sociologist Philip Rieff observed in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, we have shifted from a culture of commandment to one of self-care, from moral narrative to psychological diagnosis. Today’s dominant symbolic language is not stoic or spiritual.

We no longer interpret suffering in moral or communal terms; we personalize and pathologize it.

This shift has brought important gains: it has helped destigmatize mental illness, encouraged openness about pain, and fostered empathy. But it has also narrowed the moral vocabulary for interpreting hardship. It has eroded older cultural frameworks that once helped people locate meaning in hardship. When every wound is trauma, and every discomfort a threat to safety, the capacity to frame suffering as a site of growth is lost.

Compare this with the cultural climate of my parents’ generation. They lived through the Great Depression and World War II. They endured not only personal loss but collective sacrifice. Their hardship was real, but so too were the stories that helped them endure it: narratives of duty, grit, service, and spiritual purpose. They were told to keep a stiff upper lip. Their language was shaped not by therapy, but by religion, patriotism, and communal resilience.

To be clear, those stories also had costs. That generation often buried their pain too deeply. They lacked the emotional vocabulary to process grief or trauma. But they also carried a conviction that suffering could be meaningful, not just wounding.

Where past generations were handed scripts of sacrifice, grit, and meaning-making, this generation is often left with the language of fragility, harm, and injury.

What’s Missing in a Diagnostic Culture

Today’s students are not given such narratives. Instead, they are offered a diagnostic culture that encourages them to see their struggles in clinical terms. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, many young people are taught to fear emotional discomfort and to interpret disagreement or challenge as harm.

Discomfort is equated with danger. Conflict is pathologized. This cultural framing risks infantilizing students by encouraging avoidance rather than engagement.

As a result, resilience is treated not as something to be cultivated, but as something one either has or doesn’t. And universities, fearing litigation or backlash, have too often reinforced this mindset with policies and pedagogies aimed more at insulation than development.

Mental health matters. But when every disruption is medicalized, and every setback seen as traumatic, we lose something essential: the power to grow through difficulty.

Of course, trauma is real. As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma can alter the brain, shape memory, and haunt the body. But not all adversity is trauma. And not all trauma is destiny.

Reclaiming Resilience and Meaning

If we are to help students grow, we need to reclaim and reframe suffering as something that can be formative.

George Bonanno, in The Other Side of Sadness, reminds us that most people are more resilient than we assume. Grief is not always disfiguring. Pain is not always a pathology. And discomfort, when met with support and purpose, is often the soil of transformation.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, offered a profound counter-narrative. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that suffering need not destroy us—it can ennoble us. What matters is not the pain itself, but the story we tell about it. His concept of “tragic optimism” offers a necessary corrective to today’s culture of despair: a belief in the possibility of meaning even in darkness.

Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun have called this "post-traumatic growth"—a process by which individuals who endure crisis can emerge with greater insight, stronger relationships, and renewed purpose.

These ideas find echoes in literature and philosophy. Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, particularly in Gilead, offers quiet portraits of individuals who grow not despite suffering but through it. In the quiet suffering of its characters, we find dignity, reflection, and tenderness. Suffering is not denied, but it is absorbed into the architecture of moral life.

Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell, argues that crises often unearth hidden reserves of solidarity and ingenuity. Solnit reminds us that disaster often yields unexpected community. What appears to be breakdown can also reveal connection, courage, and improvisational strength.

And in a different register, Ta-Nehisi Coates documents in Between the World and Me how systemic and inherited trauma has marked Black lives in America—but also how storytelling, memory, and struggle can become acts of survival and dignity. Trauma, for Coates, is not destiny. It is something that can be named, resisted, and repurposed.

From Fragility to Resilience: A Cultural History of the Vulnerable Child, Adolescent, and Young Adult

In today’s schools, courts, and homes, it is taken as a given that children and adolescents are inherently vulnerable. We speak easily of trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), emotional harm, and psychological safety. We design curricula around safe spaces and therapeutic models, and public policy often treats the young as perpetually at risk. Yet this view is not timeless.

It is a relatively recent cultural construction, forged over the past three centuries through a dynamic interplay of philosophy, science, reform, and risk-conscious parenting.

Let’s briefly explore the historical evolution of the idea of youthful vulnerability and its far-reaching consequences for education, parenting, and public policy. This history challenges the assumption that fragility is natural or inevitable and argues that our current conception of the young as emotionally and psychologically delicate has both empowered and constrained.

The Rise of Sentimental Childhood

The modern idea of childhood as a time of innocence and emotional delicacy emerged during the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. Thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau transformed how society viewed children. Locke, with his notion of the child as a "tabula rasa," emphasized the formative power of early experience. Rousseau, in Emile, portrayed the child as a naturally good and pure being who must be protected from society’s corrupting influence.

