Strengthening the Mental Resilience of Our Young

Mr Speaker, just yesterday it was reported in the news that a teenager who set fire to several pop-up booths at VivoCity and HarbourFront Centre in March this year was found to be experiencing major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The reports also mentioned that he had been facing financial stress at home and that his actions may be a form of coping.

This incident does not mean that every act of mischief stems from mental illness. But it does bring into sharp focus that mental health challenges are faced by some of our youths, challenges that often remain unseen until they manifest in troubling ways.

According to the National Youth Mental Health Study conducted by the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) between 2022 and 2023, one in three young people reported experiencing severe or extremely severe symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress. Those who spent more than three hours daily on social media were especially at risk. And perhaps, most concerning of all, nearly a third of youths with severe symptoms do not seek help. They worry about whether treatment will work, fear social stigma or have privacy concerns.

Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for mental illness. So, how do we help our children build psychological immunity? How do we booster them against the stressors of life?

As a parent, I worry whether my own children will be able to cope with challenges that come their way. As a Singaporean, I worry for our children, who will constitute our future workforce, caregivers and leaders.

When mental well-being falters, it affects not just the individual, but also relationships, families, workplaces and even the fabric of our community. If we want a resilient Singapore, we must first nurture resilient Singaporeans.

First, let me clarify what I mean by resilience. Resilience is not merely the absence of mental illness. It is the ability to bounce forward from setbacks. It is a skill, not a trait.

Resilience is not something you build after a crisis; it has to be practised before things go wrong. Just as muscles need to be flexed to grow stronger, resilience must be trained, early, continuously and deliberately. Especially in schools, where children form habits and mindsets that last a lifetime.

Investing early ensures that every child has the opportunity to build, practice and strengthen these skills across each stage of their development.

But lessons alone are not enough. Mental resilience must be lived, not lectured, practiced through repetition, reinforced through experience, until these coping habits become second nature so that when stress inevitably comes, these habits are reflexive, automatic and strong enough to carry them through.

Since 2021, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has strengthened its Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) syllabus to include mental health literacy, emotion regulation, coping strategies, stigma reduction and peer support. Lessons now incorporate breathing and calming exercises, and these are reinforced through Values-in-Action (VIA) projects and co-curricular activities (CCAs).

A broader ecosystem of support has also been built around this effort: the Parenting for Wellness Toolbox for parents; the scope of examinations for non-graduating students has been reduced; more than 1,000 teacher-counsellors are being trained; and termly check-in surveys allow teachers to monitor students' social-emotional well-being more systematically.

Beyond MOE, national initiatives continue to play an important role. The Health Promotion Board's (HPB's) It's OKAY to Reach Out campaign and the National Council of Social Service's Beyond the Label movement help normalise help-seeking. The Agency for Integrated Care's Youth Community Outreach Team (CREST-Youth) and Youth Integrated Teams extend outreach and assessment to at-risk youths.

These are significant and commendable steps forward. But as we scale up these initiatives, two key questions remain: how can we ensure these efforts are truly effective and how do we build a school culture that naturally nurtures mental resilience and not just teaches it?

Mental well-being, like literacy or numeracy, is too important to depend on individual school initiatives alone. We need a systematic and sustained approach. That is why I propose establishing a School Mental Well-being Charter, a developmental accreditation framework that recognises schools embedding mental resilience into their curriculum, culture and community.

We can draw inspiration from the United Kingdom's (UK's) University Mental Health Charter, which brings together universities committed to making mental health a campus-wide priority. It encourages institutions to share best practices, supports one another through networks and training, and recognises those that demonstrate excellence in promoting mental well-being.

A Singapore variant, co-led by MOE, HPB and IMH, could serve a similar purpose: uniting schools and Institutes of Higher Learning that make well-being not just an add-on, but a defining feature of education. This Charter would signal national commitment to nurturing a generation that is mentally strong, emotionally agile and socially compassionate.

What might such a Charter look like in practice?

To make it meaningful, it must go beyond slogans and set out clear dimensions of action, balancing centralised standards with decentralised flexibility. MOE can provide national direction, resources and guardrails, while schools retain the autonomy to adapt approaches to their unique contexts and students' needs.

There are three key dimensions where this partnership can be most impactful.

