Access to in-school mental health support varies dramatically along class and race lines, with Black and low-income families far less likely to report their child’s school offers counseling and other support but are more likely to use them than their affluent, white peers. 

Just 29% of Black families and 37% of low-income families report that their child’s school offers mental health services, compared to 52% of white families and 59% of the most affluent, according to the Nation’s Kids at Risk report released last week by University of Southern California researchers. Lower income families reported using in-school mental health services more than five times as much as those with the highest incomes. 

“We often talk about mental health struggles today with teens as kind of one issue and often in generalities,” said  lead author and USC researcher Amie Rapaport. “… I’m hopeful that differentiation will help inform interventions and services to help kids that are most in need.”

The survey of 2,500 families is the latest national attempt to show the “very clear link” between poor mental health and chronic absenteeism. Over one in five children considered chronically absent, missing 10% or more of a school year, experienced conduct problems, like losing temper or fighting with peers. About one in ten report emotional or peer struggles. 

Across the country, more than one in four kids were chronically absent by the end of 2023. 

Researchers acknowledge the absences themselves may be creating more emotional distress, negatively impacting how students feel about themselves as learners. Regardless, the currently or on-track to be chronically absent students group struggled emotionally or behaviorally three to four times more than their peers with good attendance. 

“There are kids in need that aren’t being reached,” Rapaport said. 

Among all families, one in five would have used services had they been available, though Black and Hispanic families show the highest desire. Of all families receiving services, roughly 3 in 4 are “satisfied,” saying they help. 

Teen girls, between 13 and 17, struggled most with depression and anxiety symptoms, but Black and Hispanic girls appear to be struggling less than their white and Asian peers. Pre-teen boys, particularly Black boys, are experiencing the most conduct concerns, such as increases in fighting, lying, cheating, distraction, bullying and stealing, the report found, adding detail to recent CDC reports about increases in violence and bullying. 

The findings came as somewhat of a surprise to Rapaport, who expected mental health struggles to be more evenly distributed across age and gender; and because  student mental health was a priority for many districts nationwide in spending federal pandemic relief funds in the last few years. 

She explained the disparities may have to do with access to information and care – whether or not schools are adequately reaching parents about what resources are readily available, or curbing long waiting lists. 

 “Clearly, policy can help better target mental health supports to meet the needs of the children who could benefit from them the most,” the report stated, calling the patterns “unfortunate.”

With my family, I pretended everything was fine because they also told me, “You’re a young Black girl who will end up in child protective services because the system is racist against people like us.” When my middle, elementary and high school reached out about therapy, my family refused. A meeting was set up with my grandmother and mother to discuss mental health options, but they declined. When I came home, I was met with yelling and I was berated by my family for making “the school think something damn wrong at home.”

Even when I did briefly get a therapist through a health center at age 14, the provider, a Black woman, told me, “You’re a Black girl. They’re going to put you in the system and label you as crazy and aggressive.”

I have more stories like these, and I know other Black girls do too. Here’s what our schools need to know: We are not as strong as you think we are. We are strong only because we were forced to carry the weight of systemic stereotypes, unresolved trauma and our own emotional needs. That’s why schools need to address the elephant in the room: their lack of mental health support and how it is affecting Black girls. 

Our issues start at home due to our families’ fear of the school system perpetuating racism through lack of cultural connection, and schools worsen this fear through budget cuts to mental health services and by criminalizing Black girls. As a result, the Strong Black Woman stereotype is placed on us at an early age. Rather than making us feel empowered, it only leads to unique internalized pain, depression and anxiety.

As early as age 2, your Black daughter is often treated as if she’s 5. At 10, she is treated like she’s 15. By the time we’re even aware of our own existence, the world has already adultified us. This is where society considers Black girls less innocent compared to their white counterparts. People often believe Black girls ages 5 to 14 need less nurturing, protection, support and comfort than white girls of the same age. By the time we learn how to use the bathroom on our own, parents and authority figures believe we’re independent enough to handle our own emotions. Because we’re expected to know better — by parents, teachers and even the judicial system — we are also more likely to receive harsher punishment, with a whopping 37.2% of Black girls being arrested at school, compared with 30.2% of white girls.

Black people overall are less likely to seek help from professionals than our Caucasian counterparts, and this is true about teens, too. Black communities also have fewer resources. And historically, there’s a Eurocentric influence on therapy. As a result, many Black families feel like therapy isn’t made for us — and when children aren’t encouraged by their families to seek treatment, they can wind up with unhealthy coping mechanisms: problems such as cruelty, bullying others, aggression and emotional dysregulation. NYU conducted a study on 227 black women and found that in them, depression shows up as insomnia, irritability and self-criticism. Irritability is a large factor in the “Angry Black Woman.” Yet, society expects them to be strong. No wonder they’re less likely to seek treatment. 

Now, imagine having to regulate your own emotions and existence and foster independence in order to avoid further social and systemic discrimination. This is what happens to Black women who were adultified early on. They mature into the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype, portraying themselves as strong, independent women who are able to achieve motherhood without a father, balance multiple jobs and take up caregiving roles within the community, all without getting angry, crying or having other strong emotional reactions. The history behind the “Strong Black Woman” is extensive — each experience a Black woman faces stems from a coping mechanism required to keep not only themselves alive, but their family during slavery. However, this burden of strength only leads too many women — possibly some in your family and community — to internalize their pain.

I know firsthand how, when mental health struggles aren’t addressed, they get worse and affect other people, too. I lost a friend in fifth grade because her mother worried I’d influence her with my ideas of suicide and self-harm. Eight years later, my best friend told me other students in elementary school had been scared of me and found my frequent talk of death terrifying. They thought I was a witch. I can see why they were worried. To combat bullying and the fear of being seen as weak, I began having aggressive outbursts in fifth grade toward my classmates, I sat under desks to regulate my emotions and even threatened students who I felt had emotionally harmed me. My coping mechanisms have since haunted me into my teenage years. 

In ninth grade, I had an altercation with my mother over reaching out to my school in Brooklyn for help. That was during COVID. My mother eventually agreed, but started interrogating me on what was said during sessions, because she was in earshot of the conversations. However, returning to school in person in 10th grade saved me. After years of my family denying help from my elementary, middle, and high school, I finally received help from the mental health office at my high school. I met weekly with two counselors to improve my anger management and anxiety. For the first time, an adult finally understood me without instilling the fear of social implications. Due to the confidentiality of the services, I was able to discuss my issues in a healthy manner.

Unfortunately, just as I was beginning to see improvements, the office cut back its services. This exacerbated not only my mental health struggles, but those of my classmates who also relied on the office for help. At one point in my first semester of 12th grade, I broke down on the staircase when I couldn’t find a provider. 

I finally got the help I needed at my school from counselors by the second semester of 12th grade. Whether it was to gossip and vent or when I experienced emotional episodes, I had a community of counselors to support me who knew the struggle of being a Black teen girl. My school noticed and gave me an award for advocating for my mental well-being and persisting to do so — even when the odds were against me.

Unfortunately, this is not the story for many black girls in New York City and across America.

So here’s what needs to be done. Knowing that African-American families have a deep-rooted fear of trusting health systems, Black girls can benefit from counselors incorporating racial socialization into trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. This means implementing counseling and providers centered around African-American cultures, attitudes and values , as well as cultural competence, to help Black girls tackle the discrimination and historical traumas we as a community continue to endure.  

For schools to do better at mental health services, they need to recognize how Black girls are treated and how they experience the world. Schools must implement racially socialized mental health services by hiring staff who share the culture of their students or have a willingness to understand a student’s background. Black girls are far behind in receiving mental services in their schools, and the Black community has to catch up. Our community has to work together in destroying mental health barriers that are deterring its members from seeking help. It is vital for learning institutions to aid in the efforts to destroy harmful stereotypes placed on young Black girls through their families and schools.

Like most kids, Aahil Valliani has been frustrated by the filters that his school uses to block inappropriate websites. Often, he has no idea why certain sites are blocked, especially when his web browsing is tied to his schoolwork.

Many students in this situation find a way around their districts’ web filters. They access the internet on their phones instead, or use proxy servers or virtual private networks to essentially access a different, unfiltered internet. Aahil, searching for a more systemic solution, teamed up with his younger brother and father to start a company called Safe Kids, raise almost $2 million in venture funding, and design a better filter.

As The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, reported in April, almost all schools filter the web to comply with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act and qualify for discounted internet access, among other things. Most schools The Markup examined used filters that sort all websites into categories and block entire categories at once. Others scan webpages for certain off-limits keywords, blocking websites on which they appear regardless of the context. In both cases, the filters are blunt tools that result in overblocking and sometimes keep kids from information about politicized topics like sex education and LGBTQ resources.

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Aahil, now 17, points out that schools’ overly strict controls disappear as soon as kids graduate. “That’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. Kids, he contends, need to learn how to make good choices about how to use the internet safely when trusted adults are nearby so they are ready to make good decisions on their own later.

The Safe Kids filter turns web blocking into a teachable moment, explaining why sites are blocked and nudging students to stay away from them of their own accord. It uses artificial intelligence to assess the intent of a student’s search, reducing the number of blocks students see while conducting legitimate academic research. One example: if a student searches for Civil War rifles for a class assignment, Safe Kids would allow it. If a student tries to shop for an AK-47, it wouldn’t. Other filters would block both.

The filter also keeps student browsing data private, storing only categories of websites accessed, not URLs or search terms themselves. And it works through a Chrome browser extension, which means students can’t simply get around it with a proxy server or VPN while using that browser.

Safe Kids got its start during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Sitting around the dinner table with his father, a tech entrepreneur; his mother, a self-employed fashion designer; and his younger brother Zohran, a budding computer scientist, Aahil got his family to strategize how to help all the kids getting sucked into dark corners of the web and battling the mental health consequences of their internet use.

Their idea, building off of the invasive and ineffective filters the brothers saw in school, essentially puts better training wheels on the internet. Aahil said his father did a bit of hand-holding in these early days, helping find board members and angel investors, as well as the data scientists who would train the AI machine learning model behind the filter and psychologists who could craft and test the filter’s hallmark pop-ups directing students toward more appropriate browsing. The company also spent time and money getting their designs patented. Aahil has three patents under his name and Safe Kids has five.

As Aahil and his family were preparing to chase seed funding for Safe Kids, the ACLU of Northern California was demanding the Fresno Unified School District stop using a product called Gaggle, which districts use to monitor students’ internet use, block potentially harmful content, and step in if student browsing patterns indicate they may need mental health supports. The problem, according to ACLU attorneys, was that Gaggle amounted to intrusive surveillance, trampling on students’ privacy and free speech rights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation levied similar accusations against another web filter called GoGuardian after getting records from 10 school districts, including three in California, that revealed the extent of the software’s blocking, tracking and flagging of student internet use during the 2022-23 school year, when Aahil was piloting Safe Kids. Jason Kelley, a lead researcher on EFF’s GoGuardian investigation, The Red Flag Machine, looked into Safe Kids in response to an inquiry by The Markup. Accustomed to pointing out how bad filters are, he offered surprised praise for Safe Kids, commending its focus on privacy, its open source code that offers transparency about its model, and its context-specific blocking.

“This is, really, I think, an improved option for all the things that we are generally concerned about,” Kelley said.

So far, Safe Kids has not been able to break into the school market. Still, Aahil hopes to one day sign a contract with a school district, and he is marketing to parents in the meantime, offering them a way to put guardrails on their kids’ home internet use. While Safe Kids started out charging for its filter, Aahil said an open source, free version will be released next month.

One of the company patents is for a  “pause, reflect, and redirect” method that leans on child psychology to teach kids healthy browsing habits when they try to access an inappropriate website.

“When kids go to a site the first time, we consider that a mistake,” Aahil said. “We tell kids why it’s not good for them and kids can make a choice.”

For example, if a student tries to play games during a lesson, a pop-up would say, “This isn’t schoolwork, is it?” Students can click a “take me back” button or “tell me more” link to get more information about why a given site is blocked. When students repeatedly try to access inappropriate content, their browsing is further restricted until they address the issue with an adult. If that content indicates a student might be in crisis, the user is advised to get help from an adult, and in a school setting, a staff member would get an automated alert.

The teen expects to keep building the company, even as he shifts his focus to college admissions this fall. A rising senior at the selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s best public high schools, Aahil plans to major in business or economics and make a career out of entrepreneurship.

Safe Kids stands out in a web filtering market where products’ blunt restrictions on the web have barely become more sophisticated over the last 25 years.

Nancy Willard, director of Embrace Civility LLC, has worked on issues of youth online safety since the mid-1990s. She submitted testimony for the congressional hearings that resulted in passage of the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2000 and describes the filtering company representatives that showed up as snake oil salesmen, selling a technology that addresses a symptom, not the root of a problem.

“We need to prepare kids to manage themselves,” Willard said. When traditional filters block certain websites with no explanation, kids don’t learn anything, and they’re often tempted to just circumvent the software.

“This approach helps increase student understanding, and hopefully there’s a way also in the instructional aspects (to increase) their skills,” she said about Safe Kids.

Students on Chromebooks in particular can’t circumvent Safe Kids and its design aims to keep them from wanting to. Now Aahil and his family just need to find buyers.

Kelley said he’s not surprised Safe Kids hasn’t been able to yet, given the “hardening” of school security and student safety efforts over the last decade. “We’ve gone from having cameras and some pretty standard filters to having metal detectors, and locked doors, and biometrics, and vape detectors in the bathrooms, and these much more strict filters and content moderating control software,” he said, “and all this is hard to undo.”

This story was originally published on CalMatters.

LGBTQ teens are twice as likely as the overall student population to have a medically documented disability. Three-fourths of the disabled LGBTQ students researchers surveyed have a mental health diagnosis, such as depression or anxiety, and nearly 60% have a neurodevelopmental disability such as autism. One-fourth have a physical disability. More than half have more than one diagnosis.  

Nearly two thirds — 62.5% — reported physical or verbal harassment in the month before the survey. Half were made fun of, while 1 in 10 were hit or pushed by other students, according to the report.

More than 80% of disabled LGBTQ students surveyed are transgender or nonbinary, posing challenges ranging from the availability of suitable restrooms to barriers to participation in school sports. They are more likely to be bullied than their straight, cisgender disabled peers. Only a third say they have reported harassment to school staff. 

“Gender-inclusive restrooms, locker rooms and other spaces are a rarity,” the report notes. “As a result, disabled trans and gender-expansive youth face heightened access barriers to bathrooms and facilities that both match their gender identity and which accommodate their disability.” 

Separate research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that two-thirds of school buildings are not physically accessible to many people with disabilities. Restrooms were one of the top settings the agency found that children with impaired mobility and other physical disabilities could not use.

One-fourth of LGBTQ children with disabilities surveyed by the Human Rights Campaign have physical disabilities. 

Paradoxically, the high number of barriers disabled LGBTQ youth face may partially account for the fact that they are more likely to be out to the adults in their lives than their non-disabled peers, the campaign found. Three-fourths say they have disclosed their gender identity or sexual orientation to a school staff member, versus 64% of all LGBTQ youth. Nearly 90% are out to at least one member of their immediate family, versus 83%. 

Over the last four years, right-wing lawmakers throughout the country have introduced hundreds of bills in state legislatures and Congress seeking to curtail LGBTQ student protections. In-school victimization has skyrocketed during that time, along with reports by young people that bathrooms, locker rooms and other settings specifically targeted by many of the resulting new laws are increasingly unsafe. 

In February a nonbinary teen in Oklahoma died by suicide the day after being jumped by three students who had been bullying them. A new state law forced Nex Benedict, who was disabled and Native American, to use the girls’ bathroom where their head was smashed into the floor. Calls to mental health crisis lines soared after the incident, which is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education. 

A February Washington Post analysis of FBI records found that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools have quadrupled in states where the laws have passed. A 2023 investigation by The 74 Million found rates of in-school victimization rising in places where queer students still enjoy strong protections, something researchers attribute to a “spillover effect.”

The new report draws on a subset of data gathered in a 2022 survey by the Human Rights Campaign and researchers at the University of Connecticut. Of the LGBTQ youth ages 13 to 18 surveyed, 30% reported having been diagnosed with one or more disabilities by a health care provider. This is twice as high as the rate at which disabilities are diagnosed among all students.  

The actual number of LGBTQ children with disabilities is likely higher, since many families lack the resources to get formal diagnoses. Although their experiences are not included in the report’s data analysis, a higher number of LGBTQ youth overall — some 35% — reported a self-diagnosed disability. The disparity was higher among gender non-conforming youth, with one-third reporting a medical diagnosis and 41% saying they considered themselves disabled. 

In general, children from marginalized demographics and those with inadequate insurance are most likely unable to get a medical diagnosis, which is often necessary to access disability services.

In schools, the specific accommodations a special education student needs are spelled out in a legal document known as an individualized education program. Involving a team of caregivers and educators, the creation of this plan may account at least in part for the greater likelihood that disabled LGBTQ students are out to school staff, says Human Rights Campaign Public Education and Research Director Shoshana Goldberg. 

“This IEP process could establish the teacher as a trusted adult, which would increase the student’s desire to [or] comfort with disclosing LGBTQ+ identity,” she said in an email. “In addition, within the IEP, trans and gender-expansive students may also need to outline specific accommodations that address their gender identity — e.g. access to single-gender restrooms [or] locker rooms — necessitating being out to teachers.” 

Separate research has documented dramatically higher rates of transgender individuals diagnosed as autistic. In one study, 5% of cisgender people were autistic, versus 24% of gender non-conforming people. 

