We must adapt to kids’ mental health needs
A couple of quotes have been swirling around in my head ever since I read about parents in several states protesting mental health services at their children’s schools.
The first quote is from Kahlil Gibran’s beautiful poem, “On Children,” published in “The Prophet” in 1923.
“They come through you but not from you,” Gibran wrote. “And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
The second quote is from Seth Lavin, the principal of a Chicago Public Schools elementary school about four blocks from my house.
“Children are not okay,” Lavin wrote in a Jan. 24 Chicago Sun-Times op-ed. “Teachers are not okay. Schools are not okay. We need help and we need understanding.”
Help and understanding don’t seem like such a big ask. Not when the stakes are our kids, which is to say our whole hearts, the better angels of our nature, no less than our future.
But help and understanding don’t mean the same, or land the same, with everyone.
In several states, including Utah, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Indiana, groups of parents are pushing back against social emotional learning in schools and lobbying against legislation that would fund suicide prevention
programs.
“Conservative groups argue that social emotional learning has become a ‘Trojan horse’ for critical race theory, a separate academic concept that examines how systemic racism is embedded in society,” according to a recent NBC News story. “They point to SEL lessons that encourage children to celebrate diversity, sometimes introducing students to conversations about race, gender and sexuality.
“Activists have accused school districts of using the programs to ask children invasive questions — about their feelings, sexuality and the way race shapes their lives — as part of a ploy to ‘brainwash’ them with liberal values and to trample parents’ rights,” the story continued. “Groups across the country recently started circulating forms
to get parents to opt their children out of surveys designed to measure whether students are struggling with their emotions or being bullied, describing the efforts as ‘data mining’ and an invasion of privacy.”
Parent groups have asked their kids’ schools to focus on core academic subjects and, as the Southlake Families PAC in Southlake, Texas, put it, “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”
But trying to learn core academic subjects when your head and heart are in knots is like trying to learn while you’re hungry. We know kids need certain things to learn optimally — food, shelter, a stable environment. We wouldn’t tell schools to get rid of their cafeterias and leave feeding to parents. (Or we would be rightly laughed at if we did.)
We also know academics are only one of the ways in which schools forever shape and grow a young person. We know schools feed kids’ social lives, physical fitness, hobbies, independence, their sense of who they are outside the walls and roles of their home.
And we know that many young people are struggling mightily — were, in fact, already struggling mightily before a pandemic arrived to add to their woes.
From the U.S. surgeon general’s rare public advisory, released in December, we know that the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%, from 2009 to 2019. We know that the share seriously considering attempting suicide increased by 36%, and the share creating
a suicide plan increased by 44%.
We know there were more than 6,600 deaths by suicide among 10- to 24-year-olds in 2020, according to the advisory, and that Black children are now nearly twice as likely to die by suicide than white children.
We know, from the advisory, that depressive and anxiety symptoms doubled during the pandemic, with 25% of young people experiencing depressive symptoms and 20% experiencing anxiety symptoms, the advisory reports.
It’s wildly unfair to ask educators to ignore those statistics and focus on math. Mental health and academic rigor don’t sit in opposition. They are, in fact, impossible to disentangle — and we’d do well to stop trying.
“Our job is to be what
children need,” Lavin wrote in his Sun-Times op-ed. “Their needs are different now. We have to be different, too.”
Which brings me back, again, to Gibran’s poem.
“You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”
Into a future we can’t predict and probably won’t recognize. But it will belong to our children, and we owe them every shot at arriving there healthy and whole.