The Kids Are (Maybe) Not Alright
I recall a series of conversations I had back in the nineties between myself and a math teacher. We both were in the early stages of the teaching profession although he was twenty years my senior. I was new to Chicago; he was born and raised miles from the shores of Lake Michigan. We taught seventh and eighth grade kids—12-14 years old—and we both were alarmed at the decay of their basic skills.
He and I would meet at the Lincoln Restaurant (a Civil War themed diner with omelettes named for generals and a burger called 'The Honest Abe') every Sunday and go over problems we saw our students trying to navigate. We'd brainstorm ways to help these kids while maintaining some semblance of routine for the students who were doing alright.
My theory was that sometime a generation or two before the promise of education proved less than valuable. The mantra of 'get an education, get a solid job' hadn't been true for at least twenty years and the bar for what constituted a hireable education moved the needle from a high school diploma to a college undergraduate degree. The poor kids, who were without exception the students we faced every day, were left out of the equation. Their grandparents found less incentive to do well in school, their parents even less so, so we were confronted with a third generation of kids who saw education as an unnecessary waste of their time.
His theory was that with the push for more specialized services for kids with learning disabilities and behavior disorders, increasing resources for these students combined with the requirement to integrate these troubled students into the regular classroom caused such confusion that it made the very act of teaching basic skills nearly impossible. His was a math curriculum and he claimed that on any given day and in any given class he had to put together three separate lesson plans to accommodate the few children who swung in from the special education rooms that he had no time to deal with the classroom at large. The game was to focus most of his energy in an eighty-minute timeframe on those kids and hope that the rest of the class, on autopilot, could manage.
Of course, we didn't solve the issues by meeting over eggs and pancakes once a week but it was our best option to navigating what was becoming an extremely difficult challenge—how to get students motivated to learn when there were too many obstacles in their and our way to do just that?
A decade later, I quit the profession but years later went back into the classroom as a substitute and found that things were far worse than I remembered. The most obvious culprit was the smartphone. Every school I came into prevented teachers from taking the phones away and even if they allowed it it would be like trying to pry the crack pipe from the hands of an addict. There was also present a shift in who was seen as the expert in the field. When I taught in the nineties, while underpaid and overworked, the teachers were perceived as the source of the best, on-the-ground information when it came to educating kids. Years later, the dynamic had shifted to the administrators who were held accountable by the parents all of whom had the very normal yet erroneous perception that their individual children were special and should be treated as such.
In the classroom, though, the kids were now in charge.
Then COVID hit and the whole teetering Jenga tower came toppling down.
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The second weekend of April in Chicago was insane. On Friday April 14th, hundreds of teenagers took over a public beach creating chaos. There were reports of illegal fireworks, a 14-year-old boy was shot, and the window of a police car was smashed. The following day, crowds of Chicago youth decided to heed Tik Tok invitations to participate in a style of mob madness known as “wilding.” Hundreds of young people, mostly teenagers, descended on the Loop district of central downtown. Video evidence documents incidents where innocent victims were beaten.
The OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) describes adolescent offenders as immature children prone to making silly decisions. “Treating children as children” is the number one priority of the OJJDP’s guiding philosophy. Most of these kids are old enough to drive, work a job, and even spawn other children. The OJJDP decision to refer to them as “children” comes across as a rhetorical effort to shield young offenders from criminal responsibility. In the words of Chicago Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson, “we need to keep them safe.”
The OJJDP recognizes that “most brains are not fully developed until a person reaches their mid-20s, and that younger youth are prone to impulsive, emotional, and risk-taking behaviors.”
Really? No shit. It has always been thus but even more so since our lives are longer and there is so much more free time. A thirteen-year-old on the farm in 1875 didn’t have the time—either in years or in days of leisure—to ‘live his truth’ because he was hellbent on working fifteen hour days and looking to marry and get a few more kids to help him with the work.
“Impulsive, emotional, and risk-taking.” Add to that, in the Age of the Mega-Computer inches from your butthole, “anxious, unstable, and depressed.”
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Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, growing numbers of young people were experiencing high rates of clinical-level anxiety. About 11.6% of kids had anxiety in 2012, up 20% from 2007. But during the pandemic, those numbers nearly doubled, such that 20.5% of youth worldwide now struggle with anxiety symptoms, according to a meta-analysis of 29 studies reported in JAMA Pediatrics (Vol. 175, No. 11, 2021). Besides COVID-related stressors like social isolation, missed milestones, and increased family tension, background stressors such as school shootings, political unrest, and the war in Ukraine have likely fueled these increases.
Recently, the studies being touted indicate that increased use of social media is a major cause or at least a major contributing factor. It could be that many are using the excuse of mental issues as a hall pass or lead in the water is causing severe brain damage or the media and academia has them convinced that the world is simply hopeless. Whatever the reason (or combination therein) the facts remain that our young people are a bit fucked up.
The question on most minds is “What to do about them?” The question should be “How can we help them?”
How does society help a group largely defined as "impulsive, emotional, risk taking, anxious, unstable, and depressed"?
First, money. If the behaviors of teenagers cost society so much money in property damage, violent crime, and the cost of training young adults who can't effectively read or write to make them employable, how about dumping some serious Pentagon-level cash into education? Dramatically increase pay for teachers encourages better candidates for the job which equals better teachers. Dramatically increase money for infrastructure improvements (especially for schools with decades long disrepair) makes the place a better venue for learning. I'm not suggesting public schools should resemble an Apple store but why the fuck not? If, as they say children are our future I think treating their formative years as a priority as high as the military might be a solid part of the solution.
Second, empathize with students without simply taking their word for it. Being heard and understood is essential; deference to the whims of a kid is detrimental to their growth. Remember that children are in process of learning how to navigate the world. They either learn to focus on earning respect, giving trust, and treating people as collaborators in their own success or they learn that people exist as things to manipulate into doing their bidding. Empathize but interrogate. Listen but question.
Third, provide structure. We all crave structure whether we like to admit it or not. A structureless life looks like endless hours of video games, Netflix, and the consumption of the saltiest, sugariest non-food in existence. Structure is good. No wonder so many of them become fat homunculi who choose the least path of resistance and gobble up every idiotic trend displayed on the screens they stare into for hours a day. Structure looks like definable tasks that lead to definable goals; clear consequences to behaviors. Structure recognizes the deleterious effects of unfettered access to social media and restricts it.
Finally, acknowledge that we can't save everyone.
If anything I found difficult in my decade of public school teaching, this was it. There were, every year, a few kids who I couldn't help no matter how hard I tried. I found that if I spent all of my energy trying to save the kid who, by thirteen years old, was already irretrievably anti-social, violent, or irredeemably fixated on chaos, I left all the rest of the students to fend for themselves. Those students then learned that if they acted like broken birds or criminals they received the most attention.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." — Spock
