This is Mental
How a culture of inauthentic pandering and an obsession with "Mental Health Awareness" is messing with our children's heads
Apparently, describing something as “mental” or “mad” is not considered socially acceptable anymore, yet in this age of dichotomies we are obsessed with assigning an ever increasing list of mental health labels onto people. Bizarrely, some people seem to be throwing themselves over the self diagnosing cliff & eagerly applying these labels to themselves like lemmings. To me, the most worrying development in all this is the desire to drag children over the cliff with them.
I have worked for years with children, managing after school clubs, holiday clubs and play groups. I have also worked in Primary schools supervising at lunch times and more recently working as a TA. From my own experience and observations working with kids, and being a parent, I believe they need consistent boundaries, structure, routine and very clear rules. This shouldn’t be controversial but has become a rather unfashionable take. In some circles it’s even considered tyrannical or oppressive to suggest this.
Over the decades, we’ve understandably shifted away from how our “children should be seen and not heard” Victorian predecessors did things, but this has accelerated in the last few years and we have now created a mental health Frankenstein's monster. Of course, like most things, there are a very complex set of circumstances that have contributed to our current mental health “crisis”, but in my opinion, the elephant in the room is our whole approach to raising & educating children.
Some of the more challenging behaviour caused by a lack of discipline, structure and rules is now being viewed through a therapeutic lens. Instead of seeing this behaviour as something that can be corrected over time by clearly and consistently applying consequences to bad behaviour and rewards for good behaviour, the emphasis is now placed on the rewards and the consequences have been dropped. Implementing any form of discipline, appropriate to the severity of the behaviour, is frowned upon and anything that could in any way upset or cause the child any regret or discomfort is considered taboo. Children are not being encouraged or taught to take personal responsibility for their own behaviour. Their behaviour is seen as separate to them, or a consequence of something or someone else, not something that they can learn to develop any self control over.
Children feel safe playing and exploring within clear boundaries set for them by adults. By relinquishing our responsibility of setting clear, firm boundaries, because of a fear of appearing too strict, we are placing an unnecessary burden on the kids to try and find those lines themselves. I have witnessed children being visibly overwhelmed and distressed in the face of wafty, weak and frankly ineffectual adults who appear incapable of being clear and firm, but instead engage in over complicated pontificating and long winded platitudes.
Kids are being pandered to with positive & neutral convoluted language which resembles more a kind of bland and patronising management speak, than anything clear or straightforward. This language and tone is used whether they drop their lunch box, break a toy, or hit another child. There’s a deliberate flattening out of response to all behaviour with no adjustment for severity which means they are not learning a sense of proportion or how to judge the difference between different types of behaviour.
I have been on countless training courses specifically urging teachers and childcare professionals to always use this soft pandering language and steer away from more straight forward, plain language. Examples are given. Instead of saying firmly “Don’t hit other children! Hitting is wrong”, say in a gentle tone, “Do you think that’s a good thing to do? Do you remember we chatted about this before? You did SO well yesterday. You didn’t hit anyone. Remember? What happened? Let’s sit down and have some calm time”. The emphasis is shifted entirely away from the severity of the act itself and the child will even get more gentle support and positive attention than the child who was actually at the receiving end of being hit. It may be presented as a positive approach that models kindness, but in my experience it’s counterproductive and gives the wrong message to the child. They will just think it’s really “no big deal” to deliberately go around hurting other children, after all, they got a similar little friendly chat when they lost their pencil case.
There’s also a tendency to over congratulate, praise and reward children for merely conducting themselves in behaviour which should be considered normal. I have seen this causing problems with other children as they understandably see this as unfair. Why is one child being rewarded and praised so much for the one time they didn’t disrupt the whole class, when other kids, who never disrupt the whole class are being ignored? I have heard children remark on this many times. My daughter has come home from school with similar stories asking me why this is the case.
Even using the words “bad behaviour” or “good behaviour”, or “right” or “wrong” are frowned upon and discouraged because this is seen as placing an unfair value judgement, or hierarchy of behaviour on the child. I personally believe this is a huge mistake. Children think in binary terms. Girl/boy, right/wrong, good/bad, love/hate, etc. Once children get older they can then learn to grapple with more complex grey areas and nuance over time, but for young children we are being steered away from an intuitive straight forwardness and honesty, and encouraged to respond in an inauthentic and unnatural way which I think is actually confusing for kids. It also does nothing to discourage them from doing it again.
