Since COVID-19 lockdowns hit the United States in March 2020, those in the world of education have been discussing and monitoring the effects of the pandemic on students.
How has the pandemic impacted students?
Of course, one area of focus has been the academic learning loss. As the New York Times reported in November 2022, third graders’ math and reading scores are the lowest in two decades, while eighth graders’ math scores have fallen in 49 out of the 50 U.S. states. This impact was heightened among students whose families fall below the poverty line, according to a Stanford University study. Researchers at Michigan State found that the achievement gap is also growing between Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic students and their Asian and white peers.
Certainly, these academic concerns are significant. Data shows that the pandemic has left us not only with a high need for academic remediation and student learning support, but also major equity issues to address, as schools face mounting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in their students’ academic outcomes.
However, a second area of concern is perhaps more pressing: the youth mental health crisis that has emerged in the United States since the onset of the pandemic. Increasingly, teachers are working with classrooms of students experiencing anxiety, trauma, and depression.
What do the statistics show us about youth mental health in 2023?
Within the first year of the pandemic, students’ mental health plummeted. CDC studies reported that from April to October of 2020, the proportion of children ages 5–11 visiting an emergency room because of a mental health crisis increased 24% compared to the same time period in 2019. Among 12–17 year olds, that number increased by 31%. Likewise, between November 2020 and January 2021, 67% of children ages 7–15 studied by Harvard researchers had clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and depression (compared to an average of 30% pre-pandemic), and 67% also had meaningful problem behaviors (compared to an average of 20% pre-pandemic). Among teenagers, girls reported feeling sadness and hopelessness at much higher rates than boys. Trevor Project surveys also showed that students who identified as LGBTQ+ were more likely to report poor mental health symptoms than their peers who identified as heterosexual.
Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s adolescent and school health division, summarized in February 2023 why these statistics are so significant: in three decades of similar research, she reflected, “we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings…There’s no question young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.”
So, what can teachers do to support students?
Teachers are uniquely positioned both to observe the youth mental health crisis and to support students dealing with some of the most prevalent diagnoses of 2023, including anxiety, depression, suicidality, and trauma.
Brain science can tell us a lot about how to best support our students’ mental health:
- We can help students identify and acknowledge their pandemic (and other) experiences. We can replace the “prevention and banishment” model of emotional distress with direct instruction in emotional regulation. Psychologist Dr. Lisa K. Damour encourages adults to allow students to feel all of their feelings, and teach them the two major skills of emotional regulation: expression (sharing, voicing, acknowledging, and/or naming what they are feeling) and containment (being able to push pause on a feeling, return to it later, and take a break). Dr. Damour offers some concrete suggestions for teachers and parents to help students with these skills, including using methods by which students can express how they’re feeling anonymously or via text/email (in order to remove some of the pressure of expression), and asking indirect questions to individuals or to groups of students, such as “how are 6th graders feeling about life right now?”
- We can reframe how we talk about stress, anxiety, and mental health. Being precise in our language will help students to understand the differences between stress and anxiety and trauma, chronic stress, and burnout. Stress and anxiety are not the same as each other, but neither is inherently bad. However, chronic stress, trauma, and resulting anxiety and burnout have long-term emotional consequences and prevent learning. We can also help students, especially teenagers, to change the language around time when they’re not working or not active. Inert time is not laziness, and it should not come with guilt. Rest is a form of self-care. Dr. Damour uses the metaphor of stress as strength training to help students visualize the importance of rest. If you go to the gym and you always use 1-pound weights, you’re not going to gain much strength. If you go to the gym and lift 1,000-pound weights, you won’t be able to do anything, so you won’t see strength gains either. For the most healthy growth, you have to progressively lift higher weights, reaching an uncomfortable level and then stopping and resting to avoid chronic physical stress or injury. In other words, growth happens in a cycle, and down time is a necessary part of that cycle.
- We can give students safety so that they don’t have to mount it themselves. Psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, explains that trauma creates children who are “specialized in danger.” When adults can remove danger from the child’s environment, children can get out of their fight/flight/freeze response and focus on other things. In schools, this means that teachers can work to dial down environmental threats — including things like raised voices or loud noises, decreasing or changing placement of stimulating visuals, clearing pathways in high trafficked areas, and ensuring clear lines of sight around the room — to allow children to focus on learning.
- We can engage students in active and imaginative learning. Play, rhythm, movement, and social interactions are central to emotional regulation, executive functioning, and trauma recovery. We can provide these elements as part of every block in a student’s schedule — not just PE, drama, and recess. This is true for students of all ages, too. Imagination has been shown to help with trauma recovery in people of all ages. Adolescents (and even adults) need time to play, and play can benefit high schoolers’ learning and emotional development just as it can benefit kindergarteners’ growth. Exercise and physical activity can also support mental health and learning. Aerobic exercise, in particular, can help to “physically remodel the brain for peak performance on all fronts,” says Harvard professor of psychiatry Dr. John J. Ratey.
- We can rebuild students’ motivation to learn. From a cognitive perspective, struggle in learning is good. But from a motivational perspective, students need balance. Teachers can support students’ motivation by providing appropriate struggle and by helping students understand that if something is difficult, the kind of work they’re doing needs to change, not them. We can also help students set learning goals, rather than performance goals, and we can give them precise praise for their success. For more specific advice on building motivation in the classroom, see Columbia professor of psychology Dr. Carol Dweck’s work.
- We can teach students healthy coping strategies. We can explain the function of coping skills — to get us out of our fight/flight/freeze mode. We can provide and discuss what healthy coping skills look like by suggesting and modeling skills like distraction, sensory work, movement, relaxation, and processing. We can encourage students to experiment with different methods, and help them build a toolbox of skills that work for them individually. We can also help students, especially teens, understand how lifestyle — including sleep, diet, and substance use — can provide and support coping mechanisms.
- We can model emotional regulation. We can give voice to our own experiences. We can take breaks, and let students see us taking breaks. We can narrate our emotions, our problem-solving, and our coping skills for students, so that they can hear and see those behaviors in action. When students can observe their educators and the adults around them actively engaging in emotional regulation, they are more comfortable practicing the same skills for themselves, and they have experience with the kinds of tactics they can employ to acknowledge what they’re feeling and give themselves what they need in the moment.
- We can connect students to mental health professionals. Whether this means setting up time for a student to see a guidance counselor at school, sharing online resources with students, or simply discussing the concept of therapy openly with students, without stigma, we can help students get further support from mental health professionals. Teachers do not need to be psychologists, trauma counselors, or social workers. But as adults who share close connections with young people, teachers can help young people to learn what supports exist and how they can access them.
Lastly, though it’s not student-facing, teachers can practice self-care. And I don’t mean the influencer version of #selfcare, although if that’s your thing, go for it. I mean the kinds of self-care that can help teachers, and all people, to maintain a healthy relationship with themselves, body and mind, in order to feel safe and supported mentally, physically, and emotionally. Think of the oxygen mask principle (“put on your own mask before you assist others”), and do what you need for yourself, so that you can be there for your students without experiencing the same anxiety, depression, or burnout that they are.
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