One, strengthening practice and experiential learning. Resilience, like any skill, must be practised, not preached. While the CCE curriculum teaches coping and emotion regulation skills, its impact depends on how schools and teachers bring it to life. Some schools excel through CCAs, camps or VIA projects, others may struggle, constrained by time and resources. To make resilience second nature, it cannot remain ad hoc or incidental. It must be systematic, scaffolded and sustained, so students repeatedly apply, reflect and internalise what they learn.

At the central level, MOE could define broad developmental milestones for social, emotional learning and guiding principles for experiential education, such as structured reflection after setbacks, opportunities for self-directed projects and feedback that emphasises growth over fear of failure. At the school level, educators could design their own methods through camps, community service, classroom rituals that help students reframe failure as learning.

Micro interventions, when practised consistently, strengthen emotional regulation and self-efficacy over time. Partnerships with community programmes, like Sport Cares, could also help. I recently met youths from Sport Cares' Champion Leadership Programme, who organised a carnival for seniors and persons living with dementia. They were passionate, kind and full of heart, showing how sports and volunteering together can teach grit, empathy and purpose. By tapping on community partners, volunteers and youth networks, schools can enrich experiential learning without overstretching educators, allowing them to focus on guiding rather than carrying the process.

Through the Charter, such practices can be shared, refined and scaled so that no students' exposure to resilience building depends purely on which school they attend, because resilience cannot be downloaded from a PowerPoint slide, it must be lived, rehearsed and reinforced again and again until it becomes part of who our students are.

Two, enhancing measurement, evaluation and continuity. If we are to take mental resilience seriously, we must measure it with the same rigour that we measure academic outcomes. What gets measured, gets improved.

Currently, data on student well-being is often gathered through one-off surveys or teacher observations. Valuable, but inconsistent. Without a coherent system, we cannot tell which approaches work best for whom and why. To strengthen accountability and learning, the charter could establish a national evidence framework for student well-being.

At the central level, MOE could coordinate research using validated measures of subjective well-being, belonging and resilience. Not to diagnose, but to understand growth and guide interventions. At the school level, educators could use this data to refine their programmes, track progress over time and share best practices through MOE's networks of practice.

Beyond timely check-ins, such a framework could track both immediate outcomes, such as knowledge and use of coping strategies, and longer-term effects like sustained resilience and belonging. Crucially, it would shift our focus from identifying problems like anxiety or stress, to measuring strengths, such as happiness, optimism and resilience.

Importantly, this support should extend across every key transition from primary to secondary school, from Institutes of Technical Education, junior colleges, polytechnics to university and eventually into the workforce. These are the stages where stress often peaks, yet structured mental health support can taper off. Like the UK University's Mental Health Charter, Singapore's version could pair measurement with accreditation, where reviews consider indicators, such as the strength of peer support networks, perceive accessibility of counsellors and teacher readiness, to address mental well-being.

This approach ensures we do more than collect data. We also close capability gaps and recognise schools that lead the way. The goal is not to rank or penalise, but to help every school understand its progress and areas for growth. It would also allow MOE to identify exemplary practices that can be scaled nationally, creating a culture of shared accountability and collective uplift, because what we choose to measure signals what we value. And when we value well-being as much as grades, both can thrive together.

Number three, build a supportive and inclusive culture, even with strong programmes and robust data, resilience cannot flourish without the right culture. Data tells us what is happening. Culture determines why it happens and whether change endures.

At the central level, MOE can set the tone through three pillars: wellness, belonging and success. Well, at the school level, these values are expressed through stories, rituals and daily interactions. These pillars are not abstract ideals. They must be felt in the corridors, classrooms and conversations of every school.

Let me begin with the first: a wellness culture, one that makes mental well-being not just taught, but lived. A wellness culture means normalising care through visible practises and spaces, calm corners, reflection, rooms and time-outs that make it acceptable to pause and recharge. Policies, too, signal what we value, how schools handle phones and screen time, or whether they explore later start times to improve sleep, sends a message that rest is not an indulgence, but a necessity. Sleep deprivation is not a badge of diligence. It is a silent threat to mental health.

Encouraging sports and outdoor activities, likewise, reinforces well-being. Exposure to sunlight, physical activity and teamwork all strengthen mental and emotional health. We can also strengthen peer support networks through structured training and recognition, integrating peer helpers into the school system through accreditation or scholarships. When peer support is legitimised, help-seeking becomes normalised.

