Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of “Moneyball.” In his recent memoir, “Coach: Lessons From the Game of Life,” he recounts a paradox surrounding Coach Fitz, his choleric high school baseball coach: While alumni are fundraising to rename the school’s gym after the coach, parents of current students are lobbying to get him fired. Lewis spoke to SSIR about how this story reflects a generational change in the meaning of self-esteem:

When I was coming up through high school, there was a fairly widespread belief that self-esteem wasn’t given, but acquired. Coach Fitz gave us a mechanism to get self-esteem. He hollered at us. He put us through boot camp. But by the end of it we had learned how to deal with pain and failure, how not to blame our problems on other people. Coach Fitz made us better than we thought we could be.

Now the belief seems to be that people are born with a fixed quantity of self-esteem, and that the trick is to preserve it. If a coach benches kids, or makes them feel bad, or plays them against better teams, parents worry about chipping away at that fixed quantity. And then they worry that these seemingly bad things in childhood will lead to bad things in adulthood.

But it’s all psychobabble. The notion that we can trace all our adult disappointments back to childhood traumas of one sort or another is not total bull, but it’s close enough. And it’s been swallowed by everybody.

And so parents increasingly micromanage their children’s progress through life, anxious that screw-ups at age 14 might keep their kids out of Harvard. They send their kids to private schools and, in exchange for their money, expect to control the school.

This is going on at the same time as the phony exaltation of teachers. But if you really want to encourage good people to teach, you have to let them do what they do best without parental interference. You have to stop worrying about decreasing self-esteem.

My life has gone extremely well. But in those moments that did not go so well, Coach Fitz’s is the voice I hear. I don’t think that anyone could enter my life now who could influence me to that extent. You are so much more pliable when you are at that age. There are people who have that gift of getting inside. When parents block them, it is a terrible waste.

Read more stories by Alana Conner Snibbe.