395: Why Are Many of Today’s Students Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down?

Guests

Why are school children more anxious, aggressive, and shut down than ever before? We first heard answers from educators Tamara Neufeld Strijack and Hannah Beach in April 2020. Hannah takes us up to the present in this update episode.

Tamara is the academic dean of the Neufeld Institute, where she develops and delivers courses and workshops that support parents, teachers, and helping professionals around the world in making sense of children through developmental science. Tamara works as a registered clinical counsellor, parent consultant, and sessional instructor for several universities, where she lectures for the faculties of education and counseling.

Hannah is an award-winning educator, author, and keynote speaker. She was recognized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 as one of five featured change-makers in Canada. She is a Neufeld course facilitator, delivers professional development services across the country, provides emotional health consulting to schools, and speaks at national and international conferences about the power of bringing more feeling and human connection into the classroom.

Together, they are the authors of Reclaiming Our Students: Why Children Are More Anxious, Aggressive, and Shut Down Than Ever―And What We Can Do About It – a book about restoring the emotional well-being of children. As stated in the book’s preface, “Academics can no longer be divorced from matters of the heart.”

Summary

The core takeaway is this: children today are emotionally overloaded and under-supported, and until adults—especially teachers—reestablish themselves as consistent, caring, emotionally safe anchors, academic learning will continue to fall short.

Tamara and Hannah argue that modern cultural shifts—loss of free play, constant entertainment, diminished time with adults, and the dominance of technology—have deprived kids of the natural outlets and relationships they need to process alarm, frustration, and sadness. Schools cannot “fix” behavior through discipline or curriculum tweaks alone. The starting point is restoring emotional connection, safe expression, and relational leadership in the classroom.

Listen for:

1. Why are our kids in the position today of being more anxious, aggressive, and shut down than ever before?

2. What has been the impact of children losing time for free play – and of entertainment becoming the substitute for free play?

3. What are “void moments,” and what purpose do they serve?

4. How can one teacher make a huge difference in the risk factors of children?

5. What are the characteristics of the “caring leader”?

6. Why we need to provide children with outlets for expression, and why are those outlets especially important in the online learning environment we find ourselves in today?

“When we see a child who is aggressive or being difficult in some way, we look only at the behavior, and we go to correct the behavior. But what’s behind the behavior? What if we feed the emotion behind that behavior? The behavior will naturally go away, just like food will help alleviate a child’s hunger. If we’re only treating the behavior, and not the root cause of it, how do we actually shift the child?” — Hannah

Connect with Hannah and Tamara

Reclaiming Our Students on Amazon

Book website, including the “Inside / Outside Handbook

Hannah on LinkedIN

Hannah’s website

Tamara’s website

Recommended

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate