Studies of Gen Z — the age group roughly from 12 to 27 years old — show that they are experiencing higher levels of loneliness, anxiety, and fears for their personal safety, not to mention concerns about housing affordability and job availability. Three years of societal disruptions and suspension of normal activities, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, have forced kids onto screens for school and disrupted normal avenues for socializing, leaving many with lesser-developed interactive and coping skills.
But in the face of these trends, Concordia University Irvine, and Christian residential institutions like it, offer something uniquely efficacious in American society: a caring, intimate community where students feel safe, are known personally, and become empowered to thrive in key areas of life — including overcoming negative societal forces.
“Most adults don’t understand how isolated our students feel and how worried many are about the future,” says Concordia president, Dr. Michael Thomas. “Many students coming in haven’t had the normal interactions that one would expect from just a few years ago. And these disruptive aspects of their formation into adults present challenges that Concordia University Irvine, an intentional Christian community, can alleviate.”
A recent article in the online publication Axios titled, “The loneliest generation: Inside the Gen Z mental health crisis,” cited a Gallup Walton Family Foundation survey which found that Gen Z “reports the poorest mental health of any generation” and are “grappling with alarming rates of loneliness, depression and suicidal thoughts.”
“A collision of political, economic and social trends has minted a generation in which huge numbers of people struggle to cope with the present and feel even worse about the future,” the article said. “Just 44 percent of Gen Zers say they feel prepared for the future.”
Those challenges are confirmed by Concordia’s on-campus mental health experts, faculty members, and spiritual shepherds who live and work among today’s students.
“We’ve always seen students who are really struggling with anxiety and feelings of isolation and separation, but now it feels like this is a more widely-shared experienced, that many students are wrestling with these things in significant ways,” says campus pastor Quinton Anderson, a longtime campus resident who lives with his family in one of the Living Learning Community residence halls. “I see an increased number of students feeling tired and worn out, overwhelmed by all the ways they are pulled and tugged, and by busy schedules. It’s like they’re already in a zone — already so worn down that they’re trying to operate at a depleted level, emotionally and mentally.”
Donna Washburn agrees. She is assistant dean of the Townsend Institute and has more than 20 years of experience in the mental health fields, specifically in higher education and as a licensed clinician.
“As a faculty member, a community member, a neighbor and a friend, I have absolutely witnessed an ever-increasingly stressed and anxious population, whether it’s students in classrooms, community members, or people I go to church with,” Washburn says.
For instance, it’s more common now for students to request personal accommodations for relatively minor events at home or their places of employment, and to become upset over an assignment which “wouldn’t have stressed students out in previous years,” she says. Instead of bouncing back from normal stress- inducing occurrences, or from concerning developments in society and the world, “individuals are at such a high level of anxiety and stress that they can no longer cope like they used to,” Washburn says.
“You had children who were formed in years where people were afraid to go outside, afraid to shake people’s hands,” says Dr. Margaret Christmas, dean of the Townsend Institute. “When kids are learning language and facial expressions, it exacerbates problems when they can’t have social interactions with other children. They haven’t had the same amount of opportunity to develop social skills or recognize social cues as previous generations may have had.”
While this can contribute to delay, normative and restorative experiences can help them heal, Christmas says.
Kaitlyn Stafford, interim program director for the counseling programs in Concordia’s Townsend Institute, is a practicing mental health clinician and trauma specialist who works with adults and teens. She teaches master’s-level classes on addiction counseling, crisis, and trauma. Family systems, she says, have been harmed in recent years, and a lack of personal connections has led to widespread social anxiety.
“Even some of my adult clients are having a harder time because they were exposed to social situations less,” Stafford says. “When we avoid situations, they become more dangerous in our brains. The less we engage in social situations, the more dangerous it seems to become.” Pastor Anderson says many students want to connect, but also fear connecting.
“More are eating meals alone in ways that seem intentional, bubbling themselves off from others,” he says. “I’ve seen an increase in that kind of activity which of course is not a positive change.”
Paradoxically, he says, “I see a lot of people wanting to huddle together and spend more time with each other, but I also see a layer of fatigue from desiring that and then it almost causes a recoil that says, ‘I still need these other ways to have separation and my own space.’ The ways an introvert might try to recharge, now we’re seeing across the board. People want interaction with lots of people, yet there’s a struggle when they step into it now that things have opened up again.”
Among the stressors unleashed on young people by recent events is an unusual amount of loss of parents to death, says Michelle Laabs, associate dean of Student Wellness which offers counseling and health services on campus.
“In the last month, we have had three students who lost a parent, two to cancer and one who died suddenly at the doctor’s office,” says Laabs, who has worked at Concordia for 16 years. “Before, it was a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, but in the last few years we are hearing ‘parents.’”
