It’s not yet a major, but it will become a thing at East Carolina University. Adulting.

The idea is to teach kids coping skills, including how to deal with the trauma of getting a “C” grade.

The school felt compelled to do this after a soaring number of students started overburdening the campus’s existing mental health services—so much that ECU had to hire two new counselors.

Keep an eye out for the use of certain words that keep popping up in the oddest places. Everything is terrifying, horrifying, exhausting. These were once words reserved for things that were, indeed, terrifying. They are now commonly used to describe things that happen on Tuesday.* Lenore Skenazy, the world’s worst mom, explains:

The adulting classes are designed to help students turn off the negative thoughts in their heads when something goes wrong, which seems like a great skill to have. For real. Wish I’d had that training as a college kids.

But the college also recognizes that the underlying problem seems to be that kids are growing up with very little exposure to failure. In part, this is because of the “Everybody gets a trophy” culture, but more intriguingly, it could also be because kids’ exposure to social media means they are seeing a highlight reel of their friends’ lives all the time. Not pictured are the breakups, the bad hair days, and the boredom of everyday life.

A curious juxtaposition, given that dealing with life’s unpleasant moments is one of the more important aspects of growing up. There is no magic trick to save people from the need to deal with it. While Lenore may wish she had that training, “for real,” it doesn’t strike me as a good idea or substitute for learning organically how to cope with life tragedies, large and small. I don’t believe in magic, and I don’t subscribe to the notion that achieving maturity has a final exam.

The problem being addressed is that ECU has to deal with the students as they come, and that presents a problem:

Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Virginia Hardy presented the evidence in a report to the University Affairs Committee of ECU’s Board of Trustees in July. According to the report, there were a record number of student conduct, Title IX and general Dean of Students cases in the 2014-15 academic year, and the university saw a spike in demand for counseling services, disability support services and the university’s Behavioral Concerns and Care teams.

In other words, students need help with pretty much everything, because they can’t cope. And it’s not just ECU students.

Hardy said ECU is not alone in this problem. College across the country are grappling with students who similarly lack coping skills, which affects their academic success.

And, to point out the obvious, it’s not just “academic success,” though colleges are naturally inclined to put their focus where their mission is, even if it’s subject to rhetorical mission creep, where anything that can be tied, no matter how remotely, to academic success comes within the school’s purview.

And what does ECU think causes this problem?

The source of these issues isn’t known for sure, but Hardy said research suggests it has to do with not being exposed to failure during childhood.

“Students don’t have an opportunity as much these days to manage failure, they don’t experience it in certain ways as much so they don’t know how to manage it when it happens,” she said.

Technology, especially social media, also plays a part. Hardy said people see picture-perfect versions of their friends’ and acquaintances’ lives and assume theirs ought to follow the same path.

“There’s no real normalization about what success is,” she said. “Younger people think success is going from point A to point B without a lot of stuff in between, a straight shot.”

Lenore, on the other hand, has her own theory:

I suspect that another big part of the problem is this generation has grown up with almost no unsupervised time. From “Mommy & Me” music classes on up through travel soccer, they have always had adults on hand to cheer, solve, ferry, console, consult, and, when necessary, call the teacher. Or a lawyer.

My favorite Parents magazine article included this bit of advice to parents: Even if your child is old enough to stay home alone, never leave the premises when she is having a playdate. “You want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

That’s the generation arriving at college now, unable to cope with a rotten roommate, or rude remark. We raised them to depend on adults to solve their problems, so it’s no surprise that that’s exactly what they’re doing.

These concerns aren’t mutually exclusive, and are more variations on a theme than different causes.  But identifying the problem is useful to figure out a solution.  ECU’s plan is to teach their students methods to be happy.

Students will be offered cognitive-affective stress management training, which teaches them to reflect on their behaviors and change negative ones.

“What is the self-talk you’re having with yourself? Are you beating yourself up because you got a C?” Hardy said. “If you change the self-talk, you can then change the behavior that’s exhibited.”

Students will also engage in training on mindfulness and relaxation to manage stress and depression.

Kind of ironic that a problem derived from nouvelle views of protecting children from life will be solved by similarly nouvelle methods of normalizing their rationalizing away their feelings and allopathic fixes. Dean Hardy then takes an enormous leap of faith.

These coping skills will not only help students make it to graduation, but they’ll be crucial in helping them become successful in whatever they choose to do after earning their degree, Hardy said.

That’s a bit of an aspirational reach. Some, particularly the ones who find every banal problem in life terrifying, also harbor the expectation that the world will adjust to them, that they are entitled to a world where everyone bends to suit their feelings. Boy, are they going to be disappointed. Their idea of compromise is the other person gives in to their sad tears and mighty will, because they’re RIGHT!!! They can’t even accommodate each other, because each one is as entitled as the other.

Maybe they’ll take comfort in some yoga breathing, which won’t hurt them any, but if ECU thinks there’s a way to circumvent growing up, they are going to be disappointed. Or maybe they know this, but are saving the higher order lessons of adulting for the master’s program. It would consist entirely of independent study.

*Or any other day, for the snark challenged.