See how this Girl Scout from Valley Stream is building self-worth, one Post-it at a time

The acute mental health challenges of children and teens, borne out by ballooning rates of anxiety and depression, are a reality universally acknowledged by mental health experts. Girl Scout Alicia Tritschler of Lynbrook Troop 2168, a 15-year-old student at Valley Stream South High School, knows this all too well.

Her generation has grown side by side with social media and its ability to amplify or reshape the social pressures and stresses her fellow teens face.

Emerging evidence also suggests the pandemic, whose years of forced isolation and lost socialization had a lasting effect on children’s and teens’ mental health.

“I know I wanted to do something that helps people, really kids and teens, who might not be in a good mindset right now or stressed out about life because of Covid,” said Tritschler. 

Her answer, as part of her Silver Award project, was a simple yet compelling tool to help her peers elicit feelings of self-confidence and self-worth: a positivity board.

What started as a broad white canvas with a small acrylic mirror in its lower center became covered in Post-it notes chock-full of uplifting phrases. From last August to February, patrons from the Waldinger Memorial Library have grabbed a marker and Post-it note, jotted down a word or sentence of positive affirmation, and tacked it onto the board.

“The mirror is there to look at yourself, as you say to yourself, whether silently or out loud, the kind words you wrote,” noted Tritschler. “The gesture of putting it on the board and letting someone else read it can also make you feel good knowing you’re passing on words of encouragement to a stranger you may never meet.”

Social media, pandemic stress, and self-Image

Psychologists have long spoken about the link between high stress and low self-esteem, especially in young people.

Some note that the same students who tie their self-esteem to how well they do in school are also the ones more vulnerable to the onset of increased stress from studying harder and longer to get higher grades. That stress can impair their academic performance on which their self-esteem depends, which can only further erode self-worth, creating a vicious spiral.

There’s also no shortage of anecdotes warning about how girls’ self-esteem is becoming increasingly tied up in their personality profiles online.

“I see stress in a lot of kids my age and in high school, like my peers,” said Tritschler, who argued that awareness is often the first step in wrangling stress. To that end, the board also comes with a fun teaching component to deepen her peer’s understanding of the nature of stress and its implications for their mental health.

“There’s a QR code on the board that takes them to a Kahoot game,” an online system that offers multiple-choice quiz questions under a game-like format, said Tritschler. “I got books on stress from the library, and I put maybe 15 questions on the quiz game,” she noted. “Questions like ‘How many weeks of constant stress can you have before you’re diagnosed with anxiety?’”

Positivity Board gains momentum

But the Waldinger Memorial Library wasn’t the only place to promote the positivity board.

When Tritschler and her fellow Girl Scouts from across the country were treated to a theatre workshop production of Wicked the Musical, hosted by Wicked and StudentLive in partnership with Girl Scouts USA, she turned one of the program’s mini-events—an essay contest about doing a “wickedly” good service project—into an opportunity to magnify her message.

From a spate of submissions, Tritschler was not only among the five girls selected to read aloud her good service project essay, but was awarded the grand prize.

“I wanted to let people know that despite the stress, there is still so much love and hope to go around,” she wrote in her essay. “More people could take a break from their stressful lives even for just a moment to read the words of encouragement someone left. There are always nice things to say.”

Some of the onlookers from the crowd of roughly 1,000 Girl Scouts, troop leaders, and their families who attended the event that day praised Tritschler for her message. Others noted it had piqued their interest in creating a version of the positivity board themselves. 

“A school nurse from I believe Philadelphia told Alicia she is going to put a positivity board in her nurses’ office in her school,” said Michele Tristchler, Alicia’s mom. “Others said that ‘we were taking notes, we want to do this, we’re going to do this too.’” 

“I’m stunned that she’s made such a big impact and I couldn’t be more proud,” said Troop Leader Debbie Prial. “The silver is 50 hours of minimum of work on the project. And it can be done in a group, but Alicia did it on her own. I know she can be a little shy but to be able to present in front of so many people and win, I’m truly happy for her.”