In-person schooling and youth suicide: Evidence from calendars, school closures
nber.org
nber.org
> There could be a number of explanations for these findings. Families spending time together during a period of fear and uncertainty may have generated important mental health benefits for teenagers. Moreover, increased communication between parents and teenagers, as well as increased monitoring (both of behaviors and psychological health) may have yielded important psychological gains for teenagers. In addition, the absence of in-person schooling could have helped teenagers avoid negative peer effects of in-person bullying. Or, it may be that reductions in pressures associated with high-stakes exams, athletics, or romantic relationships may have reduced triggers for suicide ideation. In the final section of this paper, we empirically explore a few potential channels.
As someone who has gone to public school, I know the answer is bullying.
The authors were careful to point out that they do not advocate shutting down in person schooling because it can also offer positive mental health benefits. But you have to wonder, between teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, you would think someone would notice some bullying behavior. Could it be that collectively the adults tasked with overseeing children are, understaffed, unempowered, ignorant, complicit, or do the facilitate or lead this behavior?
One is that the teachers have been stripped off all powers. Just today I was reading some article from hacker news where the teacher was complaining that all kids from the latest freshman year gave her/him the finger when they were asked to show their hall pass.
Other side of the argument is that if teachers are empowered, then it is documented sufficiently that some teachers (not all) absolutely abuse their power and exploit/harm kids in even worse ways.
I dont know whats the solution. I hope I come out more wise from someones comment here.
If my hunch that bullies are products of abuse or otherwise need psychological help is true then trying to identify and help bullies and their victims could help.
Like in every similar position (e.g. sports trainers, preachers, band leaders, ...) teachers are both powerless and powerful at the same time. If the student has respect for them/their role the power can be real, if we are talking about students who question the rules (and have parents that don't care/actively support the breaking of them) teachers are powerless.
Is a babysitter powerful? Towards an adult no, towards the child yes. Towards a certain type of child, no.
And "dealing with it" can make the students situation worse in some cases
It's also very hard to deal with it if you have 30-35 children per class and 3-5 classes per year - which you do because we are at the height of a population wave in this region right now.
They are also absolutely unable to deal with stuff like dyslexia, ADHD, or other mental issues - meanwhile we have a push for "inclusive schooling"...
Ever seen a kid clearly bully another kid, like call him names then push him down and the teacher comes over and says 'cut it out you two, now get up and shake hands'.
When I saw that (not long after it was released) I thought how well that captured the spirit of many school interactions, where bullies would blame their victim and the teachers would fall for it.
No bullying was necessary.
I lacked experience in coping with the resulting intense emotions and didn't trust any adults enough to talk about it.
I do agree that bullying is probably the worst culprit.
I'd still support it, because with video evidence there is no they said vs they said. There is just the truth.
There's also no more wiggle room for mistakes or minor deviance. Policies that normalize and enforce non-punishment for non-serious offenses must also be put in place to prevent the abuses of that system.
Infact, social media (which has a lot to do with cameras and technology) is often a factor in alienation and bullying.
So I agree, cameras everywhere is not a viable solution. After all, someone would need to view and review those videos! And then what? Punish the bullies, leading them deeper into conflict with the school system?
How about exactly and only that? You go to school, sit in your assigned stall for the day isolated from all other stalls by a locking mechanism, and assigned to lunch periods according to your history and the other kids histories.
(Sounds a lot like administrative segregation in a prison…edit- yet I would have RAN to this option in my school days)
Read more about it on the web. Zero tolerance is something management / administration created to not have to do their job. The world is nuanced and each case has to be judged on its own merit. I do not support slapping a zero tolerance "policy" (not really a policy, more like a copout).
> Cameras - everywhere - except individual, single occupancy enforced, stalls.
Will you place an actual human outside each such stall to guarantee there is ever only one person inside?
The problem with bullying is not just that someone can beat you up, but that if you try to complain, the bully can say "actually, he attacked me" or "no, we were just playing" or something like that, and the teacher will be like "wtf, I have no idea what actually happened, so just shake hands and be friends again, okay?" And you know you get beaten up tomorrow again. What an improvement it would be to have a place where, if you get beaten up, at least the camera will record that you were the victim.
Bingo.
There's a lot of dubious research that shows that the quality of education is not related to the student-to-teacher ratio. It flies against common sense, but people in power like to give it credence, since it's budget-friendly. The funny thing is that education budgets in the US are already very large. I don't know how the money is spent, but it's not spent on lowering that ratio.
