In November 2022, I was sitting in a faculty meeting. The shininess of a new school year had long since dulled, and the staff, as a whole, was starting to feel it. The hopes of “everyone’s just getting into the swing of things” and “everything will be fine if you just keep focusing on building relationships” were starting to wane, and the pure amount of energy it takes to steer teenagers toward academic success was all too real. Everyone was tired, overwhelmed, and feeling like maybe they didn’t even know how to teach anymore.

In walked my principal, who started as a teacher in the building a couple of decades ago. He lives in the neighborhood right next to the school and often does his best to energize us for the work ahead. That day, he looked beaten down. When he took the mic, he did something few administrators are brave enough to do–he was honest.

He acknowledged that the day was hard, this year so far had been hard, that the past few years have been hard. The students are not the same students that we had before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Today’s students need so many more, and different, things than in the past. And then he admitted, “The children are not okay.”

It felt to nice to have someone in authority recognize what we’d been seeing in our library and teachers had been seeing in their classrooms. What used to be a minority of our teenaged students struggling with mental health and social-emotional skills had suddenly become a vast majority. Often, teachers complained that they could not even begin to attempt to teach curriculum because students’ emotional states were in no place to learn. So what is happening with our teens?

If Your Students Are Anything Like Mine…

My students, who generally range in age from 12-18, struggle in a wide array of ways. My middle schoolers are triggered so easily by so many things. They swing emotionally from baseline to crisis in the blink of an eye, sometimes swinging back and forth several times without warning or obvious provocation. Minor annoyances blow up into major altercations, and students struggle to regulate themselves in the face of any negative situation. They seem unfamiliar with boundaries, whether personal or academic. They are more physical with each other than before the pandemic–every interaction with peers seems to involve touching, slapping, pushing, climbing, jumping, or other physical elements. They crave to be seen and known, but far too many seek that acknowledgement with negative behaviors alone.

Meanwhile, our high schoolers are in a much different place. The pull of a screen is strong, and most students want nothing more than to be left alone to get lost inside a cellphone screen. They struggle with interpersonal skills and knowing how to navigate a variety of situations and people. They tend to askew large group gatherings and are anxious in crowds. They want connection but struggle to maintain relationships. They would rather ghost a friend than confront an uncomfortable situation with them. They tend to be isolated and deep down, pretty lonely.

What is behind these behaviors that we’re seeing?

I Have a Theory, or at Least a Hypothesis

I would like to preface this with a caveat: I am not trained as a psychologist, sociologist, or social worker. What follows is my own lay-person interpretation of what we’re seeing, based on my own research and conversations with others.

These behaviors, in my mildly-educated experience, suggest that our students are dealing some pretty significant trauma, especially potential emotional neglect. Emotional neglect is when a person’s “affectional needs are consistently disregarded, ignored, invalidated, or unappreciated” (Ludwig & Rostain, Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, 4th ed., 2009). Although physical neglect can be easier to spot, emotional neglect, where caregivers may be physically present but emotionally detached and/or unsupportive, can have lasting impacts and in some cases can be considered abuse. As I have personally been digging into my own childhood traumas, so much that I’ve read has reminded me of my students. Just some of the effects of emotional neglect can include:

• difficulty controlling emotions
• emotional volatility
• outbursts of anger
• age-inappropriate behaviors
• easily becoming overwhelmed
• difficulty trusting new people
• difficulty in making and maintaining relationships
• low self-esteem
• depression
• anxiety
• difficulties in school
  • (From PsychCentral & SplashLearn)

Emotional neglect, mixed with other trauma, can cause a host of different struggles, especially for kids of all ages who are still trying to make sense of their world and their place in it. This TEDTalk, though focusing on very early childhood, I think shows a useful example of children’s emotional response to neglect, no matter the cause. Although teens’ response may look differently, the emotional response is the same.

Through the height of COVID, many students were cut off from their normal social interactions and networks, except for those through a screen. Many found themselves at home, solely responsible for keeping themselves (and often siblings) on task with schoolwork, while parents struggled to perform their own work duties either holed up in a room or in-person at their workplace. They may have lost loved ones, unable to say goodbye or communally mourn. Because of these (and so many more) struggles, no wonder our students’ still-developing brains are struggling with emotional regulation and relationships.

Add to that, their issues with neglect may go much farther back than the pandemic. Today’s teenagers were generally born between 2005 and 2010. For context, camera phones started taking off in the US in 2003, and the first iPhone, that introduced the modern smartphone to the world, was released in 2007. The first iPad was sold in 2010. Teens have literally never lived in a world where screens were farther away than a pocket. As this technology started to takeoff, there was quite a bit of social consternation about what it all meant, especially for kids. People were *so concerned* to see parents sucked into their screens, seemingly ignoring their children, and kids of all ages being sucked into screens of their own instead of interacting with the people around them. There were even articles (like this one and this one) written about the phenomena. Much of teens’ lives have been spent online, either documented by their caregivers or by themselves, reflecting the world into which they were born where new technologies were used but not yet well understood.

Now add the traumas that come from living in an unjust society, including those from racism, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, misogyny, and other marginalizations. A society that, as of this date, has done little to address the problem of gun violence and school shootings and a laughably small amount against climate change. How can we possibly be surprised if our teens don’t feel like the world is a safe place?

So What Can We Do?

The big question is, what can we do about this? How can we help our students, especially when the needs feel so great?

Spoiler Alert: I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does. Beware of anyone who says they alone have the answer to how to “fix” our kids.

What I do know is that our students need us. They need us to be the grownups. They need us to set the boundaries and provide the safety, since the world often feels so chaotic. They need our help in order to heal. We also need to remember that often the kids who are most in need of love and caring show it in some of the least obvious ways. That student who pushes your buttons and is one of the biggest behavior issues? Odds are that the student also has some of the biggest needs.

According to neuroscience, our brains process negative emotions in one specific order, and in that order alone: Regulate, Relate, then Reason. Our brains have to regulate, i.e. come down from the initial uncertainty and/or fear that comes with a negative experience, before it can connect to other people. Then, that connection has to be there, making us feel safe, before we can access our reasoning skills and logic. This is why it does no good to try to reason with a student in crisis–they can’t even access the part of their brain that uses logic until they are re-regulated and connected to others or community in some way. (This comes from What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Dr. Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey.)

This information has been extremely useful to me in the library. When a student is showing signs of struggling, we provide ways to help them regulate, including fidgets, tactile activities, mindfulness activities like puzzles and coloring, and more, and then try to connect with them when they are ready, being someone to talk to when they are able to. Only then can we begin to have the conversation about what happened and how they might be able to handle the situation differently in the future.

The best advice I have for all of us is to seek out all the information we can about helping teens heal from trauma and about teaching students regulation and interpersonal skills. (This summer, I plan to dig deeper into Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education by Alex Shevrin Venet.) Oh, and being available when students want to talk. Check in with them, get to know them as people, and be able to tell when something seems off. That can seem like a difficult ask with thousands of students, but the better we get at it, the more students we can help watch out for. I don’t have any easy answers, but I figure that’s a good place to start.