Other surveys of queer youth well-being have found escalating mental health issues as hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in statehouses in recent years. In a 2023 report, The Trevor Project found that almost half of LGBTQ 13- to 17-year-olds had considered suicide in the prior year, compared with 19% of high school students overall. Seventy percent reported anxiety and 57% experienced depression.

Advocates are careful to note that LGBTQ youth and children with disabilities have high rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions in part because of the discrimination and barriers to inclusion they often face. Nonetheless, the disproven idea that mental illnesses can cause people to become gay or transgender persists in political debates.

The Human Rights Campaign report adds to a growing body of documentation linking unsafe school environments to poor mental health — often a particular physical space such as a locker room or restroom. In a 2021 school climate survey, GLSEN found nearly half of LGBTQ students avoid school bathrooms because they feel unsafe. About 4 in 10 avoid locker rooms and gym classes. 

LGBTQ students in general are half as likely to participate in school athletics than straight, cisgender children: 22% versus 49%. While two-thirds of disabled queer youth engage in some sort of extracurricular activity, only 18% play sports.

Some 1.5 million students of all ages are excluded from athletics because of a physical disability, while 37% of transgender and nonbinary youth ages 13 to 17 are now banned from participation on teams that align with their gender identity. Estimates of how many U.S. teens are gender nonconforming vary because more young people now identify as something other than trans or cis gender, but the one authoritative source suggests 300,000 are transgender.     

Data on LGBTQ youth that can be analyzed by demographic subgroup, like the Human Rights Campaign’s surveys, is rare. Sexual and gender minority status is rarely noted in data collected by census, education and public health officials.

In 2023, two in ten teens were bullied at school and one in ten did not attend due to safety concerns, 4% increases since 2021. Two percent more were injured or threatened at school. About one in ten experienced sexual violence, roughly the same amount as two years ago, according to 20,000 high schoolers surveyed nationwide for the latest iteration of the CDC’s Youth Risk and Behavior survey.

For the first time, the CDC’s 2023 survey prompted teens to reflect on racism, unfair discipline and social media use. Nearly one third of students reported being “treated badly or unfairly at school because of their race or ethnicity” by educators or peers.

Some key indicators show “progress” in combatting the youth mental health crisis: About 10% of Black students reported attempting suicide in 2023, down from 14% in 2021. At the same time, fewer female and Hispanic students seriously considered suicide or experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023 than in 2021. But roughly half of both groups still experience depressive symptoms, and at rates higher than national averages. 

“The data released today show improvements to a number of metrics that measure young people’s mental well-being – progress we can build on. However, this work is far from complete,” said Debra Houry, chief medical officer with the agency, in a press release last week. “Every child should feel safe and supported, and CDC will continue its work to turn this data into action until we reach that goal.” 

Only about half of teens felt close to people in their school, with key demographic groups reporting being especially vulnerable: Girls, LGBTQ and Native youth were forced into or experienced risky behavior more than their peers across nearly all metrics, including substance use, physical and sexual violence, depression, and suicidality. 

The general rise in aggressive behavior, while concerning, is not particularly surprising to experts.

“We are still seeing a long-tail of effect from the height of the pandemic with kids having been isolated… The ninth grader of today is still a bit less mature, not as good at problem solving, not as clear in their communication with peers, especially when it comes to conflict,” said child psychologist and Boston-area schools consultant Deborah Offner.

Students’ sexual activity and drug use overall mirrored rates from 2021, significantly declining over the last decade. Fewer teens have ever had sex, from about half to one in three. But those that have engaged in more risky behavior: fewer used condoms or were tested for STIs. 

While overall declines in depressive symptoms and suicidality are not “giant,” said Offner, “as we emerge from the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, kids in my orbit are overall doing better on average than they were a few years ago. Most of that is [thanks to] the reentry into the social environment of school and activities.”

Recommending stronger health education and opportunities for young people to build relationships, belonging at school, the CDC urged schools to prioritize adolescent well-being. Some ideas for schools include facilitating mentorship or advisory opportunities for older students to be role models for younger students, who may be feeling lost in their first years in high school, and training all school staff to be strong listeners, “because you never know who a kid is going to tap into,” Offner said. 

Below are five key findings from the report: 

1. Violence and bullying increased 2% and 4%, respectively, from 2021 to 2023, with about one in ten avoiding school for safety concerns and two in ten being bullied. 

Sexual violence was as prevalent in 2023 as it was in 2021: roughly one in ten teens. Girls and LGBTQ youth were more likely than their peers to experience sexual and physical violence. 

The frequency of bullying at school, students report, increased 4% since 2021, bumping back up to pre-pandemic levels. LGBTQ students experienced bullying the most of any subgroup, with three in ten having been bullied and two in ten missing school because of safety fears.

2. 2023 saw a 2% decline in the share of kids persistently sad, hopeless or making suicide plans, but significantly more experience depression symptoms than did in 2013.

Four in ten teens on average reported consistent depression symptoms, up from three in ten just a decade ago. While 4% fewer girls experienced such symptoms than and 3% less seriously considered suicide than in 2021, the proportion of girls experiencing depressive symptoms is much higher than their peers: over five in ten, 53%.

Among LGBTQ youth, six in ten felt persistently sad or hopeless, and two in ten attempted suicide.

Offner said while social media is often scapegoated as the core driver of depressive symptoms, the most common reasons youth cite as causes of internal conflicts are family or friend-related, like witnessing parents’ economic uncertainty or emotional instability, and working through friendship disagreements. 

Many, she added, are also feeling climate anxiety and worried about material needs more than other generations – their parents placing intense pressure to succeed academically and go onto lucrative careers. 

However social media does serve as a “social comparison accelerator,” she said, where teens may compare themselves to others or feel bad about being excluded from activities. 

Native teens – the subgroup spending least amount of time on social media according to the CDC, with about half using it several times a day – are still the subgroup experiencing highest rates of poor mental health and persistent depressive symptoms. 

3. One third of teens experienced racism, and nearly two in ten reported being unfairly disciplined. 

With the CDC asking for the first time, 32% of high school students reported being “treated badly or unfairly in school because of their race.” Asian, multiracial, and Black students reported this more often than peers, at 57%, 49%, and 46% respectively.

On average, 19% of teens were “unfairly disciplined” at school in 2023, with male, Native, Black and multiracial students reporting at a rate 3-13% above average. One in three Native youth reported being unfairly disciplined, more than any other race or ethnicity.

4. No significant changes in teens’ sexual behavior since 2021. Overall, students are having less sex than in 2013. 

While three in ten teens reported having had sex, down from about five in ten a decade ago; only a third used some form of oral birth control, and half used condoms. 

Six percent of teens polled had four or more sexual partners in 2023, compared to 15% the decade prior. 

Some reasons for the decline may be increased immaturity, said Offner, which is impacting kids’ relationship experience. She has also witnessed more young people express ownership of their bodies and wanting to go slowly in their sexual experiences, “I think they’re learning from the mistakes of previous generations, too.” 

5. Alcohol, marijuana, and illicit drug consumption is declining. But vulnerable student populations — LGBTQ, Native youth, and girls – used more than their peers. 

In 2023, about 22% of teens reported drinking alcohol, a significant decrease from 35% ten years prior. The number is slightly higher for girls, with about one in four drinking. While the proportion of Black kids drinking increased from 2021 to 2023, their rate is still under average, at 17%. 

Roughly the same amount used marijuana as did two years ago, about 17%, down from 23% in 2013.

Only about one in ten used illicit drugs, like psychedelics and stimulants, or misused prescription opioids. Teens’ illicit drug use has declined 6% overall in the last decade. 

Offner observed teens today are a little more health cautious, and have witnessed more siblings and peers practice sobriety intentionally. “It’s much more acceptable to say that you don’t use them or aren’t interested in using them,” she added. 

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Additional resources are available at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources. For LGBTQ mental health support, you can contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in its 2023-24 School Pulse data release. 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, unsafe or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.” 

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as restorative justice in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the community school model, schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported increasing social, emotional support offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”

A new state-by-state report shows Indiana’s child well-being ranking has dropped — in part due to Hoosier kids’ dismal math and reading scores, as well as increased rates of youth deaths.

Although Indiana continues to rank in the bottom half of states for its rates of teen births and children living in high-poverty or in single-parent households, those numbers are showing improvement.

The 2024 KIDS COUNT Data Book ranked Indiana 27th among states, three places lower than last year. It’s still a slight improvement, however, compared to 2022 and 2021, when the state ranked 28th and 29th, respectively.

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In specific categories covered in the latest report, Indiana came in 15th for economic well-being, 17th in education, 31st in family and community, and 32nd in health.

“Indiana has significant opportunities and challenges ahead in supporting the well-being of our children,” said Tami Silverman, president and CEO of the Indiana Youth Institute.

“We should celebrate the progress we’ve made, especially in economic well-being areas such as parental employment rates and housing affordability; and we must acknowledge the disparities that persist for our kids,” Silverman continued. “Every child in Indiana should have access to quality education, regardless of their background or circumstances. By addressing these disparities head-on, we not only invest in the future of our children but also in the economic prosperity of our state.”

The report is prepared by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in conjunction with organizations across the county, including the Indiana Youth Institute. It rates states in 16 wide-ranging areas, which are lumped together under the categories of health, education, economic well-being, and family and community support.

Gaps in reading and math

The education portion of the latest edition — focused on student achievement — reiterates low numbers familiar to Hoosier education officials.

Just 32% of fourth graders nationally were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022, the latest year for which numbers were available. That was down from the 34% who were proficient in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scores were even worse for eighth grade math. Nationwide, only 26% of eighth graders were at or above proficiency in math two years ago, down from 33% in 2019.

In Indiana, one-third of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency in reading — a four percentage-point decrease from the 2019 rate of 37%, the report showed.

Further, only 30% of Indiana eighth grade students performed at or above proficiency in math, marking an 11% decrease from 2019, ranking the state 11th nationally.

Among Indiana fourth graders in 2022, Black students had an average reading score that was 23 points lower than that of white students. Students eligible for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) had an average reading score 18 points lower than those not eligible for NSLP, according to the KIDS COUNT report.

Meanwhile, eighth grade Black students in Indiana had an average math score that was 31 points lower than white students. Hispanic students in the same grade had an average math score that was 19 points lower than their white peers.

The Casey Foundation report contends that the pandemic is not the sole cause of lower test scores, though. Rather, the foundation says educators, researchers, policymakers and employers who track students’ academic readiness have been ringing alarm bells “for a long time.”

U.S. scores in reading and math have barely budged in decades. In Indiana, state education officials have repeatedly pointed out that Hoosier literacy exam scores have been on the decline since 2015.

During the 2024 legislative session, state lawmakers took decisive action as part of an ongoing push to improve literacy and K-12 student performance.

Paramount among the new laws passed was one to require reading-deficient third graders to be held back a year in school.

Stats on youth health and family life

Health-focused portions of the report show that — after peaking in 2021 — the national child and teen death rate stabilized at 30 deaths per 100,000 children and youth ages 1 to 19.

But in Indiana, the death rate has continued to rise. While 29 deaths per 100,000 Hoosier children and youth were recorded in 2019, the rate increased to 36 deaths in 2022, per the report.

The Indiana Youth Institute (IYI) has already drawn attention, for example, to higher rates of mental health crises such as depression and suicidal ideation among the state’s youth. According to IYI data, one out of every three students from 7th to 12th grade reported experiencing persistent sadness and hopelessness. One out of seven students made a plan to commit suicide.

The most recent data available additionally show that nationwide and in Indiana, the child poverty rate improved and economic security of parents increased back to pre-pandemic levels.

Between 2018 and 2022, roughly 113,000 — or 7% — of Hoosier children were reportedly living in high-poverty areas. That’s a drop from 10% between 2013 and 2017, according to the report.

From 2019 to 2022, teen births per 1,000 declined from 21 to 17, and the percentage of children in single-parent families also dropped from 35% to 32%.

Still, some gains

Advocates pointed to “some bright spots” for Hoosier kids and their families in this year’s national report, as well:

Between 2019 and 2022, more parents (75%) had full-time secure employment in Indiana — which surpassed both the national average and that of the four neighboring states: Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio.

In 2022, fewer children (22%) lived in households that faced a high housing cost burden, spending 30% of their income solely on housing expenses, in comparison to the national average (30%).
In 2022, more Hoosier teens (95%) between the ages 16 and 19 were either enrolled in school or employed, an improvement from 93% in 2019.
Far fewer children under 19 (5%) were also uninsured. Indiana saw the fifth-highest decrease nationally in uninsured children between 2019 and 2022 — a 29% improvement.

The report offers several recommendations for policymakers, school leaders and educators that include chronicling absenteeism data by grade, establishing a culture to pursue evidence-based solutions and incorporating intensive, in-person tutoring to align with the school curriculum.

“Kids of all ages and grades must have what they need to learn each day, such as enough food and sleep and a safe way to get to school, as well as the additional resources they might need to perform at their highest potential and thrive, like tutoring and mental health services,” said Lisa Hamilton, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “Our policies and priorities have not focused on these factors in preparing young people for the economy, short-changing a whole generation.”

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.

One-third of LGBTQ youth outed to their families were more likely to report major symptoms of depression than those who weren’t, according to the University of Connecticut research. Transgender and nonbinary youth who were outed to their parents reported both the highest levels of depression symptoms and lowest amount of family support. 

The first research to link teens’ nonconsensual disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity to poor mental health, the report also found 69% said the experience was extremely stressful. Forcibly outed youth also reported low levels of family support. 

Since 2022, eight states have passed laws requiring schools to out transgender students to their families, potentially affecting more than 17,000 young people: Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. Proponents say the measures are necessary to uphold parents’ right to information about their kids. LGBTQ and mental health advocates counter that the laws violate students’ privacy rights and can put them in danger of being abused or thrown out of their homes. 

Forced outing “is a relatively common experience, and we need to understand more about it,” says Peter McCauley, a doctoral candidate at UConn. “People should be coming out under their own terms.” 

The data, McCauley says, bolsters research on why queer students who are victimized in school often don’t seek help. According to research cited in the new report, 44% of LGBTQ youth say they have not reported harassment to an adult at school out of fear their parents would learn their identity. A majority of sexual-minority teen boys were threatened with outing by peers.

The new report used data from a survey of some 9,300 queer youth ages 13 to 17 collected in 2017 by the Human Rights Campaign and the university’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. Two-thirds of respondents identified as cisgender, and 70% said their LGBTQ status was not involuntarily disclosed to their families. Of those not outed, 36% said their parents did not know they were not heterosexual. Nearly half of gender-nonconforming students said they were not out to their families. 

The survey found no significant racial differences in the stress of being outed. Youth whose parents had postgraduate degrees reported few depressive symptoms and high family support. 

Previous surveys by The Trevor Project, GLSEN and other advocacy groups consistently find that nearly all LGBTQ youth say they are harassed at school — which many nonetheless say is a more supportive environment than home. Fewer than four in 10 queer youth say their homes are LGBTQ-affirming.

There is evidence that people who disclose their sexual and gender identities in adolescence experience less depression and greater life satisfaction in adulthood. But not all teens who come out do so to their families. Some share with friends or trusted adults other than their parents. Youth are often reluctant to come out because they have heard their caregivers talk negatively about LGBTQ people or issues.

In addition to the eight states that mandate outing, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Montana and Kentucky — which collectively are home to a quarter-million LGBTQ youth — have new laws that critics say encourage involuntary disclosure of students’ sexual orientation or gender identity. These measures mandate discipline for educators who “encourage or coerce” children to withhold information from their families, stop schools from “discouraging or prohibiting” parental notification about pupils’ well-being and grant caregivers broad access to mental health and other records. 

Fights over forced outing are also playing out at a local level throughout the country. In at least six states, families who believe student privacy protections violate their parental rights have sued districts. So far, none of the suits has succeeded.  

A Houston Landing investigation found that during the first two months after mandatory parental notification went into effect in August 2023 in Texas’ Katy Independent School District, 19 students were outed. After the story was published, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title IX investigation into the district’s actions, which local advocates had complained discriminated on the basis of gender. 

At least six California districts require schools to disclose a range of information. In January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned districts that parental notification policies violate the state’s constitution and education laws. The admonition came after a judge’s October 2023 order temporarily halting the enforcement of an outing rule in Chino. 

As legislation seeking to restrict LGBTQ students’ rights has swept statehouses in recent years, the number of states fully administering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — the nation’s chief survey of young people’s welfare — has fallen. Some states, such as Florida, stopped participating altogether, while others refuse to ask questions about sexual orientation, gender identity, mental health and suicidality.

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates relatively high levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. Nearly 50% of U.S. students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch subsidies because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates nearly in half by significantly expanding the country’s child tax credit. Critically, the expanded credit was administered in monthly payments, giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in a February 2022 analysis, “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and several efforts to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a compromise measure giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House, but lost steam in the Senate — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” Sen. Chuck Grassley. (R-Iowa), told The Washington Post. 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They distrust Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to a substantive problem that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least the 1966 publication of the famous Coleman Report that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. Studies suggest that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — appear to be a particularly efficient way to pull children and families out of intergenerational poverty. 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families overwhelmingly used their expanded child tax credit dollars on urgent, eminently reasonable necessities.

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.

Gray grew up in the 1950s, when children were expected to spend long hours between school and dinner unsupervised. Afternoon games of Double Dutch and Red Rover became a hallmark memory for Baby Boomers, but they were only a few generations removed from the advent of Progressive labor laws that established minimum working ages and redefined childhood in America as a protected phase of life. 

Surveying the restrictions on children’s freedom today, he believes we’ve spent much of the last few decades moving backwards. “We’re basically back in the age of child labor again,” Gray said. “But it’s labor we’re imposing because we believe it’s good for children.”