Finally, language shapes culture. We must move away from labels, like Strawberry Generation or sheltered children. Such words stigmatise rather than strengthen, they close doors instead of opening minds.

But wellness alone is not enough. Students also need to feel that they belong, that they are part of something larger than themselves. This brings me to the second pillar, a school culture of belonging.

Research shows that a strong sense of school belonging is one of the most powerful predictors of resilience. When students feel seen, supported and accepted, they are better able to cope with setbacks. Belonging breeds resilience and resilience deepens belonging.

To nurture belonging, schools can foster kindness as a daily habit, encouraging small acts of care, peer recognition and teacher affirmations. Experiencing kindness, whether online or offline, reinforces connection. Unkindness fractures it. Small everyday gestures of care build the community spirit that sustains well-being.

Yet, belonging alone is not the destination. Our students also need to understand what it truly means to succeed and to redefine success in ways that give meaning, not pressure. This leads to the third pillar: a success culture.

Singapore has long prized success defined by grades and material achievement. But true success should include growth, purpose and contribution.

MOE has taken important steps – through subject-based banding and applied learning pathways – to broaden our definition of success. The next step is to embed this shift in school culture, through stories, symbols and rituals that reflect a fuller picture of excellence.

Schools could highlight diverse pathways in assemblies, tell alumni stories that go beyond grades and celebrate perseverance, creativity and community service as much as academic results.

At the same time, culture change also means addressing the unspoken pressures that erode resilience – the tuition race, excessive comparison and the fear of failure. Reducing rote learning, valuing soft skills and promoting sustainability-oriented values can help students see success as a meaningful living, not mere performance.

Because true resilience is not only about enduring pressure, it is about having the freedom to pursue purpose without being crushed by expectation.

Here again, the Charter can guide this transformation by setting broad cultural benchmarks for schools to interpret locally: do students feel psychological safety and belonging? Is success recognised beyond academics? Are conversations about mental health open and stigma-free?

In essence, practice builds skills and habits, measurement builds accountability and learning, and culture builds meaning and motivation. Together, they form a resilience ecosystem, where each reinforces the other. Practice without culture becomes tokenism; measurement without practice risks bureaucracy; culture without structure leads to inconsistency.

To bring this ecosystem to life, an MOE-led School Mental Well-being Charter could provide the unifying framework. It would serve three purposes: to signal national priority by recognising mental well-being as a core dimension of education; to promote consistency by setting minimum standards of psychological safety and resilience-building; and to encourage innovation, recognising schools that model excellence in student well-being.

This Charter could be co-led by MOE, HPB and IMH, rolled out across all school types, and supported by mentorship and peer-learning networks. Rather than ranking schools, it would celebrate those that lead with care, helping others to learn and grow.

Mr Speaker, I thank Dr Charlene Chen for her call to strengthen the mental resilience of our young and her proposal to do so by way of establishing a School Mental Well-being Charter.

She mentioned three broad points in relation to strengthening practice and experiential learning. Secondly, enhancing measurement to share best practises and sensing mechanisms, as well as building a supportive and inclusive culture.

Building our students' mental resilience is a key priority for MOE, just as learning is for us; and the CCE curriculum is a key enabler. CCE is guided by developmental milestones, which indicate the requisite knowledge, habits and skills students will need at pertinent junctures in their respective educational journeys. And as our students progress from primary to tertiary levels, they will cumulatively build up their social and emotional capacity, as well as their resilience.

Within the CCE curriculum, Mental Health Education lessons address topics such as the identifying and countering of automatic negative thoughts, emotional regulation, differentiating normal stress from distress and encouraging help-seeking habits. These equip our students with the knowledge and skills to cope with stressors and maintain their mental well-being. Older students also explore relevant topics such as stigmatisations, unhealthy social comparisons, as well as the awareness of potentially negative impact of digital lifestyles, such as poor sleep and overly sedentary habits.

CCE also covers cyber wellness topics that can affect the mental health of our students, including excessive screen use, unhealthy or inappropriate media content, cyberbullying, as well as the fear of missing out (FOMO). Students are taught skills to recognise such risks in the digital space, and identify and discern negative influences, as well as adopt a more balanced use of social media.

