Adrift After Isolation – Social and Emotional Predictions and Plans
We knew it was coming, but it was still worrisome to see. Students, teachers, and boarding staff have been struggling mightily, compared to their pre-pandemic age peers. A rare confluence of COVID and quarantine factors clearly caused young people’s normal social and emotional development to lag; social isolation, family stress, online learning (not the academic kind), apprehension about the future, and diminished access to professional care all took a toll on young and mature minds alike. Much has been written already about the mental-health consequences of the pandemic, but what does the future hold? No one knows for sure, but here are my predictions for the coming year or two, along with some essential recommendations.
1. Less resilience. Unpredictable events are a fact of life. What was different about the pandemic was how little access young people had to resilient role models. Looking back, this scarcity is scary because people are not born socially and emotionally resilient. They learn how to cope with stress in healthy ways from peers, parents, and professionals who set a good example with their own adaptive attitudes and behaviors. Young people might even learn from the occasional celebrity or main character in a book, film, or news report. But with diminished exposure to positive role models, most young people became more overwhelmed, gave up more easily, blamed others more readily, and stopped trying more quickly. This decrease in resilience was worsened by most young people’s facing fewer direct social challenges, such as face-to-face disagreements. Learning and working online also made it easier to avoid difficult or uncomfortable tasks. Today, showing up in person, without the option of muting your audio and video, exceeds the limits of many young people’s rusty social skills.
Recommendation: Everyone can learn better ways to bounce back from adversity. If you have begun already, this week is the perfect time to begin teaching students healthy ways of coping with stress. For example, share stories and strategies in advisory, in correspondence with students, in assemblies, and during inductions at the start of each term. Your students need memorable anecdotes about other people—including those from within your school—who have overcome challenges successfully.
Frame these resilience narratives for what they are: inspirational accounts of everyday people who faced everything from small daily hassles to devastating life events, yet who persevered. Emphasize the how in these stories, as well as the distinction between unhealthy coping (e.g., social isolation, substance abuse) and healthy coping (e.g., social support, positive attitudes, focusing on what you can control, not what you cannot).
Great starting places: YouTube video of Beigette Gill, who recovered from a spinal injury and eventually returned to her job directing a summer camp.
Inspirational role models are a good start, but we all need practice. And we all benefit from a stronger support system, such as peer mentors and confidants. And younger students and new students will especially benefit from having an older “big brother” or “big sister” with whom they can spend some free time. The incidental learning that will occur in these beginner-expert pairs helps less experienced students feel more connected and helps more experienced students feel more competent.
2. More conflict. Like the adults in their lives, young people witnessed—first-hand, in news reports, or on social media—a lot of conflict during the years of the pandemic. In addition to an uptick in parental discord, students heard about mass shootings, police brutality, social justice protests, political clashes, and a steady stream of “alternate facts” articulated and embraced with as much conviction as verifiable facts.
Unlike some of the adults in their lives, many students lacked the life experience and formal education to resolve conflicts peacefully and winnow fact from fiction. Nobody does either perfectly, but the pandemic deprived most students of the daily, face-to-face opportunities to work out differences and find evidence to support their convictions. Young people—who needed those opportunities most—now show deficits in conflict-resolution skills and their ability to discern what is real. Further impeding their healthy development are the misguided adults who continue leveraging propaganda for personal gain and political power.
Recommendation: Devote at least one full day at the start of the new school year to teaching new and returning students how to resolve conflicts peacefully, especially those sparked by misinformation, misunderstanding, and bias. In small groups, have every student participate in realistic role plays, based on the student-student, student-staff, and student-teacher conflicts you’ve witnessed or heard about in the last two years. Skillful conflict resolution cannot simply be described; proficiency requires ample practice.
Great starting place: For conflict resolution, boarding staff can educate themselves on Dr. Ross Greene’s Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model, available as an online course that you can take and then customize for a one-day, school-based workshop. For fake news, start with this video and article from Commonsense Media
As with resilience, cerebral preparation lays a solid foundation, but be sure your students have an opportunity to role play conflict resolution, with boarding staff coaching them through a few scenarios.