Troublingly, suicidal thoughts have increased as well, but so has student openness to seeking help through counseling and other means.
In spite of nationwide trends, all see huge upsides for Gen Z, especially when they are in the right environments for growth.
“As humans, we are remarkably resilient,” Stafford says. “When we experience adversity, we can grow and have wisdom and a greater sense of purpose and meaning. There’s almost an element of spiritual transcendence that can happen as a result. I’ve seen that a lot with our students.”
Resilience is powerfully supported through the essential experiences of life in a Christian residential community, they agree.
“A Christian residential school like Concordia does something almost no place in our society does anymore,” says President Thomas. “Many institutions in society that used to bring people together — social clubs, softball leagues, and even youth groups, for example — have collapsed in many places throughout our nation. Some of these places where young people used to mingle are no longer part of our culture. Given this paucity of physical places for communal interaction, the real power of a Christian residential experience is its holistic formation of the student. Where else do we mix young people coming from different geographical locations, urban and rural, who hold different political views, and perhaps even religious ones?”
He adds that, “Concordia’s focus on our Christian identity and our insistence that full-time faculty and staff are practicing Christians who are experts in their professions, allows us to offer a residential experience that focuses on the formation, and even maturation, of each and every student. Firmly grounded in our Christian identity, we boldly open the doors of campus to the world, and we do something a secular school can never do: we educate the heart and the soul. We guide students to think deeply about who they are, then encourage them to turn themselves outward, beyond themselves, to love God — which is the formation of their souls — and to love their neighbors, which is the formation of their heart.”
A key element that enables this holistic formation at Concordia University Irvine is a care team made up of residential directors, the dean of students, the campus pastor, mental health counselors and clinicians, the provost, and others who meet weekly to discuss whether any students seem to need special attention due to trying circumstances. “If a member of that group suspects something is going wrong with a student’s life — say he or she is missing class or is not engaged — he can discuss it within the network of these relationships and someone might say, ‘That’s a student in my residence hall,’ or someone from mental health or campus ministry may say, ‘We’re already engaged with that student,’” says Thomas. “We have this built-in web of relationships by which we monitor in a supportive way.”
The fact that there is one faculty member for every 14 students, plus a wealth of residential directors, coaches, and fellow students, means all students are known by name and seen daily. Washburn says that kind of fellowship is how healing happens.
“It sounds so cliche, but just spending time and being a presence with someone else has therapeutic value,” she says. “John Townsend calls them ‘relational nutrients.’Sitting with people, drinking coffee, not even having to have big conversations but just the physical experience of being present, responding with empathy, listening when someone wants to dump. Simple relational principles help other human beings recognize they have value. We believe it’s how God created us. God uses relationships to heal.”
Anderson says that while in the past he was inclined to spend more time listening, these days he finds that students are eager to hear wisdom from older people.
“Some of the things that can help shift these [problems] are basic life and social skills that somehow don’t seem ingrained in all students,” he says. “I find myself being more free to say, ‘What if you tried this?’”
Above all, he offers an invitation to active participation in a Christian community.
“I say, ‘It’s great that you have friends and interact with people through social media, but there’s something different when you are intentionally wrestling with day-to-day struggles of life in a community that’s wanting to do so in connection to Christ,’” Anderson says. “I encourage students to get plugged into these sorts of things and become part of a shared life in Christ, because this is how God has wired us to receive certain kinds of support and encouragement. In a world that’s moving more toward individualism, isolation, and self-dependence, we get to call people into an incarnational understanding of God who invites us into a shared life of grace with others. There are depth and riches to those sorts of relationships. It’s what we need.”
He observes that students who plug into a Christian community are “the ones who have an easier time in the midst of all these things,” he says.
Concordia is also blessed to be the home of the Townsend Institute, a national source of counseling wisdom and training, which is “all about embracing these challenges and using our clinical skills to teach students to provide healing and health at such a time as this,” says Washburn.
Embedded in those counseling processes is the active power of the living Christ.
“We think faith is a key component in what we do,” Christmas says. “Our imperative at Concordia is to bring in our Lutheran identity. We talk about the power of faith in healing people whether we work in a secular or pastoral environment. The power of the Holy Spirit comes to those spaces and the counselor becomes the hands and feet of Jesus.”
In a society increasingly characterized by isolation and fragmentation, some of the healthiest environments in our society that can help young people to build deep relationships are Christian residential colleges where students learn to thrive as adults in a vibrant campus community, and beyond. Concordia University Irvine certainly carries out this special calling on a daily basis as the community lives out the Lord’s will in this special place.