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I mentioned two studies below in the texts. One of them defines a natural mentor as someone that young people could turn to for help if they needed to. And the other study used that kind of definition and asking high school students to list up to seven adults who worked at their school to whom they could turn if they needed to. What’s intriguing was they didn’t ask them to list seven adults or up to seven adults they had ever even spoken with. The question was simply, is there somebody you feel like you could turn to or talk to if you needed to? And it had a significant impact on reducing and it was associative, not an experimental study, but still compelling. In high schools where students had more natural mentors, they had less suicidal ideation.
It’s kind of like I provide a provision in my syllabi these days that lets students know, I acknowledge mental health challenges is real and I’m willing to provide them some flexibility if the need arises. Just knowing that they have that, a number of students have told me made a tremendous difference to them even though they never needed to use it. Similarly, when students or emerging adults, as they were called in one study, know that they’ve got an adult figure they could turn to for help if they needed to, it provides an emotional shock absorber, if you will, so that they can better absorb life’s ups and downs. They’ll still have just as many ups and downs as anyone else, but they’ll be better positioned to absorb them.
So when you and I are intentional about the messages we send, for example, when we make it clear that we’re available to talk if they need to, a survey that we did in relation with the, a book showed that students were much more willing to go to office hours and talk to that professor than if the vibe they got from the professor was that the professor was busy. Simply being intentional about the messages that we send to our students can help them feel like they can turn to us if they need to, and that promotes wellness and boosts learning.
While connecting with students generally is beneficial in many ways, research shows that improving our connection with individual students and their sense that we care about them can have some remarkable effects on helping them cope with life’s challenges that might otherwise trigger depression or even suicide attempts. In one U.S. study of over 10,000 high school students, researchers asked students to list up to seven friends and seven adults who worked at their school to whom they could turn if they needed help—in other words, natural mentors (Wyman et al., 2010). They were free to list anyone from teachers to administrators to custodial workers, and they didn’t need to have ever turned to them for help in the past. Researchers then compared results by high school with suicidality. They found that the more natural mentors students listed, the lower the rates of suicidality at each high school.
Another study of emerging adults reached similar conclusions (Hurd & Zimmerman, 2010). Although it was also observational rather than experimental, this study showed a strong inverse relationship between the number of natural mentors emerging adults had and the likelihood that they would be depressed. They concluded that especially at the critical crossroads of students leaving high school, having adults they considered to be natural mentors provided an insulating effect that helped them better cope with life’s stressors.
The bottom line is that the more our students feel we care about them and are connected and supported by us, the more they will thrive in college and beyond.
Wyman, P. A., Brown, C. H., LoMurray, M., Schmeelk-Cone, K., Petrova, M., Yu, Q., & Wang, W. (2010). Peer-adult network structure and suicide attempts in 38 high schools: Implications for network-informed suicide prevention. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(8), 924-934.
Wyman, P.A., Pickering, T.A., Pisani, A.R., Rulison, K., Schmeelk-Cone, K., Hartley, C., Gould, M., Caine, E.D., LoMurray, M., Brown, C.H. and Valente, T.W. (2019), Peer-adult network structure and suicide attempts in 38 high schools: implications for network-informed suicide prevention. J Child Psychol Psychiatr, 60: 1065-1075.
Hurd, N., & Zimmerman, M. (2010). Natural mentors, mental health, and risk behaviors: A longitudinal analysis of African American adolescents transitioning into adulthood. American Journal of Community Psychology, 46(1-2), 36-48.
Discussions
Why do you think that having natural mentors has such an insulating effect on students, allowing them to better cope with life’s stressors?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.