I recently had a chance to chat with U.K-based psychotherapist Louis Weinstock, who has written a new book about helping children deal with the anxiety, depression, fear, and stress that seem to plague our 21st-century lives. The book, How the World Is Making Our Children Mad and What to Do About It (Penguin, 2022), is full of real-world examples from Weinstock’s 20-year career as a therapist, and he offers practical exercises in every chapter.

Weinstock approaches the questions parents and kids face with compassion, humor, and a sense of deep connection to history, myth, and spiritual practices from a variety of cultures. The book is structured around seven patterns that can be seen all over the world and that “shape our lives in unconscious ways.” The patterns include victimhood, virtual reality (a desire to escape our bodies and live only in our minds), narcissism, scarcity, anesthesia, chaos, and hopelessness. In each case, Weinstock examines the negative “roots” of the pattern and the more positive “fruits” that can turn the pattern into something beautiful and nourishing. So, for example, the root of victimhood is a feeling of helplessness, which can, in the right environments, turn into empowerment and strength. The root of virtual reality is the desire to escape the confines of our bodies, which can, in the right environments, turn into a feeling of being at home in our bodies and in nature.

Weinstock explains that the problematic roots of each pattern always connect to an unloved, uncared-for part of each of us. As he says in the conclusion of How the World Is Making Our Children Mad, “The world is making our children mad because it is short-circuiting our capacity for love. And so the way to help our children is by reclaiming love.”

Here is a short excerpt from my chat with Louis, which has been lightly edited. I asked a few questions inspired by topics that come up often in connection with alternative education models.

Q: Can you tell me a little about your perspective on the movement to encourage “resilience” or “grit” in kids as part of school curricula? In your book you seem to question the value of those approaches.

A: I started questioning the ideas of resilience and grit because I saw the kids who weren’t adapting easily to the dominant systems of education were the ones deemed “unresilient.” These children were being sent to me as a therapist or came to me when I was teaching mindfulness. Essentially, it seemed that the goal of making the kids more resilient was to allow them to keep going through the system . . . and to make sure the schools were doing well in the league tables [evaluations].

I think the concepts of resilience and grit are problematic because they just look at the individual child but completely ignore what’s going on in the environment around the child. I’m not throwing out the idea that we need to help our children be “tough” and expose them to some reasonable risks so they can grow and develop. But from my perspective, if a child is not adapting to a mainstream school, maybe their behaviors and symptoms are actually showing us adults something important that we need to listen to. Rather than trying to put them back in a box they’re uncomfortable in, we need to try to listen to those symptoms and see the intelligence in them. Maybe the children are showing us that something isn’t working in their environment, not that something isn’t working within them.

Q: You talk a lot about making sure children are sensing what’s happening in their bodies when they feel anxious, afraid, depressed. And I know that you believe that putting our bodies back in connection with nature is one key to feeling better and learning better. Tell me a little more about that.

A: Forest schools are quite popular in the UK, just as they are in the United States and Europe, but they are still alternative options, not mainstream. What is surprising to me is how much people still underestimate the impact nature has on our kids’ mental health. I ask parents how often their kids go out into nature, and often they say they do not go outside at all. So, I frequently make that part of a care plan. Research is showing that even 20 minutes a day is all that’s needed to make that connection, and it can be in a city park—there’s no need to seek out a wild forest. Often, time in nature is more effective than ADHD medication.

I think the reason time spent in nature is so good for us is simply because we are part of nature, and a lot of our modern way of living cuts us off from that part of ourselves. I used to have a practice on a houseboat in London and there was nature all around and I could use that during my meetings with clients. Since COVID, I see clients online, but I often give kids and parents a “prescription” to get out in nature and connect.

Q: Is there any particular change you see happening in schools today that you find especially good for kids’ emotional and psychological health and happiness?

I was just thinking and writing about this recently and considering how much things have changed since I was a child. When I was at school, if you were emotionally dysregulated you were sent to the naughty corner or given the slipper. The shoe of one of my classmates was used to smack people right at the front of the classroom. It could not have been more about shaming children, and it was the norm.

But now, my young daughter is learning about “zones of regulation,” a concept that is now a model used in schools around the world. The model uses colors to help children understand and describe the emotional state they are in. For example, yellow means they are feeling silly and funny. Green means they are feeling good and ready to learn. Red, of course, means they are angry, and blue means they are sad. This is such a non-shaming way of talking about feelings, and I think it’s quite positive.

I’d like to thank Louis for the conversation. You can order his book from any bookstore and read his blog here. He is currently working on a new charitable project called Apart of Me, that uses a mobile app and games to help children learn to deal with grief and loss. The most recent addition to that project is an app called Nadiya, specifically for Ukrainian children who have faced the trauma of war.

“At Apart of Me, we use technology only to enhance real-world connection and relationships,” said Louis. “We don’t want the future of kids’ mental health to be them looking at a screen alone in a dark room.”

Shelley Sperry | Sperry Editorial

Guest contributor Peter Hobbs is a cofounder and teacher at Progress School, a relationship-based learning community in Central Austin where work and play nurture whole child development. The school is currently enrolling students five to ten years old and now offers options to attend one or two days per week in addition to its three-to-five-days-per-week program. Progress School is hosting an open house on Saturday, August 9, from 10 a.m. to noon.