These ideas underwrote a sentimental vision of childhood that viewed children not as mini-adults but as morally and emotionally distinct beings in need of care. Childhood became a stage to be preserved and nurtured, not hurried through. This shift laid the groundwork for later developments in psychology, law, and education.

The Developmental Turn in Science and Psychology

The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the rise of developmental psychology and scientific approaches to childrearing. Freud argued that early experience shaped lifelong neuroses. Piaget mapped cognitive stages; Erikson outlined psychosocial tasks; Bowlby emphasized attachment.

Together, they advanced the idea that early emotional and relational wounds could leave permanent scars.

The child, in this framework, was not only innocent but incredibly malleable—and therefore susceptible to lasting harm from failure, neglect, or stress. Mistakes in parenting, education, or peer interaction were no longer minor; they were formative. A culture of psychological vigilance began to emerge.

Social Reform and the Protective State

In tandem with scientific developments came legal and institutional reforms. The 19th century witnessed child labor laws, mandatory schooling, and the creation of juvenile courts. The idea of parens patriae—the state as protector of children—grew. By the 20th century, child protection was institutionalized.

The 1960s marked a major turning point. Pediatrician C. Henry Kempe’s identification of the "battered child syndrome" medicalized abuse and launched a new era of mandatory reporting, intervention, and surveillance. Private family matters became public concerns. Trauma became a category through which the state evaluated and intervened in childhood.

The Therapeutic Culture and the Expansion of Trauma

By the late 20th century, a therapeutic ethos had penetrated everyday life. We shifted from moral to psychological worldviews. The question became not "What is right?" but "How does it feel?"

This shift was amplified by the adoption of trauma discourse. Initially reserved for extreme suffering, trauma became a more elastic concept. The development of ACEs research in the 1990s provided a scientific framework for linking early emotional injury to long-term health outcomes. Soon, even ordinary stressors like divorce, bullying, or parental conflict were framed as potentially traumatizing.

Parenting, Media, and the Culture of Risk

Intensive parenting grew in tandem with therapeutic discourse. In an era of fewer children and more expert advice, parents became increasingly preoccupied with managing emotional and physical risks. The rise of helicopter parenting, the ubiquity of safety warnings, and the explosion of parenting books all signaled a new ideal: children must be protected not just from physical harm but from emotional discomfort.

Media reinforced this anxiety. High-profile stories of abduction, abuse, and school shootings heightened public fear. The child was no longer just innocent but endangered, requiring constant oversight and intervention.

From Childhood to College: The Expanding Arc of Vulnerability

In recent decades, our cultural understanding of childhood has undergone a profound transformation. Where once we saw children primarily as learners-in-training—resilient, adaptable, and eager to grow—we now more often view them through the lens of fragility. This concern for youthful vulnerability, while rooted in real gains in our understanding of trauma and development, has not remained confined to young children. It has expanded—first to adolescents, and increasingly, to college-aged young adults.

The Extension of Fragility: From Child to Teen to Emerging Adult

Concern for the vulnerability of infants and young children has an intuitive and empirical basis. Their dependence, limited understanding, and physical fragility make them obvious candidates for adult protection. But by the 20th century, this protective impulse extended into adolescence—a stage historically seen not as fragile, but formative.

For centuries, teenagers were viewed as apprentices, workers, parents, and even soldiers. They were expected to shoulder responsibility and to begin navigating adult roles. But beginning with G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 study Adolescence, a new image took hold. Hall described adolescence as a period of “storm and stress”—a volatile, biologically driven stage marked by emotional instability and psychological immaturity.

This new paradigm reshaped the cultural narrative: adolescents were no longer young adults-in-training, but emotionally precarious beings who needed insulation from harm.

As developmental psychology gained cultural authority, the portrait of adolescence shifted even further toward vulnerability. Influential thinkers like Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and John Bowlby emphasized the emotional delicacy of young people and the long-term consequences of early disruption. Legal changes followed: juvenile protections, age-of-consent laws, and the extension of compulsory schooling all contributed to the reclassification of teens as oversized children rather than emerging adults.

In recent decades, the boundaries of this vulnerability have expanded again—this time to encompass college students and early adults. Diagnoses of anxiety, depression, and ADHD have spiked not just among adolescents, but among 18- to 25-year-olds. Universities now provide robust mental health services, trigger warnings, trauma-informed syllabi, and accommodations for stress-related concerns. The language of harm, trauma, and safety—once reserved for early childhood or clinical settings—is now common on college campuses. The message is clear: emotional fragility does not end at adolescence but extends well into early adulthood.

Educational and Policy Consequences

This expanded view of vulnerability has reshaped education at every level. Schools and universities alike have adopted trauma-informed practices, zero-tolerance policies, therapeutic models of discipline, and curricula that prioritize emotional well-being. While often well-intentioned, these developments risk conflating discomfort with harm and shield students from the very kinds of intellectual and moral challenges that promote maturity.

