Tag / health

by nflanagan

Are Schools the Problem?

I was somewhere between irritated and curious when I saw the headline: America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem? The subhead: From A.D.H.D. to anxiety, disorders have risen as the expectations of childhood have changed.

Well, yeah. A.D.H.D. is now better defined and diagnosed. And I certainly believe that anxiety is on the rise with our youngest people—their world came crashing down five years ago with a global pandemic.

Although I don’t think the subhead writers were thinking of this, anxiety must be through the roof for children of the undocumented, attending school while praying that their mom will come home after work and that they will still be citizens after the Supreme Court gets another whack at the Fourteenth amendment.

But have our expectations of children really changed? And are schools at fault?

Annoying headline aside, there’s a lot of alarming data in the article:

‘One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016. The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31. Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.’

It’s actually an informative read. Diane Ravitch deftly reviewed the piece in a blog post entitled Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood. In fact, people have been writing about the ever-growing pressure on kids to excel for decades (especially those in high schools where getting into the Ivies or considering a gap year is common).

A couple of decades ago, ironically, we were talking about high-pressure Asian schools and why Singapore topped the international test scores. Was that what our kids needed—a literal kick in the pants? More competition? And why wasn’t the school providing that?

Here’s the thing: Schools in general—more about that word in a minute—aren’t the cause of students’ mental health issues. Schools do what they can with what they’re given, and what they are directed to do, for the most part.

First, a “school” is not precisely defined. Let’s say a good school has competent teachers, capable and cooperative support staff, thoughtful administrators, a clean and safe facility and enough resources to serve the kids assigned there. Those features can all be undone by bad policies and the social factors surrounding the school.

When the halls are lined with buckets catching snowmelt, when there is no library or science equipment, when one of the children hid a gun in his backpack—where do we place blame? On voters who turned down the school bond issue? On the beleaguered principal? The careless parents who set a bad example? State legislatures that take money away from high-poverty public schools and give it to those who can afford private schools?

To say that “schools” are responsible for an uptick in mental health issues for students is not only unfair—it’s not accurate. The world—especially in 2025—is a scary place. For many (not all, but many) kids, school is the safest place for them to be, and I include in that number children who live in nice houses and have plenty to eat.

Have our expectations for children changed? Yes, and often in damaging ways.

Just talk to teachers. They’ll tell you that kindergarten is the new first grade. They’ll share stories of kids whose behavior is driven by shame and frustration. They’ll tell you that 15 minutes of outdoor play is a benefit, not a waste of time better used on worksheets. They’ll testify that building a cooperative community is always the first step toward learning, in pre-school and in chemistry class. They can tell stories about seeing kids work through an academic roadblock, with patience and humor—not shaming and blaming.

Veteran teachers will also pinpoint the time at which screen time and access to inappropriate, even dangerous, content began to change the way kids talk to and about each other.

Maybe we start addressing mental health issues by understanding just what it is that is making children anxious and distracted, and putting our attention and resources there.

 Don’t misunderstand—I’m not saying that schools (in addition to all the other jobs they’re expected to do) can “fix” a child with failing mental health. But schools can be a significant factor in contributing to a child’s sense of security, belonging and worth.

by nflanagan

A Veteran Teacher’s Thoughts about ADHD

I can remember the first time I heard about ADHD. It was in the early 1990s—and the person who was educating me was the mother of one of my students. His teachers—six of us, plus an admin—were sitting around a table, meeting to discuss his classroom behaviors (not good), when she whipped out stapled packets of articles on ADD.

He’d been officially diagnosed, and she was part of a parent support group, which provided materials for teachers. The packets she gave us were thick—maybe 50 pages—and filled with scientific-sounding information about diagnosis and treatment of this disease, then thought to apply to perhaps three percent of all students.

Reading through it (rather than round-filing it, as a couple of colleagues did), you could see what was coming. The Attention-Deficit Era had begun. He wasn’t hyperactive or oppositional-defiant, or a troublemaker. Not anymore. He had ADD.

Let me say, upfront, that I believe ADHD is a real thing, and using medication judiciously to treat it is often a lifesaver for parents and teachers. Let me also say that the way some classrooms operate is not conducive to deep learning for a range of students who need lots of movement and hands-on activities. And—side note– this is often not their teachers’ fault, given our increasing national focus on testing, compliance and narrowing the curriculum. Raising the damned bar.

I was horrified to read in Paul Tough’s excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine, Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?  that nearly a quarter of 17-year old boys in the United States have now been diagnosed as having ADHD. Tough does a good job of tracking the factors—drug treatments, specifically—that have made one in four boys unable to focus in a quiet classroom without chemical assistance.

