School motivation and mental health

If you haven’t noticed, I’ll play Captain Obvious and declare a crisis related to the mental health of teens.   When I started this work a couple decades ago, the percentage of students with anxiety and depression was slim.  Now, it’s common.  That’s anecdotal. Here are some facts.

The pandemic exasperated all the challenges that teens were facing with isolation, social media, video-games, and the negativity bias that dominates the news.  I started seeing these issues when I wrote Motivate Your Son.  I’ve urged Jean Card, our resident expert in mental health and teens, to write something similar related to daughters.  Many of the challenges that both genders face are similar but I’ve thought a female voice would be better able to articulate the challenges of teen girls to a mass audience.

Our role has been quite overtly distinct: we help students do well in school.  Through our Student Mastery Program, we help students organize, have effective time management, study smart, write well, and perform on tests.  But perhaps the bigger role has been more subtle:  “we are the village” as one of our clients from Madison, CT recently put it.  Her son had been struggling at Daniel Hand High School.  His self-esteem was plummeting.  She was happy that he was doing better in school after working with us but she was profoundly grateful that he would leave our sessions feeling “hopeful.”

If your child is facing mental health issues, in part due to school, we can help.