Basic Psychological Needs of At-Risk Youth

There are certain psychological factors that, while applicable to people of all ages and stations, must be understood and internalized by educators before they can respond effectively to the problems faced by the at-risk student.

The first of these psychological factors is the innate need for satisfaction of our basic human psychological needs. When one examines the body of research on essential human emotional needs, from the work of Abraham Maslow to the work of William Glasser, five central feelings emerge as crucial to an individ-ual’s emotional well-being: these are the need to feel competent, the need to feel that they belong, the need to feel useful, the need to feel potent, and the need to feel optimistic.

These five feelings (competence, belonging, usefulness, potency, and optimism) will be discussed individually throughout this text. We will refer to them collectively by the acronym CBUPO. It is important to keep in mind while reading this text that CBUPO is an abbreviation. The feelings it incorporates are not a single unitary commodity.

The Essential Feelings

Competence

Stop for a moment to consider how you, as an adult, would respond to these circumstances. How likely would you be to arrive at work every day, thoroughly prepared and enthusiastic about your teaching if you viewed yourself as an incompetent teacher? If, in the private recesses of your heart, you believed that your students were better served in your absence when they were taught by a substitute, would you be inclined to continue to invest as much emotional energy in your teaching?

Consider now the fact that the “work” of school-age children is encompassed in their role as learners. It is in this role that they are asked to focus their attention and energy for six or seven hours per day while at school and with homework each night. When viewed from that perspective, it shouldn’t seem surprising that students who constantly receive feedback on their academic incompetence will later decide to withdraw, both literally and psychologically, from the classroom.

Belonging

How likely would any of us be to continue to show up at our work place if we had reason to suspect that our co-workers and/or our associates disdained our company? As much as we adults need acceptance, youth are even more dependent in this area. It is not an overstatement to contend that every student, from the first day of kindergarten through their senior prom, is aware of and frequently consumed by thoughts of “in” groups and “out” groups and assessing which of their friends is and is not “popular” at any given moment.

A peculiar trauma of adolescence is the near universal belief that an “in group” does exist, and more importantly, that “I don’t belong to it.” We have long suspected that this phenomenon explains the continued popularity of class reunions. Specifically, our need as adults to return to our hometowns to show those members of the “in group” that we finally made it. If being denied a feeling of belonging is so significant for adults that we still carry the hurt twenty years later, its power must be incredibly intense. That being so, we ask you to imagine the emotions of a student who may not only feel incompetent but also feels out of place in his or her own school.

Usefulness

As teachers we all want to believe that we make a real difference in the lives of the young people we teach. This feeling of usefulness may be the reinforcement most responsible for our decision to stick with a career that frequently requires rising before dawn and working late into the night with little support and only meager compensation. A teacher’s feelings of usefulness are so powerful that they can explain why our bodies rarely break down during the school year (a time when we’re most needed). Apparently as teachers we save up our illnesses so that they can occur just in time to ruin our weekends or vacations.

But what is it that provides students with comparable and equally powerful feelings of usefulness? Some students derive this sense from their work as teacher helpers, student council representatives, or as athletes. But many youth suspect, way down deep, that they and their daily lives provide no meaningful service to anyone or anything outside themselves. Consider how you would feel if you believed that the world would not be affected one iota by your passing? Unfortunately, that is the perspective carried by many of our youth. Now stop and think how much worse it must be for those young people who, in addition to feeling insignificant, also see themselves as unwanted and/or incompetent?

Potency

Attribution theory posits that people can be placed along a continuum of causal attribution, often called locus of control. On the one hand we find those who believe that merit and hard work provide adequate explanation for their successes and/or failure. At the other extreme are those who attribute their victories and/or shortcomings to luck. This dichotomy produces two very different types of people, “internalizers” and “externalizers.” In other words, some people see themselves as “actors” while others view themselves as “victims.”

Overwhelmingly we find our at-risk youth on the externalizer end of the continuum. When they find themselves in trouble, they explain it away as someone else’s fault; the mean teacher, or the unfair principal. Later as adults, these same individuals may assign blame for their personal misfortunes on the economy, the criminal justice system, or perhaps their inadequate upbringing and schooling. While we are not suggesting that one should understate the impact that these and many other very real social problems create for youth, we must recognize that in contemporary society successful individuals grow up believing that it is their behavior and the choices they make that are responsible for the good as well as the bad things that ultimately happen to them. In the long run, we find that the “internalizer” adults are people who felt empowered as youth and conversely the “externalizers” are people who grow up feeling powerless.

