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It’s a stressful time to be a kid.

Young people are watching environmental disasters, school shootings, and economic and political uncertainty, all with a level of media (or at least social media) coverage that would have been unimaginable for previous generations. Against this backdrop, they’re also expected to have their lives figured out by an early age, and rack up a laundry list of achievements to cite in an increasingly lengthy and comparison-filled college application process. “You almost have to start working on your college career in middle school,” Jennifer Rothman, director of youth and young adult initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told me.

Given all this, it’s perhaps no surprise that kids need a break. Mental health days — a day off to deal with depression or anxiety, or simply to tend to mental well-being, gained currency among adults during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic — and they’ve taken off among young people as well, with at least 12 states passing laws allowing excused absences for mental health reasons.

But as chronic absenteeism remains a problem around the country, some school officials are worried that giving kids mental health days could encourage an attitude that school attendance is optional. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about how important it is to be in school — if I didn’t come to school at all in the pandemic, why do I urgently have to keep coming to school now?” Kent Pekel, superintendent of Rochester Public Schools in Minnesota, said during a webinar last year, according to EdWeek.

While concerns about mental health are far from gone, they’re also being joined by fears of learning loss and the acknowledgement that missing even a few days of school can be detrimental to kids’ education. There’s also a widespread worry that students are reaching

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