Yes, students are in crisis. But going easy on them might make it worse.

Our students are experiencing a crisis in mental health. They have problems studying, sleeping, and interacting with others. Teachers should assign less work and let students complete it at their own pace. Strict deadlines will only harm them further.

That’s been the message I and other teachers (both college and K-12) have received from school officials since March 2020, when the pandemic sent us into lockdown. Many of us have responded by lowering our expectations, in a good-faith effort to alleviate the very real pain that students are suffering.

But it hasn’t worked. Many teachers have been coddling students for almost three years now, and the kids are still struggling.

As a long line of research reminds us, young people do their best — academically, socially, and psychologically — when we hold them to high standards. By going easy on them, we might have made their lives even harder.

For example, procrastination among college students has long been associated with poor mental health. But we also know that people are less likely to procrastinate if they are required to produce small amounts of work on a regular basis, instead of something big that they can put off until the end.

That’s why I require a piece of writing from each of my students, every week. It’s not long, but it’s also not optional. It keeps them engaged in the course. And, most of all, it lets them know that I think highly of them: I believe they are competent human beings, who can accomplish the tasks set before them. And almost all of them do.

“I require a piece of writing from each of my students, every week.”

Cutting them slack communicates the opposite. It signals that I believe they are feeble, inept, or fragile. And that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, another well-known phenomenon in psychological research. If students think they are weak and wounded, they may be more likely to behave that way as well.

I also insist that my students come to class. Woody Allen might have exaggerated when he said that 90% of success in life is just showing up, but he wasn’t off by much. In a 2019 study, scholars at Indiana University showed that more students go to class when there are strict attendance rules, and that — surprise! — the students who show up get better grades.

So why are so many colleges saying that students don’t have to show up, or even offering “wellness days” when everyone gets to play hooky? I don’t doubt the good intentions of the people behind these policies. But that doesn’t mean they’re good for our students.

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Let’s be clear: There really is a crisis in mental health among American students. In a 2021 survey, nearly three-quarters of college students reported moderate or serious psychological distress. And in a 2022 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost half of high school students said they had felt sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row.

Some of those problems were surely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. But I haven’t seen any indication that our students’ mental health is improving now that the pandemic is abating.

So what can we do about that? Of course, we need more psychological services for students at every level. Many K-12 schools report that they are overwhelmed with demands for mental health treatment and lack the funds or staff to meet them. And even at an extremely well-resourced university like Penn, where I teach, students complain that they can’t obtain timely or effective psychological assistance.

But I also think we need to look more carefully at the causes of the mental health crisis. I believe one of them, ironically, is the culture of leniency around mental health itself.

Students with diagnosed mental illnesses might need special accommodations, of course, including extra time to complete schoolwork. And everyone should be encouraged to seek out psychological help when they need it. But I fear that teachers who routinely let their students off the hook — in the mistaken belief that this will help them feel better — could actually make them feel worse. The best thing we can do for their psychological well-being is to require that they show up, stay engaged, and submit their work on time. And, most of all, we need to have faith in their capacity to do it.

A beautiful new charter school just opened up in the South Bronx, in a repurposed former ice plant. Designed by the celebrated Ghanaian British architect David Adjaye, the school features a staircase with a simple inscription in bold red letters: “ALL KIDS CAN.”

If we tell our students they are frail and debilitated human beings, they will feel — and act — accordingly. The only remedy is to tell them that they are strong and that they can succeed. All of them can.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was recently published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press.