You ought to be able to get confirmation or refutation of this idea by comparing the suicide rate in other countries where the new focus on testing and avoiding play did not happen. Or did happen but at a different time.
Laura, this is an excellent suggestion. I am editing the reply I gave earlier because I have now found data showing that for European Union countries taken as a whole there was no increase in suicides for teens over the years from 2011 to 2019. This would seem to be consistent with the idea that No Child Left Behind and Common Core, unique to the U.S., is a major cause of the increased suicide rate in the U.S. It would seem to be inconsistent with the mobile phone or "screen time" hypotheses because the rise in these occurred in Europe as well as the U.S.
Good day, and thanks for all the important work on how play makes us human.
Most industrialised countries experienced a drastic peak in depression and anxiety with almost exact the same timing as the one in USA. For all countries in the Anglosphere, there is also a sudden surge in self harm and suicides starting at the same time around 2010, as reported here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/138399019. (The problem is biggest among teen girls.) So, I'm afraid that the explaination to why the suicide curve bends so abruptly in many countries at the same time needs to be valid internationally. Jean Twenge made an overview of 13 possible causes and explored the evidence for them here: https://substack.com/browse/recommendations/post/138052249
Dickens's Hard Times has a powerful passage about how the education system's disdain for relaxation, play and fantasy has a crippling effect on children and, ironically stunts their intellectual growth. I feel this is partly intentional in that the ruling class has always had contempt and fear for the “lower orders” whose existence was only justified to the rulers if these children could slot into some spiritless servitude. I don’t think much has changed.
has anyone got a take on the Emperor's New Clothes aspect of this? The situation over here in Bavaria and as far as I know in the UK is somewhat different to what you describe, Peter, but only somewhat. There seems to be a common thread running through these education systems, namely that empirical evidence doesn't stand a chance against attitudes such as: "We've always done it that way.", "We need to implement policies that our voters / the parents want us to implement.", "If exact measuring works in engineering, why shouldn't it work in school (never mind the flawed methodology)?" and so on. And strangely enough, the employers in the real world for whom all this school assessment stuff is supposed to be about obstinately refuse to be satisfied with the results ...
And: How do programmes like NCLB become law? Are they backed by any kind of social-scientific studies/evidence?
This article reflects my experiences as a mother and teacher. I also think there is a link to social media, but for a long time I didn't quite understand it. I had no personal experience and my kids are both boys. Recently, I watched a couple of episodes of "This is High School." It was filmed in Canada in 2016. The school profiled is a typical, middle class secondary school, so it's not about guns and drugs so much as the everyday experiences of the kids. One young lady misses three days of school after a text is sent to her (in class!) saying her best friend said terrible things about her. She calls her mother immediately and begs to go home. When I saw this, I finally understood. Of course, the photos of friends doing things without you and the impossible standard of beauty play a big role, too.
Being a mom of boys, I speculate that this is much more of an issue for girls for both societal reasons and gender reasons. Women are generally more socially oriented and therefore more hurt by slights. Men's socialization appears less relationship oriented and more activity and group oriented.
Peter, regarding my comment above, is there data on incidences of bullying in schools that correlates to the suicide curve? And wouldn’t one hypothesize that at schools where recess and group activities were curtailed in favor of standardized test prep we might see a reduction in reported bullying or overall social conflict as students spend less time interacting with each other? Furthermore, wouldn’t mental heath surveys at schools with less recess or free time have higher reporting of loneliness and less so of bullying?
Wow. This is challenging stuff. I was previously all-in for J. Haidt’s hypothesis that smart phone usage promotes an external locus of control in developing brains. At it’s face, the suicide timing data you report and it’s correlation with school start/stop doesn’t seem to support Haidt’s hypothesis. I would suspect smart phone usage increases when school is out of session, so then one might expect suicides increase when school is out.
To play devil’s advocate (and demonstrate my own ideological inertia in my battle against smartphones in the hands of my young kids) let’s suggest that the issue comes down to a child’s locus of control rather than the stress associated with academic rigor or testing:
1. If smart phone usage promotes an external locus of control, then conflict arising amongst peers would be more impactful, increasing the likelihood of an emotional spiral towards suicide. And if the school year is the season when young people spend the most time around their peers whilst navigating stressful social situations, then Haidt’s smartphone theory isn’t necessarily refuted by the school/suicide timing correlation.
