Are adolescents less independent thinkers and decisionmakers now than they were a decade ago? Many educators would answer that question with an emphatic “yes!”
A good number of teachers and principals in middle and high school report that their students are struggling to direct their own learning, advocate for themselves, and take responsibility for their education.
There can be big repercussions for students who struggle to self-govern, especially high schoolers who are preparing to launch into the real world where the ability to work and learn independently is a prerequisite for success in college and the workforce.
To help turn this trend in a better direction, educators need to take action, said Travis Lawrence, a middle school principal in the Hortonville Area school district in Wisconsin.
“I think [independence] is something we have to intentionally teach now, when in the past, it was something kids developed through play,” he said.
While there are myriad factors that could be contributing to the decline in youth independence that are beyond educators’ control, experts say social-emotional learning strategies are available for teachers to help students develop the skills they need to be more independent.
Asking for help is a skill many students lack
Students are displaying a lack of independence in a variety of ways. For Miranda Mack, a high school physics teacher in Dallas, the lack of independence among some of her students shows up in their inability to ask for help when they’re struggling—or to even recognize when they are falling behind in the first place. She recalls hearing from a student at the end of last semester.
“I had a student message me asking if there is anything I can do to make [their] grade better and I was like, ‘Well, that’s a great question, but why are you asking today?’” she said.
When Mack meets individually with struggling students to discuss their grades, it’s not that they don’t care about their academic standing.
“But the issue is that I have to have that face-to-face conversation with them in the first place,” she said. “They may know they don’t have a great grade, but they don’t do anything about it.”
Mack believes the problem predates the pandemic, but the pandemic made things worse.
Kids learn SEL in the service of goals that they have. They don’t learn them in the abstract on their own, divorced from a goal.
Kelly Knight, a high school science teacher in Katy, Texas, finds that an increasing number of her students defer to their parents to contest a grade or ask for exceptions. Knight teaches a project-based class on environmental systems. There are no formal assessments, and grades come from completing projects, which students have most of their class time to work on under Knight’s guidance.
Recently, she had a student fail to turn in a project.
“There was an instance lately where a student had received a zero. They got feedback in class in 3rd or 4th period, and by 6th period, mamma was already calling me and sending me emails,” she said. “When I said, ‘Sorry, your student didn’t turn this in,’ they immediately went to the principal. There is no incentive really for students to put in any effort because since COVID, they have had helicopter parents protecting them from everything.”
Helicopter parents, cellphones, and social media fuel the problem
Knight said in the 10 years she has been teaching, she has never before spent so much time responding to parents. But she worries that students are getting set up to fail in the real world, where employers and professors won’t make exceptions for excuse after excuse and probably won’t respond well to a parent calling to defend their child’s work.
“I think a lot of that probably stemmed from anxiety over not just COVID but the whole shift to online learning and then [parents] haven’t transitioned back really to fully letting go of the reins,” she said.
When we’re talking about independence, we’re trying to teach students what learning feels like. And learning is often frustrating.
Lawrence, the principal in Wisconsin, believes the pandemic exacerbated the problem, but that the decline in adolescent independence is primarily caused by kids spending more time on screens and less time engaging in unstructured play. When kids ride around on their bikes, explore outdoor areas, or go to the mall with friends, those activities are rich with learning opportunities, Lawrence said. Problems arise—a flat tire, a dispute with a friend—and kids are forced to work through them on their own.
“I think there is connection ultimately to cellphones and social media, because you see instances of this prior to 2020,” he said. “I see kids having less of an ability to socialize, less ability to problem-solve, less independence, and more reliance on somebody else to come and do things for them.”
Lawrence said he has also seen a rise in parents intervening when their child is having difficulties socially with other children.
Is this generation really less independent than previous ones?
Some experts suggest the problem might not be as bad as some perceive it to be.
Many people have a tendency to perceive each generation as morally worse than their own. This “illusion of moral decline,” an idea explored extensively in a 2023 study, probably applies here, said David Yeager, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
“The most likely thing is that kids are no worse at being independent then they were in the ‘90s or 2000s. Maybe in the ‘50s, they were more independent,” he said. “I do think that every generation shows this lack of independence in a slightly different way, so adults are like, ‘Well, they can’t even do X.’ And X is supposed to [represent] this global lack of character and resilience and independence. But you could have picked a different anecdote out of there and described a previous generation.”
