Thank you to Neuqua Valley High School (Naperville, Il) students for their honesty and vulnerability in sharing their mental health struggles in a virtual call with the U.S. Surgeon General attended by U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood.

And while additional funds for more school counselors are absolutely needed, they will not resolve any of the pressures that Neuqua Valley high school students and many of their peers across the country are dealing with. U.S. Rep. Underwood remembers them well from her days at Neuqua Valley HS.  “[T]he 2004 Neuqua alumna said some of the core issues existed when she attended the school. ‘And here we are, all these years later, still talking about these challenges,’ she said.”

In fact, we have been talking about these challenges for almost two decades now. Not only do these ‘core issues’ still exist, students have repeatedly raised their voice about academic pressure and anxiety. In 2017 Naperville middle and high school students were surveyed about their causes of stress.  Students cited pressure to get good grades, excessive academic, athletic, extracurricular competition and peer pressure as stress factors.

Research confirms that students attending high-achieving schools puts them at-risk for developing mental health issues including anxiety or depression. The Adolescent Wellness Report (2018) published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation identified four environmental factors that put adolescents’ well-being at risk: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and excessive pressure to achieve [emphasis added]. In its Vibrant and Healthy Kids Report (2019) the National Academies for Sciences, Engineering and Medicine added “youths at high achieving schools” to the list of at-risk groups along with children living in poverty and with incarcerated parents and recent immigrants. Dr. Suniya Luthar, emerita professor of psychology at Columbia’s Teachers College and the founder and executive director of AC Groups, is a prominent researcher in the field of adolescent resilience. She and her colleagues concluded in a 2020 paper in the American Psychologist that adolescents at high-achieving schools are at an elevated risk of developing “psychological disturbances from childhood and into adulthood, with risks for serious psychopathology, especially internalizing disorders such as anxiety or depression.”

A recent JAMA article describes the impact of  adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and their impact on our bodies: “ACEs lead to short- and long-term ill health through prolonged activation of the biological stress response and associated disruption of neurologic, endocrine, immune, metabolic, genetic, and genetic regulatory systems, a condition now known as the toxic stress response.”[emphasis added].

Our students are hurting. Time and time again, they have articulated their pain points. In 2017 a student petition called on administrators to “[s]tart defining success as any path that leads to a happy and healthy life. Start teaching us to make our own paths, and start guiding us along the way."  Upon reading the student petition, the Naperville Sun published an editorial using the call for change by Tessa Newman, a junior (Naperville North HS) at the time who wrote the petition on Change.org, as its headline: Listen more, talk less to understand student’s call for change. It highlights the student’s powerful invitation for high school administrators to “start understanding our [student] priorities and stop implementing yours.”

More funding for school counselors will not resolve the pressures that Neuqua Valley students and their peers across the country are experiencing unless we collectively investigate our concept of worth and bring forward the inherent value of human beings and their unique paths. The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy put his finger on the issue when he shared this in his conversation with Neuqua students: “Whether young or old, people feel like they will never be valued as humans if they don’t have enough money or good grades, attend the right college or have a perfect resume.”

Or in other words:

We have conflated grades and test scores with human worth.

We have conflated academic tracks with human purpose.

We have conflated approval with love and belonging.

We’ve created one path to a narrowly defined idea of “success” which at best is not serving our children well, and at worst is harming them. Tessa Newman spoke for many students past and present when she asked that administrators "start treating us like people, not GPAs or test scores. Start letting us choose how we wish to be defined. Start helping us find our dreams, and give us the tools we need to achieve them." It is a call for all adults to love, value and support our youth for the humans they are.  We stand at a crossroads as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation states so poignantly in its report:

Researchers, policymakers, practitioners, parents, teachers, and funders stand at a crossroads in determining our nation’s approach to adolescence. The traditional view holds that the adolescent years comprise a difficult phase to be endured and survived. But a newer path considers adolescence to be an important time to nurture, guide, and support our youth to live the healthiest lives possible. [emphasis added]

In order to nurture, guide and support our youth to live their healthiest lives possible, we must hear, believe and trust our kids and students. They are sharing their hearts, standing up for their health and are asking us-the adults-for agency and self-determination. Our kids want tools to explore their interests and pursue their paths in life. Our kids are human beings who like all of us want to be heard, seen and loved for who they are and not who we want them to be.

Our kids and students are calling on the adults in their lives to be a lighthouse that provides grounding, tools, parameters and unconditional love. A lighthouse serves for general direction only and invites us to empower our kids with life-giving trust and space to experience and navigate the calm and stormy waters of the journey we call life themselves.

Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

~Anne Lamott

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Photo credit: Howard Follas on unsplash

For more on this topic, I invite you to watch my 2021 IL PTA Convention & Leadership Conference invitational keynote address, Our Kids Were Not Alright Before the Pandemic: A Call for Renewal and Renovation.