How Can a Class Have an Impact? by Alexis

How Can a Class Have an Impact? by Alexis - February 2022 Scholarship Essay

Living as a kid in this day and age is comparable to nothing else. In a world where everything is at our fingertips, kids are taught to rely on things like phones, the internet, and social media. But what happens when youth are learning more from social media influencers and internet searches than they are from school? Eventually, it becomes hard for children to distinguish between the real world and online. The lines start to blur between how many likes you get on a photo and what you think of yourself. Children begin to determine self-worth from scrolling through instagram and they learn behaviors from online peers. While technology and the internet have many benefits, there are disadvantages too. This can be seen in an article posted by Mclean Hospital, which stated that “[social media] platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.” The article also stated “according to the Pew Research Center, 69% of adults and 81% of teens in the U.S. use social media. This puts a large amount of the population at an increased risk of feeling anxious, depressed, or ill over their social media use.”

To combat this I think there should be an elective class in school that focuses on mental health. It would teach children how to deal with common disorders and mental health issues that affect many children, including anxiety and depression. This is especially important because even without having an anxiety disorder every child will at some point have anxious feelings. To help children we need to teach them how to cope with these feelings.

Secondly, we need to teach children mental and physical self care. While this may seem like such a basic thing, it is actually something that a lot of people, even adults, either don't understand how to do or don't take the time to do. The benefit of this can be seen by something Matthew Glowiak wrote for Southern New Hampshire University. He wrote, “engaging in a self-care routine has been clinically proven to reduce or eliminate anxiety and depression, reduce stress, improve concentration, minimize frustration and anger, increase happiness, improve energy, and more.”

Lastly, this elective class should make available and local resources known to the students. This could be mental health resources like therapists, guidance counselors, mental health hotline numbers, local organizations, clubs, and group meetings. While some general resources would stay relatively the same, the available and local resources for each class would differ slightly depending on what was available and what was local for a certain school.

Overall, I think this could be beneficial for students by helping them to learn about resources available to them, healthy coping mechanisms, and mental and physical self care. In my own personal experience this would have been beneficial because I struggled with anxiety for years before being diagnosed. This caused many problems in my life, like struggling to talk to my peers because of a voice in my head, or refusing to participate in certain activities because the thought made my chest tight. A class like this would have taught me how to cope with my anxiety and how to take better care of myself, which is the goal of such a class. There are many kids out there that are struggling the same way I was and are not receiving help. This class could be a way to provide help and support for children who might not otherwise have access to this.