Episode Summary

In this episode, I look beneath some of the student behavior we discussed in the previous episode and explore the growing emotional and mental health needs teachers are seeing in classrooms. After 24 years in education, I’ve noticed more anxiety, emotional dysregulation, school avoidance, shutdowns, anger, absences, and students needing significant adult support simply to navigate the school day.

I also talk about the limits of a teacher’s role. Teachers can notice, listen, build relationships, create predictable classrooms, document concerns, communicate with families, and connect students with appropriate support. But teachers are not therapists, and recognizing that a child needs expertise beyond what one classroom teacher can provide is not abandoning that student.

I reflect on the emotional weight teachers sometimes carry after hearing things they cannot unhear. A difficult conversation or crisis can happen, and then the bell rings and another class walks in. Students need teams of caring adults—families, teachers, counselors, administrators, mental health professionals, coaches, paraprofessionals, and others—not one heroic teacher expected to solve everything.

Ultimately, I believe students are not broken any more than teachers are broken. Young people can struggle deeply and still have tremendous potential. Teachers can become an important lifeline, but we do not have to become the entire life raft. We can care deeply, notice students, connect them with help, and continue believing in what they can become without believing we have to carry everything alone.

Show Notes

• Growing student mental health needs
• What mental health struggles can look like in class
• Teachers are teachers, not therapists
• When student needs outgrow school capacity
• The emotional weight teachers carry
• Why students need a team, not a hero
• Students are not broken
• Being a lifeline without becoming the entire life raft

Key Takeaways

• Mental health struggles do not always look obvious in the classroom.
• Understanding behavior does not mean excusing harmful behavior.
• Teachers can notice and connect students with help without becoming clinicians.
• Student mental health support must extend beyond one classroom teacher.
• Teachers experience real emotional labor when students share difficult things.
• Students need networks of caring adults rather than one heroic educator.
• Teachers can care deeply without carrying everything alone.

This is Mr. Funky Teacher with BeAFunkyTeacher.com. I'm coming to you with another Be a Funky Teacher podcast.

Welcome back, everyone.

Today's episode is called The Student Mental Health Crisis.

I've been teaching for 24 years now.

This is 24 years in a classroom this year.

And when you've been doing this work for that long, you notice changes.

Some changes happen slowly.

You don't necessarily recognize them from one school year to the next.

But then you look back over five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and you realize that something is different.

One of the differences that I've noticed is the emotional weight some of our students seem to be carrying.

I see more anxiety.

I see students having difficulty regulating emotions.

I see students struggling to cope when something doesn't go the way they expected.

I see anger.

Loneliness.

School avoidance.

More absences.

I see students shutting down.

More students putting their heads down and refusing to work.

And students who sometimes seem to need more adult support simply to navigate the school day.

Now, that's not every student.

And I want to be very careful about painting an entire generation of young people with one brush.

There are incredibly resilient kids in our schools.

But something is happening.

And when schools across the country are talking about increasing mental health and emotional needs in their classrooms, I think it's worth paying attention to.

Especially because this connects directly to what we talked about in our last weekday episode.

We talked about student behavior.

Today, I want to go underneath some of that behavior.

Not to excuse it.

Not to diagnose it.

But to understand another part of the changing reality of teaching.

Well, before we get into it, let's ground ourselves in gratitude.

Here are three things that I'm thankful for.

The first thing that I'm thankful for is adults that students trust enough to talk to.

There's something powerful about a young person deciding:

"Hey, I think I can talk to this person about what's going on."

Maybe that's a teacher.

Or a counselor.

A coach.

A paraprofessional.

A parent.

A grandparent.

An auntie.

Sometimes one conversation becomes the first step toward a child receiving the support that they need.

I'm thankful for adults who are willing to listen and who also understand when it's time to bring somebody else into that conversation.

The second thing that I'm thankful for is watching young people come through difficult seasons.

If you've taught long enough, you've probably watched students go through periods where they really struggle.

And there's something incredibly encouraging about watching a young person begin finding their footing again.

Maybe they start participating.

Maybe they see their confidence return.

Maybe they reconnect with people.

Maybe they begin believing in themselves again.

Those moments remind me that a difficult season doesn't have to become someone's entire story.

The third thing that I'm thankful for is people who help teachers carry difficult things.

Teachers need people too.

Sometimes it's another teacher.

