As both the surgeon general and President Biden have acknowledged, student mental health is a national crisis. Today’s kids have suffered through uncertainty and fear during the pandemic. They’re worried about active shooters and friends dying by suicide, while living much of their lives under the (often unbearable) influence of social media.

Understandably, parents like me wonder what we can do, but may feel unqualified to offer help ourselves or ashamed to ask for assistance.

Supporting a child’s mental health is like caring for a child’s physical wounds: Failure to address small problems allows them to become major issues.

At one point, our medical system didn’t believe in hand-washing, which led to lots of minor wounds becoming infected and potentially life-threatening. Similarly, families who don’t know how to help their children with small mental health problems can find themselves facing acute situations. To do right by our children, we must overcome our discomfort and put mental health issues directly in the spotlight.

That means engaging with our children in mental health conversations more deeply, both at home and in school. If we want to help children during this ongoing student mental health crisis, families need resources that are private, on-demand, accessible at home — and which make it easier for them to cut through fear and shame.

Resources are best made available through schools for three main reasons: accessibility, ready availability and affordability.

Accessibility: Every child in America is guaranteed access to public education, and most families live closer to their child’s school than to a mental health facility.

When I first learned that my own child had mental health needs, I was living in rural Idaho, and we had to drive three hours to get any kind of services. We made the decision as a family to move to Salt Lake City so that our son could have better access.

Read the full article about student mental health crises by Anne Brown at The Hechinger Report.