Recent research has shown there is significant evidence that the mental health and wellbeing of teenagers is decreasing, not only in the UK but throughout the world. Reflecting on my recent work with schools across several continents, I see this too, and have observed numerous reasons why it seems that being a teenager has never been harder.
One of the biggest challenges I have seen is the weight of the manifold masks our students have to wear, in order to function under the spotlight we shine on them, whether intentionally or not, every single day.
Wherever I turn today, I am bombarded by talk of student performance: an overwhelming expectation that they perform ever higher and better, a bastardisation of “growth mindset” which denies them the permission to believe that they are “enough”. There is a performative amplification of the very highest academic outcomes such that students inevitably infer a stiflingly narrow definition of success.
“Wherever I turn today, I am bombarded by talk of student performance.”
In addition, childhood and adolescence should be safe spaces in which young people can explore and find their identities, and they should be encouraged, validated and affirmed in that exploration and discovery. However, it seems to me that the adult world is ever more intolerant, stubborn and fearful about the form and function of that very agency.
We routinely communicate that, on the one hand, students should be “normal”, that they should comply and conform, and that they should turn down the volume on anything that makes them different and push it into the shadow or the closet.
But, on the other hand, that they should “perform”, relentlessly pursuing the often arbitrary or unrealistic standards we set for them, and compete against each other to do so.
“We routinely communicate that young people should turn down the volume on anything that makes them different.”
Little wonder, then, that they wear manifold masks, thickly and well, in order to pretend that they are doing both these things: performing, and being normal.
One of the first questions I ask schools is: “What is wellbeing?” Like too many an important word, its overuse can dilute its meaning or cause it to evaporate altogether, and so it is important we reach a stakeholder-wide consensus about what wellbeing is.
I then ask: “How can we measure wellbeing?”, since even the briefest of epistemological forays will demand that we measure what we think we know, to verify whether, or the extent to which, we actually know it.
In this, I challenge schools to explore my “Wellbeing Data Wheel”, a systematic inventory of evidence which provides a comprehensive net through which no student can easily fall. And this is why I find research into the effective measurement of child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing so interesting and important. And why I believe we must listen to the findings thereof.
“Even the briefest of epistemological forays will demand that we measure what we think we know.”
And what are the findings of this recent research? Namely that a) we are witnessing the widespread deterioration of child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing; and b) the better we can identify the first signs when they are younger, the lesser the chance of much bigger problems further down the road. In other words, if we measure, we will know; and if we know, we can do something about it.
When asked to define my #WellbeingFirst agenda, I explain that it is simple: that we must put wellbeing first. And that, if we do, everything else will get better too. If we prioritise academics, there is every likelihood that wellbeing will suffer; but there is widespread evidence that, if we put wellbeing first, academics will, also, improve.
In Stevie Smith’s poem, Not Waving but Drowning, the narrator describes a swimmer out at sea, and that, before he died, no one was sure if he was “waving” or “drowning”. They then reflect on their own life, and that, too often, others didn’t realise that they, too, were “not waving but drowning”.
The recent COP summit will not have convinced our children that we are willing and able both to listen to overwhelming evidence of an existential crisis and to act now. The evidence of an existential crisis in child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing is overwhelming. We must act now.
