“The ugly and wonderful truth about middle school,’ [Lahey] says, is that ‘failure is not an if proposition, it’s a matter of when.’ Or it used to be. Now that parents shelter their children every step of the way, we have ‘failure deprived’ college students (as administrators at Stanford and Harvard call them) and entitled, anxious 20-somethings who can’t function in a world that’s sometimes cold or cruel or indifferent. So how can teachers snatch back their critical role and give children the necessary space to fail? They could start by making parents read Lahey.”