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It’s been a stressful year and levels of anxiety have soared. Parents worry about their children worrying. Yet a survey of over a thousand teenagers in the UK found that their anxiety levels in May 2020 were lower than in October 2019. How could this be? Don’t they read the news? Oh wait—could this be because schools locked down in March?
The teenagers in this study were given a range of questionnaires including one asking how worried they were about COVID-19—and 90 percent agreed that it is a very serious issue. Over half the boys and nearly three-quarters of the girls were worried about friends and family catching the illness. So clearly most teens are worried about the pandemic and it’s not that they are living in a complacent bubble at home.
Yet anxiety generally decreased for students in lockdown, with the most anxious students in October making the most improvement by May. Students also answered a well-being questionnaire including items such as: ‘I’ve been feeling optimistic about the future’ and ‘I’ve been dealing with problems well.’ I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many adults who could say they agree more with those statements now than last autumn. But teens with lower well-being scores in October improved substantially (from 29 to 39 points) by May.
A questionnaire on school connectedness showed most students feeling more, not less connected to school and there was no change in how connected teens felt to their family or friends which is not surprising since teens generally rely on their phones for their social lives. As parents, we often worry about our teens’ over-dependence on their phones and there are several other studies linking social media use to anxiety and depression in teenagers. But in this study, although social media use went up—mental health improved.
The students that most benefitted from lockdown were those who were more than averagely anxious and felt less than averagely socially connected in October. You might have thought that these more vulnerable teens would be especially affected by the added stress of the pandemic. But these students showed the greatest improvement in mental health and well-being. So maybe the problem is not that these students lack resilience—it could be the specific stresses that come with being in school.
That school is stressful is nothing new—although it does seem to be getting worse as the stakes get higher. But according to these results, being in high school is more stressful than being in a global pandemic. If someone felt like this about their job—we’d be telling them to get a new job fast.
Here in the UK, schools are due to re-open on September 7th and every day, when I listen to my daily dose of outrage on the radio, politicians, parents, and teachers argue over how this should be done. A line I hear frequently is that the children will be more damaged by staying home than going to school.
I am a parent of a child hoping to go to college, so I understand the long-term argument all too well. Most children have struggled keeping up with school online so in order to do well, they need to be corralled back into the classroom where their jailers, i.e. teachers (and I have been one myself) can make sure they are not distracted by infinitely preferable ways to spend their time.
Everyone understands that ‘doing well’ means getting good grades because without those it is hard to game the system. But exam pressure, excessive as it may be, is not necessarily the biggest stressor at school.
I’ve been teaching teens from all over the word this summer and I asked them how they felt about going back to school. Many of them were unenthusiastic. When asked why, they never mentioned subjects, grades or exams—but they did mention other kids. Our teens are corralled every day with hundreds of their peers, many of whom they would just as soon never see again as long as they live.
There is nothing natural or normal about this experience, which is a pretty recent phenomenon in human history. At a time in their lives when teens are most vulnerable to social stress and peer pressure as well as struggling to develop self-esteem, school makes every day like a massive reality show contest. Schools may try to combat rising stress with mindfulness sessions and other techniques, but this is a lot like telling a person on the rack to take stronger and stronger painkillers while we keep turning the wheel.
