We Should Be Asking What’s Strong, Not What’s Wrong

Nine years ago, my daughter was thirteen, a middle child in middle school, and we’d just moved across the country. I had two seemingly simple wishes for her new school: a teacher who played guitar, and a soccer team she could join. My instinct as both parent and educator was that, to thrive, my girl needed to connect to her sources of competence and joy. Then the effects could radiate out.

Research across decades of human development agrees: to thrive, people need a handful of core ingredients—competency on the way to mastery, autonomy, purpose, joy, and relationship. And honestly, you don’t need a PhD to know this—doesn’t that recipe sound about right?

What I didn’t anticipate was just how hard that would be.

The Focus on Deficits

Right then, a major shift was underway in our culture. The influencers most responsible for the healthy development of children – parents, schools, and, above all, the culture itself – turned away from an emphasis on strengths and competencies in young people. In everything from individual interactions with students to structuring school programming and headcount, schools rejected what I’ll call an “assets-based” approach.

Instead, educational and parenting culture took a heavy negative, or deficits-based turn: in school programming, in family conversations, even in the way we casually asked kids about their day. “Tell me your rose and your thorn” often meant the thorn got the spotlight, and research confirms that negative experiences carry more weight than positive ones. Indeed, in my own teacher training, we were taught that to build a working relationship with a student, a teacher has to have at least five positive interactions to each negative one.

Two elements of this shift were most troubling because they just run so counter to the core “big T “ truths about child development:

First, our child experts forgot the cardinal rule that children are not just small adults. For over a decade, we have been unleashing the full force of adult “therapy culture” on children, focusing persistently on their feelings while neglecting their competencies, programming “social-emotional learning” towards sadness and conflict rather than agency, mastery and possibility, even hosting assemblies on anxiety, depression, and eating disorders for audiences often too young for such content. Rather than creating healthy environments and opportunities for the young self to develop, the culture began constantly asking children to interrogate and evaluate the self, most often from a deficits-based or negative perspective.

Second, we forgot the truth that every teacher knows: nothing – not pedagogy, not curriculum, not experience – matters more than relationship. But rather than investing in the “super-relators” already in their teaching ranks – those adults that students work with every day and who already know or can best find out what a student’s “guitar” is – we sent kids to a faraway office to someone with an advanced degree but no connection to their daily lives, with the implicit message that they might be “broken” rather than just being a kid experiencing difficulty. This is not to diminish the importance of mental health professionals or the real impact they have in certain cases, but the wholesale shift in schools and culture to “therapeutic education for all” took away from - and in some cases worked against – the basic and core mission of promoting healthy whole child development.

In short, both headcount and airtime in schools shifted perceptibly to what was – or, worse, hypothetically could be – wrong with kids rather than what was – or importantly, could be – right with them. Attention and resources might have been creatively deployed to know kids as individuals and help them navigate strengths-based, developmental paths. Instead, we put students’ personal development firmly in the deficits column, where it has stayed for much of the last two decades. Meanwhile, outside of schools, parents relied on self-esteem boosting and safetyism over concrete opportunities for children to explore their natural industry, agency, and competency. For our teenagers, we simply kissed them and sent them off to the college-admissions hunger games. A Turn in the Tide

The good news is that families, schools, and students themselves are hungry for change. Gen Z, in particular, are looking for an educational experience (and college admissions process!) that feels more authentic and self-directed, and less panicked and packaged.

Photo by Hana Fleur on Unsplash

There has been, finally, some pushback against wholesale therapeutic education and a dawning recognition that anxious parenting practices need to change. There are some unlikely heroes emerging. And there are new tools to help students and parents find learning opportunities so students can better explore interests and drive their own educations. Finally, there are people like me working to get us all asking kids “what’s strong in you?” not “what’s wrong with you?” In my daughter’s case, she’ll answer that when she’s not studying bio, she loves picking up her guitar. ✨ What’s your child’s “guitar”? Does their school nurture it? Or even know about it? Hit reply or leave a comment—I read every one.