He rightfully notes that ADHD symptoms also look like a lot of other things: anxiety, head injury, lead exposure and many other traumas.

But the piece ends on a hopeful note, with lots of testimony from young adult men who have found the right jobs and life circumstances and seldom experience troublesome ADHD symptoms. Which makes me ponder what there is about school that makes the kids we used to call hyperactive need drugs to get by every day, even though the medicines don’t improve their learning.

“Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”

The kid whose mother insisted he had a disease, rather than merely being disobedient? He was, in fact, hyperactive and prone to (cheerfully) destroying order in a classroom. Once, while I was moving band equipment, chairs and stands across the hall from the band room for an assembly in the gym, I instructed him to load percussion equipment on a flat pushcart. (Teacher tip: Always give restless students an important job.)  

Instead, he assembled the drum set on the cart, then had another kid push him down the hall while he pounded out a little Metallica. Down the hall—and past the office. It didn’t end well for either of us. He wasn’t a bad drummer, by the way. According to mom, it was his favorite class.

I looked him up on internet, and he’s now a multimillion-selling real estate agent. Go figure.

I taught for two more decades after that day I first heard of ADD. Lots more students were diagnosed with ADD, over time—then, ADHD. My colleagues and I talked often about accurate language, and accurate diagnoses, and the differences in kids when they were medicated. Sometimes, parents let teachers know their child had been diagnosed—sometimes, they didn’t.

I took kids to camp and on field trips where I had to administer their ADHD medications, or have conversations with their concerned parents about behavior issues when they were unmedicated—at an evening performance or band camp.

And I often felt grateful that I was teaching band, with 65 students at once, all holding noisemakers. There was a lot of stimulation in the band room, plenty of activity. There was also discipline (because otherwise there would be chaos), but my attention-deficit kids could tolerate rules and procedures, as long as they were moving and doing things. Mostly.

I also taught 7th grade math for two years. I found that maintaining student focus with 28 students in a desks-and-chalkboard setting was often way more difficult than keeping 60 band kids on track.

Read Paul Tough’s piece, if you get a chance. It’s nuanced and layered with contradictions, like most things about schooling, and raising healthy children. We could be doing lots more for kids who are immersed in screens and entertainment daily, and have difficulty staying on task when that task involves paper and pencils.

But then—we could be doing a lot more for many kids, who bring their various backgrounds and issues to school. If only we had the resources. And a genuine commitment to the next generation.

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by nflanagan

Let’s Blame the Pandemic

Hey, I know it’s the holiday season, the end of a long, incredibly stressful and disappointing year. You’re entitled to a few days’ respite and mindless merry-making before returning to your job, if you are lucky enough to have a job that offers vacation time off over the holidays. I get it.

But as we move into a loosely organized resistance to whatever the hell comes next—Measles? The end of special education? Further loss of reproductive rights?—I think it would behoove us to poke around in the causes of what made has now made us, the so-called Greatest Nation on Earth, vulnerable to the likes of Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps you remember the movie “Don’t Look Up.” The film follows two scientists who discover an extinction-level comet heading for Earth,which they then attempt to warn humanity about. The makers of the film have publicly stated that the film is meant as a satirical metaphor for the response to the climate emergency.

But the movie was also about how people don’t want to hear about bad things coming their way. They find it hard to believe that terrible scenarios could happen—their homes could slide down the mountainside, or an organized group of terrorists could invade the Capitol. So they pretend that genuine crises won’t happen, couldn’t happen—or didn’t happen.

How is it that Trump voters are now wondering—before he even takes office—if he will “keep his promises” to the poor? Why couldn’t they just think back to, you know, eight years ago, when his first (and, it turned out, only) leadership success was focused on tax cuts for the rich? Aren’t they listening when he suggests nominating  as Attorney General a dude who asks his teenaged “girlfriend” for freebie sex, as ”customer appreciation?”

That was not a rhetorical question, by the way. Who IS seriously listening to what Trump and his acolytes are currently saying they intend to do?  Are we all just opening gifts and going to the movies, eating ourselves into a stupor, because nothing can be done? Why is the Titanic backing up, planning to hit the iceberg again?

Think back to a time when it absolutely felt like nothing could be done—and we (everyone on earth) were facing an existential crisis: March 2020, as COVID rolled around the globe, and its potential as history-making killer became obvious.

My working theory for why we were confused enough, as a nation, to vote Donald Trump back into office, centers around the divisions, deprivations and misconceptions we all experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are still living with the repercussions, but pretending that it’s done, gone forever.