I remember cleaning erasers and chalkboards in elementary school. Every student had a turn. You’d have to take the erasers outside. When you clapped them together just right it would make quite a bang. If you got too excited you just might end up with a face full of chalk dust. After you were done with the erasers, you’d go back inside, fill a bucket with water, and soak a big yellow sponge.

It was on a Friday, I think, that the chalkboards would get cleaned, so there was a week’s worth of writing and erasing. With the wet sponge you’d wipe the entire board clean. I remember starting at the top from one end and making columns. Up and down, up and down, up and down, like the Karate Kid. If you weren’t too careful or went too fast you’d lose the sponge and maybe even catch a fingernail on the board. Arghhhhhh!!! Column after column, the chalkboard would become a dark glistening green, only to slowly dry and dissolve into a dull blank board, awaiting another week of spelling words, random sentences, math facts, lists, rules, names, diagrams.

I didn’t know or even imagine back then that I would become a teacher myself someday. Perhaps watching a teacher stand in front of a chalkboard all day wasn’t very inspiring (I can’t even remember her name). Maybe it wasn’t a profession that was really encouraged or sincerely valued, in spite of the lip service paid to the importance of teachers in our society. And yet, I am a teacher. I don’t, however, stand in front of a chalkboard (or a dry-erase board for that matter) all day. I teach at Progress School, where, I like to think, we put a little more “progress” into progressive education.

At Progress School, the entire school is my chalkboard.

Schools have changed since the days when you would see chalkboards in every classroom and the desks were arranged into a uniform grid. Resources have improved in quality, seating arrangements have broken classes into groups or stations, and curricula have identified additional skills and knowledge that are deemed essential for every student’s comprehension. But there is a fundamental difference between change and progress where education is concerned. Change is often static and superficial. Progress is living and evolving. Teachers can change the design of a classroom (provided they have the permission of the administration), but how does education progress beyond what we expect from a school? How could education evolve if teachers and schools had the freedom to live the innovation they aspire to create?

At Progress School I have the freedom to teach because our students have the freedom to learn. We have designed our school so as to allow children to learn wherever, however, and whenever their innate desire to learn takes them. What our students find is that you don’t just go to school to learn some stuff like math and how to read and spell; you learn how to learn. Moreover, you learn that reading, writing, and arithmetic are only as important as the relationships in your life that allow you to share and use the knowledge you gain.

When you go to Progress School, you don’t learn just from teachers, but from everyone around you. You don’t just learn in class and have fun at recess; you learn that learning happens everywhere and all the time (yes, even when you’re playing):

At Progress School learning happens when you’re snuggled up with a teacher on the couch with a lap full of books you chose to be read (even if it’s the same one three times in a row).
Learning happens when you can go outside whenever you want (except when there’s lightning!), because you just have to run, and you find a 100-foot-long ruler chalked on the basketball court, and you run 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, 100 feet five times, which means you ran 500 feet! Water break!
Learning happens when you want to build a plane in the woodshop, but first you need the A encyclopedia for airplane, and then you need to choose what kind of plane you want to build, and then you find a piece of wood, and then you measure how long the wings should be, and then you get a ruler and draw a line, and then you get a saw, and then you hear “Capture the Flag! Who wants to play Capture the Flag?” and then maybe you work more later, or tomorrow, or next week.
Learning happens when you’re inside helping me measure vinegar for a science experiment this afternoon and you decide to write signs to put up all over the school inviting everyone else to come if they want to come, at what time, and how do you spell today?
Learning happens when you and a friend are bored and decide to get out a puzzle and put it together, but when there’s one last piece, you both want to finish the puzzle, and you start to argue, and it’s not fair, and—hey, why don’t we do another puzzle and I can put the last piece in for that one? Yeah!

And all this could happen in a single hour of a single day at Progress School. Because our students have the freedom to move throughout the school and choose what activities or projects they want to participate in or initiate on their own, I am teaching all the time.

When I have prepared a game about nouns and maybe just one or maybe six students give it a try, I am teaching—even when we turn the game into noun tag and have to go outside.
When I’ve started a project about sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks and one student asks if he can trace the labels I’ve written in marker and another wants to weigh the different groups to see which is heaviest, I am teaching.
When I am pushing a student on the swing and we’re talking about why Halloween is the best holiday ever, I am teaching.
When I am helping a student design his own board game and we count the spaces for landing on a square that doubles your roll, I am teaching.
When a little girl is curled up in a ball crying because her friend said her picture was dumb and I quietly sit next to her and ask if she would like to help me draw a really dumb picture (maybe a dog wearing a tutu and flying a kite underwater while a shark is playing the piano) and she slowly lifts her head, sniffs, and smiles, I am teaching.

Teaching is challenging in any school. As a teacher at Progress School, the challenge for me isn’t getting my students to complete a worksheet, turn in their homework on time, or achieve a specific learning outcome during a compulsory activity. My challenge—my lesson, in fact—is finding learning in every moment of a child’s day, whether it be in a book, with a pencil on paper, during a game, from a conflict or a joke, in a box with a fox, or with a friend or a teacher.

My school is my chalkboard. Every day we start with a clean, blank surface and end with a work of art.

Peter Hobbs