A research psychologist at Boston College, Gray has spent his career studying the effects of free, unstructured play on young people — and what happens when it is edged out by activities overseen by adults, especially school. Abundant data suggest that children now spend much less time outside making friends and inventing games, and much more at home, doing homework and absorbing media under the watch of their parents.

The results have been catastrophic for their development and wellbeing, he has found. In an analysis published last September in the Journal of Pediatrics, Gray and several co-authors argue that the contraction of kids’ independent activity since the 1960s has made them markedly less resilient and triggered a well-documented rise in mental health disorders like depression and anxiety. He advances many of the same claims in a regularly updated Substack on play and happiness, where he critiques everything from Little League sports to the curtailment of school lunch periods.

Notable is the theory of social harm that Gray dismisses out of hand: the supposedly pernicious effects of smartphones and social media, which have increasingly come under scrutiny as experts complain that they monopolize kids’ time and attention. While some of the same critics share his views on the importance of play, he calls the data implicating addictive technology unpersuasive. 

Indeed, he argues, warnings about excessive screen time are worse than wrong — they’re a deflection from the ways in which adults have re-engineered the world around kids to exclude and control them. 

“It’s really the first time in human history that children have not been free to do a lot of independent things,” Gray said in a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken. “Children are designed to grow up with independence, so over the last few decades, we’ve been doing things in a way that’s historically abnormal.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The 74: What is the relationship between unsupervised play and mental health, both in childhood and later life?

Peter Gray: There are certain obvious ways in which play is essential for mental health. First, play makes kids happy, and you really don’t have to do research to know that. If you take play away from kids, they’re a lot less happy, and the lack of happiness is a big part of depression. About this part there should be no mystery.

But play does more than make children immediately happy. It is also the means by which they acquire life skills and learn to make friends. It’s the means by which they learn to direct their own activities. In the process of doing that, they have to learn how to negotiate with their playmates, deal with disagreements and minor bullying, and so forth. If we’re supervising children all the time and not allowing them opportunities to solve their own problems, they grow up without the kinds of character traits and skills needed to deal with the bumps in the road of life.

So that’s the general hypothesis. But what not everybody knows is that, over several decades, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to play freely. Over the same decades, there has also been an increase in anxiety, depression, and suicide among children and adolescents. That doesn’t prove that one thing is caused by the other, but even from a theoretical position, it seems fairly clear that there’s a cause-effect relationship here: Play makes children happy and resilient, we’ve been taking play away from children, and, lo and behold, children are becoming less happy and psychologically resilient. 

What is the evidence that children’s play has declined in recent years? Is it clear in other countries as well as the United States?

It’s declined in the U.S. and some other countries, but it’s not universal by any means. 
Some of the most interesting evidence comes from the sociologist Markella Rutherford, who wrote a book called Adult Supervision Required. Her approach was to analyze articles and letters about children in parenting magazines — Good Housekeeping, for example, has been published almost 150 years — and look at the way people thought about play. What she found was that, through the first half of the 20th century, there was a lot of emphasis on independence. It was recommended that kids walk to their kindergartens and go to the grocery store when milk was running low, and they should be encouraged if they were afraid to do those things.

The advice from those sources was less likely to advocate for independence in the 1960s, and by the ’80s, things were changing quite dramatically. The very things that were previously recognized as important for kids to do independently were now seen as dangerous, and there was much more precaution about danger.

There is also data showing that lots of students used to walk or bicycle to school until the 1980s, when that declined sharply. Now we even have situations where people think that letting an eight-year-old walk to school is negligent, so parents send their children out and then get a call from police. 

This has all been a social experiment that obviously failed. It’s really the first time in human history that children have not been free to do a lot of independent things. Children are designed to grow up with independence, so over the last few decades, we’ve been doing things in a way that’s historically abnormal.

What would you say is normal in the history of human societies? Is it really true that kids have always enjoyed the freedoms of youth?

As part of my research, I have surveyed anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer cultures in seven different cultures across three continents. Even through the 20th century, there were still quite a number of people living that way.

Every one of the researchers told me that children were free to play and explore essentially all the time. Very little work, if any, was expected even of teenagers, and you were basically seen as a child until you had children of your own. Children explored, they tended to play at the things important to their cultures, the older kids looked after the younger ones, and the adults understood that this is how kids learn. In my mind, that’s the biologically natural way that children grew up across history. For 99 percent of our history, we were hunter-gatherers.

The anthropologist David Lancy, who co-authored our article about mental health and the decline in play, is one of the big experts on children around the world. He has found that certain cultures, more so than hunter-gatherers, do expect some work from children. But that work is independent activity; there isn’t an adult running alongside them and telling them what to do. If it’s a farming culture, kids help with the farming, or they haul and chop wood. And even in the context of those chores, they’re doing it with other kids, and there is play as well. The idea of parents following children around and micromanaging their activities is just not something that happens in many cultures.

You refer to historian Howard Chudacoff’s idea that the early 20th century was a “golden age of unstructured play.” But what about the 19th century, when lots of very young kids had to work outside of their homes? I’ve read enough Dickens to know that wasn’t a terrific time to be a kid.

You bring up a terrible time in history, the Industrial Age, where many children worked in factories amid tremendous poverty. But although it’s not a life we would want for our kids, I think those Dickens characters do play. In a Dickens novel, they have to be incredibly independent — to pick pockets, God forbid — and take risks and collaborate with other kids to figure out how to survive. So it’s a very different situation than what we have now, even if it is not the ideal. 

The way I’d put it is that our children are now less free to engage in independent activities than they have ever been, except in times of childhood slavery and the sort of sweatshop work that was fairly common in this country until about a century ago. The golden age of play in America came from our decision to end intensive labor for children and make them, in a way, more like children in hunter-gatherer cultures; they could explore and play in age-mixed groups around their neighborhoods. It was a sort of return to what a normal childhood looks like.

But Chudacoff, who wrote a great history of play in America, points out that we gradually took those freedoms away. When you count school and homework, kids are basically doing the equivalent of a full-time job. We’re basically back in the age of child labor again, but this time, it’s labor we’re imposing because we believe it’s good for children.

Don’t you think a lot of parents, while perhaps agreeing that kids are over-scheduled these days, would also point out that they really are much more likely to survive the risks of childhood and grow into adulthood in 2024 than in 1924? Maybe that’s a price we should be willing to pay.

Well, we’ve got vaccines and modern medicine now, and we’ve cleaned up the environment to a degree. We have much less desperate poverty than we once did, so that helps as well. Those are the main reasons why more children grow into adulthood.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Despite the fact that the first half of the 20th century was not an easy time — you’ve got world wars, the Great Depression, a lot of other problems — children seem to have been much happier then than they are now. We don’t have perfect evidence for all these outcomes, but we know the suicide rate for kids and teenagers was way lower then than it is now. Life was pretty rough, but they didn’t seem to suffer then as they do now. 

So what changed?

Between 1950 and 1990, school added more hours. By 1990, the school year was five weeks longer than it had been, and the school day was generally longer. You started seeing homework for elementary schoolers, who mostly hadn’t had it before. There was far less competition and worrying about grades back then. The combined result is that we’ve gradually increased what I call the “weight” of school, and the amount of time children spend on it.

We also began to believe that children were better off playing adult-directed sports than going out and making up their own games. We started Little League and all these other sports, and parents started thinking, “Better to get my kid into that than just have them go out and play.” But when you’re just making up your own games, as I did in the 1950s, you learn a lot more than you do when there’s an adult to take charge. You’re learning to create rules and keep everybody happy — particularly the people on the other team, who will go home if they’re not happy. All that is lost in a more organized setting. Little League is a great place to learn to bunt, or slide into second base, or throw a curveball, but it’s not a great place to learn anything else. 

Television would be another example. My family got a TV in 1954 or so, right when the Mickey Mouse Club started up. Before that, my friends and I would hang out after school or go fishing. But after, a lot of us would go home and watch whatever was on. It drew kids indoors, where they weren’t playing or exploring.

It seems like parents have become more worried about their kids’ safety as well.

A couple things occurred in the 1980s that played a big role in that. 

In 1979 and 1981, there were two highly publicized cases of young boys being kidnapped and murdered. Of course, those cases made news precisely because they were so rare. But they had a huge effect, and I still remember seeing pictures of kids on the sides of milk cartons in those years. As it turns out, the vast majority of those cases were runaways, and when kids are snatched away, it’s almost never by strangers. But the term “stranger danger” came into use, and when surveys asked parents why they wouldn’t send their kids out, they would cite fear of strangers. 

We talk a lot about helicopter parenting, but I don’t blame parents for this. The society has evolved in a way that changed cultural norms, and parents who try to resist those norms find it very hard to do so. 

I notice you tallied a huge list of factors without mentioning the ascendant thesis for youth behavior and mental health problems: the emergence of smartphones and social media. Do you believe they’ve been overhyped as an explanation?

I’ve looked at the papers in this area, especially the review papers. And if you want to dig out the research supporting the theory that technology is the main driver of our youth mental health problems, you can make a pretty compelling case. But you’d be cherry-picking.

There are so many studies trying to find a link between social media use and anxieties in girls, boys, people of different ages. People have tried to find a simple correlation: Are people who use social media a lot also more likely to be depressed? Some studies show a positive correlation with measures of anxiety, and some studies show a negative correlation. In a lot of studies, it kind of washes out. To me, there’s no really compelling evidence based on the correlational data.

In something of an acknowledgment of this, there’s been a search for other kinds of evidence. People point to experiments where people who say they’re anxious will agree to stop using social media for a period of time. They rate their anxiety levels at the beginning and the end, and what is often found is that those who stopped social media say they’re a bit less anxious. 

But there are two things wrong with these kinds of studies that anyone involved with research should know. The first is that when subjects involved in an experiment know what the purpose of that experiment is, most of them will be motivated to confirm the hypothesis. In this experiment, the hypothesis was very clear and couldn’t have been hidden. Countless social-psychological studies show that when subjects in an experiment believe something is going to happen, they make it happen. This is called the demand effect.

Second is the placebo effect. One of the reasons drug companies have such difficulty getting drugs approved for anxiety or depression is that these are extraordinarily subjective conditions. How anxious does a person feel? Well, if you believe you’re doing something good for you — like taking a drug — you’re quite likely to feel less anxious. In this case, college kids had undoubtedly heard that social media makes people anxious, and as part of their desire to be part of the experiment, they undoubtedly felt that it would be a good way to reduce their anxiety. 

The proponents of the social media theory have also found a few other countries where anxiety and depression increased over the same period that kids started using smartphones and social media. Apparently this is true in the U.K., Australia and a few other places. But I’ve looked at data from the European Union, who are not deprived of technology or the internet, and if you take all the countries of the EU together, there has not been an increase in anxiety, depression, or suicide over the same years. 

Taken together, I think this is just not compelling evidence.

But the more time kids spend on devices, the less they spend in the kind of unstructured, in-person play that you argue is crucial. Isn’t this just the modern equivalent of the television example you mentioned earlier?

There’s a difference between television and what kids today are using. The technology they’re using is far more interactive than TV, and a lot of it is essentially play. They’re not just doing social media, they’re communicating with one another.

There was a systematic study done near the beginning of the social media stage of teen life. The authors surveyed teens across the country about why they spent so much time on social media instead of getting together in person. Across the country, teen after teen said, “I’d love to get together, but I’m not allowed to go out.” Or: “My friend isn’t allowed to go out. This is the only way we can communicate.” That was already true in the early 2010s.

Teens, especially, need to hang out together away from adults. Thinking about when my son was a teenager, you’d see gangs of teens hanging out in malls. That’s what teens need to do! They need to get away from adults, to talk to one another in ways they don’t want their parents to hear. But we’ve created a world where they can’t really do that, except by way of the internet. In other words, I don’t think they’re on social media instead of getting together; they’re on social media because they can’t get together.

I will admit to being concerned that we’re raising kids who don’t even know about the possibilities for getting together because no one else is doing it. By this point, even some young parents didn’t have much chance themselves to socialize independently when they were kids, so they grew up thinking the only way to communicate with your friends is on a smartphone.

Do you think that can be even partially reversed?

I’m involved with a group called Let Grow, and we help organize play clubs at schools. It’s an hour of mixed-age free play for all the kids in an elementary school. Everyone plays at once. There are lots of different ways of playing, but there are two rules: no hurting anybody, and no phones. It’s been extraordinarily successful, as are summer camps when phones are removed. In places like these, where kids can interact with one another freely, it’s not a bad idea to ban phones. 

Instead of speculating about what makes kids anxious, you can look at surveys that ask them directly about what makes them anxious. The great majority say school, and nothing else comes close. The American Psychological Association did a study in 2013 that surveyed teens about their anxiety levels, which were very high. But they were much higher during the school year than the summer, and when asked what the source of their anxiety was, something like 83 percent listed school. The thing that came in second, among high schoolers, was fear about getting into a good college and having a decent future.

The reality is, we’ve frightened children by imposing this pressure and telling them that they’ve got to perform so well academically or else their life will be worthless.

You’ve written a bit about the changing structure of the school day. Can you go into more detail about how you believe the experience of school has evolved in a way that’s unhealthy to kids’ development and wellbeing?

In one of my recent Substack threads, I asked my readers when they attended K–12 schools and how long the lunch period was when they attended. I believe historical data would confirm this, but just based on the information I collected, lunchtime ran about 60 minutes from the 1950s to the 1980s. Then it suddenly went down, to around 35 minutes in the ’90s. Nowadays, the average that I’m seeing is about 30 minutes, though it appears there are schools that only provide 20 minutes. 

Twenty minutes isn’t a lot of time to wash your hands, stand in line for food, find a seat, and eat. Lunch hour used to be a time to hang out with friends, and now it’s not even a time to eat your lunch. Studies show that a lot of the federally mandated meals we provide to students are getting thrown out because kids don’t have time to eat them. Would we, as adults, stand for it if we were being treated this way? 

In some schools, recess has been cut out entirely, and in many, it’s only 15 minutes long. This certainly wasn’t a rule, but I remember having a half-hour of recess in the morning and afternoon in the fifth and sixth grade, along with a whole hour for lunch. So of our six hours of school each day, two were spent playing or socializing in whatever way we wanted. It’s now so strictly controlled in some schools, it’s really wrong to call it play.

In many schools, we have also taken away the things that were thought of as fun because of the concern over standardized test scores. Music and art classes have often been reduced so that more time could be devoted to subjects that are measured by the tests. It’s really time to evaluate the effects of No Child Left Behind and Common Core not just on test scores, but also on children’s emotions. I think the whole push around social media and smartphones is a distraction from the real problem. 

What is your advice for families trying to swim against these currents? I know you’re working with people like Lenore Skenazy to develop strategies for fostering more independence and resilience in kids, but so many parents complain that their communities just aren’t that kid-friendly.

It’s true that lots of people don’t feel they can, like parents in the past, just send their kids out to play. Among other reasons, there aren’t as many kids to play with.

Still, one of the things I advise parents is to get together with others in their neighborhood — granted, this works more for little kids than teens — and talk to them about the importance of real, physical play. Every Saturday afternoon, and maybe certain hours each weekday, everyone in the neighborhood should send their kids outdoors and not intervene unless it’s absolutely necessary for safety. And you have to keep the phones at home because many of the kids never had the opportunity to learn how to play without them.

If there’s a PTA or some venue where you can influence your school, get the school to start after-school or before-school play clubs through Let Grow. It’s still a small minority of schools doing this, but I’d like to see it at every school. It’s safe because there are adults there, but they’re trained not to intervene while kids play. It’s working beautifully where it’s being done.

And it’s possible to encourage this in other settings. More and more libraries are offering play opportunities, including even outdoor play. One in Austin hangs out a sign saying, “Joyful noise welcome!” They have kids playing inside and outside the library, and if adults bring kids, the librarians just let them know that play is for kids, and there’s a separate space for parents. Kids gather there, sometimes a hundred at once, from the ages of three or four to the early teen years. I would love to see more of that, and parents can simply go to their local library to ask about it.

There are lots of things that used to be much more common because American society isn’t as child-friendly as it used to be. In one of the towns I grew up in, there was a public park that essentially ran a free day camp all through the summer. A supervisor worked there who was probably just a teenager, and he would hand out equipment for games or crafts or whatever you wanted to do. It was free, and parents felt comfortable about their kids spending all day there because there was an adult around.

We could do all this easily. In terms of budgets, the cost of it would be a drop in the bucket compared with what we spend on schools. Unfortunately, we’re not going back to a situation where parents can just send their kids out with, more or less, total freedom. But we might get to a place where they feel comfortable not being there while their kids are playing — if there is a responsible adult there who can contact them and who knows how to handle emergencies. 

I believe we could get there if parents are willing to lobby for it.

This story mentions suicide.  If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

LOUISVILLE — Anthem Medicaid announced Wednesday it has launched a free digital mental wellness course, which is available to 1,512 students in 17 Kentucky schools.

The announcement comes during Mental Health Awareness month and as more adolescents, especially girls, report depressive symptoms.

Called “Understanding Mental Wellness,” the interactive program is for students in grades eight to 10. According to EVERFI from Blackbaud, which designed the course, it contains six lessons, each 15 minutes long.

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The course, Anthem says, exposes students “to the experiences of others in order to develop awareness and empathy, reduce stigma, and provide facts on the prevalence and symptoms of mental health conditions.”

Students then “explore their own mental health, identify challenges they may face, and develop concrete strategies for managing those challenges while increasing their awareness of resources and empowering them with the knowledge, skills, and language necessary to identify and support a peer in need or at risk.”

Online previews of the course show a tour of mental health through the program, starting with a lesson on what mental health is and ending with the chance to create a personal wellness plan.