If people need a proof that fewer students per teacher result in better outcomes, they just need to compare public and private schools.
Even deeper bingo.
In the first order, it's absurd how much better you can make your performance at a task look if you get to not count the times you dropped the hard cases.
For a second-order effect, the students who cause problems degrade the educational effectiveness of the entire classroom, so eliminating them improves performance for the rest of the students.
Unfortunately (for public schools re. their comparisons to private schools), our society demands that a cursory attempt be made to provide educational opportunities for _all_ of the children.
Of course going back to jail after being free would make any kid who values his own autonomy depressed. School in its current form is awful, because it's far too authoritarian and preachy, not because "bullying".
You wouldn't have issues with bullying if you didn't force kids who don't like each other to interact without oversight in the first place. Oversight is key, when you know kids don't like each other, don't put them together again until you know they're cool again. It's hard being a little person.
Combine that with the primitive undeveloped child brains and human group behavior...
I was bullied in primary school and hated it. I still did well grades-wise.
If you weren't bullied seriously you probably can't understand how big of a deal it is for small kids. Like psychological-issues-30-years-later serious.
It leads to damaging abusive interactions with others who take advantage of that situation. Bullies know that you can't get away. I had a situation where I was literally forced to sit next to someone I hated for months - I can't think of anywhere that could happen except prison and school
Assuming the depiction of serious bullying in TV series is more or less acurate wrt seriousness, I was barely mildly bullied. That still has had implications on my life, still to this day, more than 30 years later.
The abstract hints that bullying is the issue, and bullying is a lot harder when everyone's staying at home. Was the isolation not that bad? Or is it just that the bullying was worse?
Their data says that suicides rise in August, when everyone returns to school. Over and over here we've seen claims that school is really unhealthy; these people have data that confirms it.
I was bullied and retrospectively know no other word than torture for what happened to me. And I wasn‘t the worst off victim, we made three classmates leave the school.
This isn't really relevant though, because kids are a lot more cruel than adults.
Sadly - teachers encourage the "macho" "don't tatter, be a man" attitude to have less work. Hence bullying. Imagine if judges did that :) "So he stole your book, so what, be a man, deal with it yourself". "I don't care who beat whom - just shake hands and leave me be"
I don't think you can separate adults from the awfulness of school, including the awfulness of kids toward kids, because school isn't a Lord of the Flies situation where the setting happened by itself, and the ongoing proceedings happen without witness and active maintainance.
Ask any teacher or admin and they may say "this system has problems", but tomorrow everyone gets up and does all the same stuff, so we are a full participant in this.
Me too, even as someone who never had kids. I'm complicit in the sense that even though I went through the process and know how awful it is, now that I'm past that, I'm relieved that this problem and those people (kids) are all kept on some kind of reservation out of my hair. It's really somewhat like packing undesirables away in a compound.
Even though I don't have kids, I don't think it would be wrong or unfair to still expect me to have some sort of share in a general collective responsibility (beyond simple taxes) to help raise (and deal with) the young. After all I was one once and could have used a better society, and I still have an interest in it since they are still part of the world I have to inhabit, and are people I will have to deal with.
Please don't "If you feel a calling then go work at a school". My point isn't about me or any individual, it's that we all have this vested interest and this responsibility, we've just set things up in such a way that most of us can shirk it without having to face up to that's the essense of what we've done.
I also had a tough time in school, and I grew up in Europe.
It seems to me like it's just how humans work when they're not properly socialized and educated (which is expected for children of course) and nobody really polices their behavior effectively.
https://steptohealth.com/kiva-method-bullying-and-school-har...
Online school just wasn't real. Everyone I've talked to said they put in a fraction of the effort required to pass classes online that they did in person, and many people said they had grades practically forgiven.
I didn't have too hard of a time in school but I still remember it as immensely stressful, and for little reason. It is easy for someone with a real problem (drugs, bad relationship, abuse, trauma) to spend a few weeks marinating in cortisol as a result of the panopticon of in-person school to become convinced that suicide is the only way out of their negative feelings.
Can we stop normalizing trauma and problems with ones social life? It's not the norm, stop pretending it is.
