Abigail Shrier’s wildly popular new book, Bad Therapy, is one of the latest takes on the causes of the mental health crisis occurring among youth. Shrier’s diagnosis is that society’s obsession over kids’ feelings undermines their development, hindering their ability to manage the vicissitudes of life. This problem, she says, is largely due to contemporary approaches to psychotherapy, parenting, and schooling.

One of the schooling practices she claims is particularly harmful is social and emotional learning, or SEL. SEL programs aim to teach students life skills like emotion and attention regulation, interpersonal conflict resolution, and responsible decision-making. It may be true that SEL is harmful under certain conditions, as all social programs can be. But Shrier vastly overstates the problem and ignores evidence that SEL is, on average, beneficial to kids’ well-being and achievement. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater could worsen the problems she rightfully bemoans.

I share Shrier’s concerns about the pervasiveness of “safetyism.” And I agree with similar views like those articulated by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, which argue that popular childrearing practices are making kids less resilient and run counter to the best practices of therapeutic approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy.

For example, catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion common among those with clinical depression and anxiety, where one magnifies and ruminates about negative experiences. This is a self-reinforcing and self-defeating process that worsens a patient’s condition, so it’s a common focus of psychotherapists. Likewise, if we teach kids to be exquisitely attuned to every aspect of their negative experiences and to view them as threatening, unsafe, and harmful, we’re setting them up for a life of emotional frailty and pain.

Michael Strambler, PhD is a psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Division of Prevention and Community Research in the Yale School of Medicine.