Since the onset of COVID-19, mental health has worsened. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that sadness and hopelessness had increased from pre-pandemic levels, especially for teen girls. In 2017, 41% of female high school students and 21% of male high school students felt sad or hopeless. By 2021, those statistics were at 57% and 29%, respectively.

“Young people need resources and education from trusted sources to protect their mental health,” Leon Lamoreaux, market president for Anthem Medicaid, said in a statement.

The Understanding Mental Wellness program “will help us reach students from all over the Commonwealth and equip them with tools and strategies that will make a positive difference in their lives for years to come,” Lamoreaux said.

Tom Davidson, the CEO of EVERFI, said the goal in creating this program was to “(benefit) those who are impacted by mental health challenges, those who want to build and maintain positive mental health and those who have the opportunity to positively impact the mental health of a friend or peer.”

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter.

The research, led by a prominent expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, is attracting attention as authorities in the United States and several other countries voice louder concerns about the influence of technology on kids. Its conclusions could add to the calls for more strict regulation of their access to social media, which have already led to phone bans in classrooms and contentious hearings in Congress about the fate of TikTok. 

In February, Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower released a working paper that used survey evidence to show a pronounced increase in sadness and hopelessness over the past 15 years affecting people between the ages of 14 and 24. That trend mirrored a similar and dramatic rise in the time that young people, and especially young women, spent in front of a television, computer, smartphone, or gaming console over the same years.

All told, in 2022, more than 10 percent of young women said that they had a “bad mental health day” every day of the preceding month, a threefold uptick from the levels measured in 1993. Meanwhile, the proportion of young women absorbing four or more hours of screen time each day climbed from 8 percent in 2003 to 61 percent in 2022. 

In an interview, Blanchflower called the twin developments “a crisis of our kids” that would harm their ability to lead worthwhile lives and hamper social progress in the long run. While the tight correlation between rising unhappiness and the growth of screen time isn’t enough to decide the question of whether one causes the other, he added, the relationship was too obvious, and too dangerous, to ignore.

“You need a variable that starts in 2011 and is especially true for women, and you get screen time,” he said. “I don’t know of anything else, so if that’s not it, what is it?”

Blanchflower is hardly the first to offer this hypothesis. In the mid-2010s, just as American children’s declining mental health began to be noticed by both experts and the public, psychologist Jean Twenge accused smartphones of “destroying a generation” of kids. More recently, she has been joined by social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, whose new book, The Anxious Generation, levels a similar indictment. 

But with the arrival of Blanchflower’s critique, one of the world’s leading economists has entered the chat. And while pointing to similar data and results, his conclusions paint a distinctly new picture of the emotional trajectory experienced by much of the world’s population. Hundreds of studies previously tracked a consistent pattern to people’s long-term moods — one in which most start off relatively happy, become somewhat less so in their 40s and 50s, and then rebound later — but those rhythms have, for the moment, been upended.

Still, not all observers are as convinced as Blanchflower that technological shocks lie at the heart of the problem. While conceding that an excess of social media very likely leads to harmful consequences, researcher and commentator Will Rinehart said it would be exceedingly difficult to identify their exact effects, let alone change them for the better.

“The technology itself brings new social opportunities and new ways of interacting with your peers,” said Rinehart, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “When that box is open, it’s kind of impossible to shut it again.”

The shape of happiness

Blanchflower, a labor economist who gained public recognition by accurately forecasting the 2008 recession as an advisor to the Bank of England, has spent much of his career studying the economics of happiness — essentially an inquiry into the welfare and life satisfaction of people around the world. 

Such questions have often been left to psychologists, who traditionally take a broader view than social scientists of human motivation and behavior. As more economists expanded the sub-field, however, they generated new insights about the growing happiness of African Americans compared to whites and the particularly adverse reactions of women to the experience of the pandemic.

Perhaps the most noteworthy finding has been that people tend to experience their greatest happiness in both childhood and old age, while enduring a trough during midlife. That consistent dropoff, usually coincident with the growing responsibilities of career and parenthood, is referred to as the “U-shape” of personal well-being — high on either side, low in the middle. Its reverse, a depiction of negative emotion, would be conceived as a “hump shape.”

But according to another paper, released by Blanchflower and his co-authors earlier this month, those descriptions are no longer accurate. In an analysis of over 1.4 million survey responses across 34 countries, Blanchflower and his collaborators discovered that young adults’ widely-reported increase in fear, depression, and anxiety in recent years has contorted the hump shape of unhappiness; instead, people appear to be most unhappy around age 18 and become less so as time goes on.

Blanchflower said that reports of freefalling indicators of mental health for teenagers and young adults, including increased hospitalizations for self-harm and greater suicidality, led him to check on the latest data from benchmark surveys such as the Centers for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which conducts health-related interviews with 400,000 adults every year. The results from the past half-decade were eye-opening, he recalled, and were equally present in figures from the United Kingdom as well as the United States.

“I got in there early and said, ‘I’d better take a look at this because I’ve got endless research saying there’s a happiness U-shape,’” he said. “And I started to look and said, ‘Holy moly, it’s gone!’” People in their late teens and early 20s are now the most likely to report experiencing despair, with people in their late 60s and early 70s substantially less apt to say the same.

An additional overview of findings from the Global Mind Project, which polls a vast swath of international respondents, also demonstrated a steep rise in fear, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts among adults in dozens of countries (again including the U.K. and the U.S.).

COVID has often been cited as a major force playing on the anxieties of young people. But the survey responses strongly indicate that the pandemic actually accelerated pre-existing trends, Blanchflower and his co-authors noted. The sense of displacement brought on by online instruction in the early 2020s may have only intensified the same alienation triggered by online interaction in the 2010s. 

Devorah Heitner is a parent and author who has personally canvassed children around the country to learn how they and their peers navigate a world mediated by screens and social networks. While intermittently skeptical of the most vocal critics of smartphones and social media, including Twenge, she said many young people express a desire to limit their interactions with technology.

“Kids are very aware of their relationships with their phones,” said Heitner, whose book on the virtual lives of kids, Growing Up in Public, became a bestseller last year. “They wish they could take a break from it, or that they could get their friends to use them less.”

The ‘cost of not doing something’

Educators, parents, and politicians are increasingly open to considering restrictions on how children can engage with the internet and social media.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a law banning social media accounts for children younger than 14 and requiring 14- and 15-year-olds to obtain parental permission. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force the sale of the Chinese-owned platform TikTok, citing concerns both about users’ data security and the app’s effects on its youngest users. (The proposal has since been tied to a comprehensive package of foreign aid that is expected to win approval in the Senate.)

Heitner said that social media companies should curb their most “manipulative” features, including location sharing, which allows users to see where their friends are at a given time. Yet she also believes that full-on bans risk curtailing some of the constructive ways that adolescents use technology. While many are bullied or harassed online, for example, others find outlets for their stress and connections with new friends.

“Many of the girls I’ve talked to are using social media in really positive ways: to stay connected to friends, to do activism, to do creative work,” Heitner said. “It really does vary.”

Mitch Prinstein, a neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina and the chief science officer of the American Psychological Association, struck a similar note. The existing research revealed a correlation between the introduction of mass smartphone use and the decline of youth mental health, but not a firm causal connection, he argued. While some studies offered more suggestive evidence — including one experiment that paid students to deactivate Facebook, which left them happier and less polarized than before — potential contributors to the well-being crisis could also include a worsening political climate, along with the frequently circulated fears of environmental disaster and school shootings.

“We can certainly demonstrate that some features of social media are bad for kids,” Prinstein said. “They don’t fit kids’ brain development, they’re depriving kids of alternative experiences — absolutely. I just bristle at the idea of saying this is the singular cause of the youth mental health crisis.”

In both of the new papers, Blanchflower and his co-authors identified additional factors that may have contributed to rising rates of depression and dismay. In particular, the after-effects of the Great Recession may have altered the family lives of huge numbers of children by putting their parents out of work. A significant majority of the young women feeling despair between 2020 and 2022 also reported having suffered one or more adverse child experiences, such as cohabitating with a mentally ill person, living through their parents’ divorce, or being physically or sexually abused.

But the mounting data pointed to a clear role played by the shift of socialization to the internet, he remarked. While adding that it could take 50 years or more to establish the relationship conclusively, Blanchflower said that all the existing evidence argued in favor of enacting hard limits to the exposure of young people to social media and smartphones. Acting decisively could save lives, he said.

“We could fart around about causality, but the potential cost of not doing something is so much greater than the cost of doing something and being wrong. It doesn’t look to me like there are actually detrimental consequences of acting.”

Nearly one fourth of respondents reported being physically harmed or threatened during the previous year. Youth who were physically attacked or menaced were three times more likely to attempt suicide. 

A third of those surveyed were victimized in school because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. One-fifth were prevented from wearing clothes that align with their gender and 11% were disciplined for standing up to bullies. Seven percent said they left a school because of mistreatment.

“Our country is grappling with a youth mental health crisis, and it is particularly pronounced for LGBTQ youth,” says Ronita Nath, Trevor’s vice president of research.

Suicide rates among transgender and nonbinary youth are significantly higher than for their cisgender peers. 

More than 8 in 10 overall wanted mental health care, but half were unable to get it. More than 40% said they were afraid to talk to someone. Cost and transportation were frequently cited as barriers, says Nath. Young people also said they were afraid to ask their parents or caregivers for help.

Ninety percent said the political climate has had a negative impact on their well-being, while 45% reported they or their family have considered moving to another state because of LGBTQ-related politics or laws. 

Nath says, “It’s very important that this year we contextualize this in a political context.” 

According to Trevor’s tally, so far in 2024 lawmakers have considered 540 anti-LGBTQ bills nationwide. Nath says she expects headlines and political rhetoric to continue to spark anxiety and depression among queer youth in the runup to the presidential election.

Two-thirds of LGBTQ youth said they had recent symptoms of anxiety, a rate that rises to 71% among gender-nonconforming young people. More than half suffer from depression.  

Consistent with past surveys, the new poll found more youth get support at school than at home, work, church or in the community. A little more than half — 52% — of respondents said school is affirming, versus 40% who said they feel supported at home. Transgender and nonbinary youth  are slightly more likely to find school affirming but feel unsupported at home.

Reasons for feeling safe at school include the existence of a club such as a gay-straight alliance — also known as a GSA — zero-tolerance anti-bullying policies, and the ability to wear preferred clothing and use desired pronouns. 

Nine percent of students who were able to use a gender-neutral bathroom at school attempted suicide, versus 15% of those who were not. Young people who said their school is supportive were four points less likely to have tried to take their own life, 10% versus 14%. 

“There is a real critical need for schools to adopt protective policies,” says Nath. 

The annual survey, the organization’s sixth, was administered to 18,000 LGBTQ people ages 13 to 24 last fall. In response to virtually every question, gender-nonconforming youth reported more negative experiences than cisgender gays, lesbians and bisexuals, and young people of color more than their white peers.

Asked about ways people in their lives can show support, nearly 9 in 10 of those surveyed said they wanted to be trusted to understand their identity and 81% want others to stand up for them. 

Among transgender and nonbinary youth, 13% said they take gender-affirming hormones, while just 2% are on puberty blockers. Two-thirds of those who take hormones worry about losing access to care.

“Every time we look at one of these variables, across the board we saw higher rates of suicidality,” says Nath. “LGBTQ youth face hardships their cisgender, straight peers simply don’t.”

The young adult was set to speak at a webinar about one of CalHope’s new experimental apps. 

“I saw how many participants there (were)  and I was like, I’m about to use the app so it could calm me down,” said Paniagua. 

But Paniagua had some strategies from the app — including exercises to deal with anxiety. 

According to a study conducted by the California Department of Public Health, the state saw a 20% increase in suicides for young people ages 10 to 18 after the pandemic. To deal with the rising mental health crisis, the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) has launched two new app-based programs, BrightLife Kids and Soluna, to be a first response resource for children and participants up to age 25.

“I never really knew how to express myself,” said Esther Verdugo, another Soluna participant who had experienced anxiety from her busy life before she started using the built-in journaling exercises. “The people around me always expressed themselves that I didn’t know how to share my own emotions so I shared them through journaling, and all of this I found through the . . . app.”

The release of both apps is part of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health, which launched in 2022 with a proposed budget of $4.7 billion. The two apps are free and are focused on providing a variety of resources. 

The BrightLife Kids app was introduced to California children under the age of 13 to be able to access mental health resources with their parents and guardians. Children can navigate the app under their guidance and request family or one-on-one coaching. 

The Soluna app is made for California teens and young adults from the ages of 13 to 25, covering a range of topics based on Soluna’s research of interviewing over 300 California youth on what matters to them, including body image, discovering identity, anxiety and depression.

These topics are laid out in the app as a series of constellations, with each star in the constellation featuring a different exercise such as: articles, podcasts, videos and quizzes all built into the app. One of the exercises, a meditative breathing exercise, was made in partnership with the Calm app, Apple’s 2017 App of the Year.

 “It turns out that the needs for the younger kids are quite different than the needs for older kids and young adults,” said Amrita Sehgal, vice president of business operations at Brightline, the company that made BrightLife Kids. “Especially for younger kids, there’s a big need to involve parents and caregivers and families into their care; versus for older kids, folks may want to interact more independently.”

For many Californians, getting help for mental health issues hasn’t always been easy. Dr. Beth Pausic, vice president of clinical excellence & safety at Kooth Digital Health, said, “When you look at US healthcare at the moment, there’s a provider shortage, there’s not enough therapists, there’s not even enough psychiatrists.” This can be especially difficult for teenagers that are of color or LGBTQ.

Because the core belief is that mental health should be an ongoing conversation that is happening not just when problems arise, the apps focus primarily on prevention and early intervention. The individual coaching sessions are not meant to replace therapists or other traditional forms of behavioral health, but act as a first-response method.

“Mental health just needs to be a conversation that we’re having and not in a way that trends when something bad happens in the news,” Pausic said. “Covid put a spotlight on mental health, but there’s always been a mental health crisis. We just haven’t been talking about it.”

For kids and teens interested in using the services, they can be downloaded on the Apple App Store; and BrightLife Kids on the Google PlayStore with Soluna soon to follow.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

The Alaska House of Representatives voted by a wide margin and with bipartisan support on Friday to ban children younger than 14 from using online social media.

House Bill 254, from Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, also requires companies that provide internet pornography to check whether an Alaskan viewing that pornography is at least 18 years old.

The bill, which passed on a 33-6 vote, advances to the state Senate for further consideration.

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Vance said the age requirement, which also requires parents to sign off on 14- and 15-year-olds using social media, is about protecting children.

“It contributes to the well-being of our children, because we know that continued exposure to this kind of content affects their mental health, the way that they view themselves, the way that they view relationships, body images, and it really gives a twisted view of what healthy sexuality is,” she said before the vote.

The bill was originally written without the social media component, which was inserted via an amendment offered Wednesday night by Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage.

“I believe that with the inclusion of (a) social media (ban) for kids under 14, and only with parental consent for those under 16, we are achieving the goal of the underlying bill, which is to prevent young people from seeing online pornography,” Gray said before the vote.

The bill’s opponents — and even some of its supporters — said they believe it raises privacy and constitutional free-speech concerns. The bill requires pornography websites to verify ages via a “commercially reasonable age verification method,” which could entail submitting an ID.

Supporters who acknowledged those issues said they hope that the Senate will address potential problems, while detractors said the potential problems are too big to be overcome.

“There might be a scenario in the future where it is safe enough to protect people from privacy concerns, but really, I am very concerned about the privacy of all individuals who might have to comply with this type of commercial age verification technology,” said Rep. Genevieve Mina, D-Anchorage, who voted against the bill.

Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla and another opponent, said that right now, the United States has a very different view of the internet than a place like China, which puts restrictions on its citizens’ use.

“We are so close to going more in a direction with China’s internet,” he said, “where anytime you hop onto the Web, you have to upload your picture, you have to upload your template and again, you’re going have to do something to verify who you are, and then that will be tracked.”

The original version of the bill is similar to legislation backed by the National Decency Coalition, which says that 16 states have passed bills it supported.

Legal challenges in state and federal courts have had mixed results, and last month, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas’ version of the law in a 2-1 decision.

Gray, who added the social media ban to the bill amid bipartisan support, also successfully amended it to include a $100 per-year state voucher for parents who buy content-filtering software.

Under the language of the amendment, parents would submit a reimbursement request to the state.

Eastman, speaking to the voucher plan, criticized it as poorly worded and suggested that Alaskans might be able to receive reimbursements for their Netflix subscriptions because that company offers content-filtering features on its video streaming service.

Vance said legislators should not lose sight of the bill’s ultimate goal.

“In the end, we’re protecting the most vulnerable among us,” she said.

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.

New data confirm that these issues are top of mind for school leaders, and that education innovators are working to find solutions. The Canopy project, an ongoing national study of schools that focus on designing student-centered and equitable learning environments — and challenge assumptions about what school must be — just updated its database with survey results from 189 innovative schools. 

In the survey, most participants agreed that teacher workforce issues, AI and the mental health crisis will shape the future of education. They are also working on solutions — but are concerned about having adequate resources to sustain those efforts.

School leaders selected teacher workforce issues as the top factor that they think will transform the education sector. While some respondents said they have struggled to recruit teachers in general, they particularly have trouble finding those with skills geared to working with non-traditional instructional models. A leader from Bostonia Global, a charter school that’s part of Cajon Valley Unified School District in California, wrote that credentialing programs need to “shift to meet the needs of our current and future workforce.” The school’s competency-based instructional model requires teachers to implement an individualized approach, not just teach the same content at the same pace to a classroom of 30 kids.