With a lack of research on—or even a way to measure—whether adolescents are less independent than they were 10 years ago, that leaves anecdotes and media coverage to color people’s perceptions of adolescents’ independence or lack thereof, Yeager said. But those perceptions still matter.
“I will say that great teachers perceive a difference, and they are leaving the profession, and that is a huge issue for sure,” he said.
Building social-emotional skills that foster independence
Whether the problem is exaggerated by some doesn’t change the fact that middle and high school students need to learn how to be independent. Goal-setting, delayed gratification, self-management of emotions—these are all social-emotional skills that lead to greater independence, said David Adams, the chief executive officer of The Urban Assembly, a nonprofit school support organization that focuses on social-emotional learning, or SEL. It’s the teaching of nonacademic skills that are essential to success in school and life. These include the skills that build students’ independence, and they can be taught and cultivated in school, Adams said.
“The first thing all students should do is set goals,” he said. “Set goals for their learning, set goals for their social-emotional development, and then progress monitor their own goals.”
Although it may seem counterintuitive for adolescents, a major part of being independent is knowing how to communicate their needs and ask for help. Teaching students how to manage their emotions so they persist when tasks get challenging is also key, said Adams. That doesn’t mean easier coursework, he said, because then students don’t develop these skills—they get bored and they check out.
“When we’re talking about independence, we’re trying to teach students what learning feels like,” he said. “And learning is often frustrating, because you are in a place where you don’t know something and you’re trying to understand it, and often that evokes feelings.”
But many schools do not have SEL programs at the middle and high school levels that are meaningful to tweens and teens, experts point out. SEL has traditionally been emphasized much more in elementary schools.
SEL experts say there’s long been a perception among educators that SEL is a “little kids thing,” discounting its importance for older students. Most SEL curricula and programs are directed toward younger students, and they fall flat when grafted onto a secondary school program.
Incorporating SEL into middle and high school can also be challenging simply from a scheduling perspective. As students move from class to class, there is no single teacher who “owns” SEL. Plus, with a heavy focus on coursework in the upper grades, teachers may feel they don’t have the bandwidth to incorporate SEL into their daily lessons.
Give students meaningful SEL tasks that are important to them
Signs are afoot that this is changing. A recent report from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, and the RAND Corp. found that the number of middle and high school principals reporting in surveys that their schools use an SEL curriculum doubled between the 2017-18 and 2023-24 school years—from 37 percent to 77 percent.
But adopting an SEL curriculum only gets a district so far. Middle and high school students need SEL programming that is designed for their developmental needs, said Yeager. Chief among those needs is learning how to become independent from adults. Giving middle and high school students more responsibility and control in how their classes and schools are run—"choice and voice” in SEL parlance—is a powerful way to help students build these skills .
That might mean including students in the development of classroom rules or, on the more ambitious end of the spectrum, allowing students to propose and vote on ideas on how to spend money for school improvement projects.
“I like these ideas that I’m going to give you a meaningful task that’s important to you, and it’s consequential,” said Yeager. “Then the coaching I’m going to give you, for decisionmaking or self-regulation, is always in the context of accomplishing this goal that matters to you. Kids learn SEL in the service of goals that they have. They don’t learn them in the abstract on their own, divorced from a goal.”
Knight said she thinks her students need to learn how to hold themselves accountable, which the teacher from Katy, Texas, is now spending more time teaching. She’s doing that by discussing with her students more regularly the bad choices or decisions they made along the way to a poor grade or incomplete assignment.
“Instead of putting the blame somewhere else or saying it’s too hard, let’s look back at those choices,” she said. “That’s the skill that is most important—if we can help our kids to ask those questions and be more resilient, they will be more successful in whatever they do.”
Mack, the teacher in Dallas, has built in a system to encourage students to notice when they are falling behind and ask for help in her daily SEL check-in routine. She starts every class by having students fill in a questionnaire that asks questions about their families, hobbies, or weekend activities, but she’s started rotating in new questions: “Are you missing any work? What is your current grade in this class? Do you want to change your grade? Or is there anything you want to talk to Ms. Mack about?” She then directs them to check their grades on their phones or laptops.
It’s “step by step trying to show them ‘how can I advocate for myself?’” Mack said.
Being an independent thinker and decisionmaker has always been an important trait for success in college and the workforce. Adams believes that is going to become even more so as advances in technology force workers to be quicker and more innovative thinkers.
“This notion of self-directed learning, and upskilling and reskilling as the economy shifts, this is going to separate folks who are going to be successful from folks who are going to struggle in a knowledge-based economy,” Adams said.
