Rethinking procrastination
We’re currently neck-deep into the school semester with roughly one month to go. At this point, students usually have accumulated a backlog of paperwork and requirements. I notice that readings are now left unopened in Google Classroom. I start sensing students’ calculated decisions about which requirements they can afford to skip. At the same time, I see intermittent bursts of productivity, submitting work all at once after having been inactive for some time. It’s academic crunch time and the end is still not quite within sight; this is the hardest hurdle in a semester.
In this context, I found myself wading through a pile of clinical case formulations from our interns. Case formulation is an indispensable aspect of mental health work. It is our documented understanding of our client’s experience, including what led to their referred problems and what prevents them from being able to solve them. A good case formulation is able to offer sound hypotheses as to the hows and whys of the client, giving us a direction for possible solutions.
I noticed that the cases were starting to blur with one another as I read through them. Why do they all sound so similar? The majority of the cases, all of whom are students, seem to struggle with procrastination and the ability to perform as expected when it comes to school tasks. Unrealistic expectations coming from parents and family add to the pressure and a sense of not being enough. Pleas for help and support were viewed by loved ones as simply being weak or lazy. Stuck between not being able to catch up and not being allowed to rest, clinical symptoms, such as those of depression and anxiety, eventually emerge. Treatment plans, however, mostly remain stuck at reducing procrastination.
I was planning to bring this up in our group supervision, as case formulations should be uniquely tailored for the individual client and not read as a template. As it happened, the interns brought the issue up first, remarking that they’re noticing that clients had been coming in with very similar issues and presentations. It wasn’t necessarily that the reports were written as templates—the clients really were similar to each other. An intern wondered if there was something in the school environment itself that was causing these issues and not necessarily due to individual pathology.
Are schools fostering an environment where children question their worth and capability? Are we exacerbating self-doubt and making children think that they are not good enough?
It is time we revisit how we approach learning and recognize when the structures we put in place in academia are already eroding students’ mental health. Our curricula and where our resources are prioritized seem to be geared more toward ensuring that we produce competent and skilled workers ready to meet the demand of industry. That is what I hear often in different regulatory and policy spaces in education: “What does the industry need?” Those who propose to reduce the years spent in college do so in order to graduate children faster and turn them into workers. To this aim, the same folks propose to do away with most general education courses that have no direct links to industry demands. My own field of psychology, historically a scholarly discipline, has been molded into almost an exclusively practice-oriented profession driven by industry demands for mental health workers. (The same industry, by the way, that prefers to underpay and overwork mental health professionals.)
In early childhood education, what matters more is that we inculcate a love for learning rather than focusing right away on academic metrics like reading and writing. Educators recognize that learning itself is its own set of skills. Once children love to read, they will read. Once children love to write, they will write. Once children want to learn, they will learn.
Along the way, however, we forget about this and just demand that children learn. Teachers and parents think of motivation strategies as “coddling” the child and think of demotivation as a personal failing. Procrastination, for example, is a symptom of demotivation, which we assume is the student’s sole responsibility to fix.
We latch on to procrastination as the ultimate problem when it is likely that procrastination is a mere symptom, a manifestation of dissatisfaction and a sense that this is not the life that they want to have. It is the mind and body’s way of rebelling against life as an assembly line and not wanting to proceed simply because we were told to.
From a structural and systems point of view, procrastination is an inevitable by-product of life that is too narrowly designed by external forces. What if it’s not procrastination that needs to be fixed, but learning itself? Perhaps education needs to regain personal meaning and not just be an economic and industry demand.
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