Canopy’s survey data show that many schools are innovating to solve these workforce-related issues: 65% reported they implement some form of flexible or alternative staffing model. For example, the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, a high school that enrolls students from two partner districts in California, brings in industry professionals to work alongside teachers. Several Canopy schools foster collaboration, using staffing models such as Opportunity Culture, which provides mentorship, opportunities for small-group teaching and professional development. 

Artificial intelligence was the second most-selected driver of change. School leaders’ responses showed they want to harness its potential while staying attentive to issues of access, privacy and equity. Only 7% of Canopy school leaders said they have a policy in place governing students’ use of generative AI, but 38% said they’re developing one. Despite the shortage of formal policy, experimentation appeared abundant.

Howard Middle School for Math and Science, based at Howard University, said the school’s policy is to use AI “to enhance educational outcomes, personalize learning experiences and streamline administrative tasks, while ensuring the safety, privacy and well-being of all students and staff. Anastasis Academy, an independent microschool in Colorado, wrote, “We have trained a GPT on our model, our writings and our curriculum to help personalize learning.” 

The mental health crisis claimed the third spot on the list of factors that school leaders believe will transform K-12 education. Four in five leaders reported that their schools are already integrating social and emotional learning into all subject areas and student activities, making it one of the practices most commonly implemented across Canopy schools this year. Additionally, two-thirds of schools surveyed provide mental health services to students, either directly or through a partner like a community-based health organization, and just under half said they support adult wellness, too.

Some responses pointed to an even bigger problem beyond students’ acute mental health needs: battling despair about what the future may hold. One leader wrote, “Students are developing an increasing sense of hopelessness about the world beyond school.” Many lower- and middle-income young people, he said, feel that social mobility is “not possible for them.”

Many schools are working toward solutions that combat that sense of hopelessness. As in previous years of Canopy surveys, most schools reported designing solutions to meet marginalized students’ needs. At BuildUp Community School in Alabama, the school’s mostly Black and economically disadvantaged students split their time between classrooms and work-based learning in construction and real estate, revitalizing their communities and paving a path to homeownership. And 5280 High School, in Colorado, helps students recovering from addiction to reengage in their education and explore their passions in a setting that prioritizes mental health.

A majority of leaders worried about their ability to sustain resources in the coming years. Of those, the top concerns were the availability of local public, private and philanthropic funding. Over a third of those with concerns also said they worried about staffing shortages, inflation and the expiration of federal stimulus funding.

A few leaders pointed out that inadequate funding will not just make it harder to keep the lights on — it will stunt the development of innovative ideas to solve the enormous challenges ahead. Indeed, recent reporting shows reduced philanthropic investment in broader systemic change in the sector.Funding shortfalls in many districts and states will also mean even basic education services may lack adequate resources, making it harder for leaders to defend funding for higher-risk innovation efforts.

Too often, the scale of K-12 sector problems lead education leaders, policymakers and funders to bemoan a lack of bold solutions or flock to attractive but still-theoretical ideas that fail in the implementation stage. School-level innovation efforts are worth watching because they show unconventional ideas in the process of becoming reality — and some may hint at what success can look like. Canopy schools are prime examples of this, whether it’s a New York City charter school accelerating student learning and well-being through summer programming or a North Carolina district school achieving high growth rates with an innovative staffing approach. 

The Canopy project will release a full research report later this year. For now, the headlines from this year’s survey should prompt education leaders, policymakers and funders to take note of schools, like those in Canopy’s national dataset, that are working toward bold and unconventional solutions. 

Indeed, one answer to what will drive K-12 transformation in the coming years is that it will arise from innovation not just in ed tech companies and think tanks, but in the nation’s schools.

But being awakened in the middle of the night by sharp pains was new for Coreano and their family. Rats had begun to bite them in their sleep. Later that morning, they went to their Kensington school and pretended nothing happened.

Chronicling the life of Corem and two other Puerto Rican students from Philadelphia, author Nikhil Goyal presents harrowing accounts of childhood in his latest book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty. 

Readers see Corem, Ryan Rivera and Giancarlos Rodriguez grow up overpoliced and underfed. By the time they reached high school, the system threatened to close some 37 schools, and only after continued protests from Giancarlos and many other school community members, shuttered 24. 

In some cases walking an hour one-way to school without transportation after an eviction left them displaced, Corem, Ryan and Giancarlos give low-income children a human face and serve as a cautionary tale. The Census Bureau has revealed the rate of childhood poverty has doubled, and the country will soon see pandemic-era relief for families, schools and childcare providers come to an end. 

“If we believe that schools should be equitable and humane and child centered, then we’ve got to be willing to fight for an agenda that will end poverty,” said Goyal, who for the last two years served as the senior policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Budget Committees. 

Their stories illuminate exactly how economic instability and harsh discipline policies impact children’s ability to learn safely, making the case for change, particularly as educators nationwide grapple with how best to support students academically after pandemic disruptions.

Making economic stimuluses like the Child Tax Credit permanent, Goyal added, would mean “the lives of educators and school staff and counselors would be a lot easier.” 

Named one of 2023’s best books by the New Yorker, Live to See the Day also illuminates how school policies governing students can disproportionately shape entire futures, particularly for students of color who are more often suspended and expelled than their peers. Zero tolerance discipline policies, for instance, put children like Ryan Rivera in juvenile incarceration and harsh schooling isolated from friends for years, after being pushed to light a trashcan on fire at 12 years old.

In conversation with The 74, Goyal reflects on school closures, community schooling, chronic absenteeism, and what policies stand to make a difference for the nearly 9 million kids living in poverty nationwide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You frame childhood poverty as a crisis to be urgently addressed — why release this book now? What’s happening?

The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report for 2022 — child poverty more than doubled. More than 5 million children are plunged into poverty. It was the single largest increase in poverty in recorded history, just an astonishing development in public policy that I think deserves enormous attention as well as a full-throated response from people in Washington and people in power. 

The increase in child poverty coincides with the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, economic stimulus payments, expanded unemployment insurance, and a number of other programs that have enormously benefited children and families, whether in terms of food assistance, or housing assistance, or Medicaid access. 

We’re also at this moment where a lot of districts throughout the country are facing dropping enrollments, facing fiscal cliffs with the end of ESSER funds. People are anticipating a lot more consolidations, and possibly something like what happened in Philadelphia where a school system weighed closing dozens of schools. What are some lessons that school leaders might glean from what happened in Philadelphia? 

In 2013, the school district proposed closing some three dozen. The argument was that the district was bleeding in a major fiscal deficit. In the book I cite a major report by Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by the district to evaluate the fiscal state of schools. One of the recommendations was a mass closure of schools. They also recommended a mass firing of teachers and other school staff and a very market-oriented approach to public education. The key recommendation was taken up by the school district, against the wishes of students and parents and educators and unions, who were an incredibly robust coalition. 

Pew Research and others have found that school closures haven’t actually yielded the balance of savings that the architects originally envisioned. They cause a lot of displacement, educational instability. And, and in many instances, students are not actually necessarily attending so-called “higher performing schools” after their schools shut down. 

I read about Fairhill School, this extraordinary school in the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia, which had been serving generations upon generations of children of the working class. This was a school that had been deeply underfunded. And in spite of that, they were still able to provide children with a nurse, a safe environment. 

Their test scores weren’t as good as suburban districts, sure. But does that mean that we should necessarily be closing a school like that which has been an anchor of the community? I don’t think so. I think if we provide public schools with equitable resources, and the type of respect that they deserve, so many of the issues that folks might point you to in public education, I don’t think would exist. 

The charter movement has capitalized on this. But if you go back to the history of charter schools, and you go back to Minnesota and some of the earliest charter schools, these were laboratories of progressivism. We’re gonna bring innovation, bring the best, experiment with interesting ideas in pedagogy and curriculum and instruction and the teaching force. See what works and then bring the best ideas into the public system. That is the model that I would prefer, where charter schools work in tandem with public schools, not as competition.

Something I appreciated while reading is that you give these trends and the political events around them a human face, from the war on drugs and no tolerance policies for violence that led to thousands of incarcerated youth. What’s currently underway that you think might be on track to cause more devastation? Particularly for Black and brown children?

I think there’s a dramatic rise in the privatization movement. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in the voucher schemes as well as charter expansion. In Philadelphia alone, nearly 40% of children attend either charter schools or cyber charter schools. There’s cities all over this country where traditional public schools have become dismantled, and we’re seeing a rise of the private sector intervening in public education. There’s obviously some really amazing organizing and efforts by teachers unions and advocacy groups like Journey for Justice fighting back against those policies all over the country.

What’s at stake, if these models are to continue at the scale that they have? What would be the impact for students, based on your research and experience with Philadelphia?

If we continue down this path, where more and more charters replace traditional public schools, where voucher programs siphon even more dollars away from the public system into the private system, particularly the religious sector, then I think that’s one of the most grave and profound threats to American democracy. I think the foundations of American democracy are found in public education. I think it’s one of the areas of our society that has not been fully transformed and taken over by the market.

Look at health care, look at energy, look at housing. By and large, public education has withstood a number of those assaults over generations, but I think public schools are facing their most serious threats. The pandemic didn’t help. We can debate about school closures, the efficacy of that or not, but I think the reality is that they breed a distrust among parents who were rightfully frustrated about making sure that there was a place for their children to be during the day and be educated. 

One exception to this threat you’ve identified to the traditional public system is the expansion of 3K and pre-K programs in many cities. 

The early childhood education space is very fascinating to me. Public dollars might go to both public providers as well as private providers, and you’re seeing that there’s not a sustained level of federal dollars. A lot of those private providers cannot remain open because their margins are so low. 

There is a growing interest from states all over this country as well as cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have poured an enormous amount of money into public pre-K. We’re talking about an area of great optimism. I am deeply encouraged by efforts by states and cities to expand early childhood education, because it is not only the right thing to do, it is good for our economy and society.

At one point in the book, you say their story is one of survival, where 18th birthdays are not rites of passage, but miracles. That it’s a story of social contract in tatters. In this reality, where so many children grow up in poverty, what are some best practices for school systems?

I think every school should be turned into a community school, where they have wraparound services, social and health supports. Universal free school meals, extended hours, restorative justice, well paid teachers and staff and modernized infrastructure. 

There are incredible examples of community schools all over this country. I will point to Cincinnati as the gold standard for community schooling, because they’ve converted virtually all of their public schools into Community Learning Centers. I am always struck by the fact that they have dentists and mental health professionals and other medical staff and doctors who are literally based in the school itself to provide care to students. 

We have to recognize that the issues and challenges that young people experience in their homes and in their communities don’t get left behind when they go to school every day. It affects their ability to learn. It affects their relationships with their teachers and counselors, and their relationships with their peers. 

We’ve got to really recognize that poverty and economic insecurity is the root cause of many of these educational inequalities. That schools can be places where children can get access to healthcare and all their social support. I’m very encouraged by that trend across the country. And the research shows that community schools have a positive impact on absenteeism, on truancy, on graduation rates, and student engagement. 

It’s the idea of, meet people where they’re at, provide them with the basic, basic building blocks for dignified life and you will see many of the social problems that once existed, either be reduced or eliminated.

A third of students were chronically absent by the end of the last school year, and we’re hearing more and more about school avoidance. What does Corem’s story reveal about this trend and its links with mental health, which is what some believe to be a root cause right now? 

It’s a great crisis. I would say that Corem has a harrowing, fascinating story with a lot of lessons. Today Corem uses they/them pronouns. When they were growing up, they lived with their mother who was disabled. They endured consistent housing and food insecurity. They would run out of food. They had to endure evictions. They moved in some years, twice or three times, which meant that they had to constantly switch schools and never really settle into one school. That meant Corem’s academic performance faltered. 

I know they’ve suffered from absenteeism at times, not due to their own failings, but simply because they were deprived of the basic necessities of a decent life. They didn’t have the tools and resources that would allow him to get to school on time every day. There’s one moment in the book where the landlord tells their mother that sorry, we just sold the house and you have to leave immediately. 

That means, in the middle of the school year, they have to walk more than an hour from the new home to the old school. Their mother was able to get them a public transit pass, but it just goes to show homelessness and housing insecurity are huge obstacles to consistent and regular school attendance. 

There’s a lot of research to show that homeless students in particular make up a significant part of the population that is going to be absent. As emergency rental assistance winds down and now we’re more than two years since the end of the national eviction moratorium, our families are really suffering through the housing affordability crisis. And I think we see that play out with children.

The report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation surveyed more than 14,000 respondents in the fall of 2023 — including about 6,000 enrolled college students, 5,000 students who left college and 3,000 adults who never enrolled.

More than 40 percent of Black and Latino students considered leaving compared to 30 percent of white students — with stress, mental health and cost leading the reasons why.

“The fact that stress and mental health concerns continue to be the number one concern for Black and Latino students is alarming,” said Dr. Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “It’s something we need to pay attention to because it’s almost like a cry for help for [postsecondary] institutions to do something about this.” 

Brown said Black and Latino adults’ enthusiasm for enrolling in a traditional four-year college has waned in comparison to certificate and associate degree pathways.

Most recent enrollment gains were carried by community colleges with a vocational program focus compared to those with a transfer focus.

“Black and Latino adults recognize the cost is high and their time is limited,” said Brown. “So if they can invest in something like a certificate or associate degree that gets them into the workforce as fast as possible it makes more sense.”

Here are four key takeaways from the report:

1. Black and Latino students are more likely to leave postsecondary programs than their white peers.

More than 40 percent of Black and Latino students were likely to consider leaving college compared to about 30 percent of white students.

Black students experienced slight improvement compared to 2022 but their likelihood of leaving remained higher than 2021 and 2020.

Latino students also saw improvement compared to 2022 returning them to similar levels in 2020.

2. Emotional stress, mental health and cost are consistent reasons across racial groups for why current students considered leaving their postsecondary programs.

More than 50 percent of students said stress was their biggest reason to consider leaving college — followed by mental health and cost by more than 40 and 30 percent respectively. 

Brown said Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to balance coursework with a part or full time job in addition to taking care of family members.

“All of these students greatly value getting a degree and understand how important it is, but all these things accelerate their stress level,” Brown said. 

She added how the competing priorities in their lives influence their desire to leave their postsecondary education to join the workforce and earn income faster.

“Black and Latino students often don’t have the money to actually enroll or stay enrolled,” Brown said. “So it becomes hard for them when they can get a job but the opportunity is lost because they’re in class.”

“It’s short-sighted and they end up losing that opportunity cost because with a degree they would be able to get a better job in the long-term,” she added.

3. Black and Latino adults who have considered enrolling in a postsecondary program are largely interested in certificate and associate pathways.

Nearly six in 10 unenrolled adults have considered enrolling in a postsecondary program in the past two years.

But, Black and Latino adults are more likely to consider a certificate or associate program compared to a slightly smaller number who have considered a bachelor’s degree. 

Brown said postsecondary institutions can help Black and Latino students who have difficulty working towards a bachelor’s degree by providing resources such as healthcare, mental health services and childcare facilities.

“A bachelor’s degree is a lot more involved and it’s going to take a few years minimum if you’re going full time,” Brown said. “So providing these services will give them a leg up to completion.”

4. Financial aid and scholarships hold larger importance to Black and Latino adults than their white peers.

Nearly 60 percent of Black and Latino adults said financial aid and scholarships are important to get them to enroll in a postsecondary program in the next year compared to about 50 percent of white adults.

Also, more than 40 percent of Black and Latino adults said emergency aid would influence their enrollment compared to about 30 percent of white adults.

“I hope this data becomes a call to action for [postsecondary] institutions,” Brown said. “Their attainment rate is very low because our system has failed them again and again, so we can and must do better.”

Natasha Kulviwat, having been interested in neuroscience and mental health from an early age, noticed that neuroscience wasn’t making as much progress in mental health diagnoses and interventions as she thought it should.

So, the 17-year-old from Jericho High School in Jericho, New York embarked on a search for a biomarker related to suicide, wondering if there was a way to use neuroscience to identify those at risk.

Kulviwat looked at brain tissue for those who died by suicide and found there was an increase in a protein biomarker in suicide decedents. The biomarkers could also identify genetic vulnerabilities that could lead to suicidal ideation. 

So, for instance, pathologists could find spikes in the protein biomarkers and, along with a self-report questionnaire, could catalyze suicide prevention in the future.

“My research serves as a small puzzle piece that will hopefully advance the way we view diagnostics for suicide in the future,” Kulviwat said.

It was huge news. At the time, an autism diagnosis frequently meant life in an institution for the child in question. The opening of a path to a version of a “normal” life seemed nothing short of a miracle. Few people questioned the history of Lovaas’s research or the ethics of his methods.

Rather, determined to do right by their children, parents fought hard to get the new therapy, dubbed applied behavior analysis, or ABA — though it was as expensive as it was supposedly game-changing. Today, there is an excellent chance that a child diagnosed as autistic will receive a referral to a provider of ABA, routinely described as “gold standard” therapy that uses behavior modification techniques to eliminate traits deemed undesirable. 

As the rate of U.S. children identified as autistic has risen to 1 in 36, an entire industry has grown up around them. Where once parents had to sue to force school systems, social service agencies and insurers to pay for what was billed as an autistic child’s only fighting chance, today there are ABA treatment centers where families and schools can send a child; therapist degree programs; at least 100 companies running networks of ABA centers; countless standalone programs; dedicated ABA schools that students attend full time at public expense; and ABA training for special education teachers. With all this comes the potential for profit — up to $2.45 billion a year, according to investment firms — and thus an army of lobbyists and public relations specialists making sure ABA is the first, and often only, therapy available. Armed with testimonials of success, parents became — and many remain — their zealous ambassadors. 