Sometimes it's a spouse.

A friend.

A counselor.

An administrator.

A mentor.

There are things educators hear and experience that stay with us.

I'm thankful for the people who give teachers a place to process those moments and remind us that we don't have to carry everything by ourselves.

So the topic, once again, is The Student Mental Health Crisis.

And here's the question I want to wrestle with today:

If more students are arriving at school with significant emotional and mental health needs, what is the teacher's role?

And just as importantly:

Where are the limits of that role?

Because teachers matter tremendously in this conversation.

But if we're serious about helping young people, we also have to be honest about what teachers can and cannot reasonably provide.

So let's get into it.

Teachers are seeing more students struggle.

I want to begin simply with what I've observed.

I've been teaching over 20 years, and the emotional needs coming into classrooms feel different than they did when I started.

Again, I'm not suggesting that students over 20 years ago didn't experience anxiety.

Of course they did.

Kids experienced trauma.

Families struggled.

Children had difficult home lives.

Mental health challenges existed over 20 years ago.

But the frequency and intensity of what educators are navigating today just feels different.

More students seem to struggle with emotional regulation.

More students appear overwhelmed by relatively small setbacks.

Some students shut down completely.

Some become angry.

Some avoid school.

Some miss significant amounts of school.

Some need frequent reassurance from adults.

And sometimes learning becomes almost secondary because the student is simply trying to get through whatever they are experiencing emotionally.

That changes teaching.

Because you can have the greatest lesson in the world.

But if a child is overwhelmed emotionally, getting them to engage with that lesson may be incredibly difficult.

So when we talk about changes in education, we can't only talk about curriculum.

We have to talk about the children walking into our classrooms.

Mental health doesn't always look like mental health.

This is where our last episode about student behavior connects to today's conversation.

Mental health struggles don't always announce themselves clearly.

A student usually doesn't walk into your classroom and say:

"Mr. Funky Teacher, I'm experiencing significant anxiety today, and I'm having difficulty regulating my emotions."

Right?

They're not doing that.

Sometimes it looks completely different.

It can look like:

"I don't care."

"I'm not doing this."

"Leave me alone."

It can look like a head down on a desk.

It can look like refusing an assignment.

Or it can look like anger.

Argument.

Avoidance.

Constant trips out of the classroom.

Missing school.

Withdrawal.

Actually withdrawing from friends.

Or suddenly reacting intensely to something that seems relatively small.

So now here's where we have to maintain the balance from our previous conversation.

Understanding what's underneath behavior doesn't mean every behavior becomes acceptable.

If a student hurts somebody, disrupts learning, or behaves inappropriately, we still have to address that.

But understanding gives us another question to ask.

Instead of only:

"How do I stop this behavior?"

Maybe we also ask:

"What might be happening underneath this behavior?"

See, those two questions can exist together.

They should exist together.

And sometimes that second question changes how we respond as educators.

There probably isn't one reason kids are struggling.

It's tempting to find one explanation.

COVID.

Phones.

Social media.

Parenting.

Technology.

Social pressures.

And depending on who you're listening to, somebody will probably tell you that they've discovered the one thing responsible for everything.

I don't think it's that simple.

COVID disrupted children's lives.

For some students, that disruption happened during incredibly important developmental years.

Technology has changed childhood.

Social media has changed how young people interact with each other.

Kids can compare themselves to hundreds or even thousands of other people before they've even eaten breakfast.

Some children have less unstructured play.

Some families are experiencing tremendous stress.

Some students are dealing with trauma.

Some are dealing with instability.

And some young people are simply wired differently and need different types of support.

There are probably dozens of factors interacting with one another.

That's where I'm cautious about pretending I know exactly why we're seeing what we're seeing.

I'm a teacher.

I'm observing what's happening in classrooms.

And I think sometimes that's an important starting point.

We don't have to know every cause before we acknowledge that something has changed.

Teachers are teachers, not therapists.

I want to be very clear about my perspective in this episode.

I'm not a mental health therapist.

I'm a teacher.

I'm a veteran educator with over 20 years of experience.

I've received training.

I've worked with counselors and other professionals.

I've supported students through some incredibly difficult situations.

But experience doesn't turn me into a clinician.

And teachers shouldn't pretend they are medical clinicians.

Our role is different.

Teachers can notice.

We can listen.

We can create safe and predictable classrooms.

We can build relationships.

