A brand new study suggests that a school’s academic emphasis can play a significant role in a young child and adolescent’s mental health.
Researchers from University College in London and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia conducted a longitudinal study that found that children in schools with a heavier bent on performance-related goals related to peers were more likely to experience symptoms of depression than in schools with a heavier bent on mastery-approach goals.
This disparity showed up in grades as early as kindergarten.
Now, you might be asking – what’s the difference between performance and mastery-approach goals?
Dr. Liji Thomas helpfully explains at News Medical.
Performance-approach goals refer to the desire to outperform peers, and performance-achievement goals refer to the desire to avoid under-performing peers.
Meanwhile, mastery-approach goals are quite different. This is when a student doesn’t measure his or her success based on their test scores or their peers’, but instead on the sheer desire to learn and develop competence in a subject.
Get the difference? When kids are focused on their academic success, as defined by relation to their peers’ success (either overperforming or underperforming), they’re more likely to develop symptoms of depression.
The takeaway is that the stress of doing well out of either a drive “to be better” or a fear of “doing worse” leads to the kind of pressure that can cast a dark shadow over a life (think of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying: “comparison is the thief of joy”).
Meanwhile, when students adopt a mastery-approach mindset, they’re less likely to experience that dark shadow.
In other words, Billy is probably more depressed if he’s driven by how well he’s doing in relation to peers, rather than how well he’s actually learning the subject.
Now here’s something you’re probably already thinking — a child’s basic personality might play a role in whether he or she is unconsciously adopting peer-focused goals versus a mastery approach.
Probably!
And if genetics were the sole cause of this disparity, how much could a school really do to help?
It turns out – quite a bit. Which suggests that this isn’t a genetics-only thing.
Numerous studies have shown that kids in schools that emphasize mastery over performance are less anxious, less depressed, more confident, and more active.
In other words, it could be a nature and nurture thing (surprise, surprise) — an interplay between how a school develops and implements a culture, and a child’s basic personality.
In other words, if a school is constantly testing (as is common in the United States these days), it’s easy to see how that could impose significant distress on a child whose basic nature is peer-based, and also push more pliable kids into that camp, as well.
Meanwhile, if a school makes the conscious decision that it’s going to emphasize mastery over performance as the achievement goal, then that might relieve undue pressure on everybody.
Parents understandably want to give their children the best education possible, but kids both perform and feel best at schools that focus more on mastery and less on performance-related goals.
That rings true, personally, and anecdotally.
The “best schools” with the “WOW” test scores, including those “great” kindergartens that everyone wants their kids in, are often little pressure cookers, where kids might come home with great test scores, but also declining mental health.
Kids, remember, are human beings.
Adults are human beings.
Give an adult a pressure-cooker job and maybe they’ll do well, but how many suffer burnout and overwhelming depression and anxiety?
The same, according to this study, seems to go for kids in grades as young as kindergarten.
Of course, the question for administrators is how to orient a school culture to emphasize mastery over peer performance, and that’s another issue.
But studies like this are good reminders that schools can help reduce the risk of students’ developing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and also that parents should look at more than a school’s test scores as a criteria for judging how good an education their kids will get.
If you’re depressed, or struggle with any aspect of mental health…
For readers from the United States….
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.
[Photo: Francois Truffant’s masterpiece, Les quatre cents coups]
