In May, 2016 I began the most important journey of my life. With the full support of Dartmouth Health, I set out on a seven-year odyssey all across New England to speak to middle school and high school kids about mental health awareness. I invited myself nowhere but the invitations kept coming.
During those years I drove over 100,000 miles in all kinds of weather on backroads and highways to visit over 360 schools. I spoke to tens of thousands of kids in their gyms and auditoriums on those visits and hugged several thousand more who were brave enough to confide their pain, their stress and their struggles to this perfect stranger. All they knew is that I wouldn’t judge them, or blame them or shame then. That’s all it took. Lines formed for confided conversations almost everywhere I went. My eyes have been opened. I am impatient for change. If I could change things myself I would but I can’t. But we could if you want to help.
During those long days on the road, I had a lot of time to reflect on what kids were sharing with me; on what they were teaching me. I had begun my journey to let kids who were suffering know that it wasn’t “just them” and that help was available. I told them about my own ignorance on mental health and how I had failed my own son. I also shared that hope was real and that treatment works. But it’s what they shared with me that has inspired me to write this open letter to parents.
While I fully understand that there are many reasons for adolescent mental health challenges from adverse childhood experiences, to trauma of all kinds, to genetics, to chemical imbalance, to the social determinants of health, most of what I hugged and heard these last many years I believe was socially and culturally driven—but well within our grasp to fix if we’re strong enough and wise enough to act. I hope we are.
Today’s kids are an amazing group. They are smarter than I ever was and more worldly wise than I remember being at their age. They are also the least judgmental generation in the history of the United States. I have come to really know, understand, and respect this incredible generation and I have great affection for them. They were kind enough and brave enough to let me in. While I have learned firsthand their skills and capacities, I have also learned about the stress, depression, and anxiety many of them are dealing with and trying their best to conceal.
I believe to my core that parents love their kids as much as I loved mine. There are no bad actors here. While I am not a clinician, I pride myself on being a good and discerning listener from all my years as a trial lawyer and an appellate judge. I listened intently for most of my professional life to what people said and sometimes to what they didn’t say. Over the last seven years I have listened intently to kids. They opened to me. They have been my teachers. We all need to listen to them; really listen. So much of what is happening to kids is unintended but nonetheless very real. Most of it can be fixed.
I offer what I have heard and seen in my travels and talks these last seven years without any righteousness. I am the last person to be righteous about mental health. I made my own mistakes. My hope is that parents will take some or all of my observations to heart, engage their kids and eventually convene community-wide discussions. Only with candor, humility and commitment will change happen. So many kids are depending upon us.
What follows are my heartfelt thoughts and reactions to the wisdom I’ve gathered from kids these last seven years. Pretending our kids are OK is no longer an answer I can accept.
Academic achievement and success are admirable but not sufficient for a kid’s overall development. But too many of us have let a singular focus on academics crowd out real opportunity for kids’ personal and emotional growth.
While it’s important to do well, it’s just as important to be well. Too many of us seem to have forgotten that. Depression and anxiety are epidemic in today’s kids. Although kids may have those problems, the kids are not the problem.
Kids should not be defined by their GPA, their class rank, their SAT results, how many goals or points they scored or minutes they played. Eventually nobody will ever ask them or much care. But they will be defined by who they are, the values they hold and practice, their capacity to solve problems, and by how they relate and work with others. There is no grade or class for those skill sets but immersion in everyday life is essential to their discovery and development. For many kids there is no time or much support to pursue those skills. They are not included on transcripts or eligible for a varsity letter and thus often get marginalized.
Resume building should have no place in childhood. Too many kids are encouraged to begin building resumes in junior high school.
Childhood has a purpose that too many are wasting. Childhood was never intended to be a dress-rehearsal for adulthood. It is intended to allow kids the opportunity to grow, make mistakes, experience success as well as failure, make friendships, understand their increasing responsibilities, and begin to discover who they are. Kids need space, trust, support, and unstructured time to do that. Sadly, those seem in short supply.
