Why Students Today Are Normalizing Too Much: A Teacher and Parent’s Practical Observations
I was stacking used copy paper by my desk after school last Wednesday, three 8th graders loitering by the door waiting for their late carpools, when I overheard Mia, one of my top students, rubbing her temple and saying, “Yeah, this migraine’s fine. I get them three times a week now, it’s just normal. Almost everyone in my honors math class gets them.” Jake, leaning against the cinder block wall, nodded like she’d just said the sky was blue. “Duh. My lower back hurts 24/7 from hunching over my laptop doing homework after practice. That’s just what being a high school-bound 8th grader is, right?”
I froze with a ream of paper in my hands. When I was 13, if I’d had a headache three times a week, my mom would have packed me off to the pediatrician, scheduled extra tests, and kept me home from school for a day. It never would have occurred to any of us to call that normal.
That night, I mentioned the conversation to my own 14-year-old son over takeout fried rice. He shrugged and said, “Yeah, I get stomach aches from stress like twice a week. All my friends do. It’s no big deal.” I almost dropped my chopsticks. I’d had no idea. He’d never mentioned it, because it was normal to him.
I’ve been thinking about this shift a lot lately. Kids today do normalize a lot of things, and not all of it is bad. Ten years ago, no one my students’ age talked about going to therapy or having anxiety out loud. That normalization of mental health care is a good thing, something we should celebrate. But the line gets blurry when they start normalizing things that are actually harming them: chronic sleep deprivation, physical pain from overwork, skipping lunch to cram for tests, ghosting friends because “that’s just how friendships work now,” struggling in silence instead of asking for help because “everyone else is too busy to deal with my stuff.”
This isn’t some sort of decline in kid culture, it makes total sense how we got here. Social media feeds are full of peers posting their 6 a.m. gym sessions, 12 extracurriculars, and late-night study grids like they’re badges of honor. College admissions pressure starts in middle school now, not senior year. After the pandemic, when a lot of kids got used to juggling messy, overlapping schedules and ignoring small discomforts just to get through the day, that habit stuck around when schools piled the old workload back on top of it. Even we as adults normalize overwork more than we used to, so it’s no wonder kids pick up that habit.
At first, I made the mistake most adults make: I’d panic a little and blurt “That’s not normal!” and the kid would just shut down. Or I’d say “When I was your age, I never had that problem” which is a lie, and also makes them think I have no idea how heavy their load actually is. Now I do three small, low-friction things that actually work, both in my classroom and at home with my son.
First, I name the abnormal out loud, without panic or lecture. If a kid says constant headaches are normal, I don’t yell or dismiss their experience. I just say, “Wait, that’s actually not normal for your body. Headaches that often are your body waving a red flag, not just something you get used to.” That’s it, no big speech. Just a gentle correction of the narrative they’ve absorbed from peers and culture. When my son said his stress stomach aches were normal, I used almost the same line: “That makes sense that you’d feel that way with all you have going on, but it’s not normal to have pain that often. Let’s figure out what we can shift.”
Second, I share my own overwork mistakes, instead of just lecturing them about theirs. Last month, when a kid told me he’d pulled two all-nighters in a row to finish his science fair project, I didn’t tell him he should have planned better. I said, “Two weeks ago, I stayed up until 1 a.m. grading papers and forgot to bake the cookies my son needed for his homeroom party the next day. That was me overworking, and that’s not normal. I ended up cutting back on one of my after-school committees to get more sleep, and it didn’t ruin anything.” This models that it’s okay to reject constant overwork as just part of life, instead of making them feel like they’re failing for being overwhelmed.
Third, I build small, regular check-ins to surface these things before they get worse. At home, every Sunday at dinner, we go around and name one thing that felt like too much last week that we just brushed off as normal. In my class, I add one quick question to our weekly exit ticket: “Is anything hurting or feeling too heavy that you’ve been ignoring?” It takes 30 seconds, and once a month, at least two kids write something that lets me sit down and talk to them about shifting their load. Just last week, the boy who pulled the two all-nighters emailed me a week before his next project was due to ask for an extra two days, something he never would have done before. He told me no one ever asks for extensions, because it’s just normal to stay up late. Now he knows it doesn’t have to be.
I don’t pretend this fixes everything. Some weeks, my son still ignores his stomach aches and crams for a test, and I still overwork and end up with a tension headache I just brush off. Last month, Mia still had a migraine the day of our state test, but she came to me after and said she talked to her mom about dropping her weekly SAT prep class a month early, so that’s something. It’s not a perfect fix, and there’s no neat ending where all the pressure goes away. But the small work of un-normalizing the things that don’t have to be normal adds up, one conversation at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Students Today Are Normalizing Too Much: A Teacher and Parent’s Practical Observations