A Response to Harvard’s Report 'On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges'
Mental health challenges among young adults are a persistent and growing concern. According to Harvard University's 2023 report On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges, loneliness, purposelessness, and poor mental health are easily and often intertwined. It’s clear that many of the struggles contributing to the current crisis are the result of preventable shortages of structured exploration, community building, and purpose development that schools could provide throughout students' K-12 experience.
Wayfinder was created in response to a rise in youth mental health struggles and began as a purpose development curriculum supporting character education in high school. As an organization and a curriculum provider, Wayfinder has been developed, advised, and evaluated by three leading experts on purpose and youth development named in Harvard’s report: Doctors Bill Damon, Kendall Cotton Bronk, and Heather Malin. Their research and guidance have aided Wayfinder’s development as a provider of learning opportunities that support foundational skill building for living a healthy and meaningful life.
Years after our founding, Wayfinder now includes all of the essential components that Harvard researchers deem crucial for healthy development, encompassing and transcending traditional social-emotional learning (SEL) with teaching and learning resources that support mental health through intentional purpose development. From our experience developing research-backed K-12 curriculum and years of supporting SEL implementation in schools and districts, we offer the following reflections and recommendations in response to Harvard’s report.
Heather Malin, Ph.D
Director
Stanford Center on Adolescence
Kendall Cotton Bronk, Ph.D
Director
Claremont Adolescent Moral Development Lab
Dr. Bill Damon
Director
Stanford Center on Adolescence + Author, Path to Purpose
Building Foundations: Paths to Purpose Begin With Identity Exploration + Development
Identity development is a critical aspect of youth and adolescence. It involves exploring personal interests, values, and beliefs to form a coherent sense of self. The Harvard report cites Dr. Kendall Cotton-Bronk: “[R]esearch suggests that identity development is a precursor to purpose.” It explains how adults share the responsibility to model living purposefully, offer mentorship to young people, and provide structured reflections for young people to explore who they are and what matters to them.
When young people understand who they are and what they stand for, they are better equipped to navigate the complexities of life. Although K-12 educators can only support young people in this work until they graduate, they can give students tools to navigate uncertainty and face challenges with the confidence to make values-aligned decisions while being open to continual learning and personal growth. The Harvard report emphasizes this process of fostering a strong sense of identity can help mitigate feelings of purposelessness and contribute to overall mental well-being through adulthood.
Educators can support identity development from an early age to start students on a purposeful path. Wayfinder’s elementary school Core Curriculum and activities do just this, offering developmentally appropriate opportunities to build self-awareness and social skills from early on. By guiding students to develop their senses of self, explore their interests, and distinguish wants from needs, educators can help them build solid foundations for their futures.
Belonging: Creating a Supportive Environment for Youth Mental Health + Academic Success
Like identity formation, belonging is a key part of living a purposeful and healthy life. According to Harvard’s report, “[W]hen we asked young adults what gives them meaning and purpose, a large majority focused on relationships with family and friends. Other research similarly indicates the importance of these relationships.” Studies cited in the report show that those who experience belonging are less likely to encounter undesirable mental health outcomes, including anxiety and depression.
Belonging is critical for mental health and academic success. Strong student-teacher relationships and peer-to-peer relationships support a healthy and safe learning environment in which students feel encouraged to take the risks necessary for academic and personal growth. Tapping into young people’s social drive is an important part of engaging them in academic learning: young people find purpose in building and developing relationships. Educators who understand that and use it to support collaboration and community building can help students not just enjoy their time at school more but also make the most of it.
Schools can foster belonging by actively listening to students, uplifting their voices, and teaching them to work together toward common goals. Creating a supportive and inclusive environment where students feel valued and understood can make a significant difference. Wayfinder's curriculum promotes relationship-building through activities that encourage student agency, collaboration, and community building. By seeing themselves as part of a greater whole, students are less likely to struggle with loneliness and the individual pressures that can accompany it.
Purpose: Guide Students Toward Meaningful Goals
Purpose is a powerful motivator. Put simply by Harvard’s researchers, young people need “opportunities to develop a core sense of purpose, or what William Damon, Kendall Bronk, and Heather Malin define as a future-directed, personally meaningful goal aimed at ‘contributing to something larger than the self.’” The report suggests that cultivating meaning and purpose in young people through service and goal-setting can significantly improve their mental health.
However, according to Harvard’s report, all too many young adults today lack purpose. It reads:
“[H]alf of young people in our survey reported that their mental health was negatively influenced by ‘not knowing what to do with my life’ and more than half (58%) reported experiencing little or no ‘purpose or meaning’ in life in the previous month. Lacking purpose and meaning is highly correlated in our data with both depression and anxiety.”
On the other hand, when young people have a clear purpose, they are more likely to set goals and work toward them, which can alleviate anxiety and stress.
A key takeaway from the report is the intertwining of purpose and mental health and their roles in reinforcing one another:
“[A] lack of meaning/purpose and the experience of depression/anxiety compound each other. Those who feel little purpose and meaning in work or relationships, for example, may slide into depression or anxiety, which may cause them to pull back from activities and relationships that formerly provided purpose and meaning, which in turn deepens their anxiety and depression.”
This underscores the importance of helping young people know themselves deeply, recognize their emotions, and strategically interrupt counterproductive mindsets and behaviors. When young people develop the ability to work through discomfort, set goals with clear milestones, and take the long view, they are better equipped to find meaning during difficult moments in their lives and keep from getting stuck in loops of misery and inaction.
Harvard’s report makes the important note that the pressure to define and follow a purposeful path can itself lead to anxiety and depression. As purpose-driven learning becomes more popular, this is an important lesson for educators to heed. While we teach and advocate for purpose development, it’s essential to keep in mind—and to help young people understand—that living purposefully is all part of a journey. It’s not about reaching a singular goal or sticking to a steadfast path. Purpose can guide us and bring meaning to our lives even if that purpose is only a temporary one, and understanding the innate flexibility of purpose is crucial for supporting youth mental health.
This is not new information to Wayfinder; it is the foundational concept on which we were founded. Our teaching and learning tools guide students to develop purpose by helping them identify their strengths and interests and tying them to meaningful projects in service of the needs they see in the world. This approach fosters purpose while supporting a growth mindset as students learn to see challenges as meaningful opportunities for growth and skill-building. It supports long-term mental health through the development of core competencies that grow with young people as they face increasingly complex situations and challenges over time.
Meaningful Achievement: Integrating Purpose-Driven Learning Into Academics
Harvard’s report also dives into a part of students’ academic lives that often feels at odds with personal purpose: achievement for achievement’s sake, and the negative mental health impacts pressure to achieve can lead to. The report reads, “Disconnected from meaning, achievement is a particularly frantic, hellish hamster wheel. We have spoken to therapists who underscore that much of the work of therapy with young people is getting them to stop ‘achieving to achieve’ and to instead find some meaning and purpose for achieving.” Integrating purpose-driven learning into core academic subjects could be an invaluable remedy for achievement burnout.
