American teachers are among the most dedicated I’ve encountered. School counselors show remarkable sensitivity. The individual care is impressive. And yet, something about the structure itself seems to work against children’s mental health — not through anyone’s failure, but through design.
I notice this as someone who recently moved to the United States with three children. What follows is not an indictment. It’s a set of observations that accumulated into a question I couldn’t ignore: why does supporting children’s mental health feel so effortful here, even when everyone involved is clearly well-intentioned?
The Missing Social Unit
From middle school onward, American children don’t belong to a “class” in any stable sense. They move continuously — subject to subject, room to room, teacher to teacher. There’s extensive discourse around respect, equity, and inclusion. But there’s remarkably little structured attention to the actual social life of any group.
Because there isn’t really a group.
One recess. Little unstructured time. Almost no shared space where conflicts, alliances, exclusions, and misunderstandings can be noticed and worked through together. Even birthday celebrations, small but symbolically important, are treated as private matters, with no shared norms to prevent children from being left out.
Research on adolescent development consistently shows that stable peer relationships are protective for mental health. A sense of belonging reduces anxiety, buffers against depression, and supports identity formation. When belonging must be constantly rebuilt across fragmented contexts, children lose access to one of the most fundamental supports for wellbeing.
Community Ends at the Bell
In other countries I’ve lived in (or visited for a long duration), school doesn’t end when the bell rings. Children flow into after-school frameworks that preserve the social group — sports, clubs, shared spaces populated by the same peers. Here, everything fragments again. Soccer practice in one town, basketball in another. Each child transported individually. Social continuity becomes a parental responsibility rather than something the system provides.
Community must be actively constructed, or it simply disappears.
When Equity Requires Parental Time
Parental involvement is explicitly expected for a child to succeed. Homework, projects, preparation — these often require significant adult support to manage. But equity isn’t only about access to opportunity. It’s also about protection from failure. A system that assumes time, energy, and cognitive bandwidth at home will inevitably widen gaps between families who can provide those resources and those who cannot. Children whose parents work multiple jobs or lack the capacity to help don’t just miss assignments — they may fall behind in ways that compound.
Equity, in practice, means ensuring that most learning happens within school walls.
Therapy Without Depth
Coming from a system where therapist training is long, centralized, and highly standardized, I was unprepared for how difficult it would be to find deeply trained child therapists. If you’re looking for manualized treatment, CBT for anxiety or depression, you’ll likely find someone, at least at a private clinic. But if you need something more nuanced — emotion regulation through embodied play, relational repair, therapy that moves beyond the office — the options narrow quickly.
This isn’t about dedication. Many therapists here are caring and hardworking. It’s about training depth, supervision culture, and what the system is designed to produce.
Infrastructure Shapes Mental Health
None of this diminishes the professionals working within these systems. What feels misaligned is not intention, but infrastructure. And infrastructure, more than attitude, shapes children’s mental health. When the structure fragments belonging, outsources continuity to parents, and limits therapeutic depth, even the best intentions struggle to compensate.
The question isn’t whether people care. They clearly do. The question is whether the systems they work within are designed to support what children actually need.
Be well,
Amit