I’ve written and re-written this blog three times over the last three months. This is exactly three times and three months more/ longer than I usually think about these things.

But I want to talk about resilience and mental health post-pandemic; choosing my words very, VERY, carefully.

Because I’m not sure we, as a schooling system or a society, have got the emphasis right when it comes to building childhood resilience.

I’m worried that we are enfeebling our children by pandering to a narrative which medicalises normal childhood experiences. Experiences which children need to have if they are to develop the skills to navigate the world as it is.

I am worried that the pandemic has accelerated this worrying trend and cast doubt in the minds to parents to the point where, they too, are looking for deep psychological explanations for childhood behaviours which have none.

Now I am no clinical psychologist or expert in childhood trauma. The issues I raise here are not about children who have experienced real, scarring trauma, or have a clutch of adverse childhood experiences which have re-shaped their brains and which requires careful and prolonged therapy to unpack and then treat. I do not seek to minimise or trivialise such trauma. It is very real. I know plenty of children who need a lot more than some fresh air and less worried adults to improve their precarious mental health. This blog is not about them.

This blog is about my concern for the ‘worried well’ – or more precisely ‘the worried parents’ of the worried well’.

We have all experienced a shock over the last 18 months.

The pandemic turned life upside-down.

If we have been lucky, the pandemic will have disturbed our sleep, made us gain a few pounds, left us with a sense of lost social and emotional connection with friends and family, and disrupted our work and the schooling of our children. A sense that life had been ‘put on hold’.

If we have been less fortunate it will involve more catastrophic loss: lost jobs and financial security; lost mental health; lost lives. These wounds will take longer to heal.

Just because it’s new to us, doesn’t mean it’s new.

The pandemic feels new and alien to us adults. But crises’ have been a hallmark of every generation for millennia.

My parents’ generation grew up in the rubble of Britain’s ruined cities, immediately after the Second World War, under the constant cloud of imminent nuclear apocalypse.

My Grandparents’ generation fought in a war which killed 75 million people.

My Great Grandparents’ generation fought in the ‘war to end all wars’ – and then lived through the Spanish Flu pandemic straight after.

My parents, or grandparents didn’t think the world they lived in was at all unusual – it was the only world they’d known.

And our children won’t have found the pandemic as unusual as we did – it is simply their lived experience of the world.

Crises’ aren’t new – they’re just new to us.

To most children, the question isn’t ‘why was there a pandemic?’, but ‘why wouldn’t there be?’

The rise of fragility

Even before the pandemic, as a Headteacher, I was becoming increasing concerned at the exponential rise in children being diagnosed by their parents as having mental health issues – mainly anxiety.

Around the same time (Jan 2019), I read a fascinating article in the Guardian entitled ‘By mollycoddling our children, we are driving mental illness in teenagers’, drawing on the work of Nassim Taleb in his book ‘Anti-fragile’, and a 2013 study into childhood resilience.

It put into words something I’d long suspected (and observed) but couldn’t articulate – namely, that it is how we treat normal childhood anxiety, risk and uncertainty, which is exacerbating poor mental health in young adults.

The article describes this in terms of our immune system; strengthened by years of exposure to the germs and viruses which will forever surround us. It argues that resilience, like our biological immunity, is strengthened and developed by exposure to things that test it.

I am not blaming parents for this epidemic of fragility, this is a societal trend. Moreover, in the last twenty years, a generation of children have been exposed to an open Pandora’s box of the internet and social media, influencing their young brains in ways which we are yet to understand. Showing them a world of terrors.

But as educators, we have to take a lead in teaching our children, and their parents, that life’s everyday knocks are not to be feared, removed or (worst still) medicated against. They are to be understood, accepted and overcome – with a confidence that we have within us sufficient resources to withstand the storm.

Sometimes life will make children anxious (adults too for that matter).

At Blackhorse, we have a School Counsellor who works two days per week supporting children. We pay for this with some of our Pupil Premium money and it is one of the most impactful things we provide.

My Counsellor, Mrs A, a clinical professional, is very keen to point out to children (and their parents) that some stress; some disappointment; some anxiety – is normal. Is part of life. Is how we build resilience.

She explains that sadness, fear and anxiety are all normal human emotions – not to be ‘treated’, but understood and accepted.

She is sympathetic. She provides them with a space to process their thoughts and the tools to help them navigate these new experiences.

But she doesn’t try to insulate them from them – nor tell them that they are ill or damaged because of them.

Resisting Doctor Google

And so to my main concern – that of more and more parents (and increasingly the children themselves) self-diagnosing their children as ‘having anxiety’.

Again (I keep repeating this for clarity) I know some children will indeed have clinical anxiety as a result of truly horrible experiences. But not anywhere near the numbers who are seeking a medical or clinical solution for experiencing a normal (if unpleasant) human emotions.

Often discussions with parents around these issues are fraught and charged. They have often consulted the internet and the echo-chamber of message boards and are convinced that only psychological adaption and additional provision will cure their ‘damaged’ child.

