Several years ago, the psychiatrist Sally Satel and her co-author Christina Sommers published the intriguing volume "One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance" (St. Martin's Press, 2005). Attacking what they saw as a potentially harmful wave of concern with minor child mental health problems, Sommers and Satel proposed that the "therapeutic" and "helpful" attitudes of educators were in fact interfering with the normal development of children's independence and mastery.
In the first chapter of "One Nation" Sommers and Satel examined what they called "the myth of the fragile child", and argued against the value of schools' concerns with children's self-esteem. Pointing out the emphasis on this issue, and the resulting micromanagement of any activity that might make a child feel less than superior, these authors focused on the decades-old conviction of the American educational system that high self-esteem actually causes academic success, rather than in some cases being its result and in other cases not even being correlated. This conviction seems to have produced a belief that raising self-esteem will create academic achievement without the need to go through difficult processes like teaching and learning, and current educational problems may be connected with this belief. Obviously, Sommers and Satel found making this argument somewhat easier than shooting fish in a barrel, although their attempts to bolster it by anecdotes about a mean baseball coach whom everyone loved made the whole thing seem a bit questionable.
It's always fun to erect a straw man and punch it to pieces, of course, but maybe this isn't the best approach when we're dealing with serious concerns about the education of the next generation. Instead, let's try looking at these issues in more detail.
Is it indeed a myth to claim that children in general are fragile beings whose self-esteem needs constant support? Yes, of course that would be a mistaken statement. Most children are rather resilient, and bounce back from everyday disappointments and distressing experiences. As for their self-esteem, years of research on this topic have shown the difficulty of making any across-the-board statement about the advantages or disadvantages of high self-esteem as measured by questionnaires. The most basic understanding of research methods tells us that the correlation of two measures (like self-esteem and academic success) does not necessarily mean that one of them causes the other; studies of self-esteem and educational or other achievements are almost always correlational studies. If it turned out that high self-esteem really could be shown to cause academic achievement, we would still have to ask whether anything adults do can in the short term make a meaningful difference to children's self-esteem.
Well, then. Would it also be an appeal to a myth if we said that some children are fragile beings? What if we said that some children really do need some extra buffering from the impact of the environment before they can do their best in school? These statements are much less mythical, but unfortunately it's all too easy to think that what is untrue of ALL children is also untrue of SOME children.
It's clear that children are different in their degree of resilience. For reasons that are not completely clear, some are less able than others to bounce back from difficult experiences or even from everyday problems. And even resilient children have their limits, so that experiences of poverty, domestic or community violence, illness, injury, maltreatment, and so on can soon add up and affect abilities at school and in social settings. Without being "fragile" in the sense of vulnerability to every difficulty, then, some children are relatively ready to be disturbed in their developmental trajectory, and some of them are also in life situations where disturbing events are likely to occur.
Let's think about that group of children and consider how schools usually respond to their vulnerability. One of the most helpful things these children could find in the school setting is a consistent, predictable situation, with adults who are familiar and know the children well. Such a school experience can buffer some of the effects of a chaotic home and community. But, regrettably, it's not very likely that children in difficult life situations will get such support at school. For one thing, schools in disorganized, violent communities often have difficulty keeping teachers. Children in the early grades may experience several different teachers, teachers' aides, and substitutes in the course of a school year, and little effort is made to help either adults or children adjust to these changes. Children are expected just to soldier on in the face of unpredictability, no matter how much they would benefit from a consistent school experience with familiar adults. Not only do school administrations fail to provide experiences that would help vulnerable children-- they do not even seem to recognize that this is a problem.
Now, another problem that can affect millions of American schoolchildren: the impact of divorce. What happens when parents divorce, and children's lives become unpredictably and uncontrollably changed? Usually, divorce means that the home must be sold, or a large apartment given up. This means moving to another residence-- and another residence is likely to mean another school district. The school district, in most cases, determines what school the child may go to, although it may be that if the family can afford to pay tuition, the child may attend a school in another district. This situation means that having lost the familiar family organization, and having had to move to a new home, the confused and distressed child must now enter an unfamiliar school, with new teachers and classmates. Because of our national system of local options on curricula, even the schoolwork may be unlike what the child had recently been studying.
Schools could offer help to children in these difficult positions. They could permit children to finish a school year at a familiar school, and they could make a point of offering guidance to children transferring to a new school. But most school districts do not provide assistance for children who, if not exactly "fragile", are in a vulnerable position. Would doing so be "overprotective"? Excuse me if I ask never to hear that word again! There is such a thing as being appropriately protective; not all protectiveness is "over". One of the jobs of families is protection or buffering, and when families can't perform this task, the rest of the community needs to. We shouldn't let the errors of the self-esteem industry make us think that children don't need adult help.
