America’s child mental health crisis is often discussed in terms of what happens inside clinics and classrooms. But some of the most important opportunities for supporting children happen somewhere else: at home. According to a 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report based on its 2023 national survey, 39.7 percent of U.S. high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness during the previous year.
These numbers make access to professional care essential, but they also raise another question: What happens between appointments, between school days, and during the ordinary moments when children are learning how to manage emotions? The home environment matters because social and emotional development does not stop when a child leaves school for the day. The same CDC research found that school connectedness and having an adult at home who consistently tried to meet basic needs were associated with better mental health outcomes.
These findings do not establish that those factors cause better outcomes, but they do point toward the importance of relationships and supportive environments in children's everyday lives. The challenge is that parents are often expected to provide that support while managing significant pressures of their own. Surgeon General's 2024 advisory, Parents Under Pressure, cited 2023 survey findings showing that 48 percent of parents felt completely overwhelmed by stress on most days, compared with 26 percent of other adults.
When parents are already struggling to manage financial pressures, work, childcare, and household responsibilities, telling them to simply do more for their children's emotional health is not a realistic solution. What parents may need is not another responsibility, but practical ways to incorporate social and emotional learning into things they are already doing. Schools have an important role to play in that process.
The CDC's mental health action guide highlights supportive environments, connections with caring adults, and access to services as components of mental health promotion. Social and emotional learning has also become increasingly familiar within education. But if children spend only part of their day in school, it is worth asking whether some of those skills can also be reinforced in the environment where they spend the rest of their time.
My interest in this question developed through my work communicating research from Dr. Stephanie Jones on behalf of the Wallace Foundation (my client at the time). Jones, who is the Gerald S.
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