11/25/2025
From the New York Times...they say........ I’d like to look at the mental health crisis facing America’s children. Some parents, educators and health experts are wondering: Are schools part of the problem?
A dark school hallway in which students appear in silhouette.
High school students in Williston, N.D. Erin Schaff/The New York Times
School daze
The numbers are staggering.
Nearly one in four 17-year-old boys in the United States has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In the early 1980s, a diagnosis of autism was delivered to one child in 2,500. That figure is now one in 31. Almost 32 percent of adolescents have at some point been given a diagnosis of anxiety. More than one in 10 have experienced a major depressive disorder, my colleague Jia Lynn Yang reports.
And the number of mental health conditions is expanding. A child might be tagged with oppositional defiance disorder or pathological avoidance disorder. “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” an academic who studies children and education told Jia Lynn. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.”
Why did this happen? A lot of reasons. Kids spend hours on screens, cutting into their sleep, exercise and socializing — activities that can ward off anxiety and depression. Mental health screenings have improved.
And then there’s school itself: a cause of stress for many children and the very place that sends them toward a diagnosis.
A slow transformation
In 1950, less than half of American children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school. After-school hours were filled with play or work. “But as the country’s economy shifted from factories and farms to offices, being a student became a more serious matter,” Jia Lynn writes. “The outcome of your life could depend on it.” College became a reliable path to the middle class.
Schools leaned into new standards of testing and put in place measures of accountability. The No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 made it federal law.
States rewarded schools for having high scores. They punished them for low ones. “Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits,” Jia Lynn writes. “Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings.”
And there were clear incentives to diagnose students with psychiatric disorders: Treatment of one student, especially a disruptive one, could lead to higher test scores across the classroom. And in some states, the test scores of students with a diagnosis weren’t counted toward a school’s overall marks, nudging results higher as well.
The metrics may have gotten many kids the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change: According to one analysis Jia Lynn found, the rate of A.D.H.D. among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes rose by half after the passage of No Child Left Behind.
A student in a classroom is writing math equations on a white board.
In San Luis, Ariz. Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times
The effect on kids
The pressures on students became extreme. In 2020, Yale researchers found that nearly 80 percent of high schoolers said they were stressed.
And that stress has trickled down to younger and younger kids. Kindergartners learn best through play, not through the rote lessons in math and reading that began to enter classrooms. Preschoolers are not predisposed to sitting still. And yet as they, too, now face greater academic expectations, many are being expelled for misbehavior.
Even the school day became more regimented, with fewer periods of recess — by 2016, only eight states had mandatory recess in elementary schools. Class schedules are packed. “You’ve got seven different homework assignments that you’ve got to remember each night,” one expert told Jia Lynn. “Think of the cognitive load of a sixth-grade boy. I challenge many adults to do this.”
It’s a vicious cycle, where bad outcomes lead to worse outcomes.
And Jia Lynn writes about that beautifully:
By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups.
Read more about schools and the rise of childhood mental health disorders here. Don’t miss the comments that accompany the article, especially from parents and teachers. Many boil down to something a recently retired teacher wrote: “A child’s school day is insane.
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