Hit the hardest by Covid school closures, teens need help

A school in Jodhpur has responded to higher teacher resignations driven by post-covid teen indiscipline issues by ending slots for extracurriculars, games, and the library and sending kids home by lunch. This inappropriate response resonates with the disproportionate WYMWOT (wasting your money and wasting our time) letter to parents that my husband’s boarding school used to send for academic challenges decades ago. Covid was hard, but the goodness and challenge of learning drove elementary school children, and high schoolers were focused on academic performance as their entry ticket to college. But middle schoolers need special attention because they have confused and blurred their freedom boundaries with Covid’s digital dial tone and deluge.

Middle schoolers undertake the “Who am I?” journey with the higher complexity of identity (inside out) in conflict with roles (outside in). While the physical development of the brain is complete, decision-making ability is pending, and hormones push many buttons. Parental control is resisted, and peer relationships lead to cognitive, physical, emotional, political, religious, and even gender cues. During Covid, friends were primarily accessed digitally with their mix of satisfaction and toxicity. Infinite OTT, social media, and online time bred a casualness in language around mental illness, anxiety, and physical or social disorders that amplified a stage always full of angst and self-focus.

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Education is a tall building, built higher on earlier floors. Grades 4–7 are the seeding stage for tools, habits, and routines. Grades 8–10 consolidate these into a self-narrative with emotional resilience. This establishes the ethical foundation for the harvesting years, with big decisions from Grade 11 through college. Delaying the emotional work of adolescence is dangerous, and it’s hard for adults to decide whether their teenager needs a gentle push out of their comfort zone or a warm blanket of security. Risk and resilience are in delicate balance, and neuroscientist Madeline Levine describes adolescents as trying on powerful new adult brains without fully developed self-control. The teenage brain has more synapses than the adult brain and operates on the “use it or lose it” principle. How teenagers spend their time matters because their brains are incredibly malleable with raging hormones; they are susceptible to the duality of toxic experiences that can harm them and the positive influences that sustain development. Clinical Psychiatrist Dan Siegel describes the need to strengthen adolescents’ “yes brain,” which opens a green window of relationships and learning, taking on emotional and cognitive challenges with flexibility, when it drops into the “no brain” blue window (because of fear) or red window (because of anger), by practising balance, resilience, self-insight, and empathy.

Schools must offer learning experiences that build adaptability, mental agility, curiosity, collaboration, failure tolerance, ethics, optimism, and resilience. Social and emotional learning has to move from episodic to cross-curricular. Learning that is purpose-led, choice-based, and questions the real-world implications of knowledge needs to replace the demand for “coverage,” which manifests as “teaching by mentioning.” Accurate transcription and retention skills are not worthless, but skills like organisation, collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and reflection are paramount for the twenty-first century. Cambridge University professor Joan Ruddock suggests that by secondary school, kids are hungry for the three ‘R’s—responsibility, respect, and “reality”—and the three ‘C’s —choice, challenge, and collaboration.

What can parents do when middle-grade temper tantrums feel like a scene out of The Exorcist and the door slams shut? Levine believes we have two children—the child we expected and the child we got—and suggests focusing on our baggage and the child we have. Build joy into everyday routines and special events. Don’t constantly grade your super-sensitive teenager cognitively, socially, or physically—the world does that—talk with them and help them reflect. Don’t turn them over to tutors or therapists; enjoy the sausage-making. Discuss how they spend their time—music, sports, study, languages, video games—and encourage diversity, outward focus, and stuff that involves other people. Surface and support their resilience, values, and community. Healthy habits should be modeled. Kids who are most protected from the rigours and frustrations of learning and relationships are the most vulnerable and brittle when they finally meet them. Create space for vulnerability, but switch from “Are you okay?” to “You’ve got this!’

Kids think with a hive mind - Zombie Apocalypse and Dragons featured heavily in a middle school writing contest. Foggy identities and the warmth of the herd shackle unique thinking. A Grade 8 student said, “People are always conscious of being judged, and so you cover your identity to be like someone else so that they accept you.” The echo chamber is typical, but the quality and complexity of the noise matter. Middle schoolers listen more to peers and social media than to adults, but this creates a window to include friends and responsible media to deal with their emotions, minds, and bodies with clear rules, not deals.

Teenagers seek adults who like to watch them at work, talk openly about their concerns, listen to half-baked ideas, give feedback graciously, and expand their learning ability. This is hard, not impossible; parents and schools need to team up because the mezzanine mind is best served by the Madhyam Marg (middle path) between authoritative schooling and permissive parenting.

(The writer is Head of School, Neev Academy)