Here are six ideas about how the pandemic is still with us, impacting our institutions and daily life:

We totally underestimated the impact of a pandemic, before it occurred, and since, whenever we declared our personal liberation from living with a potentially mortal disease. We underestimated our capacity for coping with danger, and we underestimated the need to see ourselves as in charge, not helpless in the face of that danger. We underestimated the fear and lack of patience. We were panicked but—living in a rugged individualism/patriarchy—pretended not to be. We talked endlessly about when we could return to normal.

We especially underestimated the impact on children—on their emotional security, their need to play and learn with children their own age, their need to succeed at tasks set for them, as they built a mature personality. We’re still feeling those insecurities in our schools and often, responding with more pressure, rather than flexibility and the gift of time. We’re still having trouble getting kids to show up at school, a flashing red light for school leaders.

The pandemic was socially disruptive. It took families away from landmark gatherings—weddings, holidays and even funerals. It ruined existing workplace norms; we’re still trying to hire workers and adjust prices. The entire labor market has been disrupted, and the people in control don’t like the backlash of workers (including teachers) demanding more money. Mask-wearing (to keep either wearer or the people they encountered safe) became controversial.

The pandemic unsettled traditional religious beliefs and practices. Injecting the divine into a global pandemic was confusing to believers: Did God send us a lethal pandemic for a reason? If you trusted in Jesus, did that mean you didn’t need to wear a mask? Attendance at churches, which impacted their ability to stay afloat financially, dwindled—causing many churches to close, and others to put more faith in a Christian nationalism theology, where humans were in control.

The pandemic revealed how little Americans knew or cared about actual science. You remember Anthony Fauci, bona fide expert in viral disease transmission, putting his hand over his face at one of Trump’s COVID press conferences, right? Or the charge that the COVID vaccines “didn’t work” when some vulnerable people thought they were a magic shield instead of a lifesaving mitigator? All the scientific advances that have come in the past four years—and now we’re moving   toward vaccine refusal and, God help us, RFK Junior driving the public health ship.

The pandemic was politically disruptive. Donald Trump’s leadership style during the last year of his presidency—the Ivermectin and the bleach, the assertion that we’d be packing the churches by Easter, his drive around in a limosine to wave at fans while being treated for COVID at Walter Reed—was horrifying. But establishment of the Big Lie and the January 6th Insurrection at the Capitol ripped the fabric of American politics more than the previous hundred years’ worth of wars and rebellions. For every person who felt relief at having Uncle Joe in the WH, passing useful legislation, rebuilding international relationships and remembering the dead, there was an angry voter who thought he’d stolen the presidency (and pissed off that he still had to wear a mask in the grocery store).

Which brings me back to the last days of 2024, where we—like the heedless citizens in “Don’t Look Up”—are standing on the tracks of democracy, facing an oncoming train, but feeling too hopeless to muster a response.

Susan Glasser, on the Musk/Bannon/Ramaswamy/Loomer blah-blah on Twitter:

Would it be too 2016 of me to suggest that this is absurd, embarrassing, worrisome stuff? As 2024 ends, the prevailing attitude toward the manic stylings and overheated threats of the once and future President, even among his diehard critics, seems to be more one of purposeful indifference than of explicit resistance; call it surrender or simply resignation to the political reality that Trump, despite it all, is twenty-five days away from returning to the Oval Office.

Or, as Paul Waldman suggests in a terrific piece, everything is just awful: You can date it back as far as you like, but the prime suspect is the covid pandemic, a trauma that still profoundly affects us. That’s true not just for those who lost family members or businesses, or whose kids basically lost a year of schooling, but for everyone, the way it blanketed the country in misery and left us at each other’s throats. One of the most revealing data points is that during the pandemic, pedestrian deaths skyrocketed. People were just driving angry.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, sitting here, lonely, at my computer, I imagined a dozen ways that surviving a global pandemic might lead to improvements in our habits and way of life. Read it—it’s embarrassing to imagine that I believed a country that chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton could turn the corner on a dozen issues and needs, courtesy of a pandemic that brought us together. We should all know better, now.

A couple of days ago, Dr. Vin Gupta (speaking of pandemic heroes) wrote this:  I’d recommend everyone regardless of medical risk bring a mask on your airplane journey, a disinfectant wipe to clean the seat you’re in and hand sanitizer. It’s going to be on you alone to protect your health. Warning signs are everywhere.

There you have it. It’s on you. Me, too.
Let’s work together.