We can teach students strategies for handling frustration and regulating emotions.

We can document concerns.

We can communicate with families and appropriate school personnel.

And sometimes one of the most important things we can do is connect a student with someone who possesses expertise that we don't.

There's strength in knowing the limits of your professional role.

Because saying:

"This child needs more support than I can provide by myself."

Isn't abandoning that child.

It may be one of the most responsible things we can do for them.

The need may be outgrowing the system's capacity.

Here's where this becomes much bigger than the individual classroom teacher.

What happens when student needs increase faster than our ability to respond to them?

Schools have counselors.

Some have psychologists.

Social workers.

Behavior specialists.

Community partnerships.

Mental health professionals.

And there are some tremendous people doing that work.

But the need can be enormous.

And outside the school system, families can also struggle to access mental health services.

There can be shortages of providers.

Waiting lists.

Financial barriers.

Transportation issues.

Geographic barriers.

All kinds of challenges.

And eventually, some of that unmet need arrives at school.

Because school is one of the places where children consistently show up.

Teachers see students day after day.

Sometimes we notice changes before anybody else does.

That makes schools incredibly important.

But here's the distinction.

Identifying a need is not the same as having the capacity to meet the entire need.

Schools can be part of the solution.

They should be part of the solution.

But schools cannot become the entire mental health system for children.

And one classroom teacher certainly can't.

Teachers hear things they can't unhear.

This is one of the pieces of teaching that people outside of the profession may not completely understand.

Sometimes students tell us things.

Sometimes families tell us things.

Sometimes counselors or administrators need to make us aware of things.

And once you know something about a child's life, you can't unknow it.

Over 20 years, I've encountered students dealing with some incredibly serious things.

I've known situations involving significant trauma.

I've known situations involving serious mental health crises.

I've encountered situations where a young person attempted to take their own life.

And I'm telling you, that affects you as a teacher.

Because that's somebody's child.

But they're also your student.

You see them every day.

You've talked with them.

You've laughed with them.

You've encouraged them.

You've watched them grow.

And when you discover that a young person you've been teaching is hurting that deeply, you don't just shrug your shoulders and move on.

Great teachers care.

That's part of what makes this profession beautiful.

But caring also means sometimes hearing things that are incredibly difficult to carry.

And then the bell rings.

This is something I've experienced that I think many teachers will immediately understand.

You can have an incredibly difficult conversation about a student.

Maybe you've learned something heartbreaking.

Maybe you've been involved in responding to a crisis.

Maybe a child has told you something that you're now required to report.

Maybe you're worried deeply about whether a student is okay.

And then the bell rings.

And 25 kids walk into your classroom.

And you're supposed to teach math.

Or reading.

Or science.

And those students deserve your attention too.

So you take whatever emotion you're experiencing.

You put it somewhere inside yourself.

And you teach.

That's a strange part of this profession.

There isn't always time to process what just happened.

There isn't always an opportunity to sit somewhere quietly for 30 minutes.

Sometimes the next responsibility is waiting immediately.

There are terms connected to some of this.

Secondary trauma.

Compassion fatigue.

And we're going to explore those much more deeply later in this series.

I don't want to get ahead of those conversations today.

But I do want to acknowledge the emotional handoff that teachers make constantly.

Something difficult happens.

And then the bell rings.

That emotional labor is real.

And if we're going to talk honestly about teacher well-being and teacher retention, it belongs in the conversation.

Students need a team, not a hero.

Education loves the heroic teacher story.

One teacher refuses to give up.

One teacher changes everything.

One teacher can save the child.

Those stories can be inspiring.

But I think there's also a danger in them.

Because students shouldn't have to depend on one heroic teacher to save them.

They need a team.

Ideally, that includes family.

Teachers.

Counselors.

Administrators.

Mental health professionals who can be brought in when appropriate.

Coaches.

Paraprofessionals.

Extended family.

Community organizations.

Trusted adults.

Different students need different combinations of those people.

And yes, there are situations where home isn't providing the support a child needs.

Sometimes home itself may be part of what that student is struggling with.

That makes things incredibly difficult.

And in those situations, a teacher may become an especially important, stable adult in that child's life.

But even then, the answer can't be:

"Teacher, you handle everything."

We need systems around children.

Because the strongest support isn't one heroic adult.

It's a network of caring adults working together.

Our students aren't broken either.