In fact, Peter, all your work on the dearth of play during childhood without adult mediation neatly complements Haidt’s child smartphone usage suspicions. Both elements are contributing to the emergence of entire generations of humans raised without the skills to manage social conflict. For kids, this becomes evident the moment they return to school and enter back into society and away from the digital media onslaught that represents the bulk of kid’s summer break
Rawley, what you suggest here is plausible; but there are lots of plausible theories out there. In my next letter I will dig into the research concerning the relation between smart phones, social media, screens in general and young people's mental health. I have more research to do before that letter, but I can say already that the findings are messy. Most researchers and reviewers of the research do not agree with the strong views of Haidt and Twenge that the matter is settled, and some present what they see as strong evidence against an overall causal relation between any of these and the rise of suicide or other indices of mental health decline.
Peter thank you for documenting and writing about this! I have witnessed and suspected that the change in educational expectations since the early 2000's on children that are not developmentally appropriate have had an impact on their mental health as well as their ability to develop their social skills. I feel that the increased reliance on computers to educate children is also having a negative impact on learning and compounding these issues. I have been asking my middle school students how they feel about using computers all day and many of them report that the hate it and wish they could write more or read from actual books! Many students as young as kindergarten are using the computers throughout their day for reading and math instruction, it is heart breaking. I would love to hear your thoughts on that issue as well!
Regardless, the contril group is hard to maintain because we are unable to remove the variable of home life. My daughter is in kindergarten in a school that graduates over 93% proficient in reading and math. While an elementary school just 8 blocks away graduates a mere 53% proficient. The 53% hands out candy and us waaay more "fun" based. The difference between the 2 can only be seen in home life. I sit down and do homework "WITH" my daughter. We practice together. When she gets frustrated. I teach her to breathe, calm her emotions, it all takes time, be patient with yourself, don't get frustrated. I believe the other school is made up of many families that do not sit down with their children. More, many of the parents English is a second language. I do agree, however, that awesome grades or rigorous academia does not necessarily transcend to success. I also shower attention over my daughters artwork more then her letters and numbers. I scrapbook her artwork and put it on the fridge, letting her know that everybody needs an art. An argument could be made with the above data that parents began to pay attention to their kids more, take interest in their activities, do art with them, and thus is what led to better mental health.
Well - the problem here is that she is in kindergarten and already has homework? I find that ridiculous. If you are doing it WITH her, it just means you place a lot of importance on her having it done before she gets to play. And showcasing her artwork is placing a lot of value on what she makes/produces. And she's just 5 yrs old! By the time she is in highschool, she will feel pressure that she needs to perform and produce to make her parents happy and that if she's feeling frustrated - well, she is just not coping well enough and being too emotional.
I am on board with Peter Gray's theories as I was one of those kids in high-achieving schools that really wanted to just die b/c of all the pressure to get into an elite college. This was in the 90's - so I think all the social media in the 2010's compounds the problem. If I had to see my friends (some of who got perfect SAT's) on my social media feed showcasing their achievements and IVY league acceptance letters when I was home alone, depressed and stressed in my bedroom studying for a test or trying to finish a paper, I think it would have put me over the edge and I wouldn't be alive today.
As for boys - I think they are more impulsive so attempts or deaths are a higher percentage of the stressed out kids possibly.
I just wonder if there are other details besides gender about the kids that end up in the hospital like socioeconomic background, ethnicity, grades, parents' education level (high achieving parents expect high achieving kids), etc... With those details, his theories will either be upheld or not. I mean, the suicide clusters in Palo Alto in the 2010's in one of the top high schools in the country seems to support Gray's ideas.
There is even a YA BOOK "The Silence that Binds Us" by Joanna Ho that features this exact trend, so obviously school pressure/achievement is a major issue for teens today - and teens today just seem more fragile mentally..... as a result of all the factors Gray discussed previously.
Dude, it's simple words and bean counting. She plays ALL the time. I'm a single father and it's no different then sitting down to read a book. Be careful of becoming an expert child psychologist because you read one essay. I'm 44, I graduated in 98. You don't have more wisdom then me. EVERY school district teaches their OWN curriculum. No child left behind was first launched in Texas and didn't make it much past that. The writer is making an intriguing argument but the statistics are wholly incomplete. In the 90s, in my district. They created drop out schools basically. A way for kids to get credit when they couldn't perform at the real high school. It was like kindergarten for high schoolers. 20% of boys dropped out and went to these schools. I was friends with ALL of them, most ended up in jails, some got out and made something of themselves. I promise you, not a single one felt pressured, lol. Not a single one was pushed by parents. These are the ones that had mental health issues and future drug problems with parents that put exactly zero art pieces on the fridge and sat down to work with them none. Another missing variable in the numbers. You are doing numbers on students "attending". So are the drop outs stress free kids that will make it in the daily stress and grind of the work force? Because I could make that argument from the numbers too. The author is arguing the importance of "play" in mental health but I don't find this facet of the argument to be as persuasive as the rest. As much as I'd LOVE to have an excuse to play video games with my daughter ALL day, lol. OF COURSE, a kid is going to say school is stressful. Its designed to be a stress test and it engulfs their lives. As in all things, balance needs to be struck. If my daughter can write and read "I LIKE TO PLAY OUTSIDE" (lol, because she likes to write in all caps), a year before I could. It doesn't mean she's going to become a racing suicidal lunatic. Ridiculous.