But 37 years after Lovaas’s bombshell article, researchers, therapists and autistic adults who themselves were ABA patients as children are pushing back. Proponents of other approaches and some educators — as well as the U.S. Education Department — have expressed frustration over the depth with which ABA has become ingrained, to the exclusion of other therapies and the potential detriment of potentially hundreds of thousands of children. A critical mass of advocates is challenging the notion that non-disabled diagnosticians should get to decide how autistic children should be treated — indeed, how the entire concept of disability should be defined. 

The U.S. Department of Defense, among other research organizations, has called into question whether ABA actually works. And scholars are investigating whether it causes harm to the children subjected to it. Some who experienced the intervention say it absolutely does.

The problems with ABA started early on, beginning with Lovaas’s own beliefs.

“You start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic person,” he told Psychology Today in 1974. “You have a person in the physical sense — they have hair, a nose, a mouth — but they are not people in the psychological sense.” 

This lack of humanity, Lovaas did not shy away from saying, justified using electric shocks, slaps, withholding of food and other forms of physical punishment to “extinguish” autistic traits — even joyful ones — and replace them with “normal” behaviors. 

Simultaneously, Lovaas was using the same methods to “treat” suspected homosexuals and transgender people — so-called conversion therapy, which was quickly recognized as a human rights abuse. But the same reasoning that propelled the research community to turn away from using “operant conditioning” on LGBTQ people was not extended to autistic children. Instead, proponents charged ahead — even though Lovaas’s own landmark study does not come close to what many current researchers deem credible. The Norwegian-born psychologist, who died in 2010 at age 83, had personally decided which children received his pioneering intervention and which became the control group. Six years after his initial publication, Lovaas conceded that ABA becomes less effective over time, because, “These people are so used to pain that they can adapt to almost any kind of aversive you give them.” 

More concerning, a growing body of research from, among other sources, the U.S. Department of Defense and a multi-disciplinary team of university scholars called Project AIM has found the evidence base for ABA is too thin and of too poor quality to justify its widespread adoption. The majority of studies that have found it effective are rife with industry conflicts of interest. 

And many former patients who were subjected to ABA as children believe the treatment is abusive. One 2018 survey found that just 5% of autists ​​— a term used by some people with autism — support the therapy, with a majority of neurotypical relatives of autistic people opposing it. 

As neurodivergent adults have moved into the ranks of academic and independent researchers, some have begun compiling evidence that ABA subjects are more likely than other autists to suffer from PTSD and other serious mental health problems. 

“It doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar that these interventions could cause harm,” says Kristen Bottema-Beutel, a Boston College professor and an author of the Project AIM meta-analysis. “There seems to be this unwillingness to listen to autistic people who say that it does.”

It’s a Catch-22, she continues: “There’s no evidence. But the reason there’s no evidence is because we are unwilling to collect it.”

‘My monkey tricks were impressive but dehumanizing’ 

Unlike Lovaas, most of today’s ABA therapists don’t wield paddles or electric shocks. But they continue to push for compliance in ways many parents and autistic adults describe as controlling and abusive. There’s no more slapping, but toys, treats and — possibly most damaging — attention are frequently withheld when a child is not compliant. The goal remains “extinction” — the term still used for the process of drilling until an autistic behavior no longer takes place. The centerpiece of this conditioning still bears the name Lovaas gave it: the discrete trial.

Often delivered for long periods, and beginning at ages when children are too young to sit still and obey commands, ABA involves a therapist giving an instruction — such as asking the child to make eye contact, fold their hands in their lap or speak out loud. Positive and negative feedback comes repeatedly and rapid-fire, sometimes including physical reinforcement like turning the child’s head or holding their hands down. When the patient complies, a new command is introduced. 

Sometimes, the targeted behavior is dangerous for the child, such as head-banging, or exhausting for caregivers, such as smearing food or feces. Other times, it’s simply a visible deviation from “normal.” Either way, the goal is to train the child to respond differently to the surrounding environment. 

The upshot, say many adult autists, is that because patients appear more neurotypical, non-disabled people may believe they are “better,” when in fact they may well have sunk into a state of burnout and are developing mental health issues. 

From a non-autistic perspective, many of ABA’s goals seem entirely reasonable — indeed, even a kindness undertaken to facilitate a child’s chances of social acceptance. It’s hard to make neurotypical friends, the reasoning goes, if your affect is flat or you make guttural noises when you are excited. Teachers can’t deliver lessons if they’re trying to keep a student from bolting from the classroom. It’s nigh unto impossible for a parent to finish the grocery shopping with a kid who has melted down and may be physically out of control.

ABA, autistic adults say, may train a child to stop some of these behaviors. But it does nothing to address the underlying causes or teach coping skills, and comes at a tremendous psychological cost. To someone who is easily overstimulated, buzzing fluorescent lights, hyperactive siblings or continual changes of setting and activity can make classrooms and public spaces a sensory nightmare.

Take, for example, the common ABA goal of asking a child to make eye contact. While there are several levels of expertise, and therapists’ training varies, the board that certifies ABA practitioners “requires no education and training on autism in general, let alone [its] cognitive and neurological characteristics,” the journal Cogent Psychology reported in 2019. So therapists who compel eye contact — even going so far as to turn the child’s head so they are face to face — may not know that it overstimulates the portion of autistic children’s brains that is primarily responsible for anxiety. 

One way autists cope with anxiety is to “stim” — make sounds or movements, such as hand-flapping or rocking, that discharge this overstimulation. The more overstimulated a child gets, the more pronounced the behavior. Unable to self-soothe or leave an overwhelming environment, the child is likely to melt down. In trying to eliminate stims, the authors of the Cogent Psychology article report, ABA makes “arbitrary distinctions between which movements are pathological and which are not.”

“A lifetime of being punished for certain movements, and being forced to engage in eye contact despite the physiological pain and discomfort of doing so, is psychological and physical abuse,” they write. “A lifetime of being forced to sit still with no regard for actual cognitive abilities can create further emotional and psychological harm.” 

Autists describe attempting to appear “normal” as masking or camouflaging. It often takes so much effort that it can suck up all of a person’s energy, meaning they may not actually hear a lesson being delivered or be able to engage with a conversation. If directed to do something that is a physical impossibility, a child may not even be able to mask. 

Nor will behavioral therapies do anything to change what a person’s neurotype — the scientific label for a brain and body that operate differently — physically prevents them from doing.

“They are neurological problems, not problems with my social understanding or intellect,” one adult who experienced ABA told researcher Laura Anderson for a 2022 report published in the journal Autism. 

Research on the harms of masking is mounting. A 2018 study published in Advances in Autism found ABA participants were 86% more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD than autistic people who were not exposed to the therapy. Nearly half of those affected displayed PTSD symptoms that would be considered at “extreme levels of severity.” 

An emerging body of research suggests that separate from mental health conditions, camouflaging is associated with heightened risk of suicidality, already much greater for autists than the general population. 

Summarized one participant quoted in Anderson’s report: “My monkey tricks were impressive but dehumanizing.” 

Who wouldn’t want to hear, ‘I love you’?

When Elizabeth’s daughter Lily was diagnosed at age 3, she was told to start ABA as soon as possible, preferably for 40 hours a week. “It’s just overwhelming,” Elizabeth recalls. “I didn’t know anything about the diagnosis. I didn’t understand what it could mean.” (To protect the child’s privacy, Elizabeth and Lily are pseudonyms for a mother and daughter who live in a Massachusetts city that is home to a number of universities.)

A scientist, Elizabeth downloaded all the research she could find and immediately became concerned. Because of ABA’s focus on how many correct responses a child provides, there was data galore. But it documented the number of times it takes to extinguish or create a behavior. None of it told her how Lily’s life might change. 

Lily is hyperlexic, meaning that for such a little girl she had a huge vocabulary. But she is sometimes nonverbal. For some autists, speaking out loud may be physically difficult, even impossible. Coordinating the complex physical and mental functions that go into talking may take so much effort that it wears them out or sends them into a meltdown.

A common criticism from autistic adults who experienced ABA is that they used precious energy struggling to say what the therapist wanted to hear just to get the exercise to stop. A therapist may eventually succeed in getting the child to name the toy they want, but it often stymies meaningful communication.   

Unaware of the hurdles speech can pose, parents are often thrilled when ABA teaches their child to speak — after all, who wouldn’t want to hear, “I love you”? They rarely realize that other approaches could facilitate more interaction while taxing their child less.

In fact, because ABA is frequently offered in place of speech-language therapy or assistive technology — such as programmable electronic “talkers” that allow children to piece together pictures or symbols into sentences or even stories — parents and teachers may not be aware of how much language a child actually has.

Lily spoke as a small child, but as she got older, she would stop talking for a day or two at a time. Elizabeth wanted to teach her to sign but was discouraged by health care providers who had heard from ABA therapists that children given alternate means of communication are less likely to become verbal. 

When Elizabeth was first looking into ABA’s research base, she saw that among the evidence that it works was data on the number of times a patient speaks. To her, this was a poor substitute for knowing whether Lily could describe how she felt or what she was thinking about.

Lily now has a device she can use when she can’t or doesn’t want to speak. Often, Elizabeth says, the girl is much more expressive with it. 

“You can train any mammal to do the things that ABA can train your kids to do,” Elizabeth says. “How a kid is feeling and growing in terms of their relationships and their anxiety and feeling comfortable with people — that’s really different than sitting at a table and pointing at a picture nine times out of 10.” 

Based on data gleaned from the nearly 10 million military dependents it insures, the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly called the evidence supporting ABA “weak,” noting there is no research to determine whether the small number of participants who show improvement — 15% — do so because of treatment or simply because a child has matured. After a year of the therapy, the department reported to Congress in 2019, 76% of 16,000 participating autistic children saw no change, and 9% worsened.

(The private nonprofit National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is conducting a federally mandated review of the Defense Department’s autism intervention research. Its findings are slated for release in summer 2025.)

Even accepting more typical behavior and communication as legitimate goals, research has found scant evidence that the treatment achieves those outcomes. Results of a randomized trial in England, for instance, “suggest lack of clinical effectiveness,” researchers concluded in 2020. A 2010 review of the “Lovaas Method” by the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse looked at 58 studies, concluding that only two even partially met its standards.  

Project AIM’s meta-analysis, published in 2020, found little high-quality research — and little evidence in the investigations that did meet rigorous standards — that supported ABA’s efficacy. Of the 150 investigations undertaken between 1970 and 2018 the Project AIM team examined, 70% had serious conflicts of interest, which less than 6% disclosed. 

After an autistic researcher, Michelle Dawson, pointed out that Project AIM had not considered whether the studies it analyzed reported side effects or harm, members reexamined them and found that only 11 included even cursory mentions of participants’ psychological or physical distress.

Including adverse events data should be standard, says Bottema-Beutel, the Boston College professor and Project AIM author: “It is in other fields, and it absolutely isn’t in autism research. … It’s especially important because there is an enormous community of autistic people who say that they have been harmed by participating in these interventions.”

A related flaw in the overall body of research, Bottema-Beutel adds, is that it disregards what autistic people say they want in the way of therapeutic support. “It would be difficult to find studies that were well designed, that don’t have risks of bias [and] that show improvement on meaningful outcomes that autistic people care about,” she says. “Show me an ABA study where they improve quality of life.”

‘It was so humiliating being there’

Concerned about the way ABA-affiliated researchers defined and quantified success, Elizabeth went back to the internet and searched for opinions from autistic adults. “I just wanted to hear from older autistic people who experienced therapy,” she says. “And try to understand that from my daughter’s perspective, because at the time, she certainly couldn’t tell me.”

What she heard were responses like these:

“It resulted in corrosive damage to self-esteem and deep shame about who I really am,” a former patient told a University of California researcher in 2017. “No effort was made to explain autism to me or to explain the role of sensory overload in issues like meltdowns, shutdowns, etc.”

Therapists, another former participant told researchers at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, “teach you to anticipate that when you say ‘no,’ they’ll bulldoze through that because you don’t own your own body.” 

Another said she was left with crippling social anxiety: “All of those things that I was doing wrong would automatically go through my head any time I was in a social situation. … I would be inherently super judgmental and self-critical about everything I was doing to the point where even in some social situations, I just shut down.”

And: “It was so humiliating being there.” 

Perhaps the most painful element of the swelling controversy about ABA is the clash of perspectives of neurotypical parents and autistic adults who say — often bluntly — that the effort families are making to do right by their child is misguided. The conversation is especially freighted because both groups have unhappy histories. Until Lovaas, poor parenting was blamed as the root cause of autism. For their part, many autistic adults are enraged that they are not routinely invited to help shape research and policy. 

Autistic adults who believe they were harmed by ABA are quick to say they believe their parents were doing the best they could with the information and resources they had. “I am not mad at them for their effort,” one autistic woman told researchers looking into trauma rates. “They weren’t disrespectful. They just had a flawed paradigm for autism, and therefore, what they tried didn’t work. That doesn’t make them bad people.”

Many parents wholeheartedly believe ABA delivers great victories. Often, they are proud that after their struggles to find services and pay for them, their child talks, follows directions and has far fewer disruptive behaviors.  

One of the most visible advocacy organizations, Autism Speaks has played a leading role in helping families of autistic children press for expanded access to ABA and other services. 

The organization’s stance on ABA is that it may be effective for some people and not others; therapies should be tailored to the individual and should not attempt to enforce behaviors based on social norms. When implemented properly, the organization holds, “ABA can lead to improvements in IQ, adaptive behavior, communication skills, social skills and a reduction in challenging behaviors.” 

The evidence behind behavioral science is sound, says Andy Shih, Autism Speaks’s chief science officer. But as with any other treatment, there can be differences in how a therapy is conducted — particularly given the range of training and experience among therapists. A skilled practitioner working in the right conditions can succeed in changing behavior, he says, most notably eliminating those that endanger a child.    

“Everybody experiences ABA differently,” says Shih. “The setting in which we see them, the quality of the service provider, they all make a difference, I think. In general, even though there are established standards and criteria in terms of what a good autism service should look like … just like in other branches of medicine, what is ideal and what is actually delivered, sometimes there’s a big gap.”

Eileen Lamb, director of social media for Autism Speaks, credits nine years of ABA for helping one of her children, who is nonverbal and has a potentially dangerous eating disorder called pica. The boy, Charlie, is now able to express his basic needs.

“He’s also learned safety skills like being able to ‘stop’ when someone asks him to,” Lamb said in a statement provided by Autism Speaks. “ABA was also successful in helping Charlie through his fear of the doctor and dentist. We don’t have to put him under anesthesia for dental exams/interventions anymore, which is incredible.”

Similar glowing recommendations from parents abound. Last summer, a group of Indiana parents staged a protest after being alerted by their kids’ therapy centers that the state wanted to cut reimbursement rates. They gathered outside the governor’s mansion, holding signs that said, “ABA is the way” and, “They wouldn’t be who they are today without ABA.” 

In Virginia, then-Delegate Bob Thomas kicked off a 2019 press conference announcing a push to expand access to autism therapy by asking the grandson of a local advocate to step to the dais. 

“Mark is a great example of why we are here today,” Thomas said, explaining that the child had once been unable to speak. “Thanks to the services and the resources Mark had access to, he’s now able to stand here in front of a roomful of media, media cameras and lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.”

In response to a reporter’s question about what was at stake, a mother of three autistic boys stepped to the mic: “If it weren’t for the behavior therapy that we receive, we would not be able to go out in public like this today.”  

Add to displays like these effusive testimonials on ABA center websites, memoirs penned by parents who credit ABA with their children’s miraculous recoveries and whispered confessions from caregivers that the therapist’s arrival gives them a much-needed break from kids who require constant supervision. 

Research has begun to probe the disconnect between parents’ and children’s perceptions. The 2018 Advances in Autism study, for example, predicted that nearly half of autistic children exposed to ABA will meet the threshold for a PTSD diagnosis within four weeks, while caregivers’ satisfaction will rise as the treatment goes on.

Still, the study noted, 9% of caregivers surveyed discontinued the therapy because they didn’t see enough progress or saw negative changes. Overall, “caregiver satisfaction was generally reported within the neutral range. The longer a child was exposed to ABA, the more likely a caregiver was to rate the intervention as effective for improving overall functioning.” 

Have you seen Mr. Potato Head?

Denise’s son Logan was 27 months old when a neurologist at the prestigious Boston Children’s Hospital diagnosed him with autism. He was smart and carefree but very rambunctious, more likely to throw toys than play with them. He never spoke words but used his voice to stim. (To protect Logan’s privacy, he and his mother have been given pseudonyms. The family lives in western Massachusetts.) 

Home to numerous elite research universities — including Harvard, where behaviorist B.F. Skinner planted ABA’s conceptual roots — Massachusetts is considered a great place for autistic children. It was one of the first to mandate insurance coverage for autism services and now contracts with 22 companies to provide intensive early interventions. ABA dominates the offerings. 

Eager to get her son as much help as possible, Denise got him on wait lists for two treatments: ABA and a lesser-known approach called Floor Time. Within two weeks, an ABA therapist was spending 14 hours a week with Logan. 

For a while, Denise says, things went fine. But when COVID-19 forced the therapy online, Logan balked. 

“The idea that he was hiding in the closet because I was turning on the computer for ABA was just like a total alarm going off,” she says. 

Denise told the therapist the discrete trials didn’t seem like a good fit, fears that were compounded when in-person services started back up. At her first visit, the therapist invited Logan to jump on a trampoline with her. She pointed a finger skyward and said, “Up, up, up.” Pointing his own finger, a delighted Logan started shouting the word with her. Saying words out loud was new for him.

