Drifting and Isolated Teens

What can schools do for teens who are isolated or drifting through life?

I’m always reluctant to tag Kids These Days with diagnosis that comes with strong echoes of the past. But observers have been repeatedly pointing out that both data and anecdotal observation suggest that Something Is Going On, and maybe we ought to be doing something.

At The Argument, Lakshya Jain wants to point out that so-called loneliness epidemic for men is really a youth loneliness crisis that hits everybody, but hits young women harder. Jain’s data set only takes us as low as the 18-29 year old age group, but I think it’s safe to assume that young humans are not perfectly okay until they turn 18, and then something goes wrong.

Jain points out that young men and women are distressed and lonely, and that the “internet generations” are way way more socially isolated than their elders. In addition to fresh surveys, Jain piles up an assortment of data.

Our poll’s findings on young people being more antisocial are also substantiated by broader societal patterns observed over the last few decades. For instance, it’s well-documented that young people party less. That isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself, but it’s reflective of a broader and more worrying social trend, where young people are spending less and less time socializing with each other. (The American Time Use Survey estimated a nearly 50% decline in face-to-face interactions among teenagers over the last two decades.)

Jain’s post came just last week, but I thought of it immediately this morning when reading the latest from Robert Pondiscio, discussing the problem of what happens with students between 3:00 PM and 3:00 AM. He talks about a framework offered by Mike Goldstein, who is a charter school founder and a “pioneer in high dosage tutoring” and a guy who just generally attracts my side-eye, but who makes an on-point observation about “languishing teenagers,” who are neither flourishing nor obviously in trouble. They’re just kind of drifting along.

Anyone who has taught for more than a half hour knows the languishing students. As a high school teacher, I found the hardest students to reach were the ones who weren’t particularly passionate about anything. Not just uninterested in school, but uninterested in anything. They weren’t my students struggling with major challenges, because those students were struggling, passionate about something in their lives, even if it was surviving and escaping their big obstacles. They weren’t my very best students, who were also passionate about something. They were the students with middling achievement, drifting along uninvolved and unexcited.

Getting interested in stuff tends to lead to social connections of one sort or another. After school activities. Volunteer fire department. A sport. The band or choir. A church group. A job. All of these give students social connections, plug them into a wider network of human beings that keep them from being isolated, even if they are just (as philosopher Ron Swanson put it, “workplace proximity associates.”

As I said, none of this is new. It has been twenty-six years since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, about the collapse and revival of American community. Putnam observed that we’re losing shared public spaces and fragmenting in ways that make social capital harder to come by. Hannah Arendt was talking about this stuff mid-the-last-century. As Damon Linker summarized her in part

In her view, totalitarianism is a novel form of government for which the men and women of modern Europe were prepared by “the fact that loneliness … ha[d] become an everyday experience” for so many. The all-pervasive system of the totalitarian regime promised and, for a time, provided an all-encompassing orientation, meaning, and purpose for the masses that they otherwise lacked and craved in their lives.

A report from the Survey Center on American Life in 2021 suggested that the pandemic had accelerated an already-growing problem of friendlessness. The list of studies goes on and on.

The cause of all this unraveling? Technology has made it more and more unnecessary for us to venture into shared spaces. I use the band bus example: in 1973, high school band members coop up in a band bus together had to work together to negotiate what music everyone was going to have to listen to on the trip, but a few decades later, the students could each escape into their own personal music on their own personal device. Now we don’t even have to leave the house to shop, and the general trend is not encouraging, now that we can talk our problems over with an AI companion rather than a friend.

Should schools, lord help them, be asked to fix this problem too? Can we just add one more thing to the plate? Well, no, but we can’t ignore it, either. As Pondiscio observes

For educators—and for the rest of us—the challenge is not to take on yet another mandate, but to recognize a simple truth we have been slow to acknowledge: academic success and human flourishing are inseparable, and what happens after the bell rings may matter more than we have been willing to admit.

I’ll point out that some of us have not been slow to acknowledge this at all, but for many years the ed reform movement’s response was to accuse teachers of making excuses. But he’s right-- young humans who are not flourishing do not make highly successful students, and the system can work better when we admit it.

That said, are there things that schools can do? Absolutely yes.

Offer a variety of activities-- clubs, sports, activities before and after school. And don’t just offer them, but make it easy for students to participate, because an after school activity for students who have no way to get home after the meeting is over is no help. Sometimes (but not always) my old district included an activity period during the daily schedule, during which clubs could meet and all students were able to attend. This is exactly the sort of thing that gets cut when administration is worried about things that are not on the Big Standardized Test.

Invest in programs that allow students to work together, not merely do their own thing in parallel with other students. Band. Choir. Theater. Stage Crew. Sports. Yearbook. Clubs oriented on service projects. These are not extras-- these are the avenue by which schools foster connections between students and students learn how to work with others. When you talk to people about the relationships that they kept long after graduation, these are the groups they talk about. My oldest friends in the world are people I played in high school band with.

Classroom teachers can also foster these sorts of connections by how they manage group work in their classroom. And schools can also foster school-and-community partnerships. I play in a 170-year-old community band, with members from ages 14 up to Don’t Really Want To Talk About It, and for part of the year we rehearse in the high school band room.

Still, the issue is largely a community and family one. One hesitates to suggest that families need to chase their kids out of the house by signing them up for more activities, because there is a non-zero number of families who are working their kids down to the last nub. But for every kid who is signed up for six sports and forty-seven activities, there are ten who are just kind of doing nothing except maybe staring into a screen.

Screens. Damn. I think it’s becoming pretty clear that the younger the child, the less they need to spend time looking into a screen. Our eight-year-old twins have positively antediluvian restrictions on their screen time, and zero access to devices like tablets-- except for school, where some of their work is done on chromebooks, and while I can understand some of the benefits there, I would not shed a single tear if every chromebook and school tablet collapsed tomorrow (or, alternatively, was taken over by a corporation that viewed students as young humans to be carefully and thoughtfully served rather than data-emitting resources to be monetized). Fewer screens for young humans seems like an excellent idea. Australia has outlawed social media for under-16-year-olds, and I am really interested to see how that goes.

Screens may point to another root of the overall problem-- our technological abilities have given us the impression that we have a right to curate the bubble of our own personal experience. I’m not sure that has made our society better or happier, but I’m pretty sure it has left us less connected to the whole world around us.

As parents, we look for ways to put our children out in the world. It can be scary (and this may be another piece of the puzzle) it means putting our children under the direction of people who are not us. But they are going to spend most of their lives with people who aren’t us; practice now will help. And we try to expose them to a variety of activties and potential interests, in hopes that they will find things to be passionate about. Right now that means Pokemon cards, but I’m confident they will trade up as they get older. And we drag them to things they wouldn’t necessarily choose for themselves, because it turns out sometimes that it’s a hit (e.g. working at food bank distribution, which was not an easy sell but which they now drag us to).

As communities, schools, and families, we can be better at this, and I am hopeful that the message is penetrating that we need to try. I say that part of education is learning to be fully human in the world, and finding passions and connections seems like a fundamental part of that.