She also threw a temper tantrum when i took the binkie away and I taught her the same trick. Your child will want to quit everything in favor of tv or something electronic, lol. If you want to be their friend, give them a cell phone. If you want to be their parent, give them lessons. No academia is natural and quitting is the easiest thing. Frustration in anything is natural. It's not like we do breathing exercises everytime we sit down, lol, that's absurd. But it is important to teach a child techniques for controlling emotions and that emotions are fleeting. This is another variable that goes unregaurded in the argument. What outlets did the suicidal children have? Doing homework with my daughter is just another way of bonding. She then does whatever, barbie dolls and make a video of them walking across the Lego stage, or she asks me to do puppets. I will say that this authors essays has made be feel better about the time I let her randomly play throughout the house. I look at it different now. Look, you have only but a couple hours after school with your kids. And somebody else put stuff in their heads for 8 hours. If we were in stone age. I would teach her to make a bow and arrow to hunt, or show her how to super crop seeds for the field. I'm sure I will teach her to change a tire and frustration might occur, stress, anxiety. One day, I won't be there. Breathe, control your emotions, change the tire, keep moving. If the authors argument is that too much stress is being placed on kids through academia thereby leading to increased suicides. I'm sorry, objective senses of drop out rates and kids graduating elementary schools in 50% proficiency or the fact that half of Americans read at a 7th grade level do not born that out. Also, we would need to look at the lives of the kids that committed suicide. We're they 4.0 Ivy league futures forced to do homework in the bedrooms every night? I'm positive the author will next try to pull in suicide numbers from Japan where REAL rigorous academia is placed upon kids. However, in such a case. You would be introducing an entirely new control group to argue the outcome of a separate experiment. If our entire culture was reduced to academic standards as an identity. Then the authors arguments would ring closer to truth. However, I don't think America's ranking amongst nations even approaches a country that takes education seriously. Mostly, we are a country of parents that move past our children like ships in the night, leave somebody else to teach them, and let them find coping mechanisms through drugs and alcohol. Abusing my daughter because I teach her to breathe and sit for 15 minutes to write her name. Stupid.
You're making the mistake to attempting to provide proof for your hypothesis. Never works in this area, you can only disprove your point. The research you list is highly unreliable and biased. I.e. suicides during school is higher but this does not have to mean the problem is the class. It might be away from home or not in touch in class mates.
Second, the enormous difference between girls and boys means you need to find a cause that clearly explains this sex difference. Boys tend to have much less anxiety, especially in the 15-19 age range, than girls which is incompatible with the stress for testing. Second, boys tend to do better on real tests vs school teachers that tend to favor the more behaving girls.
Peter K, thank you for this comment. In the social sciences it is never possible to absolutely prove a hypothesis. However, what one can do is present multiple lines of evidence that bear on the hypothesis, which is what I have done here. All of these converging lines of evidence are consistent with the theory that I am presenting; none contradict it. You can think of each line of evidence as an attempt to disprove the theory, and none of them succeed in that regard. Concerning the issue of sex differences--girls report more anxiety and boys commit suicide at higher rates--please look back at my discussion of that in Letter D2. The main point concerning the theory presented here is that for BOTH boys and girls the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide increased over the period considered here.
Getting to this late. Thank you for posting on this difficult topic. Would be good to see how suicides split by socio-economic status. I see research that lower SES kids have higher suicide rate. But I suspect that it is the higher SES kids that feel the most cultural pressure around grades. Your data on a link to school looks pretty solid, but I’m not yet convinced that stress over grades is the biggest factor. What about bullying?
1. Seasonality seem to be a possible other explanation for the trends you showed. You mentioned that when schools opened sooner/later, this was reflected in suicide rates, but I would like to see some data about this
2. Other countries showed exactly the same pattern of depression symptoms and suicides without NCLB or pre-K literacy and numeracy programs. What are your thoughts about this?
3. Did mobiles interfere with schooling? They distract (making it more challenging to keep up with the pace), they decrease the sleep time and most importantly, they interfere with free play/chat at school. During lecture breaks I used to see a lot of people talking to each other, to hear a lot of joyful noise. Now not: everybody is staring at the phone. An impressive silence. The same goes for school trips. I remember the travel (by train! by bus!) moment as the best, the most exciting, the one that really matter of the whole trip. Now you can sit in a train in the middle of 13-years old pack of students and writing an article or reading a book without problems. The kids are silent. That makes a huge difference in the quality of their free play/time. What is your position about these phenomena?