Beyond classroom lessons, Mr Speaker, students are encouraged to practise what they have learnt through other student developmental experiences as well, such as the CCAs, sports and games, visual and performing arts, and outdoor education activities, school camps and VIA projects. Teachers and coaches provide guidance to help students apply relevant knowledge and skills in real world context for better internalisation and reinforcement of the lessons learnt.

To help schools better facilitate students learning beyond the classroom, MOE provides guidance on how schools can structure their student development experiences to promote social and emotional learning, including the reinforcement of resilient mindset and skills. Further to this, the Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) then build on the CCE efforts in the earlier years, and avail a range of mental well-being programmes and activities to their students, including modules and workshops on topics like positive psychology, to teach students how to manage their setbacks better.

Even as MOE HQ provides the broad guidance and baseline curriculum provisions and guidelines, I would like to reassure Dr Chen that there is no lack of initiatives from our schools, or even the students themselves. For example, schools have designed their own programmes to promote the "Growth Mindset" in their students and supported student-led activities, such as the Mental Wellness Day.

Centrally, MOE does provide platforms for schools to share their best practices to others. This is similar to the charter that the Member has raised, and just last week, in fact, CCE key personnel from all secondary schools gathered to hear about the latest developments in CCE and to discuss their school initiatives with others. For example, Pasir Ris Secondary shared about their efforts to build students everyday resilience, not only through CCE lessons, but also through peer support networks, through camps and even after-school programmes.

Recognising that programmes alone are insufficient, the school leadership also build this emphasis into their staff culture, into the school's strategic plans, as well as in the everyday language of communication in school. MOE will continue to tap on the passion, the ideas and the efforts from the ground to complement our efforts as well.

In our schools and IHLs, educators are at the frontline where students' well-being is concerned. They help students feel understood, supported and cared for. And through their daily interactions with students, educators are often the first ones to detect an unhappy student and to offer their first words of support.

There are ongoing efforts to empower educators to provide first-line support to our students, including raising their awareness, confidence and sensitivity to the growing and evolving mental health needs of our students. We will continue to strengthen the mental health literacy of our educators through resources and professional development, including basic counselling skills and the ability to recognise students in distress.

Our educators certainly do not work alone but are part of a larger support system. Students who require more support are referred to school counsellors or community mental health resources, such as the Response Early intervention and Assessment in Community mental Health (REACH) teams in our hospitals such as the National University Hospital, IMH and KK Women's and Children's Hospital. The IHLs similarly collaborate with social service agencies to expand their range of outreach programmes and promote holistic well-being as well.

Peers are also integral to every school's ecosystem of support. Peer support leaders have been identified in every school and are trained to provide a listening ear to their friends and encourage help-seeking early. All students are also taught about peer support in CCE where they learn to look out for and show care to one another. In our IHLs, some also have institution-wide peer supporter programmes while others have dedicated ones housed within their schools or faculties.

Dr Chen has reminded us that resilience cannot flourish without the right culture. Through empowering our educators, building student peer support networks and strengthening the schools' referral system, we seek to foster a stronger supportive culture as highlighted by the Member.

Dr Chen also spoke about the importance of gathering data on student well-being. We closely monitor the state of youth mental health through various data sources and research studies, including the recent Youth Epidemiology and Resilience Study by the National University of Singapore and the National Youth Mental Health Study by IMH. Besides relying on data, MOE also engages relevant experts, professionals and community partners to regularly receive inputs regarding the mental health needs and challenges of our youths.

I also want to assure the Member that MOE regularly reviews and refreshes our curriculum and strategies to keep up with the students' evolving needs. Our CCE and mental resilience building efforts, including the curation of topics and pedagogical approaches, are evidence-informed and age-appropriate. We also have internal mechanisms to monitor the implementation of our CCE curriculum and programmes, and regularly obtain feedback from stakeholders to ensure that our efforts have the intended and positive desired impact for our students.

Yet another key approach that MOE has introduced is the student well-being check-in surveys conducted termly. These surveys enable teachers to detect students who might be struggling and provide timely support. IHLs also similarly deploy a range of sensing mechanisms, such as well-being surveys, campus walkabouts and town hall sessions.

All our tracking and review efforts, at MOE and the varying school levels, are part of our culture-building endeavour to strengthen awareness of and commitment to student well-being.