Should We Encourage Anxiety in Parents, Students, and Staff?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder questions whether schools inadvertently increase anxiety by constantly messaging about mental health risks.
Key Takeaways
- Constant anxiety messaging can backfire - Repeatedly telling people to be worried about mental health can actually increase anxiety
- Normal stress isn't a crisis - Some stress and challenge is healthy and necessary for growth
- Be careful with communication - Schools should support mental health without creating a culture of fear
Transcript
How should we think about the risk of school shootings?
One of the things that's come up over and over in regards to the cell phone conversation is that people are very afraid of school shootings.
And of course, parents want to be able to contact their kids if there is any kind of incident like that at school, or at least they want their kids to be able to contact them.
I don't think it's especially helpful for parents to contact their kids in the middle of an event, but obviously kids should have the opportunity to do that or the option to do that if there is some sort of emergency.
But I think we need to be careful about making policy based on statistically very, very rare events.
And I've been criticized for pointing out that school shootings are rare because they don't feel rare, right?
They feel way too common, and they are way too common.
And it's difficult for us to think about things that mentally loom large but are statistically rare.
For example, car accidents are common, very, very common.
Like 30,000 people a year die in car accidents in the U.S., but they don't loom large because they just kind of seem ordinary.
They don't really seem remarkable.
Terrorist attacks are rare, but they loom large and we have this outsized fear of them.
And I think school shootings are kind of similar in the sense that they're, you know, you have about a one in a million chance of dying in a school shooting.
Like it's extremely low in terms of probability, but it looms very large and I get that it looms large.
And I think when it comes to making policy and helping young people decide how to think about risk and helping parents decide how to think about risk, we have to use math.
We can't just say, well, it feels scary.
It feels like a big deal.
Therefore, we're going to allow you to text your kid constantly all day long.
I think when it comes to any kind of anxiety, especially, we have an obligation to bring some reality into the equation and say you know what like i get that this is a real thing i get that your fear is legitimate and real but we can't make policy based on something that is extremely unlikely to happen and you know just allow that to distort and kind of ruin everything else like the sheer number of parents who really seem to legitimately believe that they need to interrupt their child all day long and transfer their anxieties about everything in life onto their child by texting them, you know, and I've continued to get stories about, you know, like, uh, grandma's sick or grandpa's in the hospital.
Like you don't need to text your kids stuff like that during the school day in the name of, Oh, there might be a school shooting.
And, uh, I just think we've got to really look at the numbers here and say, okay, is this a real thing?
Yes.
Is this a rational fear based on how likely it is to happen?
No.
And that's hard.
It sounds insensitive.
But I think the alternative is to feed into anxiety that is far more broad, far more universal and far more destructive to learning and to well-being.
I think there's real harm to feeding into panic and irrational fear and anxiety.
Let me know what you think.
Thank you.