Now, again, we ask you to imagine yourself as a child. Imagine you feel inadequate as a student, unwanted by friends, unneeded by society, and powerless over your life. If you were in that situation what would motivate you to behave positively and continue to persevere at school?

Optimism

Students who have continuously received feedback on their competence, belonging, usefulness and potency have good reason to be optimistic. They intuitively know that there is no greater predictor of the future than the past. For this reason these children will be inclined to respond, as many of us did, to the suggestion that they defer immediate gratification for long-term rewards. They believe that if they simply do what is expected: complete school, attend college, and stay away from trouble, their future will be bright.

Likewise, those students who have repeatedly been told that they are failures, that they don’t fit in, and that they aren’t in control of their lives, will likely develop a pessimistic view of their future. They will conclude, “If the future looks so bleak, why defer gratification.” Those youth are not behaving irrationally when they adopt the nihilistic motto, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

We are all familiar with the story of “the little engine that could.” Using that metaphor, we suggest you consider two types of children at school. One group continuously plays a mental tape recording saying, “I feel successful here, I feel like I belong here, people like me here, I feel needed here, I have the power to make things happen here, and I expect to be a success in the future.” What would you predict regarding the eventual school success of that child?

Now, imagine another youngster, one whose mental tape recorder plays a very different tune, one that says, “At school I feel like a failure, I feel like an outsider, and no one seems to need me here or miss me when I’m absent. Furthermore, there is nothing I feel I can do about it, and I have no reason to believe it will get any better in the future.” Would you expect that child to attend regularly, work hard, and act in a socially appropriate fashion? We suspect not. Under those same circumstances, most of us, even as adults, would probably retreat or rebel.

Those two categories of students help us understand the power of having or lacking the emotional well being that comes from feelings of CBUPO. It also helps us understand why some youth who do not feel CBUPO at school seek out those feelings through membership in gangs or other non-mainstream subcultures.

In an important study on a set of schools that demonstrated unusual success with at-risk youth, Gary Wehlage and his colleagues (1989) concluded that school success was due to 3 things:
- the level of engagement with school activities,
- the degree of commitment demonstrated by the students, and
- the degree to which they felt membership at their schools.

Those three key factors membership, engagement, and commitment only occur when, where, and if the students regularly feel CBUPO. Understanding the emotional needs of our students is a starting point, but it is also necessary for us to examine certain behaviors which are characteristic of alienated youth.

Characteristics of the Discouraged Learner

While there is some disagreement regarding the precise process for identifying students who are at risk, there are certain behaviors that generally characterize the defeated and discouraged learner. In his excellent handbook for teachers, Our Other Youth, Jerry Conrath (1986) describes the most common characteristics of these kids:

1. They are low in self-confidence and have a deeply held sense of personal impotency, helplessness, and lack of self-worth.

2. They are avoiders. They avoid school because it is demanding and/or threatening, or because it is confusing and unresponsive to their needs. They avoid contact and confrontation with other students and adults, for they are not confident of themselves. They avoid classes because they are “behind” and because there is often a more satisfying short-run payoff to skipping school than going to class and trying to figure out what is going on. Avoidance of adults and school begins in the very early grades.

3. They are distrustful of adults and adult institutions. Adults in their life have been unfair, unresponsive, or even abusive—mentally, intellectually, and/or physically. Gaining trust that you are not merely a continuation of a long line of ill-mannered adults is your primary task, but be patient; it will come only through your demonstration of good faith, good intentions, good deeds, and your skill in helping them learn.

4. They have a limited notion of the future. They are very responsive to short-run, measurable goals with demonstrations of success and competence. However, discouraged learners do not see the future as either bright or positive.

Their life is usually grim and they have no cause to see the future any other way. Therefore, long-range class projects are deadening as are complicated career planning schemes. Even more than other youth, their life imitates a series of dreary, unimaginative TV dramas interrupted only by silly commercials of items not good for them. Teachers and other involved adults must be willing to compete for their attention and interrupt that tempo, rhythm, and pace. Or lose them.

5. At least by mid-school or junior high school, discouraged learners have good reason to be discouraged: they are behind others in academic skills. They usually lack adequate reading, writing, and math skills and have come to see themselves often as “dumb” rather than unskilled. Many adults see them that way too. Dumbness, goes the reasoning, cannot be cured so adults give up on them and the kids give up on themselves. School is often “nice” to them and stops taking them seriously as learners and only puts patty-cake worksheets in front of them that make no intellectual demands and offer no challenge. The students think that is “nice” but boring and continue to avoid. They are not convinced that skills not yet learned can be learned. They are poisoned by a sense of intellectual incompetence.

