A major theme of my work over the past few years has been a push back to the efforts to accelerate children to become adults. This is an extremely challenging and nuanced conversation. On the one hand, we know children are typically anxious to get older and become adults. We foster some of that with conversations about “changing the world” and becoming “future-ready”. The expectations we’ve placed on children, I believe are contributing factors to the increase in anxiety and stress among young people. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to prepare students to become healthy, contributing adults. But I think we might be leaning too far in one direction at the cost of them losing out on what it means to be a kid.

Not every child gets the full experience and not everyone agrees on what the childhood experience should be. However, I think it’s pretty universal that these formative years need to be full of wonder, innocence, exploration and a gradual increase in responsibility. So many factors determine how much each of these tenets is preserved, many of which schools and even parents have little control. Today’s world is a constant barrage of … Read the rest