Are private schools impacted by common core and NCLB? If not, couldn't you compare the changes in the rates of suicides between kids in public vs private schools?
Also, why has the pressure impacted male students so much more than female students?
Luthar, whose work I mention in the article, found that rates of mental breakdown are highest in "high achievement schools" whether or not they are private or public. To my knowledge, private schools have changed at least as much as public schools in response to the various forces that are fallouts of Pisa testing, NCLB and Common Core. Concerning male compared to female students, there in fact is some evidence that male student adapt less readily to schooling as it exists today than do female students. More boys are quitting than girls. There are now many more young women than young men going on to college. Also, one of the studies I found showing higher rates of mental breakdown during the school year compare to the summer separated the rates for boys and girls and found that girls' rates were not as strongly affected by timing in the school year as were boys' rates. But, also see my Letter D2 for the reasons why suicide rates are always higher in males than in females.
You provide evidence that school contributes to teen suicide, but you conclude that recent changes in school produced the recent increases in teen suicide. I don't see any evidence for this. Here are some relevant analyses that seem pretty easy: (1) Look whether the gap between suicide in school and out of school has widened in recent years. Some of the studies you cite are complicated studies with precise details of particular school districts, but you should be able to easily get seasonal patterns from CDC. (2) Compare teenagers to older people. College students may have the same effect of school, but they shouldn't have any effect from NCLB. Even older people shouldn't have either effect.
You suggestion (1) is a good one, but I don't know of any studies that go back far enough for a reasonable comparison over time. It is not easy to get the data. (2) The correlation of suicides with the school year applies only to school age kids. For people over age 18 there is no such correlation. In fact, for most adults the suicide rate is highest in the summer, which is when they are lowest for school-aged kids. Also, the increased rate of suicide over recent years is much greater for school-aged kids than for adults.
Such an excellent series of letters. Two questions in follow up to this letter.
1. You cite the self-reported stress attributed to school from the relevant modern cohorts. But how does that compare to past cohorts? It could be that school has always felt much more stressful than other factors in a young person’s life, even if that stress has risen in “absolute” terms over time. I don’t know, but it isn’t contextualized here.
2. In the Tennessee example, I was under the impression that researchers have since shown that program was of a low quality, and that a body of literature suggests quality matters. You draw a fine distinction here in play-based versus academic-oriented pre-k. Is that distinction yours (not to dismiss it! just to understand the full picture) or is there a supporting body of work looking at quality along such an axis?
I ask all this as a motivated father who is not interested in confirming my priors so much as making affirmative choices grounded in truth. And I ask in the spirit of clarification and great respect. This is one of the best things on substack.
It would be interesting to find studies of sources of distress for kids in decades past. I don't know of any but I may begin to make a search. From my own experience over the years, I can say with some confidence that kids in the 1950s through 1980s or so found school to be annoying but not so stressful. There was much less concern about grades, about getting into a fancy college, etc. But it would be good to find relevant research.
Thanks for this link, Peter. You’re right, the Vanderbilt paper is quite clear. I had trusted a notable pundit who seems to have mischaracterized the study’s conclusions. I have asked that person to address the error.
Twenge's work shows that suicide rates for girls has risen sharply and bypassed boys. Yes, social media, schooling and culture all play a part. But being a former teen girl, I can tell you that the increase coincides with the Kardashian's appearance not just on social media, but EVERYWHERE. Girls and women are publicly devalued as misogyny increases and now the trans/men are actively destroying girls and women's athletics and physically assaulting women and coming up with TERF hate. Good men need to stand up for girls and women. The illusion that women were making progress was false as so many of them in high positions are turning out to be transmen.
Gayle, thank you for this comment. However, I think you are mistaken that suicide rates for girls has passed boys. According to CDC data, the suicide rate for boys is still much higher than that for girls. See my discussion of reasons for this in my Letter D2.
You ought to be able to get confirmation or refutation of this idea by comparing the suicide rate in other countries where the new focus on testing and avoiding play did not happen. Or did happen but at a different time.
Laura, this is an excellent suggestion. I am editing the reply I gave earlier because I have now found data showing that for European Union countries taken as a whole there was no increase in suicides for teens over the years from 2011 to 2019. This would seem to be consistent with the idea that No Child Left Behind and Common Core, unique to the U.S., is a major cause of the increased suicide rate in the U.S. It would seem to be inconsistent with the mobile phone or "screen time" hypotheses because the rise in these occurred in Europe as well as the U.S.
