Dear Mindful Philanthropy
About that Blueprint for Youth Mental Health
Dear Mindful Philanthropy,
You just published a report called The Upstream Philanthropic Blueprint for Youth Mental Health. Loved it.
This is a fan letter with four quibbles, which is the highest form of praise we know how to give. In our homes, a family dinner with only 4 complaints is a big winner…
First, the fan part. Upstream! Yes. An ounce of prevention and all that.
Have you read our friend Dan Heath’s book with that title? You’d love it. Read the Iceland chapter, where they solve teen drinking circa 1998. Totally up your alley.
You asked kids what they actually want. Excellent. Their answers: sports, arts, books, outdoor space, friends. Not more therapy slots. Kids keep saying this in survey after survey. Agree!
(Of course the caveat is many kids are “voting with their feet” - and hands - to decline offers of real life sports, arts, friends, outdoor space, in order to increase screen time).
Now our quibbles.
Friendly Complaint one: teenagers got the leftovers in your framework. Play & Grow, your best focus area, is defined as ages 6 to 11. Then adolescence arrives and the menu thins to “leadership and mentorship” and “flexible engagement.”
This puzzled us a bit. You correctly flag “participation drop-off risk” at 12 to 14. You cite the stat that 70% of kids quit organized sports by 13. So you know exactly where the cliff is. And then the blueprint sort of waves at the cliff….and goes to AI policy.
The 15-year-old scrolling in his room at 4pm on a Tuesday, and then still at 9pm that night, is the whole ballgame. He’s probably the one driving the scary lines on the CDC charts. Remember, this is not just a CAPACITY or supply side problem. In many cases - not always - that dude has ALREADY been offered sports, arts, books, and so forth, and has moved away from it.
Please consider age 13 to 19 as BIG opportunities for non-parent adults to help teens FIND their thing. Assume friction. Assume many false starts. If you stop at building capacity, it won’t pull a Languishing Teen (at risk of future mental health, but not yet acute) off the futon and serve as the upstream bulwark.
Friendly Complaint two: there’s no dosage mentioned. Can we persuade you that hours per week in Any Reasonable Real Life activities is an important metric?
We come from the tutoring world, having coined a phrase that stuck: “High Dosage Tutoring.” Okay, it’s a complicated story, because the whole phrase was supposed to be “High Dosage Tutoring By Tutors Who Are Unusually Good At Connecting With Reluctant Kiddos, so you have to reject a ton of applicants and also fire some who don’t click.” That’s what we actually did.
But that was clunky. So HDT was what stuck.
Anyway, our dosage was 8+ hours per week….that mattered as a parameter. What we were fighting AGAINST was not “zero tutoring” but “a little sprinkle of tutoring”….a few minutes here and there, just enough for adults to claim victory, and for kids to gain zero.
We’re fighting the same thing here. We need to help kids find MEATY commitments that eat up large chunks of hours per week. Stories like Gary.
Friendly Complaint three: Digital Well-Being and Play & Grow sit in separate silos in your framework. But the single best screen-time intervention for a teenager isn’t a media literacy curriculum or a family tech contract, useful as those can be. It’s the stuff you listed in Play and Grow.
Substitution is the most potent digital strategy. Suppression alone often fails. Many parents who have tried the various phone contracts knows their half life. (Half Lives? Grammar is hard.)
Friendly complaint four: Your treatment sidebar has a binary: prevention on one side, clinical care on the other. Behavioral activation is a clinical intervention that accomplishes your Play & Grow stuff. Perhaps its own box in the next report?
Anyway, we could have spent many paragraphs AGREEING with so much of what you wrote. Because we do. Great stuff.
Yours in flourishing, CTF