It’s OK for kids to be bored. Imagination, creativity, and self-reliance might break out. We need to stop booking kids’ lives and let them experiment with the inefficient use of time that a lot of us enjoyed.
Personal technology is great but not if it consumes too many hours of your kid’s day and night. It should be a supplement to their life and not a substitute for their life. Virtual reality is not reality as important as it has become. Allowing the average adolescent to spend five to seven hours a day on an iPhone is not in their interest. Phone addiction isn’t preordained and happens only because parents pretend not to see it or believe they can’t stop it. Something needs to change.
Social-emotional growth happens eyeball to eyeball and not from a screen. Some things are immutable but apparently easily forgotten. Kids spend way too much time looking down when they should be looking up. It affects their mental health.
We are over scheduling, over organizing, over competing, and over stressing kids. I’m not sure how that helps them but I have hugged the adverse consequences in gyms and auditoriums all across New England.
Our kids’ childhoods are different than ours were and that isn’t always a good thing. We are building too many fences to keep our kids “safe” while unintentionally fencing out the valuable lessons to be learned from the risks of everyday life and the growing self-confidence and earned trust that comes from increased personal responsibility.
Family meals and family time had a bonding and socializing purpose that texting or fast food in the car on the way to or from practice can’t match. Our “time famine” and 24/7 lives are preventing us from getting to know our kids and letting them get to know us. More and more kids report feeling lonely. In their ‘alone together’ world that’s regrettable and correctable but not surprising.
Too many kids are chasing rabbits they’ll never catch and dreams that aren’t their own. It’s not healthy for them. I have hugged that stress everywhere I go. While we need to support our children and be present for them in meaningful ways, we need to loosen our grip to give them the space and opportunity to “figure it out” themselves. Controlling choices and counseling choices are not the same thing. Helicopter parenting can retard resilience and foster dependence. Neither are helpful.
Parents should consider not attending every sport practice their child has. Most kids would enjoy that freedom and time with their teammates outside the watchful eye and critique of their parents. Parents are not coaches and the overwhelming majority of their kids won’t get any financial aid to play college sports. Sports are important for kids but sadly not for the reasons too many now think.
Too many kids fear failure whatever that means to them, are uncomfortable making decisions and choices and are often afraid they will disappoint their parents. Kids’ emotional infrastructure is too often undervalued and under nourished.
When kids have hugged me and confided their plan to a perfect stranger but are afraid to tell their parents how they’re feeling, we all need to be concerned.
“Influencers” for kids used to be their parents, their neighbors, their friends, their coaches and the cool kids at school. While that is still happening, many of today’s influencers reside on social media platforms away from parents and anonymous to most adults. We have unwittingly given license to 15-year-olds we’ll never see or know to have an outsized influence in raising our kids and modeling “acceptable” behavior. Are we OK with that?
All of us should be concerned that in a nationally respected survey of high school students in 2019 before Covid hit, 46% of high school girls were depressed (feeling sad or hopeless for two consecutive weeks or longer such that it was hard for them to engage in normal everyday activities); 26% of high school boys reported depression. In that same survey, 25% of high school girls reported giving “serious consideration” to ending their own lives in the previous 12 months, 15% had made plans to do that and 11% had attempted suicide ONE or more times in the same 12-month period. That wasn’t my high school experience and I’ll bet it wasn’t yours either. Are we OK with those numbers and, if not, what are we doing to change them? After SEVEN years and thousands of hugs from kids, it is clear we are not doing enough.
I don’t pretend to know all that I might about what it’s like growing up in a world that seems to never stop and always expects achievement, but I do know that it’s taking a toll on too many kids and families. I encourage all of us to pause the high-speed film of everyday life and be honest about what it is showing us. It will reveal more than we might want to acknowledge or be comfortable discussing but very little we can’t change. Or we can just kick the can down the road because our child is doing well. But it’s not about our child, it’s about all children. They need us to address what’s ailing many of them. But that may require many of us to see the child in front of us and not just the child we think is in front of us. We owe it to ourselves, our families and to all the kids I have been privileged to hug. It’s our move.
John T. Broderick, Jr. is the former Senior Director of External Affairs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and formerly served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