Sweden (where I live) does not grade students until the sixth year (so they are 12-13 years
old). Study about Swedish child suicides here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00431-021-04240-7
In Austria, the rate in boys was declining, but in 2014 where the study ended, there was a sharp increase.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00508-016-1092-8
Springer has links to findings in other countries.
Good day, and thanks for all the important work on how play makes us human.
Most industrialised countries experienced a drastic peak in depression and anxiety with almost exact the same timing as the one in USA. For all countries in the Anglosphere, there is also a sudden surge in self harm and suicides starting at the same time around 2010, as reported here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/138399019. (The problem is biggest among teen girls.) So, I'm afraid that the explaination to why the suicide curve bends so abruptly in many countries at the same time needs to be valid internationally. Jean Twenge made an overview of 13 possible causes and explored the evidence for them here: https://substack.com/browse/recommendations/post/138052249
This might be a helpful link for data. https://pxdata.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ksyyt/statfin_ksyyt_pxt_11by.px
I have tried looking this up as well and both Finland and Sweden have higher overall suicide rate as well as teen suicide rate.
Dickens's Hard Times has a powerful passage about how the education system's disdain for relaxation, play and fantasy has a crippling effect on children and, ironically stunts their intellectual growth. I feel this is partly intentional in that the ruling class has always had contempt and fear for the “lower orders” whose existence was only justified to the rulers if these children could slot into some spiritless servitude. I don’t think much has changed.
Maybe telling kids the seas are going to rise and the planet is going to boil has something to do with it.
Hello Peter and everyone else,
has anyone got a take on the Emperor's New Clothes aspect of this? The situation over here in Bavaria and as far as I know in the UK is somewhat different to what you describe, Peter, but only somewhat. There seems to be a common thread running through these education systems, namely that empirical evidence doesn't stand a chance against attitudes such as: "We've always done it that way.", "We need to implement policies that our voters / the parents want us to implement.", "If exact measuring works in engineering, why shouldn't it work in school (never mind the flawed methodology)?" and so on. And strangely enough, the employers in the real world for whom all this school assessment stuff is supposed to be about obstinately refuse to be satisfied with the results ...
And: How do programmes like NCLB become law? Are they backed by any kind of social-scientific studies/evidence?
This article reflects my experiences as a mother and teacher. I also think there is a link to social media, but for a long time I didn't quite understand it. I had no personal experience and my kids are both boys. Recently, I watched a couple of episodes of "This is High School." It was filmed in Canada in 2016. The school profiled is a typical, middle class secondary school, so it's not about guns and drugs so much as the everyday experiences of the kids. One young lady misses three days of school after a text is sent to her (in class!) saying her best friend said terrible things about her. She calls her mother immediately and begs to go home. When I saw this, I finally understood. Of course, the photos of friends doing things without you and the impossible standard of beauty play a big role, too.
Being a mom of boys, I speculate that this is much more of an issue for girls for both societal reasons and gender reasons. Women are generally more socially oriented and therefore more hurt by slights. Men's socialization appears less relationship oriented and more activity and group oriented.
You can watch the series on FreeVee or Prime Video. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6575184/
Peter, regarding my comment above, is there data on incidences of bullying in schools that correlates to the suicide curve? And wouldn’t one hypothesize that at schools where recess and group activities were curtailed in favor of standardized test prep we might see a reduction in reported bullying or overall social conflict as students spend less time interacting with each other? Furthermore, wouldn’t mental heath surveys at schools with less recess or free time have higher reporting of loneliness and less so of bullying?
Good questions. It would be great to know of such studies, but I don't know of any.
Wow. This is challenging stuff. I was previously all-in for J. Haidt’s hypothesis that smart phone usage promotes an external locus of control in developing brains. At it’s face, the suicide timing data you report and it’s correlation with school start/stop doesn’t seem to support Haidt’s hypothesis. I would suspect smart phone usage increases when school is out of session, so then one might expect suicides increase when school is out.
To play devil’s advocate (and demonstrate my own ideological inertia in my battle against smartphones in the hands of my young kids) let’s suggest that the issue comes down to a child’s locus of control rather than the stress associated with academic rigor or testing:
1. If smart phone usage promotes an external locus of control, then conflict arising amongst peers would be more impactful, increasing the likelihood of an emotional spiral towards suicide. And if the school year is the season when young people spend the most time around their peers whilst navigating stressful social situations, then Haidt’s smartphone theory isn’t necessarily refuted by the school/suicide timing correlation.