Of course, all this would have started out as a legitimate response to adults overreacting really angrily & behaving cruelly towards children. However, like with so much at the moment, this has morphed into an ever expanding overcorrection which has created a whole new set of disastrous consequences. The more these tactics prove to be clearly not working, the more they seem to double down on this approach, which is why it has got more and more deranged and counter intuitive over time.
In addition to all this, teachers are actively encouraged to constantly seek out deeper psychological reasons for why a child might be acting out. Lack of boundaries or discipline are seldom ascribed as a possible reason. Instead they are trained and presented with a plethora of different mental health problems and labels that can be placed on the child. Anything to avoid the dastardly act of actually applying some kind of discipline. Schools receive extra funding if one or several of these labels can be placed on a child, thus increasing the incentives to diagnose.
Before people start, I am not suggesting that there aren’t children with genuinely complicated mental health problems who need specialised support that should be appropriately applied. Of course, there are. I also don’t think a “one size fits all” approach is the way to go. What I am saying is that the criteria for applying these labels, and the ever expanding types of mental health issues have broadened to such a degree, that we are ascribing them to children who, in my opinion, don’t always qualify, and are just normal kids reacting to bad incentives created by adults who have been trained up to the eyeballs in these techniques. We are also creating a special class of kids who are beyond reproach and who the other kids just have to put up with. A very common concern with parents is that their well behaved child is essentially being ignored, while the disruptive ones are receiving all the praise, attention and special treatment, and when they approach the teachers about this, the response inevitably boils down to having to just suck it up.
Now we have the push of national initiatives in schools such as “Mental Health Awareness Week”. Raising awareness of such things is just a fancy way of saying “putting ideas into their heads”, because this is the reality of it. If I keep asking my daughter if she’s okay, and repeat this enough, she will start to wonder if she is actually “not okay”. She may not have even considered the possibility that there may have been something wrong in the first place. Imagine spending a week getting Primary school kids to engage in navel gazing, focusing on their own mental health, giving them questionnaires digging into how they feel about themselves and thinking this is a good idea?
If my daughter falls over and cries, of course I will comfort her, but unless it’s serious, I tend to follow this with a quick “you’ll be fine”, change the subject and encourage her to move on and forget about it. I do this for her benefit so that she learns over time to be more resilient, but the new conventional wisdom is that we must “affirm” the child’s feelings and placate them. So encouraging the child to not dwell on something and move on, is considered being insensitive to the child’s feelings and we must acknowledge that those negative feelings are “valid”. This is all well and good for very particular serious cases, but this is considered the best approach for anything that might upset the child. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with kids will know that they are prone to building things up and making them bigger than they ought to be and it’s actually our job as adults to help them gain a sense of proportion and reassure them that they’re going to be okay. In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff. All this has always been, up until 10 minutes ago, common sense, but common sense has left the building.
Working in schools has become more and more challenging and I know some amazing teachers who are doing fantastic work under increasingly difficult situations. Much of the issue here is a set of powerful incentives that drive this culture along and even if a teacher or someone who works in childcare might agree with me, there’s very little they can personally do to change things. I have had private conversations with people who work in schools who agree with me but feel trapped in this culture and feel it is a hindrance to their work rather than a help.
The really sinister element to all this is that adults are being guilt tripped into playing along with this nonsense or it is implied that they are insensitive, or not empathic, kind or compassionate towards children. So despite how obviously wrong headed and damaging it is, people just go along with it through fear of being made to feel like they’re terrible people.
We know that GenZ are the least well adjusted cohort to date. Mental health problems with this age group are through the roof compared to previous generations. Of course, a lot of this is rightfully attributed to screen time, smart phones, social media, Covid lockdowns etc, but the generation that has had the most “mental health awareness” education, has become the generation with the most mental health problems and the response to this will no doubt be to double down on yet more mental health awareness education and more pandering.
This is mental.
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This is spot on. I wish there were more teachers and parents who said this.
It’s strange as a mental health professional to feel total disgust towards all of these mental health initiatives.
omfg exactly