Supporting Social and Emotional Development in the After School Hours

[Speech by Keith Hefner at a national conference on Reframing Expectations of After School Programs, sponsored by the Partnership for After School Education, New York City, November 22, 2005.]

I am always amazed by the sense of hope and expectation among young people on the first day in an after school program.

It’s different from the feeling you get in school, where the kids want to know what they’re going to be required to learn and how they will be graded.

Instead, in an after school program you can almost feel the young people’s desire to burst out and share some important part of themselves.

Of course, they don’t—not right at the beginning—because they’re checking you out, to see if you will create an environment in which what counts most is not the lessons or activities, or grading rules, but WHO THEY ARE.

At home, they are projections of their parents’ dreams (if they’re lucky). At school they are noticed primarily for their cognitive abilities. But in the after school program, their hope is that they can be seen for who they are and who they want to become.

This is, or should be, a major difference between school and after school time. Schools are necessarily curriculum-centered and, to a fairly large extent, teacher-centered. After school programs, in my opinion, should be youth-centered. And, because they are focused on the young people themselves, there is a much greater likelihood that health issues, and especially mental health issues, will come to the fore. And there is also much more opportunity for after school staff to help young people deal with the causes and symptoms of those issues.

I fully understand the desire of funders and evaluators who want to know what we hope to accomplish in after school settings, and how we will know if we’ve accomplished it. However, gleaning that knowledge is far more complicated than measuring a reading or math score. For example, each semester when I start with a new group, I know that I want each young person to become a little more thoughtful and mature by the end of the semester, and to gain a greater sense of self-control and self-efficacy.

What I don’t know is what challenges that young person will work on to make those changes. Does she want to learn a new dance and get a major role in the show? Does she want to gain greater acceptance from the group? Does she want to explore feelings of loss or grief? Does he want to experiment with visions of manhood that are different from those he’s seen at home? Does he want someone to notice that he’s sad or angry all the time? Does he want to improve his English?

A single after school group could include young people struggling with every one of those challenges—and more.

To me, the beauty of the after school setting is that—because we are not burdened with covering a specific body of content—we can work on the content of the lives of the young people in the room.

Getting to know young people deeply and letting them take the lead in what issues to explore gives us an extraordinary opportunity to have an impact on their physical and mental health.

In my few minutes I’m going to focus on mental health issues, because I think they’re harder to deal with in school settings and thus and more likely to be ignored during that part of the day.

Furthermore, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, 1 in 5 youth faces a significant emotional challenge, and 1 in 10 youth struggles with a mental health issue that is severe enough to lead to a “serious impairment.”

Those numbers are much higher among the young people I’ve worked with in poor New York City neighborhoods and in foster care. In my own program—just last week—one student was preoccupied with the fact that she just had an abortion. Another student confessed to a staff member that she had a serious eating disorder.

A third student told a staff member that he was thinking of killing himself and wanted us to take him to the hospital. I knew that this young man had access to mental health professionals (he had made a couple serious suicide attempts in the past), but he felt more comfortable seeking help from after school staff.  And this time—because he trusted us—he sought help before he downed the bottle of pills that he had in his pocket.

Let me give you a few more anecdotes that I think suggest some of the challenges we face (or at least I face) in addressing mental health needs in after school programs. Then I’ll generalize from them.

Though my priority in after school work is social and emotional learning, I almost always use reading and writing activities—because they provide a focus for discussion, and because I want to reinforce academic skills whenever I can.

A few years ago, I was working with a group of middle school kids on a newsletter project. One girl had written a fictional story about a father who sexually abuses his daughter. In her first draft she said they went on a camping trip, some hunters passed by, and the girl grabbed a rifle and killed her father.

That was a little abrupt, I thought. I asked her to share the story with some of the other young people in the group and get some other suggestions for the ending. The gave her ideas like, “She should turn him in!” or “They should go to counseling.”

The next day she wrote a new ending: The father and daughter go to one counseling session, the father apologizes…and they live happily ever after. That also felt unsatisfying to me and to the other students.

I suggested to the writer that she interview the Teen Choice counselor (who was located in the basement of this school) about what typically happens in these situations so she’d have richer material on which to base her ending.

I wasn’t too surprised when she confessed to the counselor that this story was actually about her. Appropriate action was taken.