The victory was short-lived. The therapist moved on, asking Logan to put his hands in water. Still excited, he kept pointing and chanting, “Up, up, up” instead. The response was gentle but devastating: The therapist folded his finger down and moved his hands where she wanted them. The boy shut down. 

“To see the joy disappear from his face — all of a sudden he’s no longer a willing participant,” Denise recalls. “There was no abuse or anything, but she made him comply.” 

Denise canceled Logan’s ABA. Meanwhile, his name had come up to the top of the Floor Time wait list. Floor Time uses play-based activities that the child chooses. The aim is to make interactions increasingly complex.

During the first session, Logan picked up a Mr. Potato Head and threw it. Denise watched with bated breath, anticipating negative reinforcement. But the new therapist started throwing toys, too. And then wandered the room picking up toys and asking in a silly voice if they had seen Mr. Potato Head.

“All of a sudden, [Logan] is picking up a toy and perfectly imitating her intonation — without words, but her tone perfectly,” says Denise. Next, he held toys in front of his mouth and said words for them. Soon, Logan was a chatterbox, talking about the dream he had the night before, ways to defeat bad guys, becoming a superhero — everything. 

Insurance codes and new markets to mine

As recently as the year 2000, insurance coverage was not required for autism therapies, which researchers estimate cost from $10,000 to $100,000 per year. After fierce lobbying, by 2017 advocates succeeded in pushing laws requiring reimbursement in 46 states. As this sea change was taking place, ABA therapists were among the few people with formal credentials who could step into jobs created to help families access newly covered services. 

This meant that ABA practitioners were often the ones who created insurance billing codes, referral networks and other systems, making them de facto gatekeepers. As a result, though many states require coverage for other types of therapy, getting care other than ABA can be incredibly difficult. Parents who get referrals for speech and occupational therapists, or for augmentative and assistive communication technology for their nonverbal children, often find that the only available providers typically offer ABA.

Revel Weber has firsthand experience with this. A clinical social worker and the autistic parent of four children, one of them autistic and two with ADHD, several years ago she was asked to create a program to serve autistic children belonging to the White Earth Nation in northern Minnesota. As part of her research into treatments that would both benefit tribal families and qualify for public funding, Weber took some online ABA training courses. 

She quickly decided it wasn’t appropriate for White Earth children. In addition to being uncomfortable with the focus on compliance, Weber, who is not American Indian, believed ABA could play negatively into historical trauma associated with attempts to assimilate Native children. 

Like many states, Minnesota requires insurers to pay for a number of autism therapies, but as Weber explored alternatives to ABA, she ran into a maze of red tape. In their rush to provide the greatest access to services, the government created Medicaid reimbursement codes — the backbone of health care billing — that reflected the most available treatments. The majority were ABA. Thirty-seven years after Lovaas’s bombshell study, there are numerous ways to become an ABA therapist, ranging from full-fledged degrees to online courses. But there are far fewer providers of other kinds of treatments. Those ABA therapies are now locked into the codes, meaning billing for anything else can be difficult.

The ABA sector’s strategies for making its services widely available were smart, says Jeffrey Guenzel, head of the International Council on Development and Learning, which provides Floor Time training. But it has made it challenging for other therapies to become established. 

The intervention’s rapid spread has also resulted in uneven quality, even supporters like Shih, of Autism Speaks, say. Some practitioners hold credentials that may require an advanced degree and long experience, while others — typically identified as technicians — may have taken only a few hours of virtual training.    

Venture capitalists are up front in saying the increase in autism diagnoses and continued unmet demand suggest the sector is poised for explosive growth. In a market overview, one investment company asserted that there are about 1 million autistic children in the United States. In 2020, the analysis said, ABA programs generated $1.4 billion — a figure expected to grow to $2.45 billion by 2025. And there are new markets to mine.   

“ABA treatment is widely recognized as the most effective method for treating [autism], but its evidence-based treatment methods are applicable beyond [autism] alone,” the brief asserts. “Mental health issues in schools and the provision of more providers will ultimately expand ABA recognition beyond [autism] exclusively.” Other areas of opportunity, the investment bankers’ materials say, include ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder and PTSD.  

The one and only option

For the first few years after earning a degree in special education, Ryan Haenze, himself autistic, taught in Twin Cities school districts. His training was to let students’ interests steer his instruction, but this wasn’t what his higher-ups wanted. They wanted behavior management, he says — specifically, compliance. 

The kind of instruction he favored because of his autism — sensory accommodations, interactive projects and movement breaks for the kids — earned him bad evaluations. “I had administrators saying, ‘What you are doing is not best practice. You need to physically put these kids into chairs, do hand-over-hand,’ ” says Haenze, meaning moving the child’s hand with his own. “It needed to be those specific, very structured methods.” 

Haenze repeatedly pointed out that those strategies often lead to explosive behavior. Once, he said, he watched helplessly as one of his third graders was removed from school in handcuffs. 

At many schools like Haenze’s, administrators adopt ABA principles because they are viewed as best practices. But other places take a more formal approach. For example, Boston Public Schools now offers ABA in every school. Between 2011 and 2021, The Nation reported, the number of behaviorists in the district doubled. Families with autistic kids in Cambridge Public Schools are routinely placed in ABA-aligned classrooms.

Many communities have privately operated ABA schools that students attend full time at district expense. Haenze says most of his students received therapy at ABA centers as toddlers and preschoolers. In kindergarten, they began spending half their day at school and the rest at an ABA center — a common arrangement.

However, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services has warned schools not to let ABA crowd out other services that are supposed to be considered for students’ Individualized Education Programs. Specifically, the department said it had received reports that a growing number of children were not being evaluated by the range of professionals who typically determine what the appropriate — and under a child’s IEP, legally mandated — services are.

“Some [special education] programs may be including applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapists exclusively without including, or considering input from, speech language pathologists and other professionals who provide different types of specific therapies that may be appropriate,” the department warned. “We recognize that ABA therapy is just one methodology used to address the needs of children with [autism] and remind states and local programs to ensure that decisions regarding services are made based on the unique needs of each individual child.”

Communication support is one accommodation that has become increasingly scarce as ABA’s strategies for teaching children to be verbal have spread, says Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. Because many people believe spoken words are superior, special educators often aren’t trained in the alternative technologies, she says. 

For Haenze, being an autistic teacher unable to convince his co-workers he had useful insight was maddening, he says. Receiving poor evaluations from supervisors unwilling to consider that his ideas might make classrooms calmer and students more engaged was demoralizing. Worse, he says, was neurotypical teachers’ misunderstanding of their students’ capacity for self-expression — and, by extension, their intellect.

Midway through his sixth year, Haenze quit teaching and went to work for the Minnesota Disability Law Center as an advocate.

‘I don’t ever want them to feel shame’

Given the prevalence of ABA, it is difficult even for parents who don’t want to engage with the treatment to avoid it entirely. Denise says that for a long time, she was asked at Logan’s pediatrician check-ups whether he was getting the therapy. It made her nervous to say no, over and over again, and know that answer is being entered into an official record. Eventually, though, it was so clear the boy was thriving that the conversations stopped. 

Elizabeth, too, rejected offers of ABA interventions many times, simply saying her family doesn’t think it is a good fit for Lily. She believes she got away with turning down services because her daughter doesn’t engage in many behaviors that schools typically try to eliminate.

Weber has gone a step further — choosing, based on her experience as both a therapist and an advocate for her children, not to have her autistic son diagnosed or evaluated for special education, where she would have to fight to turn down ABA-related services. 

“I am trying to avoid that,” she says, choosing instead to work with the boy and his two neurodivergent brothers herself, at home. “I don’t ever want them to feel shame. I always want to instill pride in who they are.”

The 1975 passage of what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act established that every child, no matter how profound their needs, has a right to a “free and adequate” public education. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act enshrined in law the right of people with disabilities to enjoy the fullest possible access to jobs, housing and other pillars of a life of dignity. It meant they were entitled to have a wheelchair ramp, sign language interpreter or other forms of assistance that would help them literally take a place at the tables where discussions of their needs were underway. 

Once included, people with disabilities pushed for a shift in thinking about how disability issues should be framed. In the past, the non-disabled people making decisions about how to meet the needs of people with disabilities employed what was often described as the medical model. The goal was to determine how to make up for physical, neurological and intellectual deficits. 

Today, many disabled people prefer what they call the social model, which instead identifies systemic barriers to participation in society, including ignorance, bigotry and social exclusion. The new goal is to make the environment more inclusive and hospitable to everyone. 

Nowhere has this change of attitude been more apparent than among autistic people. Autism, once blamed on poor parenting, is now understood, in scientific terms, to be a neurotype — not a condition resulting from a lack of anything physical or psychological, but a body and brain wired differently. Not only is it impossible to fix or cure autism, many autistic adults say, it’s not desirable; autists have abilities that non-autistic people don’t. 

And they are demanding a voice in how their own needs should be met. As the motto of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network puts it: “Nothing about us without us.”

One flashpoint is applied behavior analysis — long described as the “gold standard” intervention for autism. Developed and nurtured into a multi-billion-dollar industry by neurotypical researchers, parents and service providers, ABA is now the chief therapy recommended when a child is diagnosed as autistic. 

Created in the 1980s, ABA aimed to condition autistic children to act as neurotypically as possible using punishments including slaps, electric shocks and withholding of food. Many parents saw its goals as desirable — autistic youngsters can exhibit behaviors that can exhaust caregivers and teachers, and make friendships difficult, if not impossible. Over the years, ABA has moved away from physical punishment, and many families credit the therapy with helping their child make miraculous strides. 

But many adult autists believe even its more recent methods of withholding toys, treats and attention and physically compelling patients to make eye contact — which some find extremely painful — can be extremely damaging to their mental health. Some, who have become autism researchers themselves, have documented harms ranging from dramatically higher incidences of PTSD to a debilitating focus on compliant behavior that impairs participants’ ability to act independently as adults.

And research from, among other sources, a multi-disciplinary team of university scholars and the U.S. Department of Defense — which insures thousands of autistic military dependents who have undergone the treatment — has found the evidence base for ABA thin and of poor quality. This is particularly troubling to critics of ABA, as it is often the only therapy offered to parents, to the exclusion of other, possibly more effective, treatments.

During a 2020 address at Drexel University, Julia Bascom, until recently the network’s executive director, offered an example of how changing the prism through which disability is viewed clashes with the most prevalent therapies and services:

“In the medical model, autism means that my senses are disordered. If sounds hurt me, the solution is to fix how my brain is processing those sounds, or teach me how to get used to it, or at least how to hide my discomfort. The problem is located in my body. In the social model, the solution to auditory overload is to give me a pair of headphones. 

“The social model also allows us to acknowledge complexity — that the same painful sensitivity might also make my experience with music uniquely transcendent. The same thing that makes wool unbearably itchy might also make water between my fingertips more soothing than anything else in the world. Maybe not all of those things need a ‘solution.’ Maybe autism might need a more nuanced approach than has traditionally been offered.”

There are also concerns that trying to alter a fundamental aspect of a person’s identity — especially without their consent, as in young children — violates their rights.

An assistant professor who teaches bioethics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing, Daniel Wilkenfeld was diagnosed as autistic after an evaluation of one of his children — a common occurrence. ABA’s goal of trying to train youngsters to act in ways found socially acceptable is unethical, he wrote in a 2020 paper published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.

“Autism advocates are fully justified in their concerns,” wrote Wilkenfeld and co-author Allison McCarthy. “The rights of autistic children and their parents are being regularly infringed upon. Specifically, we will argue that employing ABA violates the principles of justice and nonmaleficence and, most critically, infringes on the autonomy of children and (when pushed aggressively) on parents as well.”

The most basic problem, they say, is that the therapy is promoted even though it may not benefit children themselves: “If we are correct that the use of ABA at least frequently violates the standard principles of bioethics, then this has massive implications for health care and society generally.”

Like many critics, Wilkenfeld notes that ABA was developed in tandem with so-called conversion therapy used to “treat” suspected homosexuals and transgender people — in the same lab, by the same researchers. But the reasoning that soon turned the research community away from using “operant conditioning” on LGBTQ people has not been extended to autistic children. “Thankfully, most of society recognizes that being gay is not a problem,” he says. “There is less recognition that, for the most part, being autistic is a perfectly valid and helpful identity to have.”

Indeed, one rarely discussed aspect of attempting to replace autistic traits with more “normal” ones is that it can wipe out the ways in which neurodivergent people like to socialize and play. “Stims” — self-soothing rocking, hand-flapping and vocalizations that some autistic people use to cope with overstimulation — can also be expressions of joy. ABA discourages both.

“Would you tolerate being told that the proper way to express happiness is to spin in circles, but then be punished when you smiled or laughed instead?” Chloe Everett, a psychology student at the University of North Carolina Asheville who experienced ABA as a child, asked in a regional Tedx talk. “I don’t think so.”

When confronted with this “age-old story,” as King calls it, she starts asking questions. Do you not like the class? Is something else going on? She checks their grades. And once she identifies the core issues, she provides the student with wraparound services, engaging school counselors, social workers, teachers and parents.

The main goal? To get students the support they need to return to class as quickly as possible. She calls school nurses “the sentinels,” arguing it’s their role to identify when there’s an issue and then pull together as many people as they can to support that child.

Her current school, World Language Middle School, a bilingual language immersion school in Columbus, Ohio, electronically tracks when students go to the nurse’s office so they can quickly identify these patterns.  

“My primary focus — and a school nurse’s primary focus — is that children are in school,” she said. “Many people think our primary focus is to send children home, but actually our focus is to keep kids in school.”

King’s experiences mirror the results of a new study of 21 nurses out of the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing. Researcher Knoo Lee, himself a registered nurse, found that students who have many partial-day absences often seek out school nurses as a source of comfort and support. This puts school nurses in a unique position to intervene before their absences become chronic. 

“We discovered something that we haven’t seen before,” Lee told The 74, “where school nurses are actually in a position where they are able to identify students who are going through the early symptoms of partial-day absences.” Knowing that partial-day absences often lead to full-day absences, “we believe from these results that school nurses have the potential to play a key role in terms of really helping out with chronic absenteeism.”

Despite this, school nurses are often left out of policy-making decisions and conversations, Lee found. They also need access to greater support and resources to respond to the challenges students face that impact chronic absenteeism, including mental health concerns, homelessness, lack of transportation and food insecurity. And in order for school nurses to be effective, the report recommends that districts work to make sure schools are staffed with an adequate number who are trained and certified and that they have the needed supplies.

Especially post-pandemic, chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10% or more of school days a year, has proved to be an intractable problem. In the 2020-21 school year, at least 14.7 million students nationwide were chronically absent — more than double the number pre-COVID, according to Attendance Works, a nonprofit that aims to reduce chronic absenteeism. Children living in poverty are two to three times more likely to be chronically absent. Students from communities of color as well as those with disabilities are also disproportionately affected. 

Historically, researchers looking at chronic absenteeism have largely ignored partial-day absences, according to Lee, even though they are more prevalent and can be a precursor to full-day absences. And both types impact academic outcomes. Lee’s study is the first to examine the effect school nurses can have on partial-day absenteeism, which is tracked differently from state-to-state and sometimes not at all.

The study is based on interviews with the nearly two dozen school nurses in six online focus groups between June and August 2020. Their years of experience varied and they worked in rural, urban and suburban schools across greater Minnesota. Nurses were also asked to complete a pre-interview survey. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Minnesota Youth Sex Trading Project, which is associated with the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and works to prevent the sexual exploitation of young people.

The research is the first to reveal that students who miss school partially are inclined to initiate their own visits to the school nurse’s office, according to Lee. These scenarios could involve a student trying to avoid a particular class; proactively stopping by the nurse’s office each morning to receive a meal they weren’t getting at home or needing to lie down after working late hours to help support their family. Once there, the nurses were able to intervene with these students and provide support. Since they didn’t have to seek out these “at-risk” students, identifying them was a relatively low lift with potentially big positive outcomes.

This demonstrates the importance of advocating for a more holistic understanding of the role of a school nurse, the study argues, particularly when it comes to offering mental and emotional support.

It becomes much more challenging for nurses to identify these absenteeism patterns if they’re not in the school building every day, according to King, who also serves as president of the more than 17,000-member National Association of School Nurses. On average, about two-thirds of public schools have access to a full-time school nurse, according to the association’s  workforce study. In rural districts, this drops to 56% and in the West, it plummets to 16%. About 40% of school nurses rotate between at least two schools. 

Parents — especially those whose kids have chronic illnesses — feel more comfortable sending their kids to school when there’s a nurse in the building every day, according to King. This is particularly true when students lack access to medical care outside of the school building. “We’ve seen so many times, the school nurse is the only health care provider that students see,” King said.

 In addition to taking away that much-needed health care opportunity, when there is no school nurse for a student to see, they are more likely to be sent home: 18% of the time versus 5% of time, according to King.

While the number of schools that have full-time nurses has substantially increased since before the pandemic, King thinks that’s likely due to COVID relief funding. She worries a number of schools will once again lose access to a full-time nurse when that federal money runs out later this year.

Notably, the study took place during the first few months of the pandemic. Since then, chronic absenteeism has only gotten worse. While there have been lots of attempted interventions over the last few years, most school districts are still struggling to find the right mix, according to Lee, the researcher. 

His study, he hopes, will highlight that “school nurses can really take a huge role in this.”

Kids, teens and young people, who researchers say are historically more likely to be optimistic than older generations, are overwhelmingly concerned about peers’ and their own mental health, as well as their futures and the nation’s political environment.