The larger focus of this episode series is that teachers are not broken.

But the more I've thought about today's conversation and planned for today's conversation, the more I think there's another message we need to say:

Our students aren't broken either.

A student experiencing anxiety isn't broken.

A child struggling with emotional regulation isn't broken.

A young person who has experienced trauma isn't broken.

A student who needs counseling isn't broken.

A child going through an incredibly difficult season isn't broken.

They're human.

And human beings struggle.

But struggle doesn't erase potential.

That's something I believe deeply as a teacher.

I've spent my career trying to convince young people that they can make a difference.

They can impact their community.

They can change the world.

And changing the world doesn't have to mean becoming famous.

Maybe you become a nurse.

A mechanic.

A teacher.

An electrician.

A parent.

An artist.

A business owner.

Maybe you become the person in your family who changes something for the generation that comes after you.

That's changing the world.

Young people need adults who see beyond the struggle they're experiencing right now.

Adults who can look at them and communicate:

"This is hard, but this isn't the end of your story."

That's hope.

And sometimes hope is one of the greatest things a teacher can give.

Be a lifeline without becoming the entire life raft.

Funky teachers, I want to encourage you to be a lifeline without becoming the entire life raft.

And this brings me to the idea that I want to leave with you today.

You can be incredibly important in a child's life.

You might be the person who notices.

Who listens.

You might be the person who realizes something isn't right.

You might be the person who makes the call that connects that student with help.

You might be the consistent adult who welcomes them back tomorrow.

You might be the person who continues holding high expectations because you still believe they're capable.

You might become a lifeline.

And that's powerful.

But being a lifeline doesn't mean becoming the entire life raft.

You don't have to solve everything happening in that child's life.

You don't have to possess expertise you don't have.

You don't have to personally fix every trauma.

Every family situation.

Every mental health struggle.

Every crisis.

You don't have to fix all of it.

Your job may be to hold one part of the rope.

And somebody else holds another.

A counselor.

A family member.

A therapist.

An administrator.

Another trusted adult.

That's what a support system looks like.

And I think understanding that matters for teacher sustainability.

Because teachers can care deeply without believing that they have to carry everything.

You can be a lifeline for a struggling student without being expected to become the entire life raft.

Well, as I do a reflective close here, I've been doing this work for over 20 years, and I still believe deeply in young people.

I don't look at today's students and see a broken generation.

I see kids.

Kids growing up in a complicated world.

Kids trying to figure themselves out.

Kids learning how to regulate emotions.

Kids experiencing anxiety.

Kids navigating technology and social media in ways my generation never had to navigate at their age.

Kids dealing with family struggles.

Kids experiencing trauma.

Kids who sometimes don't know how to put into words what's happening inside them.

And those kids need adults.

They need people who notice.

Who listen.

They need people who establish boundaries and maintain expectations.

They need people who connect them with appropriate help.

And people who believe in what they can become.

Teachers can absolutely be some of those people.

That's one of the incredible privileges of this profession.

But we cannot do it alone.

And maybe that's one of the larger lessons underneath this entire series.

Teachers are not broken.

And students are not broken.

But sometimes the systems surrounding both of them aren't strong enough for what we're asking them to carry.

That's where the work is.

Building stronger support.

Creating better partnerships.

Making sure teachers have somewhere to turn when a child's needs go beyond what one classroom can provide.

And making sure students have multiple adults around them who are invested in their success.

So here's my challenge today.

Think about the students you work with.

Is there somebody who might need you to notice them a little more closely?

You don't have to diagnose them.

You don't have to fix them.

Maybe you simply check in.

Maybe you listen.

Maybe you connect them with somebody who can provide additional support.

And then remember something else.

You deserve support too.

Because caring for the adults who care for the children isn't separate from caring for children.

It's part of it.

In our next weekday episode, we're going to continue looking at the changing reality of teaching with another conversation that can get uncomfortable.

Parent expectations have changed.

And we're not going into that conversation looking to blame parents.

We're actually going to ask:

What has actually changed?

How have those changes affected teachers?

And most importantly, how can families and educators strengthen the partnership that kids ultimately need?

If you found value in this episode, head over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts and hit me up with a five-star review.

Let me know what you think.

It helps more teachers find this space.

As you go into your day, I want you to remember to inspire greatness in young people.

And don't forget to be a funky teacher.

Bye now.