Another example:

I was having a group of middle school girls read and discuss a story about a girl who is depressed and cuts herself. In the story she gets too little help from peers and adults, and she’s resistant to seeking help. I structured the discussion around what each party could have done differently: the peers, the adults, and the girl herself.  The kids came up with a wide range of thoughtful and practical suggestions, as you might expect. I then had them brainstorm about who in their school or agency they would go to if they were cutting or had similarly serious problem. They discussed the pros and cons of various staff members.

You’re probably not surprised that toward the end of the discussion one of the girls admitted that she is a cutter, and a couple others said the “used to” cut.

A final example:

I was leading a rowdy, all-boy middle school group. We read a story by a teen about growing up with an alcoholic father. I stopped the story halfway through, after dramatic scene where the daughter confronts her father about his alcoholism and what it’s doing to their family. I asked the boys to get in groups and figure out an ending to the story and report back. Most of them had the father go off the deep end: losing his job, abandoning his family, etc.

In the real story, the father goes to residential rehab, and there is a very emotional scene with the daughter in which they write letters to each other about what they want from their relationship.

Almost immediately after finishing the story, several boys started talking about having alcoholic fathers, what it meant in their homes, and how they coped. I am sure that these boys had never been so open with each other before, but I could also tell that for the boys who opened up, it felt like a weight had been lifted from their shoulders.

For many young people, issues of abuse, cutting, depression, and alcoholism are commonplace. Managing them takes up an enormous amount of their emotional and cognitive energy. But schools—because they focus on the curriculum, not the person—pretty much ignore this huge component of young people’s lives.

In after school programs, however, we have a wonderful opportunity to help young people deal with those challenges in a supportive environment.

But how? And what issues does it raise?

A few observations:

First, young people can be powerful resources for each other, especially with good adult facilitation. In each of the above examples it wasn’t my intervention that convinced the young people to open up and share their experiences. Rather, it was reading a story by a peer and hearing their peers wrestle with the issue that normalized it for them and gave them some practical strategies for getting help. That kind of positive peer pressure is usually far more powerful than adult advice.

Second, more problems than one might think can be managed in the group instead of being referred out. When the girls who said they cut, or had cut, revealed their secret in the group, I was trying to assess whether there was any imminent danger, and what, if anything, they wanted me to do. But because they had already had a thorough discussion about their options, which included coming to a consensus of who in the school was the best person to turn to for help, and an a exploration of how peers could play a constructive role, I was pretty confident they could work things out. Over the next few weeks I noticed that the girl who confessed to cutting—who had been somewhat of an outsider in the group up to that point—began to gather a supportive group of peers around her.

She asked for help from the group, and in this case at least, she got it. I still remember the last day of that class. It was an unstructured party with cake and ice cream, the formerly isolated cutter now easily she interacted with rest of the girls and they with her. I think we often underestimate how helpful young people can be to each other, and overestimate the benefits of a referral to an adult expert.

However, my third observation is that access to good referrals is important. When I sent the young woman who was writing about sexual abuse by her father to “interview” the Teen Choice counselor, I was very thankful that a competent and caring person existed in that school. Her confession and its aftermath were bound to be traumatic, but at least I had the assurance that it would be handled as carefully and conscientiously as possible.

Fourth, if after school staff are going to be expected to get to know young people well and develop the kind of trust that encourages them to share their mental health problems, their sex and relationship issues, and feelings about things like body image, depression, manhood, acceptance by peers, and other emotionally-laden topics, then staff need support in how to respond to those issues. What should we do when young people raise these issues? Listen? Share with the group? Keep it secret? Go home and cry? Create a lesson? Refer? Report? It’s not easy to know what to do.

Staff need access to training, support, and resources—and peers with whom they can compare notes.

*     *     *

I think that the after school movement is at a crossroads. After decades of flying under the radar—and delivering services of widely varying quality—we are being scrutinized much more closely and asked to professionalize and justify our work, which is not a bad thing.

It’s how we respond to that scrutiny which concerns me. Are we going to become an appendage to the school day, burdened by curricula that are imposed by outsiders instead of arising from the needs and interests of the group? Will we agree to be held accountable for “covering material” instead of getting to know young people and their concerns? And will we then end up using many of the same emotionally-distancing approaches that are used in school?

Or will we respond to those expectant faces we see on the first day by showing the young people that after school is special place where we aren’t afraid to get to know them as people? As after school workers, learning to do our jobs better does not mean learning how to run test prep classes. It means learning how to be responsive and supportive to young people so we can give them the space and permission and the tools to develop as full human beings. In the long run, I think even the schools would benefit from that.