Understanding Their Struggles with School
The Many Ways that the World Our Children and Teens are Growing Up in is Harder Now
As an adult, it is pretty common to feel confident that you know what certain experiences are like, because you have been through them. Especially parents, you might feel confused about why kids are complaining or struggling to achieve, because you went through school, and it wasn’t that bad.
What you might be failing to recognize is that a lot has changed between your school-aged experience and those of the people who’ve come afterwards. Technology has significantly changed what socializing is like for children and teens. School policies have dramatically moved in new directions to embrace newer norms. The experience children today are going through is almost unrecognizable in many fundamental ways.
In wrapping up my employment as a school-based therapist over at Rhodes Junior High School (Baseline & Longmore in Mesa), I took some photos of the classroom I had often provided therapy in to help show some of those changes.
Classrooms don’t tend to use projectors anymore. They have been replaced by smart TVs. Every student is assigned a laptop to complete school work on. They don’t have many assignments on paper these days. Their assignments are all online.
Safety-wise, schools have tightened security measures significantly. It might be pretty well known that most classrooms don’t have windows, but teachers can’t even prop open their doors outside of passing periods now, as they are required to be locked. In many districts, parents can’t even go into the front office of the school without knocking or ringing a bell to be buzzed in. Schools have lockdown drills 4-8x each school year, with people loudly knocking on doors and jiggling in door handles to check for safety; sometimes those drills are purposefully not announced to teachers, so no one knows if they are safe or not.
For afterschool events, dances, football games, you name it, students aren’t allowed to leave campus and come back. This means they need to wear their dresses and dance outfits to school that day, and don’t get the chance to get ready with their friends. Even parents attending events at the school have restrictions. No bags or purses are permitted to be taken to a graduation ceremony unless it is see-through.
In the name of safety, even policies for students have been more restrictive than ever. I have seen lunchrooms where kids are elbow to elbow, at an assigned table with their classmates, where they are not allowed to get up or move to talk with students in other classes. Many schools do not allow teens to ever have a phone out, even in the hallways or during lunch periods. Due to the rise in vaping in school restrooms, it isn’t uncommon to see a school with policies restricting restroom usage. For example, they might have restrooms locked during passing periods, requiring them to go to class, wait for class to start, and then be given a pass. Then even with a pass, the school might implement a policy of only one student in the restroom at a time. There have even schools starting to have metal detectors at the entrances of schools.
Not every school has all of these policies and changes, but it would be rare to see any school in these days without a few of them. We tend to see more restrictive environments in schools with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, almost mirroring a prison-like atmosphere. What would it feel like to go to school in an atmosphere like that?
I will tell you what children and teens have told me. It doesn’t feel safe. They all have back-up plans about what they would do if a shooter entered their classroom. You feel like you are seen as undeserving of trust, treated like a criminal. The warm experiences that used to make school feel homey have been taken away. Opportunities for connecting with others, connecting with staff members, have been reduced or eliminated. If they have trouble focusing and need to interact with others or use their hands in order to stay engaged, they feel shame and disengaged from learning, like there is something wrong with them.
Most of us don’t have the privilege of moving our kids to a better school or have the time and resources to homeschool them, just to get them out of such an environment. Those are big picture systemic problems that are affecting a whole generation. What we can do is have more empathy towards their struggles and recognize that the world we grew up in isn’t the same as the one that they are trying to get through now, and their struggles might indeed be worse in many ways. Just prioritizing helping them feel heard and understood goes a long way.
