Scaring Our Children To Death

In the Washington Post last week, yet another alarm sounded about the mental health crisis among our children, calling it "much vaster than we realize." 

This alarm has been rung again and again over the past year, including a declaration of a national emergency in the fall of 2021 from the American Academy of Pediatrics (and underlined it this year), but for folks working in the field, it's not exactly news. 

I wrote about this, sort of, in 2015, and did so in response to a story about the high rate of teen suicides in Silicon Valley. Back then I focused on the One Wrong Move syndrome, the message we send students that a single screw-up, a critical failure, can leave your whole life in shambles. And I still think that's part of it.

Things have not improved. The WaPo piece cites data saying that 75% of schools report concerns about student depression and trauma. Counselors are in short supply, both in school and out.

Causes? Some folks would like to blame the pandemic and the closure of school buildings or the trauma of personal loss to the disease, but according to the AAP, suicide was already the second leading cause of death for youths age 10-24 in 2018.

There's no doubt that the reasons are complex and varied, that the pandemic and social media and generational trauma (I just saw somebody refer to the under-25 crowd as Generation School Shootings). But I want to point at one factor in particular.

Everyone lives in scary times. In the 1930s, it looked as if the world was going to collapse, first economically and then with a rise of fascism. In the 1970s, we grew up with the assumption that nuclear holocaust was a when-not-if proposition. 

But we live in different times. For the past couple of decades, the go-to political strategy is to whip up fear and anger, anger and fear. From the days when every initiative was The War On [Your Cause Here], we have moved on to an endless series of existential crises. Every election is about the continued existence of democracy and/or our country. Every Congress vote is critical test; every Supreme Court decision is a turning point in the struggle for our very existence. Our enemies want to destroy Western Civilization. 

We are all-apocalypse, all the time.

For those of us who have grown up with this steady escalation, there's a certain recognition that this is political puffery, ever-anxious marketing designed to herd the electorate one way or another. For those of us who live in circumstances that allow us to assume that the floodwaters will not so much as soak our shoes, it's easy to distance ourselves. And much of the country is just sort of numb, hence the impulse to scream louder to cut through the haze and mobilize people.

But if you're a young person in this country, you were born into a theater where people were already screaming "Fire," and your whole life, they have never stopped. Our constant soup of rage and fear may be background noise to adults, but to students, it defines the world they have navigated for their entire lives.

There is no sentiment more quaint than "Not in front of the children." We don't have differences of opinions that the grownups need to work out on our own; we have enemies who must be silenced and obliterated and called out publicly on cable news. School exists downhill from the culture, and our culture is all about fear and anger and oncoming disasters that YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY SURVIVE SO YOU'D BETTER SEND US SOME MONEY AND GET OFF YOUR COUCH AND VOTE AND ARM YOURSELF AAAH AAH AAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

I can't remember the last time the prevailing message on an issue--any issue--was "This is probably going to suck, but we are tough enough to get through it." 

For students, in addition to the general noise about onrushing catastrophe, we send messages about their weakness, about all the things they must be protected from because otherwise they'll be broken and bent, about how they must either be kept in a protective bubble or taught to put on the armor of "grit" or some other quality that we imply they naturally lack. 

Young people are the canaries--the young, vulnerable canaries--in a cultural coal mine. They suffer from adults who forget to affirm them, to tell them that they are in fact strong and resilient and beautifully and wonderfully made, that despite the fact that life will often go in directions contrary to plans or expectations, that they can still rise and advance. And they suffer from adults who reject nuance and complexity in favor of an always-on scream of impending doom, that we must all be terribly afraid because Something Terrible is about to deliver Destruction That Cannot Be Withstood.

I expect that plenty of people will not heed any of this, that the plight of the canaries will not move them. We are a culture that likes to talk about how we value children, especially when we're using it to justify our latest policy initiative, but our actions and choices show that mostly we aren't serious about it. But we could be. We could decide tomorrow to do better, to listen for the canaries, to act like the people they need us to be.