School is also becoming more and more stressful as smaller and smaller metrics were tracked. When my grandfather went to school his parents were sent a report card twice per year. When my father went to school his parents were sent four report cards per year. When I went to school my parents were sent twelve report cards per year, and they started experimenting with an online system to track every grade on every assignment. Now that my young cousins are in school even their daily classroom participation can be tracked.
Any survey of modern schoolkids that asks about anxiety or depression has enormous rates of response in the positive.
I'm glad to hear you had a good school life. Most people aren't that lucky.
Online schooling might have been a way out of the social side of public school, though just going to college a couple of years earlier would have been ideal.
I count myself lucky for realizing half way through my education that school and especially grades don't matter at all, so I could just wait out the couple last years so I can get to work life and relax.
It turns out that "real life" is way lower stakes than I was led to believe (at least if you have solidly upper middle class parents like I did). Even poorly-paid jobs are livable if you have low expectations, live somewhere cheap, and don't have children. Rent gets even cheaper relatively if you have a partner with a job. Unemployment insurance and medicaid are an inadequate safety net but they do exist and can get you through a rough spot.
Win-win? I would have loved isolation when I was at primary school.
So, I'll point out that the KiVa [0] program from Finland has been proven to reduce bullying by a huge amount. It has been running for years now, with repeated success.
[0] - https://steptohealth.com/kiva-method-bullying-and-school-har...
Parents should talk to boys about the danger of suicide much more that they talk about drugs and or drowning.
Cause of death by age and gender, EU, 2010: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/HLTH_CD_ANR__...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-risk-of...
Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/student-suici...
bullying is issue, but children mental health during school closings clearly deteriorated if you look at increase in mental related visits, so I doubt results of this study, there might be temporary increase associated with any change, but long term it's definitely healthier if someone in school is able to monitor kids and take care of their mental health, which is going largely unchecked if schools are locked
The article you linked is just for a single school district, which may have unique circumstances. It could also be statistical chance, given the small sample size and single year referenced.
Suffice it to say, not a place to raise kids nor use as an example of choices made for their best interests.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/588302-closed-schools-...
and tons of other articles while here we have one clickbaity study which says opposite, but sure this one study will be the right one, while literally everyone else is wrong that school closings are harmful and very bad for children mental health
We French have the worse schools in europe according to PISA, where we score around the same as the US. According to data, too much emphasis on grade, too much pressure, school is mostly good for children who already do well (we would rank in the top if only the top 5% was ranked), but bad for the rest. Interestingly, we also have on of the higher teen suicide rate of europe.
But we do not have as much bullying issues as it seems US have if i read the comments right. Or at least did not when i was there, nor when i was a youth camp counselor, or "speaker" in school (i brought science experiments, gears and stuff for 6-11yo and did cool stuff with an association). I don't remember any isolated kid when i was in middle school, and i guess in highschool "I" was the most bullied kid at the start of the year (playing violin in the school boarding facilities when the school was 70% technical/trade and 30% generalist do not help), but i mean, people overall were great and the education team helped me past the first few months until my natural charm and bad jokes did the work and offset the out-of-tune sounds (joking, but not entirely).
Are those hn comments representative of the overall bullying in public school in the US?
We do have bullying in France though, i don't mean to say we are good on this point, and from what i managed to understand in my few years around the education system, those who have the greatest impact are the directors (school or youth camp). A good director will have meeting with this team where he talks about children with special needs, or children who are especially needy ("attention whore" is the special term internet came with, which says a lot about how charitable and nice we are with each other naturally), and help professors or counselors manage those needs. With permanent emphasis on this, the "bad elements" are peer-pressured into doing better (in my experience as a counselor, but its probably the same for teachers). Those with the second greatest impact are people at the departement of education who allocate budgets and basically decide how many children per teacher. Teachers themselves are a most third, at least 5th behind parents and the community.
And the data from early 90s to present year confirm that.
Eg, a hint of bullying gives you a two week online-only experience that increases in duration for repeat offenses.
They could find a room at the library or something.
It’s an obvious solution that would work to some extent.
Bullies don’t deserve the right to be at school when they could learn online if they are pushing people to suicide.
I find this line of thinking abhorrent. If it will reduce suicides by 15%, in-person schooling should be stopped outright until someone fixes what's wrong with it.
School is organized the way it is, because we need workers and soldiers. Not because we want kids to behave better or to "grow up". People "grew up" before we had schools.
[1]Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World