In fact, Peter, all your work on the dearth of play during childhood without adult mediation neatly complements Haidt’s child smartphone usage suspicions. Both elements are contributing to the emergence of entire generations of humans raised without the skills to manage social conflict. For kids, this becomes evident the moment they return to school and enter back into society and away from the digital media onslaught that represents the bulk of kid’s summer break
Rawley, what you suggest here is plausible; but there are lots of plausible theories out there. In my next letter I will dig into the research concerning the relation between smart phones, social media, screens in general and young people's mental health. I have more research to do before that letter, but I can say already that the findings are messy. Most researchers and reviewers of the research do not agree with the strong views of Haidt and Twenge that the matter is settled, and some present what they see as strong evidence against an overall causal relation between any of these and the rise of suicide or other indices of mental health decline.
Peter thank you for documenting and writing about this! I have witnessed and suspected that the change in educational expectations since the early 2000's on children that are not developmentally appropriate have had an impact on their mental health as well as their ability to develop their social skills. I feel that the increased reliance on computers to educate children is also having a negative impact on learning and compounding these issues. I have been asking my middle school students how they feel about using computers all day and many of them report that the hate it and wish they could write more or read from actual books! Many students as young as kindergarten are using the computers throughout their day for reading and math instruction, it is heart breaking. I would love to hear your thoughts on that issue as well!
Regardless, the contril group is hard to maintain because we are unable to remove the variable of home life. My daughter is in kindergarten in a school that graduates over 93% proficient in reading and math. While an elementary school just 8 blocks away graduates a mere 53% proficient. The 53% hands out candy and us waaay more "fun" based. The difference between the 2 can only be seen in home life. I sit down and do homework "WITH" my daughter. We practice together. When she gets frustrated. I teach her to breathe, calm her emotions, it all takes time, be patient with yourself, don't get frustrated. I believe the other school is made up of many families that do not sit down with their children. More, many of the parents English is a second language. I do agree, however, that awesome grades or rigorous academia does not necessarily transcend to success. I also shower attention over my daughters artwork more then her letters and numbers. I scrapbook her artwork and put it on the fridge, letting her know that everybody needs an art. An argument could be made with the above data that parents began to pay attention to their kids more, take interest in their activities, do art with them, and thus is what led to better mental health.
Well - the problem here is that she is in kindergarten and already has homework? I find that ridiculous. If you are doing it WITH her, it just means you place a lot of importance on her having it done before she gets to play. And showcasing her artwork is placing a lot of value on what she makes/produces. And she's just 5 yrs old! By the time she is in highschool, she will feel pressure that she needs to perform and produce to make her parents happy and that if she's feeling frustrated - well, she is just not coping well enough and being too emotional.
I am on board with Peter Gray's theories as I was one of those kids in high-achieving schools that really wanted to just die b/c of all the pressure to get into an elite college. This was in the 90's - so I think all the social media in the 2010's compounds the problem. If I had to see my friends (some of who got perfect SAT's) on my social media feed showcasing their achievements and IVY league acceptance letters when I was home alone, depressed and stressed in my bedroom studying for a test or trying to finish a paper, I think it would have put me over the edge and I wouldn't be alive today.
As for boys - I think they are more impulsive so attempts or deaths are a higher percentage of the stressed out kids possibly.
I just wonder if there are other details besides gender about the kids that end up in the hospital like socioeconomic background, ethnicity, grades, parents' education level (high achieving parents expect high achieving kids), etc... With those details, his theories will either be upheld or not. I mean, the suicide clusters in Palo Alto in the 2010's in one of the top high schools in the country seems to support Gray's ideas.
There is even a YA BOOK "The Silence that Binds Us" by Joanna Ho that features this exact trend, so obviously school pressure/achievement is a major issue for teens today - and teens today just seem more fragile mentally..... as a result of all the factors Gray discussed previously.
Dude, it's simple words and bean counting. She plays ALL the time. I'm a single father and it's no different then sitting down to read a book. Be careful of becoming an expert child psychologist because you read one essay. I'm 44, I graduated in 98. You don't have more wisdom then me. EVERY school district teaches their OWN curriculum. No child left behind was first launched in Texas and didn't make it much past that. The writer is making an intriguing argument but the statistics are wholly incomplete. In the 90s, in my district. They created drop out schools basically. A way for kids to get credit when they couldn't perform at the real high school. It was like kindergarten for high schoolers. 20% of boys dropped out and went to these schools. I was friends with ALL of them, most ended up in jails, some got out and made something of themselves. I promise you, not a single one felt pressured, lol. Not a single one was pushed by parents. These are the ones that had mental health issues and future drug problems with parents that put exactly zero art pieces on the fridge and sat down to work with them none. Another missing variable in the numbers. You are doing numbers on students "attending". So are the drop outs stress free kids that will make it in the daily stress and grind of the work force? Because I could make that argument from the numbers too. The author is arguing the importance of "play" in mental health but I don't find this facet of the argument to be as persuasive as the rest. As much as I'd LOVE to have an excuse to play video games with my daughter ALL day, lol. OF COURSE, a kid is going to say school is stressful. Its designed to be a stress test and it engulfs their lives. As in all things, balance needs to be struck. If my daughter can write and read "I LIKE TO PLAY OUTSIDE" (lol, because she likes to write in all caps), a year before I could. It doesn't mean she's going to become a racing suicidal lunatic. Ridiculous.