We must react with empathy and kindness – but also firmness. We must push back where we feel that normal experience is being talking into psychological illness.

Because the data is appearing to show us that if we seek to remove and mitigate all childhood anxiety, then real and more persistent mental health issues are lurking around the corner.

Most of all we now need to provide a different path through the post-pandemic parenting jungle. One that is more brightly lit and inviting than the rabbit-hole of internet psycho-babble, calling siren-like our parents down into a confusing warren of self-doubt.

We must teach bravery and fortitude.

At Blackhorse Primary, we have had endless discussions as a staff about this issue. It is not that the issue is any worse at our school than anywhere else – in fact, I believe that our curriculum mission and the nurturing provision which was already in place before the pandemic, set our children in good stead for the shock which we all experienced.

However, enough time has passed since the pandemic began, and school and life is now normal enough to accurately see the problems which have been caused to children’s resilience, allowing us to plan a route through to an anti-fragile future.

Some things we can do are easy…

We can get our children outside in the rain and the snow – let them experience the elements. We can give them time to play without adults dictating the structure and the game – as it is these interactions which, particularly young children, have missed, and which are so vital in learning how to socialise and manage complex, fast moving emotions.

We can let them fall over and help them when they fall out – co-constructing the bridge-building, but not taking all the messy social navigation away from them. We can provide extra-curricular experiences which model disappointment and success in a safe environment.

We can provide time to discuss emotions.

We can tell our children that these emotions are normal.

Because, just like the toddler falling off their scooter and looking at the parent for a reaction before deciding if they should be crying, we – the adults – must model resilience to emotional shocks and normalise childhood adversity.

We need a resilience curriculum

Having re-established all the usual childhood experiences which our schools have always provided, we then need to think seriously about how we will teach resilience in a determined and structured way.

Our children, to a greater or lesser extent, have all experienced an interruption in their social and emotional development, and resuming normal service and hoping for the best (or worst still pandering to fragility and making it the norm), will doubtless store up huge problems for our children’s longer-term mental health and resilience.

We need a planned ‘catch-up’ curriculum for resilience, which understands the nature of this social and emotional interruption and actively fills the developmental gaps with tools and techniques which will allow our children to flourish.

This is currently where we are at Blackhorse Primary. We know the problem; we know the need for a structured response, but we don’t know what that structured response should be. However, meeting with the ‘Doctor of Happiness’, Andy Cope (an actual Doctor of Happiness) this week, we think we have a seed of an approach, based around his successful ‘Art of Brilliance’ CPD for children and staff. Our plan is to work this up to a fully-formed curriculum strategy.

We need to give our parents tools and confidence

We have noticed that some of our parents have lost confidence in themselves and their ability to parent, questioning themselves over every little decision or judgement.

In some case, this has led to a warping of the parent/ child relationship, where it is no longer clear that the parents’ prime job (beyond providing unconditional love and support) is also to parent – to be the provider and enforcer of rules and routines and structure and normality.

The pandemic threw a lot of family relationships up in the air and put them through a strange, dream-like existence. Some parents have found it difficult to return to a state of balance and normality, so we are planning to include a structured programme of support to help the parents regain their sense of resilience and fortitude.

Even better, we plan to teach the children first, then use the children to teach the parents, so that the language of hope and positivity at school and home is the same.

We need a curriculum of hope.

Our young people are bombarded on all sides by information telling them that if the pandemic doesn’t get them, then war, famine or climate change will. A recent poll showed that more than half of under 18’s felt the world was getting worse, not better.

This is a hugely concerning statistic and must be addressed by us as educators by creating a more hopeful narrative which acknowledges the very real challenges which the world faces, but gives children the agency to believe that they can (and will) make their world a better place.

Humans have a natural ‘negativity bias’ – we are pre-wired to assume the worst as an evolutionary necessity. However, human ingenuity has overcome every challenge faced by humanity to date, and we must instil in our children the firm belief that they are powerful enough to change the world.

When we teach about climate change, or of the many horrors facing our world, we must teach it from a position of agency and action. We must instil in our children that they have the power to change the world.

Indeed, as part of our ‘Curious Cities’ curriculum, one enquiry asked our children ‘How do you change the world?’. As well as tackling climate change, it also set off a chain reaction of activism – with children choosing to pick up rubbish around the local area whenever they came across it.

A tiny act, but a powerful one – teaching them that they can shape their environment for the better.

Post-pandemic, we must actively teach hope and activism.

Because happiness lies in purpose.

And if we can make our children resilient to challenges…

If we can make them hopeful about their futures, connected to, and invested in societies success…

Then, and only then, can we build a generation of children who are not just up to the task, but revel in it.

And if we don’t?

Well… I believe that, as George Bernard Shaw, said: if we don’t teach resilience and hope, and a mighty purpose in life… then we risk a generation which has the latter by default.

And that disaster would eclipse us all.