6. In fragile homes, their parents often suffer similar characteristics: low skilled, low self-confidence, distrustful of institutions, avoidance, suspicious of the future. Indeed, some of these kids come from homes with parents eager to help, but more often, parent response is to be grateful that an adult finally is helping their child. Some of these fragile parents don’t care, treat sons and daughters with hostility, and even engage in serious physical and sexual abuse. That reality in the life of the discouraged learner, when it is reality, must be endured. Some come from homes of well-educated parents who are bewildered by their child’s discouragement and lack of academic interest and success; these parents often feel great frustration, and the profile of their child is difficult, and sometimes impossible to pin down. Few of the youngsters under consideration here fit this category, but a few do and represent perhaps the most confusing child to deal with. Too often parents are of little help for they too are discouraged, feel impotent, sense helplessness in their lives. And far too many come from homes of poverty.

7. Discouraged learners often have, by textbook definition, adequate peer relationships. Some are powerfully lonely; others have friends that meet many emotional needs; caring, fun to be with, similar interests, supportive. Adults usually do not approve of the peer relationships, but the kids do and are unresponsive to school’s attempts to get them to join into the social life as a strategy for combating discouragement.

This doesn’t work, often to the surprise and sometimes disgust of the adult who thought the idea so “neat.” For discouraged learners, self-confidence will begin to grow with success in learning and skill development; not through critiquing their friends.

8. They are impatient with routine, long-time sitting and listening, and classrooms with little variety; more so than kids who feel good about themselves as learners and have a better developed political sense of how to get along in adult institutions. Because of this, and their low skills, discouraged learners are often seen as disruptive when they demonstrate their impatience, or when they ask the intelligent question, “Why do we have to do this?” Once the disruptive label is attached, there is a predictable chain to difficult, dumb, delinquent, dropout.

9. Discouraged learners often come from the category of learning preference identified as “practical.” With this, they are good at working out applications of what is being taught if that is allowed and encouraged. They learn well through their own private experience and can talk about that better than write about it. They remember very little of what is delivered in linguistic style to a physically passive, note-taking audience.

10. Most significantly, discouraged learners do not see a relationship between effort and achievement, but instead, see success as a matter of luck or ease of the task. They are “externalizers”—people who see the world as happening to them and one over which they have little control of events, especially failures and successes. When they do poorly, it is the result of an impossible task, bad luck, a bad day, or an adult who refuses to help them. And, of course, they attribute results to the “fact” that they are dumb, a situation of which they have no control and, therefore, can take no responsibility. It is the same when they do well: good luck, easy assignment, wonderful teacher. They will not take personal responsibility because they do not see the relationship; not, as adults often accuse, because they stubbornly refuse to. Because of this, conversations over how much effort they put into a task fall on deaf ears. To an externalizer, effort has little to do with it. Because of this phenomenon, these kids do not learn from their mistakes, and they do not learn from their successes. They think mistakes and success just happen and they cannot explain why or how. They are “crap shooters.” They roll the dice each day and see what happens. To ask them “why” they did something prompts an impotent response, “I don’t know. It just happened.” They are a severe challenge for an internalizer adult who understands internal responsibility but does not understand the impotent world of the externalizer youngster. If you do not think your actions cause your effects, you take no pride in effort, and no personal responsibility for your actions. It makes no sense to.

The behavioral characteristics delineated by Conrath help us describe these youth, but they don’t explain why they are so difficult to help, especially when they are being taught by caring adults such as us. Although schools are chronically under funded, in recent years billions of dollars have been spent to improve the academic performance of disadvantaged youth. The sad reality is that very little success can be traced to most categorical programs and pilot projects designed to remediate educational disadvantages.

It is through the application of a major precept of behavioral psychology, cognitive dissonance theory, that we can begin to see why it has been so difficult to get these young people to shake their at-risk status, no matter how committed and dedicated we, their teachers, may appear to be. Cognitive dissonance theory, more than anything else, demonstrates why defeated and discouraged learners tend to remain stuck outside of the mainstream. Through our understanding of this concept we can begin to construct program interventions with much greater promise for success.

more on At-Risk Students: Reaching and Teaching Them 2nd Edition by Richard Sagor and Jonas Cox