College instructors are increasingly expected not only to educate, but to anticipate and manage students’ psychological responses to material. Controversial topics are accompanied by opt-outs and warnings. Assignments are redesigned to avoid potential distress. Meanwhile, failure—long an integral part of learning—is treated not as a developmental necessity, but as a threat to self-worth.

Public policy reflects these shifts. Mental health programs have proliferated in K–12 and higher ed. The age of criminal responsibility has been raised in many jurisdictions. Risk management, rather than growth promotion, has become the organizing principle of youth policy. The adolescent brain is frequently cited as grounds for excusing poor judgment or deferring responsibility—sometimes well beyond the teen years.

What Has Been Lost

There have been important gains: increased awareness of abuse, improved mental health resources, and greater empathy toward the emotional lives of the young. But there has also been a cost.

What has eroded is a cultural narrative that once saw adversity as formative, resilience as learnable, and struggle as essential to character. We risk raising young people who are taught not how to face hardship, but how to avoid it; not how to develop strength, but how to manage fragility.

By extending the category of vulnerability to include older teens and college students, we have—however inadvertently—delayed the very developmental milestones that foster adult identity: autonomy, responsibility, and moral agency.

Toward a New Cultural Balance

We need to recover a more balanced view of youth—not one that denies vulnerability, but one that does not make it a permanent identity.

In education, this means challenging as well as supporting students. In parenting, it means encouraging independence, not perpetual supervision. In public policy, it means designing systems that promote growth, not just prevent harm.

Above all, it means recognizing that vulnerability is not destiny. It is a condition shaped by the stories we tell, the structures we build, and the expectations we hold.

Let us tell better stories—ones that affirm strength as well as sensitivity. Let us build institutions that foster courage, not just care. And let us accompany young people not merely as protectors, but as guides—helping them grow into the resilient, thoughtful, and morally serious adults our fractured world so urgently needs.

What We Can Do: Restoring Fortitude in Education

As educators, we need to reclaim a fuller, more humanistic approach to adversity. That means reintroducing frameworks that allow suffering to be seen as morally and psychologically formative—not simply disabling.

1. Reclaim Moral Language.

Therapy and care matter. But we must also speak the language of character -- of courage, responsibility, perseverance, justice, and gratitude. These are not antiquated virtues. They are developmental imperatives. bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, writes that education is not just a transfer of information but a deeply ethical act—one rooted in freedom, love, and the cultivation of the whole person. Teaching students only to protect their pain, rather than transform it, is a moral failure.

2. Model Resilience.

Students benefit when faculty share moments of struggle—not to self-disclose, but to offer insight and solidarity. When faculty speak openly about failure and persistence—not as confession but as insight—they offer students a vision of adulthood that is realistic and inspiring. This is what Parker Palmer calls teaching from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

3. Reframe Struggle as Growth.

Challenge students to see discomfort not as damage, but as development. Use reflective writing, narrative inquiry, and hard conversations to help students reinterpret pain—not as something that defines them, but as something they are capable of growing through.

4. Build Relationship-Rich Learning Environments.

Belonging fosters strength. As Christina Maslach and Arthur Brooks have shown, burnout and fragility are eased when students feel known, mentored, and connected. Students thrive where they feel seen and supported.

5. Give Students Purpose.

Students become more resilient when they feel that they matter. Leadership roles, service learning, and research with social impact build not just confidence, but meaning. Meaningful projects that link students to something bigger than themselves foster agency and a sense of purpose.

6. Broaden Cultural Perspectives.

Help students recognize that reactions to crisis are historically and culturally variable. Introduce them to the various ways that different cultures have interpreted through suffering – through ritual, story, religion, or resistance. This helps them see that their reactions are not inevitable, but culturally shaped.

Helping Students Grow Deeper, Not Harder

Our goal should not be to make students “tougher” in the conventional sense. It should be to help them grow deeper—morally, emotionally, intellectually. That means equipping them with a story in which adversity is not the end of agency but the beginning of growth.

Depth of character, not hardness of heart, is what enables human beings to endure, to adapt, and to act with grace under pressure. That depth is cultivated through the stories we tell, the virtues we model, the challenges we do not shield them from.

Yes, this generation has lived through profound instability. Yes, our students have been tested. But the meaning of their suffering is not foreordained. What matters now is what we teach them about strength, struggle, and the capacity to flourish in a broken world.

As educators, we are not merely transmitters of knowledge. We are cultural stewards -- of memory, of language, of moral possibility.

What stories are we giving students about what it means to hurt? To struggle? To grow?

To teach this generation well, we must hold two truths at once: they have lived through unprecedented turmoil, and they are capable of extraordinary strength. Our task is not to shield them from every difficulty, but to guide them through it—to help them develop the moral, emotional, and intellectual capacities that crises, rightly interpreted, can cultivate.

Let us give our students not only knowledge, but courage. Not just care, but hope. Not just protection, but purpose.

Let us help them move—from fragility to fortitude.