3. Mental-health manipulation. The de-stigmatization of mental illness and mental-health care has been heroic, heartwarming, and healthy. Protagonists of popular television series, such as Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) and Bobby Axelrod (Billions) even visit psychotherapists weekly. Ignoring for a moment their unscrupulous behaviors, characters like these demonstrate how toughness and vulnerability can coexist, how social and emotional struggles are human, and how professional supports are beneficial. In addition, student organizations (e.g., Active Minds), university programs (e.g., Orygen), and Olympic athletes (e.g., Michael Phelps, Simone Biles) have successfully raised awareness about the normalcy of mental-health problems and the effectiveness of both self-care and clinical treatments.
However, the rise of influencers (personalities with a substantial following on social media sites) has sometimes caused the public perception of mental illness to morph from normal to necessary, from permissible to popular. On TikTok especially, everything from depression and anxiety to dissociative identity disorder and anorexia nervosa has been glamorized. Indeed, certain influencers turn serious, sometimes lethal problems into fashion statements and social currency by romanticizing their (often self-diagnosed) mental illnesses, hospitalizations, and self-harm behaviors. Rather than de-stigmatizing mental illness, this socially competitive practice puts unhealthy pressure on young people to conform. In turn, some of these young people adopt a mental-health diagnosis of their own, as part of their identity, lest they be considered banal.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that joking about COVID and other physical illnesses also has had pernicious effects. Many people who lost loved ones, or watched them struggle through intensive care, have felt hurt and disrespected by pandemic humor. Too soon. Monitor your students’ sarcasm and joking for themes that are upsetting to others.)
Recommendation: Whereas de-stigmatizing mental illness and treatment have been a noble pursuit (with additional progress still to be made), making young people feel deficient for not having a diagnosed mental illness, or having a mental illness that is not severe enough to have required hospitalization is clearly counterproductive. Also unhealthy is a situation when a young person begins seeing natural ups and downs as mental illness. To counteract this trend, schools can clearly and repeatedly communicate their core values. On a website, letterhead, promotional materials, merchandise, and signage on campus, state something your school stands for. (Avoid the misstep of saying what your school doesn’t stand for.)
In your school-branded style, communicate any of the following: all people have inherent worth; people’s treatment of others matters far more than whether they have a medical or psychological diagnosis; we share a responsibility to one another and to the earth; all members of the community should feel included. If you communicate these and other core values clearly, members of your community are less likely to feel pressure to adopt a medical or mental-health diagnosis, as well as less likely to feel inferior if they have a legitimate diagnosis from a licensed professional.
Because many of your school’s printed information and web pages will be unseen, signage overlooked, and merchandise messages ignored, schools should spend most of their effort training boarding staff on the best in-person ways they can teach the school’s values. This might include small group discussions and thought-provoking games, as well as candid discussions about the media that students consume. Boarding staff should also learn how to respond compassionately but honestly to peers’ and students’ over-pathologizing life’s normal ups and downs. This might include correcting someone who misuses words like trauma, migraine, depression, and panic attack.
Great starting place: The sensitivity of this topic merits in-person discussions between boarding staff and students. Prepare to do this by re-familiarizing yourself with your school’s core values, including what behaviors your community celebrates. To lay the groundwork for such an important discussion, you may want read a few editorials about how values are transmitted in popular culture. For example:
Why Has Social Media Made It ‘Cool’ To Have Mental Illnesses?
Can ‘The Culture’ Make Mental Health Cool?
Then, arrange a time for boarding staff to meet together and discuss thoughtful questions that have applied leadership implications, such as “How will the example we set for students convey our school’s core values?”
4. Amplified fears. As of this writing, COVID-19 has caused 6.5-million deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Among your students and colleagues are probably some who have lost a loved one to coronavirus; others who have had to care for a seriously ill family member; and many who have feared for their own health. To the list I shared in the two-part article entitled “Kids’ Big Fears” (Camp Business, Jan/Feb + Mar/Apr, 2012), I can add “fear of illness or death.”
