Back to School

September has started, and with it back to school. For the school community, this return means reconnecting with friends and sharing happy moments. It is known that this is the season of change, whether it is a change of school, teacher, class, or extracurricular activities the fact is that all of this change can unlock a lot of stress and anxiety.

This school year is already starting without something that we have been acquainted with over the past two years: confinement, social distancing, and masks, so everyone can just go back to normal. But how natural is this?

The absence of physical communication with colleagues, and professors has brought the difficulty of training fundamental skills to healthy relationships like conflict management, emotional regulation, etc.

That being said, parents must strengthen the importance of independence and responsibility when they are away. Parents that overprotect are restricting their children's independence. When this is the case, children might be more perceptible to having high levels of anxiety because their parents are constantly resolving their difficulties and issues for themselves, not letting the child develop their creativity and independence, making them immature and insecure.

Nowadays, students are labeled depending on their grades and their school performance, diminishing the effort they put into daily accomplishments and reducing their identity to Good or Bad grades.

School grades are not equivalent to personal values that will make children into healthy adults. Reinforcing the need to “have good grades, like a good boy” is to build a necessity for external validation that will lead to insecurity and doubt.

The result is an endless cycle of self-doubt. Resorting to grades or results to find self-worth is like seeing a rainbow right in front of you and never being able to reach it, no matter how close to it you might get.

This endless search for validation will jeopardize your happiness in three different ways. Firstly, it is a starving ghost with an insatiable desire for infinite approval. Secondly, even though it might help us to be more productive, it will compromise our resilience and efficiency. Lastly, it is a recipe for narcissism, anxiety, and depression.

Self-worth is a loyal companion that does not rely on meeting expectations, not from others or ourselves. Self-worth is independent of our performance; it is a never-ending friendship with oneself. We are still worthy even when we have bad grades, fall in a physical education class or when rejected. It does not matter where we go we carry with us our self-worth.

When we detach our worth from school grades, we take away the need to prove we are worthy, giving us an endless sense of self-worth, happiness, and freedom.

With self-worth, you have more energy and resilience and get over setbacks more easily because you believe you are growing.