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I am a mother of four and a clinical child therapist in the community. I run an Anxiety and OCD center, designed for all ages, but mostly serving school-aged children with nascent mental health struggles. After COVID, the fires, and the Table Mesa shooting, our kiddos reacted to this trifecta of terrifying experiences with maladaptive coping strategies. Young people today have more compulsions, worry cycles, and self-destructive habits than I have ever seen before,
The local school district, while well-meaning, has perpetuated this sense of fear by having drill after drill preparing today’s kids for all the dangers of our modern world.
In our community, besides the usual bear and mountain lion lock-ins, our kids also practice monthly for different forms of active shooters and extreme weather. My clients have stories of teachers not being warned of drills and barricading their classrooms in terror, preparing to fight.
Some students and teachers get desensitized by so much practice for danger. In my OCD therapy world, exposure to a fear stimulus leads to apathy (as I say to my clients while practicing phobia triggers: “You can’t be bored and scared at the same time”).
My clients, who tend towards compulsions that reinforce their fears, have not gotten habituated to the danger. The kids that come to the center are often the first to avoid and leave school when anything feels awry.
Last year, an instagram post made by a student claiming the intent to kill his classmates went viral at my son’s school, Fairview High School. 90% of the students were gone within a couple hours. The teachers taught classes to a smattering of kids for the rest of the day, the few who trusted the principal’s assurance that the school was safe. The rest of that afternoon, our center fielded the remnants of the students’ panic. As therapists, we are asked to hold space for the emotional dysregulation that comes from students not feeling protected by their adults.
The CDC data on the prevalence of pediatric anxiety disorders holds that the rate is only 9.4% based on a study from 2016-2019 – these statistics cannot be true anymore. I would argue, anecdotally, that childhood anxiety levels have skyrocketed.
Yes we need drills. But do we need to involve the children? I believe that we are teaching our kids that they are inherently unsafe. Over and over again.
My 16 year old son, whose best friend lost his house in the local fires, and who currently works at the grocery store where the mass shooting occurred, was one the few students who stayed at school after the threats. He has a very pragmatic and sometimes fatalistic stance on danger which he credits to his autistic brain. However, he wore a mask to school on that day, as he did every day for over a year longer than his classmates.
Anxiety is not logical. Anxiety can look like a kid sitting in a near empty classroom wearing a mask, wondering why everyone else fled. Anxiety can be a panic attack during a lockdown drill that others view as an annoying chore.
But mostly, anxiety presents as an inherent and subtle unease that something horrible could happen, or worse, will happen someday.
Our children do not need schools reminding them constantly of the dangers that they face. They are already very, very afraid. As adults, we need to find more ways to protect them without involving them. I wonder, how can we stop reinforcing their core beliefs that they are defenseless in their own classroom?