Hearing daily mortality statistics, on top of other horrific news, has made many young people and adults feel edgier. Although the pandemic has had some positive outcomes for many people, it also has made many of us feel that life is more bleak, tenuous, and brutal than we felt before. It’s how I imagine the character, Francie Brady, feels in Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy. Francie’s lifetime of trauma prompts him to ask, upon his release from a mental health treatment unit, as a middle-aged ex-con, “Are all the beautiful things gone?”
Recommendation: In addition to recognizing that none of us knows everything about another person’s lived experiences (popularly referred to as being trauma-informed), we owe it to ourselves to assume the best intentions behind other people’s behavior. Until we have evidence to the contrary, even behavior that we find irritating, jolting, or patently offensive should be considered well-intended.
Jumping to the conclusion that others have malicious intent has created pockets of “cancel culture” and given rise to the phenomenon of “doxing,” both of which sidestep civil debate and the right to defend oneself. The latter is considered a basic human right in most countries.
It’s beyond any individual’s power to reverse, single-handedly, the contemporary trend of avoiding difficult conversations in favor of defaming or dismissing someone, and sidestepping human rights and published concepts of justice in favor of throwing someone to the Internet wolves. However, nearly all professional educators and caregivers have the power to cultivate patience, compassion, and open-mindedness in themselves. Perhaps a widespread commitment to such personal growth will turn the worldwide social tide.
Great starting place: The U.S. Bill of Rights is under 500 words; adding Section 1 of the 14th Amendment bumps the total to 564 words—not an unwieldy reading assignment for students. Many of those 564 words are hotly debated (at least in the U.S.), which makes it a great prelude to a discussion about how we debate.
Whatever their political persuasion, citizenship, or identity, you and your students might be able to cultivate more patience, compassion, and open-mindedness by discussing the question, “How are the U.S. Bill of Rights and a school or boarding house Code of Conduct alike and different?”
One of the most fascinating consultations I provided to a summer camp this year came from a director who left me this voicemail (which I have edited for confidentiality):
“Chris, a staff member came to me after breakfast to report an incident of bullying that occurred yesterday evening after lights-out. Apparently, this staff member overheard a few openly gay campers bullying a straight camper. The staff member intervened and spoke to the kids about respect and so forth, but wanted to talk with me before completing a Behavioral Incident Report. I have some initial thoughts, but I wanted to chat with you before I follow up with the campers and their unit. Please call me if you get this message before noon.”
As unusual as this scenario may sound, it reflects some universal human needs. For example, we all want to feel worthy, and we all want to belong. As I have outlined above, many students are less resilient, less deft at resolving conflicts, more inclined to advertise their uniqueness, and more fearful of capricious loss than previous generations.
Young people have always ridiculed other youth, so that part of the above example is unsurprising. But to witness young people who identify as members of a historically persecuted minority bullying a peer for being a member of a majority group is unusual. Yet, maybe it’s not surprising, given the turmoil of the past few years.
Even though I was able to call back before noon, the camp director had already realized that, although the particulars of this incident were atypical, the underlying needs of the kids involved were normal. Both the bullies and the target wanted to be heard and respected; both wanted the world to be predictable and fair; both sought to exercise some control over their lives; and both craved social connection. Guided by experience and intuition, and unruffled by the incident, the director’s skillful follow-up began by providing empathy for all the parties’ common needs, then moved to listening carefully to each person’s perceptions. The discussion ended by cooperating with the kids in designing a prosocial path forward that allowed everyone’s reasonable needs to be met.
The pandemic has set students’ development adrift. Perhaps knowing more about what to expect and how to prepare will help you and your team reverse some unhealthy trends and reset a steady course for everyone’s continued, positive growth.
Christopher Thurber, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and faculty member at Phillips Exeter Academy. He created Prep4School.com, an engaging collection of brief videos that teach students healthy ways of coping with common social, emotional, and academic challenges. His newest book, The Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure, includes eight ways adults can transform harmful pressure to healthy pressure.
Learn more about the work that Chris does with schools, camps, and companies on DrChrisThurber.com
