School Stress and the Importance of Culture

I was recently asked to speak to a school during a teacher workshop day. When the director first reached out, I assumed she wanted me to talk about ADHD, autism, suicide risk, or some other typical mental health topic. Instead, she asked a much broader question:

“Students are stressed. Teachers are stressed. What can we do about that?”



I remember thinking: that’s an enormous question.

Helping one struggling child and one set of parents is difficult enough. Trying to think about stress on the scale of an entire school — hundreds of students and dozens of adults — is a completely different challenge.

Still, I’ve spent much of the last twenty years thinking about schools. Schools are one of the biggest drivers of stress in children’s lives, and therefore one of the biggest drivers of my own business. Every year our admissions rise dramatically during the school year and fall off during the summer. That alone tells you something important.

So I started by asking a simple question: Why is school stressful?

The answers came quickly.

Students are asked to wake up early, often before their natural sleep rhythms allow. They are sent into large buildings filled with people they may or may not like. They sit through subjects they may or may not enjoy. They navigate friendships, competition, social hierarchies, rejection, embarrassment, pressure, and evaluation almost constantly.

And they still don’t get paid for it.

I joked during the talk that my own son recently asked why he doesn’t get paid for going to school, since it resembles a full-time job. Honestly, I didn’t have a particularly good answer.

Then I asked what stresses teachers.

The list turned out to be almost identical.

Teachers also wake up early. They also spend their days in large buildings filled with people they may or may not enjoy. They work within systems full of regulations, bureaucracy, deadlines, evaluations, and social conflict. They manage stress, exhaustion, and interpersonal tensions just like the students do.

The major difference is that teachers get paid, although often not enough.

Once we made the list, another realization became obvious:

Most of these stressors are not realistically modifiable.

Schools are not going to stop existing. Students are still going to have to interact with difficult people. There will still be deadlines, social pressures, evaluations, awkwardness, conflict, boredom, and stress.

So where should the focus go?

I would argue the single most important variable is culture.

Not curriculum, not breathing exercises, not motivational posters, but culture. 

By culture, I mean the emotional and relational environment in which all of these stressful interactions occur.

When I first opened my own treatment program nearly twenty years ago, I asked my partner Joe what his plan was for running groups. I came from more traditional psychiatric settings where groups largely involved sitting in circles discussing CBT or DBT concepts for an hour at a time.

Joe gave a surprisingly simple answer.

“We’re going to establish a healthy group culture.”

At the time, I remember being a little skeptical.  Eighteen years later, I think it is the single most important thing we do.

Our program treats children and teens with every imaginable combination of difficulties: depression, anxiety, autism, trauma, substance use, behavioral issues, court involvement, family conflict, school refusal, and more. The only way you can successfully place dozens of struggling adolescents in one closed environment is if there is a healthy culture holding the entire thing together.  Without that, nothing else works very well.

Over the years, I’ve come to think healthy cultures share several important characteristics.

First, people feel they are on the same team working toward a common goal. They support each other, but they also challenge each other. Good cultures (just like good therapy, and good parenting) require both support and challenge simultaneously. People need to feel accepted and valued, but they also need to be expected to grow.

Second, conflict is viewed as inevitable and even healthy.

Human beings are different. That is not a flaw in the system — it is the system. Different personalities, perspectives, temperaments, and ideas are necessary for adaptation and growth. Healthy cultures understand that disagreement is not automatically dangerous. Conflict becomes something to work through rather than something to avoid at all costs.

Third, people assume goodwill before bad intent.

This is one of the most underrated aspects of healthy environments. In positive cultures, there is a general tendency to give one another the benefit of the doubt. People interpret ambiguous situations less defensively. That dramatically lowers tension and suspiciousness within groups.

Finally, healthy cultures acknowledge stress openly rather than pretending it does not exist.

Schools are stressful. Parenting is stressful. Teaching is stressful. Life is stressful. When stress is hidden or denied, it tends to emerge indirectly through irritability, withdrawal, gossip, conflict, and burnout.

A healthy culture allows people to say: “This is hard.”

And ideally, to maintain some humor about it as well.

One of the most powerful realizations I’ve had over the years is that relationships and group dynamics are often far more important than people realize.

I quoted two lines during the talk that capture this idea well.

The first: “You charge the hill because the person next to you does.”

Human beings will endure extraordinary hardship when they feel connected to a group with shared purpose, and will even charge a hill and straight into enemy fire. 

The second was from Viktor Frankl: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how’.”

Meaning matters. Relationships matter. Shared identity matters.

Unfortunately, I think schools often underestimate how important explicit relationship education really is. We spend enormous amounts of time teaching reading, writing, mathematics, and science, all of which are important. But we largely assume children will somehow absorb social functioning automatically.

In reality, many of the most important adult skills are relational:

• managing conflict
• apologizing
• tolerating discomfort
• handling rejection
• communicating frustration
• taking space appropriately
• resolving disagreements
• functioning while stressed

These are not secondary life skills. They are foundational ones.

At our program, we make this explicit through what we call the Behavioral Guidelines, a one-page social code we’ve used for nearly two decades. Many of the rules sound almost painfully obvious:

• greet people respectfully
• acknowledge effort
• apologize for offenses
• communicate conflict directly
• participate in resolution

The difficulty is not understanding these principles intellectually. The difficulty is practicing them consistently when people are tired, stressed, angry, anxious, embarrassed, or overwhelmed.

That is what culture really is: repeated relational habits practiced over time.

Schools face enormous challenges in maintaining healthy cultures, especially as they grow larger. Human beings simply function differently in smaller groups. Once groups become too large, people become less connected, less accountable, and less known to one another.

This is one reason I strongly believe schools should intentionally create smaller relational communities within larger systems whenever possible. Smaller groups create stronger connections, better communication, and healthier accountability.

I also believe schools benefit enormously from mixing students across ages and backgrounds rather than sorting everyone into rigid categories. Real life is heterogeneous. Children learn from differences, not just similarities.

One of the great mistakes I believe made by many mental health programs is over-separating people by diagnosis, age, or problem type. In reality, most human struggles are variations of the same developmental challenges: anxiety, identity, belonging, independence, competence, and relationships.

At the end of the talk, I emphasized one final point.

Adults in schools are not merely instructors. Whether they like it or not, they are role models and parental surrogates. Students watch how adults handle stress, disagreement, frustration, exhaustion, and conflict. Adults set the emotional tone whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Healthy cultures therefore cannot simply be demanded from students. They must be modeled by adults.

Ultimately, I do not think there is a simple solution to school stress. Complex problems rarely have simple solutions. But I do think culture is one of the most neglected and powerful variables in education.

A healthy culture does not eliminate stress, but it makes managing stress a team effort.