But you mention that you have to go through breathing exercises to calm her down when she gets frustrated with her work.
The question is whether, at that age, she should be getting frustrated with academic work in the first place.
She also threw a temper tantrum when i took the binkie away and I taught her the same trick. Your child will want to quit everything in favor of tv or something electronic, lol. If you want to be their friend, give them a cell phone. If you want to be their parent, give them lessons. No academia is natural and quitting is the easiest thing. Frustration in anything is natural. It's not like we do breathing exercises everytime we sit down, lol, that's absurd. But it is important to teach a child techniques for controlling emotions and that emotions are fleeting. This is another variable that goes unregaurded in the argument. What outlets did the suicidal children have? Doing homework with my daughter is just another way of bonding. She then does whatever, barbie dolls and make a video of them walking across the Lego stage, or she asks me to do puppets. I will say that this authors essays has made be feel better about the time I let her randomly play throughout the house. I look at it different now. Look, you have only but a couple hours after school with your kids. And somebody else put stuff in their heads for 8 hours. If we were in stone age. I would teach her to make a bow and arrow to hunt, or show her how to super crop seeds for the field. I'm sure I will teach her to change a tire and frustration might occur, stress, anxiety. One day, I won't be there. Breathe, control your emotions, change the tire, keep moving. If the authors argument is that too much stress is being placed on kids through academia thereby leading to increased suicides. I'm sorry, objective senses of drop out rates and kids graduating elementary schools in 50% proficiency or the fact that half of Americans read at a 7th grade level do not born that out. Also, we would need to look at the lives of the kids that committed suicide. We're they 4.0 Ivy league futures forced to do homework in the bedrooms every night? I'm positive the author will next try to pull in suicide numbers from Japan where REAL rigorous academia is placed upon kids. However, in such a case. You would be introducing an entirely new control group to argue the outcome of a separate experiment. If our entire culture was reduced to academic standards as an identity. Then the authors arguments would ring closer to truth. However, I don't think America's ranking amongst nations even approaches a country that takes education seriously. Mostly, we are a country of parents that move past our children like ships in the night, leave somebody else to teach them, and let them find coping mechanisms through drugs and alcohol. Abusing my daughter because I teach her to breathe and sit for 15 minutes to write her name. Stupid.
You're making the mistake to attempting to provide proof for your hypothesis. Never works in this area, you can only disprove your point. The research you list is highly unreliable and biased. I.e. suicides during school is higher but this does not have to mean the problem is the class. It might be away from home or not in touch in class mates.
Second, the enormous difference between girls and boys means you need to find a cause that clearly explains this sex difference. Boys tend to have much less anxiety, especially in the 15-19 age range, than girls which is incompatible with the stress for testing. Second, boys tend to do better on real tests vs school teachers that tend to favor the more behaving girls.
Peter K, thank you for this comment. In the social sciences it is never possible to absolutely prove a hypothesis. However, what one can do is present multiple lines of evidence that bear on the hypothesis, which is what I have done here. All of these converging lines of evidence are consistent with the theory that I am presenting; none contradict it. You can think of each line of evidence as an attempt to disprove the theory, and none of them succeed in that regard. Concerning the issue of sex differences--girls report more anxiety and boys commit suicide at higher rates--please look back at my discussion of that in Letter D2. The main point concerning the theory presented here is that for BOTH boys and girls the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide increased over the period considered here.
Getting to this late. Thank you for posting on this difficult topic. Would be good to see how suicides split by socio-economic status. I see research that lower SES kids have higher suicide rate. But I suspect that it is the higher SES kids that feel the most cultural pressure around grades. Your data on a link to school looks pretty solid, but I’m not yet convinced that stress over grades is the biggest factor. What about bullying?
Dear prof. Gray, just three questions.
1. Seasonality seem to be a possible other explanation for the trends you showed. You mentioned that when schools opened sooner/later, this was reflected in suicide rates, but I would like to see some data about this
2. Other countries showed exactly the same pattern of depression symptoms and suicides without NCLB or pre-K literacy and numeracy programs. What are your thoughts about this?
