But in one significant way, high school has changed a lot: there is more academic pressure. A lot more. Freshman are told everything counts for college. Students now take many more AP classes. And many teenagers are devoting so many hours to extracurriculars, they have little time to relax or spend time with their families. To be sure, some teenagers are able to weather the high-school pressure cooker with aplomb. But others—often boys—are checking out of academics altogether. And still others are experiencing rates of anxiety and depression not seen in previous generations. This issue, we asked experts what’s going on and what parents can do to help.
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Ways to Help Your Teen Survive and Thrive
BY RANDYE HODER
T
“Children are mortgaging their childhood for the slim chance to get into an elite college,” says Julie LythcottHaims, a parent of two teenagers and former dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Lythcott-Haims explored the growing mental health crisis at colleges in her 2015 book, How To Raise an Adult. “At the end of it, they are scathed, they are brittle, and they are harmed.” In the process, the true meaning and value of an education are lost. “We are now consumed with status, prestige, and rank instead of character, curiosity, and compassion,” says Lloyd Thacker, executive director of The Education Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to re-
en years ago, psychologist Madeline Levine published The Price of Privilege, a book whose central theme was that bright, socially skilled, affluent teenagers were suffering from serious emotional problems. Since then, it seems, things have only gotten worse. Adolescents from well-off families are experiencing high rates of depression and anxiety, much of it in service of getting perfect grades and perfect standardized test scores so as to get into the “perfect” college. This relentless pressure—to meet an impossibly high bar that continues to move upward—comes from all quarters: their parents, their schools, their peers, and themselves.
YOUR TEEN
storing sanity to the college admissions process. “That is distorting students’ relationship to learning, and it’s harming their mental health.” Yet, importantly, parents can do things to alter this trajectory. “We have more agency than we realize,” says Lythcott-Haims, w h o s e c h i l d r e n att e n d Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, home of the widely reported Silicon Valley suicide clusters. (Eight students from the school have committed suicide in the past seven years.) “ The system is broken, but we are not at its mercy. We can make different decisions.” To that end, here are a half-dozen practical things that parents can do to help
| SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2016
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