By Clayton Westerbeck, Greenville Middle School Assistant Principal grades 5-8 |
In this day and age, the social/emotional well-being of students couldn’t be more influential in their success. Factor in that students (depending on their age) have minimal life experience and coping skills. As adults, we have experience with emotional distress and social failures as well as successes. Knowing what it feels like to fail is an important social, emotional and life skill. Sometimes, adults who have children or even teach children forget what it’s like to be in those shoes with limited experience and skills to deal with the stress of the landscape, so the expectations become too lofty.
So, what does it mean to be a teen or pre-teen in today’s world? Well, this means you have experienced very little life experiences except for the shutdown that COVID provided and that by itself is a huge impediment of your development and growth by limiting social interactions and thus leading to a delay in your social/emotional development. This epic event occurred when you have only been alive for 10-17 years. This is not exactly an amount of time to become an expert at handling social experiences that potentially go south, and decisions are made out of emotion. We are starting to see the motivation of students return to the school environment. Socially and emotionally, this created a gap in development due to the separation of peers and the rigor of the school environment which teaches schedule, self-control, and social norms.
Contrary to opinion, schools are more than just academic institutions. They are places where students fraternize and socialize. Students place most of their value on how they are viewed by their peers. Some students allow this to dictate their decisions in a given school day. Sometimes, this causes apathy with grades and negative behaviors to occur. An example of this would be showing off to your friends or making fun of another student because that’s what your friend finds funny. this type of behavior is obviously negative. Asking for help is another struggle that is influenced by a student’s Social/Emotional well-being. On the other side of this coin, when a group encourages each other to do well and supports each other, good things occur.
Students, on the whole, struggle to self-advocate or ask for help. Most of the time asking for help occurs in front of their classmates and this is intimidating and embarrassing. So, they will “gut it out” and keep their head down so as to not make themselves the center of the attention. We as professionals and as parents must teach our young people how to communicate effectively and read the landscape of their world in order to develop coping skills for what life throws at them. For us “adults” a “B’ on a test may seem trivial now, but in the moment at that age, it is emotionally significant or getting in trouble in school and getting that phone call home to mom or dad and knowing you’re in hot water when you get home. Another example is when students ostracize each other from social groups, this can be devastating when a student feels like they lost their friend group which in reality is their social/emotional support group. The concept of being kind and treating people the way you want to be treated must be coached as well as the concept of asking for help, whether it is academic or social/emotional assistance. Sometimes, just putting those “emotional bricks” down allows the student to feel better and reset their day.
In short, students are human beings with limited life experience and in the big picture they need supported, held accountable and coached up to the appropriateness of how to respond to the ever-changing world. Their social/emotional well-being dictates how they perform in and out of school as well as their potential growth as people.