3. Did mobiles interfere with schooling? They distract (making it more challenging to keep up with the pace), they decrease the sleep time and most importantly, they interfere with free play/chat at school. During lecture breaks I used to see a lot of people talking to each other, to hear a lot of joyful noise. Now not: everybody is staring at the phone. An impressive silence. The same goes for school trips. I remember the travel (by train! by bus!) moment as the best, the most exciting, the one that really matter of the whole trip. Now you can sit in a train in the middle of 13-years old pack of students and writing an article or reading a book without problems. The kids are silent. That makes a huge difference in the quality of their free play/time. What is your position about these phenomena?
Are private schools impacted by common core and NCLB? If not, couldn't you compare the changes in the rates of suicides between kids in public vs private schools?
Also, why has the pressure impacted male students so much more than female students?
Luthar, whose work I mention in the article, found that rates of mental breakdown are highest in "high achievement schools" whether or not they are private or public. To my knowledge, private schools have changed at least as much as public schools in response to the various forces that are fallouts of Pisa testing, NCLB and Common Core. Concerning male compared to female students, there in fact is some evidence that male student adapt less readily to schooling as it exists today than do female students. More boys are quitting than girls. There are now many more young women than young men going on to college. Also, one of the studies I found showing higher rates of mental breakdown during the school year compare to the summer separated the rates for boys and girls and found that girls' rates were not as strongly affected by timing in the school year as were boys' rates. But, also see my Letter D2 for the reasons why suicide rates are always higher in males than in females.
You provide evidence that school contributes to teen suicide, but you conclude that recent changes in school produced the recent increases in teen suicide. I don't see any evidence for this. Here are some relevant analyses that seem pretty easy: (1) Look whether the gap between suicide in school and out of school has widened in recent years. Some of the studies you cite are complicated studies with precise details of particular school districts, but you should be able to easily get seasonal patterns from CDC. (2) Compare teenagers to older people. College students may have the same effect of school, but they shouldn't have any effect from NCLB. Even older people shouldn't have either effect.
You suggestion (1) is a good one, but I don't know of any studies that go back far enough for a reasonable comparison over time. It is not easy to get the data. (2) The correlation of suicides with the school year applies only to school age kids. For people over age 18 there is no such correlation. In fact, for most adults the suicide rate is highest in the summer, which is when they are lowest for school-aged kids. Also, the increased rate of suicide over recent years is much greater for school-aged kids than for adults.
Such an excellent series of letters. Two questions in follow up to this letter.
1. You cite the self-reported stress attributed to school from the relevant modern cohorts. But how does that compare to past cohorts? It could be that school has always felt much more stressful than other factors in a young person’s life, even if that stress has risen in “absolute” terms over time. I don’t know, but it isn’t contextualized here.
2. In the Tennessee example, I was under the impression that researchers have since shown that program was of a low quality, and that a body of literature suggests quality matters. You draw a fine distinction here in play-based versus academic-oriented pre-k. Is that distinction yours (not to dismiss it! just to understand the full picture) or is there a supporting body of work looking at quality along such an axis?
I ask all this as a motivated father who is not interested in confirming my priors so much as making affirmative choices grounded in truth. And I ask in the spirit of clarification and great respect. This is one of the best things on substack.
Thanks for these questions. In fact, the Tennessee preschool was very high quality by the usual markers of such quality. For much more on that, see my blog post on the study here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202201/research-reveals-long-term-harm-state-pre-k-program
It would be interesting to find studies of sources of distress for kids in decades past. I don't know of any but I may begin to make a search. From my own experience over the years, I can say with some confidence that kids in the 1950s through 1980s or so found school to be annoying but not so stressful. There was much less concern about grades, about getting into a fancy college, etc. But it would be good to find relevant research.
Thanks for this link, Peter. You’re right, the Vanderbilt paper is quite clear. I had trusted a notable pundit who seems to have mischaracterized the study’s conclusions. I have asked that person to address the error.
Twenge's work shows that suicide rates for girls has risen sharply and bypassed boys. Yes, social media, schooling and culture all play a part. But being a former teen girl, I can tell you that the increase coincides with the Kardashian's appearance not just on social media, but EVERYWHERE. Girls and women are publicly devalued as misogyny increases and now the trans/men are actively destroying girls and women's athletics and physically assaulting women and coming up with TERF hate. Good men need to stand up for girls and women. The illusion that women were making progress was false as so many of them in high positions are turning out to be transmen.
Gayle, thank you for this comment. However, I think you are mistaken that suicide rates for girls has passed boys. According to CDC data, the suicide rate for boys is still much higher than that for girls. See my discussion of reasons for this in my Letter D2.