#48. More Play, Less Therapy
Schools produce anxiety and depression, and then they hire therapists to reduce it.
Dear friends,
Everyone acknowledges the problem. School-aged children are suffering from stress and its associated anxiety and depression at epidemic levels. One result is that schools, more than ever before, are going into the mental health business. They are hiring, or lobbying for more money to hire, ever more therapists and counselors. The job market for school psychologists is great and growing. Many schools are bringing in new SEL (social and emotional learning) courses aimed at teaching students to be more aware of their own and one another’s feelings and ways of reducing negative feelings through cognitive means. According to eSchool News, US schools spent over $1.7 billion on SEL programs in the 2021- 2022 school year, with estimates much higher than that the following two years. That’s above and beyond what they spend for school psychologists.
I’m not against psychotherapy—especially cognitive behavior therapy—where it is clearly needed, clearly desired, and intelligently and sensitively delivered. I’m also not against SEL programs if well done and not too time consuming, some of which have been shown to be helpful (to be discussed in my next Letter). But the message I want to get across here, which has proven to be so difficult to get across, is this: If schools would stop stressing kids out as they do, and stop preventing them from being kids, our kids wouldn’t need so much therapy!
Our Collective Blindness to the Harm of Current School Policies
The evidence is overwhelming that school policies—policies that require students to spend so much time on boring, sedentary, micromanaged schoolwork, that put students in competition for grades, that fail to recognize students for anything other than test performance, that make students feel like failures if they don’t score as high as others on standardized tests—are stressing students out. I’ve summarized the evidence for this in previous letters (e.g., Letters D5, #40, #43), documenting, for example, the facts that mental health breakdowns, including suicides among school-aged children and teens, are much higher when school is in session than when it is not and the great majority of students, when asked about the sources of their emotional distress in national surveys, cite school pressures as the primary source.
To say that school is the cause of children’s suffering is, apparently, a national taboo. If your information comes from the national press, you might think that smartphones are the primary causes of children’s and teens’ distress, but, as I have documented previously (e.g. Letters D6 & D9), the evidence there is scant at best. The rise in anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens long predates the popular use of smartphones and parallels the increased pressures of schooling following the No Child Left Behind act and kids’ declining freedoms to play and explore on their own over recent decades.
If we would open our eyes and see the problem, stop putting our collective heads in the sand, we would also see that the solution is easy and would save money, not cost more money. What we need is LESS school, not more, and we need to restore long recesses and other opportunities for play and fun in school. Kids need more time to play and just be kids, both in and out of school. Mother Nature designed kids to play, explore, and socialize freely with other kids, without adult intervention, because that is how kids develop the skills, confidence, and attitudes that are necessary for mental health and overall wellbeing, as I and colleagues described, with multiple lines of evidence, in this article published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Am I Being Too Cynical? Play Is Neglected Because It’s Free.
Would it be too cynical for me to suggest that one reason we look to drugs, therapy, and SEL programs rather than play to solve kids’ problems is because many adults make money from drugs, therapy, and SEL courses, but nobody makes money from play? Just a question. Drug companies advocate for drugs. Therapists advocate for therapy. People who create and administer SEL courses advocate for SEL. Who is advocating for play? Might it be that in our society what is free is not valued precisely because it’s free, so no organized group is really pushing it? [Play is “free” by both meanings of the term.]
A Challenge
Here’s a challenge to any state legislature, or any large school district, willing to take it up. Do an experiment. It wouldn’t cost much and in the long run might save taxpayers a chunk of money. Set up three conditions over otherwise matched schools. In one condition continue with standard practice. In the second condition hire more therapists and institute SEL courses. In the third condition cut homework in half (or eliminate it entirely), reduce emphasis on testing, and, most important, include at least one full hour of truly free play at school every day, of the sort advocated for (here) by the nonprofit organization Let Grow. My bet is that the third group will show the greatest improvement in mental health with no loss (and maybe even a gain) in measures of academic performance. I’m not normally a gambler, but I’m willing to put money on this one. Burning kids out is no way to foster academic excellence. And play with other kids is not only the direct highway to joy and stress reduction for kids but is also Mother Nature’s way of teaching social and emotional skills.
Further Thoughts
As part of preparation for this letter, I looked into research on the effectiveness of therapy and SEL programs in schools. What are the results of these expensive programs? The results are mixed, and in my next letter I will review some of the research I found.
This Substack series is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, and sometimes especially when they do. You will notice in reading comments on previous letters that everyone is polite. What questions and thoughts might you have concerning the growing trend toward therapy in schools?
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With respect and best wishes,
Peter
Note: This letter is an updated and revised version of an essay I previously published as a Psychology Today blog post.
Giving therapy without meeting the underlying need for play seems a little like giving tutoring without meeting the need for food.
I am not sure about the best school policies, but I know one thing and that is children today have INADEQUATE time to play. Maybe you have to be old enough (60+) to remember playing with other kids, after school, in the evenings, and all summer. Going out into the neighborhood in which all the moms kept an eye out for behavioral challenges. In that setting, children learned independence, resilience, and settled their own disputes. I don't see this happening these days. Our children need more free play time - whenever they can get it.