“I refer to anxiety as a cult leader. If you’ve ever been in a cult, you can back me up on this,” psychotherapist and author Lynn Lyons said on Tuesday, January 7, a day after high school students returned to school with the looming cloud of final exams suspended over their heads. A chortle emanated from the crowd, composed of teachers, students, and non-Parker affiliated visitors. 

The previous day, Lyons addressed teachers at a post-Winter Break faculty workshop, educating them on how to build a school culture that facilitates students’ growth and independence by changing the way Parker community members think of anxiety. “These are spectacular times,” Lyons said. “It can feel so overwhelming and so big, and there are so many things to deal with. Yet we have these little people in front of us whom we are raising, loving, and trying to send into the world. We have to make sure that we don’t let the macro get so overwhelming that we lose track of the primary job that we have of raising the little people in front of us.”

Lyons believes that educators have a responsibility to teach their students processes for coexisting with, not eliminating, anxiety. The first step is to focus on processes instead of content. “If you are trying to rearrange the outside world in order to appease the cult leader, that’s called a content-based intervention,” Lyons said. “If instead you are teaching children how to respond to worry when it shows up, that’s a process.”

According to Lyons, over-accommodation typifies content-based intervention, which is detrimental to growth. “If you are in a cult and you listen to the cult leader, things go fairly smoothly,” Lyons said about anxiety. “When you disobey the cult leader, that’s when there are problems. This is why families accommodate. My grandmother used to say, ‘What’s easy now is hard later, what’s hard now is easy later,’ and when it comes to anxiety and emotionally equipping our kids, she was exactly right.”

Lyons discussed the detrimental nature of over-accommodation in the classroom. “Accommodation is a dirty word,” Lyons said. “This is tricky when we’re working at a school because of accommodations. I am totally talking about accommodations for anxiety. In the world, accommodations are doing the work of the cult leader. Family accommodations predicts treatment failure. If you step into a school situation and you demand an accommodation, you are not teaching skills.” 

Lyons’s discussion of accommodations with teachers forced Upper School science teacher Ryan Zaremba to ruminate about his experience as an educator. “For me, I really reflected on the flexibility piece,” Zaremba said. “As I’ve been thinking about it more, I feel like I have, with what I thought was having the interest of the student first in my mind, been too flexible, especially with deadlines and extra time. I’m wrestling with how do I become a bit more rigid? I have to find that line, and I’m still working it out.”

Upper School science teacher Bridget Lesinski, who teaches “Mind and Brain,” a psychology elective, agrees with Zaremba about how Parker teachers treat students seeking extended deadlines on assignments but not about extra time on tests. “That student has more and more time to be anxious that it is still not completed,” Lesinski said. “I think that individual teachers—I’ve done it too—will extend deadlines thinking they’re helpful when maybe they’re not helping.”

Zaremba, who has both public and private school teaching experience, finds Parker’s atypical reliance on accommodations alarming. “What’s unique about the Parker community that we have such a high rate of accommodation,” Upper School science teacher Zaremba said. “At their very core, accommodations are needed for some students. I do think that sometimes we take them too far here at Parker. We are overly flexible.”

Lyons assured audience members that, in spite of her aversion to over-accommodating, she is not advocating overwhelming students. “This isn’t about stiff-arming kids,” Lyons said. “It’s not about throwing them into situations ill-equipped so that they don’t know what to do. It is about allowing them to experience uncertainty. Even if you were trying your best, 24 hours a day, you couldn’t protect your child from harm, so the goal is to give them some skills to help them manage whatever life throws at them.”

Lyons recommended teaching students problem-solving skills because they will not be able to prepare for every possible situation in which they may find themselves. Problem-solving, according to Lyons, is a much better approach to managing anxiety than rumination, a point with which Lesinski agrees. “It’s a natural human tendency for students to go over things repeatedly, but, basically, that doesn’t move the ball forward at all,” Lesinski said about rumination. “I think about that in my own life. Students do that too. If they’re upset about a grade, they will ruminate on it instead of moving forward.”

In addition to discussing rumination, Lyons focused on perfectionism. “Perfectionism was a very big topic,” Zaremba said. “How to really communicate to a student that they have these perfectionism characteristics and then how to strategize with that student and help them realize that it’s okay to turn something in that is incomplete. It’s okay to cut corners once in a while. You have to do it strategically. It’s a skill to be able to figure out when you should be cutting corners and when you shouldn’t. It was all about skill-building and really approaching students and the patterns that they exhibit and working with them on it but also having the language to be able to articulate that to them.”

Lesinski, like Zaremba, thought that Lyons’s presentation provided her with valuable language to use when conversing with students, particularly those who embrace a perfectionist classroom mindset. “As an educator, I will definitely keep in mind students who have more perfectionistic tendencies,” Lesinski said. “It’s not helpful for me to give them all of these extra accommodations. We can have that common language. It’s normal to be worried about this, but we just have to move forward. That’s what will help me as a teacher: to have this expert who tells me that these are things that will be helpful and directly tell students these things.”