“Gen Z is a group of people who care and have gone through a kind of collective trauma — I think we see it,” said Amanda Lenhart, lead researcher with Common Sense Media, which has just released a report on the state of kids and families in America. “They’re kind of fed up. They’re worried about the future and they really would like people to pay attention.”

When asked what would improve life for children in the United States, Gen Z said a better education system. They and voters point to a need for increased mental health care offerings and affordability, job preparation classes and free after-school programming. 

For Gen Z, schools are “where they see an opportunity for assistance and amelioration,” Lenhart explained. Across party lines older members of the generation shared the same desire: for schools to provide more wraparound services like health care and food pantries, aligned more with the community school model. 

Lenhart and fellow researchers are interested in what will come when the remaining Gen Z youth reach voting age, because “they have a lot of frustration about what they see as a little bit of a kicking of the American dream in the teeth. That is, a sense of my own opportunities are diminished; I see my peers burdened with this mental health crisis.” 

For many, feeling frustrated and stressed has impacted future aspirations: An overwhelming 75% of Gen Z has interest in at least one STEM field, with the next most popular fields being healthcare and arts, media or journalism – areas that offer long careers and support society. 

Yet many feel their goals are out of reach: less than a third will pursue STEM, according to Gallup and the Walton Foundation’s latest Voices of Gen Z report. Outside of environmental science applications, the majority haven’t been exposed to foundational material like computer programming or coding, robotics, or electrical circuits.

Here’s a recap of four key findings from the nearly 3,000 12-26 year olds surveyed late last year by Common Sense Media, Gallup and the Walton Foundation.

1. Mental health & gun violence are the most concerning issues for kids and teens right now.

Nearly a third of Gen Z feels that youth mental health challenges are the most pressing issue for their generation, with girls and white children citing the issue more than their peers. When asked about top concerns at schools specifically, the number grows dramatically: 53% said mental health. 

They attribute the cause of the mental health crisis to two main sources: bullying or discrimination, and social media. 

About 21% of Gen Z feels gun violence is the most pressing issue for their generation — even more so for Black kids and teens, 28% of whom cited gun violence. 

In just the first month of 2024, about 400 children and teens were wounded or killed by gun violence. 

2. Most of Gen Z are interested in STEM careers, but less than a third plan to pursue them.

A major gap is emerging between desire and preparedness for STEM careers. The gap is even more stark for girls, who are less likely than peers to pursue the field, due in part to a lack of mentors who students can identify with, imposter syndrome, and facing stereotypes about who is capable. 

“Half of gen Z is far less confident than the other half that they’re even good at this,” said Gallup pollster Zach Hrynowski of the gender gap, adding that prior research has confirmed the importance of having diverse STEM teachers and mentors, who can help students break through inadequacy, fear or systemic barriers. 

Having a teacher or mentor that looks like you or has shared life experiences can make a world of difference. For a Black student to have a Black computer science teacher, Hrynowski added, could “make you more likely to want to step through that door that currently is not something that you’re being pulled through by virtue of the curriculum.”

Simultaneously, there’s a huge discrepancy of middle and high school STEM offerings across the country that has left the majority of Gen Z high schoolers unexposed to basic courses and curriculum such as computer programming, 3D design, cybersecurity and hydraulics. 

Researchers fear a potential hit to the American economy. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of STEM jobs will increase 11% by 2032. About 1.4 million technical jobs, in fields like engineering and computer science, may go unfilled by then if pipelines aren’t built up imminently. 

3. Most of Gen Z believe better education is the key to improving lives of children in the US

The majority of voters across party lines agree with young people — about 53% point to the education system as a saving grace for children in the U.S.

Likely voters, including some older Gen Zers, say their top education priorities are getting kids to read at grade level, teacher burnout and associated shortages, bullying, and student mental health. They believe individualized learning plans, increased teacher pay, more social, emotional and mental health support, and smaller class sizes would make the biggest impact. 

At the same time, young people feel like political priorities are misaligned. About 60% of Gen Z believe politicians do not reflect the needs, desires, and experience of young people in this country well. 

“They feel like people in elected office and people in positions of power aren’t listening to them, not doing a good job of representing what young people need,” said Lenhart.

4. They’re still optimistic: 70% of young people think they’ll be about the same or better off than their parents in adulthood

Despite coming of age during periods of extreme violence, social unrest, and historical traumas, including 9/11 and a pandemic, Gen Zers are still more cautiously optimistic about their future prospects than voters writ large. 

In contrast, only about 22% of likely voters who are not parents believe children today will be better off than they are now. 

Yet a majority of parents of color are in hopeful alignment with Gen Z: 60% of Black parents, 62% of Asian American and Pacific Islander parents, and 52% of Latino parents say kids today will be “better off.” Just over a third of white parents believe this to be the case.

Black kids and teens are the most hopeful subgroup, with just over half saying they will be better off. 

“The more we can help create a functional adulthood for our teenagers and our young adults,” Lenhart said, “where they’re not worried about meals, health care, their own safety, their ability to take care of their families when people get sick … if we can make that better, then people will feel better.” 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

Districts that have faced historic enrollment losses could lose even more families if they don’t respond to student needs, according to the report, released Thursday and provided exclusively to The 74 by Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that has tracked the shifting education landscape since the pandemic. 

Based on a survey of what the researchers call “open-minded parents” — those who show interest in school choice options — 46% said their children’s mental health drove them to find something different. Among middle school parents, the rate was 54%, followed by 48% of high school parents and 44% of parents with elementary school children.

Adam Newman, founding partner at Tyton, said he was “dismayed — but not surprised — by how mental health concerns color parents’ choices.”

“For many parents, there’s a sense that ‘school’ isn’t working, and alternatives might provide a much-needed spark,” he said.

The survey results offer a different look at the youth mental health crisis that escalated in the wake of pandemic school closures. It comes as federal relief funds — and many of the mental health investments that went with them — are set to expire later this year. Many districts used the money for extra mental health professionals and special rooms for students experiencing anxiety or acting out in class.

With one counselor for every 385 students, the average ratio is the lowest it’s been since the mid 1980s, according to the American School Counselor Association. But it still doesn’t reach the organization’s recommended ratio of 250-to-1. Jill Cook, executive director of the association, said some districts might not be able to keep the additional counselors, social workers and school psychologists they’ve hired. 

“The hope is … that districts would choose to keep these positions because [they] contribute to student success,” Cook said. “Students who have access to a school counselor often have improved attendance, improved achievement and fewer disciplinary issues.” 

Due to staff shortages, schools have also expanded the use of teletherapy programs.  The federal government aims to boost the supply of mental health professionals through grant programs to districts, states and universities.

‘A big reason people leave’

But some students crying for help can’t find it. Erin Goldman’s daughter reached out to a counselor at her Houston middle school in the fall of 2022 when she received harassing messages on social media, like “KYS,” an acronym for kill yourself. But the counselor couldn’t fit her in.

“She couldn’t get on the calendar. Then the guidance counselor was just supposed to come find her when she had availability, but that never happened,” Goldman said. The cyberbullying was affecting all areas of her daughter’s life. “She would not get up in the morning. It was a constant battle, like screaming matches. Her grades were suffering.”

In the middle of the school year, her parents transferred her to Dietrich Bonhoeffer Academy, a small private middle school. 

“In less than two weeks, she was happy,” she said. “The person who I thought would never like school again likes going to school.”

Consultants who help families navigate school choice options aren’t surprised that emotional health concerns are prompting some parents to change schools.

“If your child is being bullied, that to me is a mental health issue,” said Colleen Dippel, CEO of Families Empowered, a Texas-based nonprofit. “It’s a big reason people leave their schools. Their child says things like ‘I hate school. I don’t want to go to school.’ That’s pretty common.”

Tasha Tarpley, a single mother in Texas, pulled her son Preston out of the Red Oak Independent School District, south of Dallas, after a series of confrontations he had with other students. After one fight, he was suspended.

“My child was afraid to go to school,” she said. “I have a tall 10-year-old. He’s a big guy, and quite naturally [they’re] going to blame everything on the big one.”

On the way to school, she said his mood would drop, and his face “looked like he’d just had a very emotionally, psychologically rough day.” A year ago, she joined Leading Little Arrows Homeschool Academy, a network supporting homeschool families with curriculum and online or in-person classes. 

“We’ve got our lives back,” she said. “He has healthy friendships, and I’m in a healthier state as a mom.” 

A ‘new arena of competition’

But sometimes, simply moving to another public school in  the same district, instead of leaving the system, can solve the problem, said Whitney Oakley, superintendent of the Guilford County Schools, which includes Greensboro, North Carolina.

The district offers 66 choice options and this year saw at least an 11% increase in applications for choice schools, compared with last year. Oakley took advantage of the system for her own son, who struggles with anxiety.

“I knew that he would probably benefit from a smaller middle school,” she said. “Every family deserves access to that kind of option.”

In addition to the relief funds, the district has received $20 million in federal grants for mental health services, and last school year, students and teachers participated in more than 10,000 therapy sessions, she said. While the district has seen small decreases in enrollment over the past three years, Oakley said some families who’d left the system have returned. 

“I think all public school systems are going to find themselves in this new arena of competition,” she said. “What can we offer here to make sure that choice doesn’t mean us or them? Choice means what best fits the needs of this particular student.” 

According to the Tyton report, the “enduring attraction of a traditional school environment” is what keeps some parents from pursuing other options. Among those who said they would consider switching schools, 41% said the “benefits of school culture and extracurriculars” are holding them back. 

Parent comments cited in the report also reflect concerns that students would miss out on “foundational experiences” if they cut ties to public schools. 

The report is the first in a three-part series about the “evolving landscape of parents’ K-12 education options.” In addition to holding focus groups, the researchers surveyed more than 2,000 parents last August. Almost two-thirds said they were only looking to supplement their children’s existing education through extracurricular programs, including tutoring or enrichment activities. 

Ten percent indicated they would transfer their child to a private school or even an alternative model like a microschool. And more than a quarter of the respondents said they would consider piecing together multiple options to provide their child a customized experience.

Following mental health, academic performance ranked second among the reasons parents said they would choose another schooling option. Forty-four percent of parents open to making a change cited academics as a driving factor.

Tarpley said her son was in fourth grade before she learned he was missing some basic math skills. 

“I needed to know way back in kindergarten that they were seeing some challenges with addition and subtraction — even if it’s just adding doughnuts and cookies,” she said.

Choice options certainly haven’t worked for everyone. For some families, the new arrangements didn’t meet their children’s needs. In other cases, private schools didn’t accept their kids.

Pamela Lang pulled her son, who has ADHD, out of the Kyrene School District, near Phoenix, when he was in fourth grade. She used Arizona’s education savings account program. But most independent and religious schools turned him away. 

Arizona also allows families to transfer outside of their district, but for her son, “schools are always magically full,” she said. Now 16, he attends a private school for students with disabilities, but she’s considered returning to the public system. “At this point, our options are so limited.”

Newman, at Tyton, said the researchers have not yet followed up with parents to see if those who changed schools are satisfied with their decision. But they plan to in the future. 

The second paper in the series will examine why parents decide not to switch, and the third will look at the rise of organizations like Dippel’s that advise families on their options.

Most of the parents that seek her group’s help are “making really good parenting decisions,” she said. “By and large, they’re not hysterical. They don’t want to rip down the [traditional] system. They’re just like, ‘I want to pack up my stuff and get my kid out of this toxic situation.’ ”  

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Tyton Partners and The 74.

A Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the Oxford High School shooter, guilty of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday.

In a first-of-its-kind case, the jury found that Crumbley bore enough responsibility for the deaths caused by her son’s actions that she should be held criminally liable.

At age 15, Crumbley’s son shot and killed four of his classmates at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021, days after his father bought him a gun. Crumbley’s son was sentenced to life without parole in December.

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Crumbley’s husband, James Crumbley, has a separate trial scheduled for March.

After two days of deliberations, a jury in Oakland County Circuit Court in metro Detroit delivered the guilty verdict for Jennifer Crumbley on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the students killed: Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Hana St. Julianna and Justin Shilling.

The jury had been tasked by the court to determine whether Crumbley’s actions warranted involuntary manslaughter charges, which marks new legal ground for determining responsibility for a mass shooting.

Crumbley now faces up to 15 years in prison ahead of her sentencing scheduled for April 9.

Her defense argued during the trial that began on Jan. 25 that Crumbley couldn’t have known what her son was going to do. She was portrayed as an attentive parent who was aware that her son was going through a hard time, but nothing indicated he would become a school shooter.

“It was unforeseeable; no one expected this,” Shannon Smith, a lawyer for Crumbley, said in her closing arguments. “No one could have expected this, including Mrs. Crumbley.”

But the prosecution argued that Crumbley failed as a parent to perform her legal duty to exercise reasonable oversight to her son to prevent him from harming others and was negligent to the point that it harmed human life.

The prosecution proved Crumbley’s role in the shooting and how she could have intervened at several points beforehand to get her son help or secured the firearms in the home, but she didn’t, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in her closing arguments.

“We have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she is guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. It’s a rare case. It takes some really egregious facts. It takes the unthinkable and she has done the unthinkable and because of that four kids have died,” McDonald said.

Despite audibly crying at several points throughout the trial, Crumbley didn’t have a substantial reaction to the verdict being read. McDonald and other members of the prosecution hugged family members of the slain children.

In addition to the four students who were killed, the shooter injured six other students and a teacher. Molly Darnell, the teacher who was shot in the arm, was the first witness to testify at the start of the trial in January. A total of 22 witnesses spoke during the trial, including Crumbley, members of law enforcement and people who had interactions with Crumbley.

A major element of the prosecution’s justification for the involuntary manslaughter charges was Crumbley’s actions the day of the shooting after she and her husband were called to the school because the shooter had done a drawing of his gun on his math assignment.

Four days prior, the shooter and his father went to a gun shop and the father purchased the gun used in the killings on Black Friday as an early Christmas present.

After the meeting at the school where Crumbley and her husband were advised to seek out professional help for their son, the prosecution brought in witnesses from the school and law enforcement to show that neither parent took the shooter out of school for the day. Neither parent checked their son’s backpack where he had the gun. And neither parent asked their son where his gun was or checked to see if it was still at home.

There had been other meetings with the shooter’s parents, Shawn Hopkins, the school counselor at the meeting the day of the shooting, said during the trial. He said he was hoping one of the parents would take the shooter home. Although Hopkins didn’t tell them they had to, he thought it was strange they didn’t.

“She sat down in the chair; [I] felt she was a little bit distant. … It felt like it was a little bit of an inconvenience to be there,” Hopkins said of Crumbley during the meeting.

Hopkins said the shooter showed signs of possible suicidal thoughts and he didn’t want him to be alone. Hopkins added that he did not know that the shooter’s father had bought him a gun.

In addition to the drawing of a gun, the shooter’s assignment had the words, “my life is useless” and “the thoughts won’t stop help me,” written in addition to other statements and drawings.

When school officials asked Crumbley and her husband to go to the school, Crumbley testified she thought the shooter had sketched the gun in defiance of a recent conversation they had about his falling math grade, during which he had his phone taken away and was told he couldn’t go to the shooting range until his grade improved.

This was the first time she and her husband had been called to the school on an “immediate” time frame, Crumbley testified and she had told her boss she would be back at work an hour later.

Crumbley said she expected her son to get in trouble and get suspended, but the meeting was “nonchalant” and “brief.”

“There is never a time where I would refuse to take him home,” Crumbley testified, adding that she told her husband to start calling mental health professionals suggested by Hopkins.

Crumbley said she and her husband lost everything, adding she doesn’t feel like she failed as a parent and she had no reason to think her son was a danger to anyone else. She said she doesn’t look back and think she would have done anything differently.

“You spend your whole life trying to protect your child from other dangers. You never would think you have to protect your child from harming somebody else,” Crumbley testified, adding that she wished he would have killed her and her husband instead of the other kids at the school.

The shooter’s father was responsible for gun storage as firearms were not really her thing, Crumbley said. The gun that was bought for her son’s use was secured using a cable lock and the key to unlock it was hidden in one of the many decorative beer steins throughout the house.

The prosecution “cherry-picked” evidence to make Crumbley look like a negligent mother and conflate the magnitude of the tragedy with Crumbley’s parenting, Smith said as part of Crumbley’s defense. Hours of the trial were dedicated to members of law enforcement going over the gruesome details of the shooting. But Smith said the case came down to the prosecution improperly asking the jury to come to the assumption that Crumbley could have conceived what no parent would think their child would be capable of.

“When you look back in hindsight, with 20-20 vision … it is easy to say this could have been different, that could have been different, this would have changed,” Smith said.

Due to the community impact of the shooting and the future legal implications for parents of mass shooters in the future, the case has garnered national attention.

The jury’s verdict stands as a reminder to parents and gun owners that they are responsible for ensuring children can’t access their firearms unsupervised, Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement after the verdict was read.

“Plain and simple, the deadly shooting at Oxford High School in 2021 should have — and could have — been prevented had the Crumbley’s not acquired a gun for their 15-year-old son,” Suplina said. “This decision is an important step forward in ensuring accountability and, hopefully, preventing future tragedies.”

The decision marks Michigan setting a standard for the legal response to “when our kids are killed in their sanctuaries,” U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly) said in a statement Tuesday. She applauded several pieces of gun reform legislation Michigan will enact on Feb. 13, which includes safe storage laws for firearms.

“Today is a historic day in Michigan, and really for the whole country. Having watched the Oxford community go through this school shooting firsthand, and seeing the lifelong hole it ripped in the lives of everyone involved, this verdict feels like a small moment of relief,” Slotkin said. “It is my hope that it brings a bit of peace to the survivors and to the entire community, as I know everyone in Oxford has worked to heal together over the past two years.”

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and Twitter.