Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been injected into every facet and grade level in schools, but American children and teens are more anxious and depressed than ever, observes Abigail Shrier in an excerpt of her new book “Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.”
The author of the blockbuster “Irreversible Damage,” which drew attention to the sharp surge in gender dysphoria among teen girls, Shrier on Tuesday provided a peek at her investigation into the psychological deterioration of American youth at Bari Weiss’s The Free Press.
“Most American kids today are not in therapy,” the excerpt begins:
But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students.
To enhance her investigation, Shrier says she registered in July 2022 for a public school teachers’ conference in California focused on “emotional and behavioral services.”
Attendees discussed their schools’ “expanded psychology staff, which oversees every public school the way diversity officers dominate a university,” Shrier reports, adding that teachers appeared to admit the surge in mental health staff was necessary to deal with the “dysregulation” of their students.
Other jargon phrases that were bandied about at the conference, she writes, include giving kids “brain breaks,” encouraging “Mindfulness Minutes,” ending the school day with “optimistic closure,” and seeing the “whole child,” their “social and emotional” abilities as well as those in the academic realm.
“Our mandate: ‘trauma-informed education,’” she observes. “We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma.”
Shrier notes she discovered the SEL umbrella can hover over a wide swath of what happens during the school day, including an “emotional check-in” before the actual academics begin:
Sometimes described by enthusiasts as “a way of life,” social-emotional learning is the curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year and more than eight percent of teacher time. (Many teachers say they try to ensure that social-emotional learning happens all day long.) Through a series of prompts and exercises, SEL pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness,” “social awareness,” “relationship skills,” “self-management,” and “responsible decision-making.”
One presentation at the conference she attended focused on “Embedding SEL in Math,” during which a kindergarten-level exercise revealed the solution was “no wrong answers.”
SEL “enthusiasts,” she adds, “claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn. They also insist that having an educator host a class-wide trauma swap before lunch will help such kids heal.”
“Neither claim is well-founded,” Shrier asserts.
Mental health experts she consulted warned that such “unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated.”
“Many psychological studies back this up,” she explains. “An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge.”
In California, Shrier notes, a new law has school districts billing Medicaid for mental health services provided to children in schools themselves.
Indeed, the outpouring of government “help” to try to “fix” the problem of the mental health crisis among American youth continues without end, and, perhaps predictably, focuses on still more “mental health services” offered in public schools and funded by American taxpayers.
In a January letter, Biden secretaries of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education Xavier Becerra and Miguel Cardona wrote to U.S. governors “to share a new funding opportunity for states to help tackle the mental health crisis we’re facing and expand access to health care services, including mental health services, directly in schools.”
The two Biden officials celebrated the offering of $50 million in grants to states that agree to “implement, enhance, and expand” school-based health centers (SBHCs) through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
In its “comprehensive guide” to the delivery of services in SBHCs, the Biden administration makes the claim that students who receive their healthcare services at school have better academic outcomes:
The school setting provides a unique opportunity to deliver health care services to children and adolescents, especially those enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). School-based services (SBS), including but not limited to preventive care, mental health and substance use disorder (SUD) services, physical and occupational therapy, and disease management have been shown to improve both health and academic outcomes.
There’s an ethical problem inherent in providing therapy in schools, Shrier argues. One that revolves around the concept of “dual relationships,” which are off-limits for therapists in the outside world.
“[School] counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them,” she writes. “They know all of a kid’s best friends; they may even treat a few of them with therapy. They know a kid’s parents and their friends’ parents … And they report, not to a kid’s parents, but to the school administration.”
Since the release of her past book focused on the rapid onset of gender dysphoria in girls, Shrier says she has been “inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents.”
Though she has discovered some “good school counselors,” Shrier nevertheless cautions parents – especially those who assert “my child has never been to see the school counselor”:
But more likely, you don’t know. In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so.
Questioning the SEL agenda, however, is apparently a non-starter in many schools.
“The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning,” Shrier writes in her excerpt. “A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone.”
