How is our environment continuing to create a mental health crisis? — Conversations with Katie
In my most recent piece, I wrote about the Era of Anxiety we are living in and the multiple stresses today’s children are facing: the threat of school shootings, the high levels of pressure to succeed academically and excel in extracurricular activities, the lasting effects of pandemic isolation, the constant stimulus of social media and internet-connected devices, and the looming sense that the world is becoming a more difficult place to survive.
And that is the baseline — the things that almost all children are dealing with, without accounting for individual circumstances and personal struggles.
There have always been children who experienced or witnessed violence or lived in reasonable fear of it. There have always been parents who imposed unreasonable expectations on their children and pressured them to achieve. There have always been children who lost loved ones to suicide, drug overdose, and disease and feared losing their own lives the same way.
There have always been reasons to fear what the future might bring. But something has changed.
These harms and risks are widespread in the present day, and most children are likely to have been exposed to most or all of them to some extent. The red flags are going up in far too many places, for far too many children, which means the adults — professionals and educators — need to take ownership of the environmental causes.
I wrote that I know I would not have been able to handle what our children are expected to handle. And, in fact, our children are not “handling” it. While some traditional markers of risk among teenagers, such as substance abuse, have declined over the past few decades, inwardly directed risk factors, like self-harm and suicidal ideation, have surged.
In 2021, the CDC found that 44% of teens reported feeling a persistent sense of hopelessness or sadness. That is almost half of all teenagers; that is a tremendous red flag.
Many adults look at the teens and young adults in their lives and see a lack of crucial skills and necessary resilience, an inability to self-regulate emotions, and a deep-seated anxiety about their own ability to act and live independently, find meaningful and sustainable work, and simply survive. Young people did not create this situation, yet, often, I hear parents, school administrators, educators, and other adults directing their frustration at the kids.
They’re too sensitive.
They can’t deal with stress.
They don’t have the skills for the real world.
Those expressions of frustration have an underlying message: kids today are different. We weren’t like that.
But I was like that.
I’ve mentioned in previous articles that I experienced anxiety as a child; I used to get the “Sunday scaries” every week, dreading Monday morning and the looming week at school. I went to a very strict Catholic grade school, and it was a stark contrast with the warm, organized chaos of my eleven-person household.
The rules at the school were rigid, and a kind of black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking was imposed on us, making me feel like I had to maintain constant vigilance so I would not accidentally step out of line. When it got to be too much, I would pretend to throw up so I could be sent home, where I was allowed to color and make messes and generally be a child.
People referred to me as “hyper,” but in reality, I was anxious, and I learned to keep myself busy as a coping mechanism. I didn’t stop being prone to anxiety, and I didn’t simply “toughen up”; I gradually learned ways to manage my sometimes-disproportionate feelings of distress.
I believe that my sense of physical and psychological safety at home was crucial to my ability to do this. It is not possible to learn when you are in fight-or-flight mode, especially to learn the kind of skills necessary for personal growth.
My home was largely a happy one, but I didn’t grow up in the Brady Bunch. I was the youngest of nine children, and there was something going on every day at our house. Our family experienced difficult times and tragedies that impacted us all, and I was not shielded from the normal ups and downs of life as a human being.
However, I was always safe, as long as I looked both ways before crossing the street and didn’t take extraordinary risks. My parents had expectations of me, but they were manageable: I had to clean up after myself, do my homework, help out around the house, and assume other age-appropriate responsibilities.
I was not stressing about college in grade school while undergoing active shooter training drills. In other words, the environment of my childhood was entirely different from the one my children grew up in.
Why are many of today’s kids struggling? Perhaps it is not the kids who are different. Kids are kids. Rather, it is the adults who have changed the environment, which in turn changed the ways that kids relate to themselves and to the world, inhibiting their social and emotional growth.
I contributed to that environment. I listened to the societal messages telling me I needed to sign my preschoolers up for soccer and other activities. I remember waking my son up one afternoon to take him to Mommy and Me and thinking, What am I doing, waking him up from a nap for this? This is nuts! But I did it anyway. It was a prime example of me as the adult, the parent, allowing societal norms to make a decision I knew was not right.
In a way, I’ve come full circle; when my oldest son was five, I started writing a book called Take It Down a Notch! that I never completed. And now, all these years later, we still need to take it down a notch.
If my children had grown up in a safer, less pressurized atmosphere, they might have slowly developed their own coping strategies the way that I did. And I think that if I had grown up in an environment like this one, I would have just as many struggles as so many young people do today. The difference was that I was allowed and expected to grow and learn from my mistakes.
I believe most children today are living on high alert, under extreme pressure, in an environment of comparison. We can’t be surprised that our children are struggling socially and mentally.
They are not different from me or inherently less resilient than I was. They had the disadvantage of an environment that did not allow them the psychological safety required for growth.
The goal is not to prevent children from being uncomfortable or facing tough challenges — on the contrary, it is developmentally necessary for kids to experience discomfort and learn to manage emotional distress. The goal is to give children the support they need to build resilience and the physical and psychological safety to learn and grow.
As parents, educators, and community members, we must work toward making mental health resources more accessible and teaching children skills to manage their emotional well-being, but the best parenting and education in the world cannot protect a child from environmental hazards. We must work on changing the environment.
The good news is that young people today are more likely to be willing to acknowledge mental health issues than their parents were at their age. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found that a majority of students trust the information they get in school and want their schools to play a bigger role in supporting their mental health.
Young people are not shutting us out. In fact, they are desperate for our help.
