Overview
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Even in good times, childhood and adolescence are difficult periods, but recently the stress of being young has grown into a global mental health crisis among children and adolescents. Over the past three years, the Covid-19 pandemic has been particularly rough on the young, escalating the ongoing mental health crisis among young people. Consequently, within the first year of the pandemic, a national emergency was declared for children and adolescents’ mental health.
Unlike physical ailments, childhood mental health problems are more likely to go untreated and continue into adulthood. With our children in crisis and their future clouded by uncertainty, we need bold leadership: policymakers who will legislate initiatives to protect and enhance the mental health of our young. Foremost among these initiatives is a mandate for school-based exercise training.
A school-based exercise mandate is justified by the growing body of evidence showing the mental health of children and adolescents improves with physical activity. Even in clinical and healthy adult populations, exercise effectively treats anxiety and depression; develops greater self-esteem and coping self-efficacy under stress. The ability of exercise to develop children’s belief in their ability to successfully cope with and effectively perform under stress (i.e., self-efficacy) warrants a policy mandating school-based exercise programs.
We all know the demands life puts on us, but none of us are born with the knowledge of how to cope with and function effectively under the stress of life. Therefore, as a society, we are obligated to provide our children with lifetime tools to maximize the enhancement benefits of stress and “inoculate” them against its deleterious effects.
Whether it is exercise or some other daunting task, a caring environment is essential to teaching children how to maximize the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of stress. Regardless of race or socioeconomic status, all children need to know that they are cared for by their parents, teachers, and other adults in their lives. Genuine caring is how adults earn the trust of children, and it is what makes children so eager to learn from and imitate the adults teaching them.
Children at play often imagine themselves as superheroes or some other superior power pitted against make-believe forces in a home environment that is safe. However, the environment outside the home is not always safe and the potential dangers are real. The real-world stress of school-based formal exercise training (FET) provides a safe, logical transition from the make-believe stress children confront when playing.
Play reveals children’s aspirations to become more than just a child. The rapture that seizes children when enthralled in play reflexively compels them, as it does with artists and athletes, to boldly transform emotions into actions. Under the spell of playing, the line between make-believe and real is obliterated as children become heroic, beautiful, sublime creatures idealized in their imagination.
Although children will acknowledge they are “only playing” when some adult rudely breaks the spell, the seriousness of play is never broken. On the contrary, the serious nature of play, in all its emotional, aspirational, and idealized aspects, must endure as it primes children to confront the stress of real-world forces. And it is the caring of an exercise specialist that safely guides children in their quest to become the meaningful force they playfully imagine themselves to be.
FET safely prepares children to leave the make-believe world of pretend forces and learn how to confront forces like gravity, the stress of life, or other real-world forces. That is why the climate in which children learn how to contend with these forces should be a continuation of the safe and caring home environment you, as parents, provide for your children. A well-trained exercise instructor will be sensitive to children’s usual fears and self-doubts and help children develop the emotional and cognitive skills to cope with self-defeating thoughts and focus on the task of mastering skills.
It is the expression of caring that reassures your children the instructor is concerned about their well-being. Educators who create a caring/task-involved (C/TI) climate nurture and strengthen the self-efficacy of children confronting the stress associated with learning how to perform exercise and sports skills. Additionally, as instructors emphasize and reward effort and personal improvement (e.g., skill mastery) in this caring environment, they cultivate a desire to learn that is intrinsically motivated.
The development of intrinsic motivation also gets a boost when the instructor directs the focus of children on learning from mistakes (versus shaming), thereby compelling them to keep trying rather than give up. Moreover, by cultivating a fair and cooperative C/TI exercise environment, children help each other to learn from their mistakes, eliciting more positive interpersonal relations.
Learning to successfully apply these coping skills to stressful situations outside the controlled exercise setting (like taking a test) is part of the stress-inoculating effect of FET. In and outside the exercise setting, these coping skills help children develop a sense of ownership as they increasingly experience success as a product of their efforts to learn and master skills that were initially difficult. Moreover, children become more empowered with each positive experience that results from their striving.
The power of caring has not been lost on marketers. Inundating children with more than 40,000 commercials annually, marketers use popular cartoon entertainment characters to combine caring, children’s play fantasies, and false promises of pleasure, fun, happiness, athletic ability, and instant gratification to teach children to be consumers.
However, commercial caring does not build self-esteem and self-efficacy but rather conceals the marketing strategy of making children feel like complete losers without the product being advertised. Instead of teaching coping skills, commercials teach children the nag factor despite the strain it will likely place on parent-children relationships.
Whereas FET empowers children, the deceptive, false promises of commercial caring tend to make children powerless. By the time children become adolescents, they are aware of being deceived by marketers, accept it, and feel they cannot do anything about it. This sense of powerlessness is characteristic of the mental health problems children and adolescents are experiencing globally.
In a time when children and adolescent mental health has gone from a crisis to a national emergency, it reasons policymakers would capitalize on the mental health benefits of exercise and mandate school-based FET. Unfortunately, however, policymakers are tending to more important matters, leaving parents on their own to protect and promote the health rights of their children. So what can parents do? Here are some suggestions:
Children will learn to care about their health and the health of others when they learn society’s leaders are united with parents and teachers in caring about their well-being.
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