Article- Overpriveldged kids and us parents- food for thought

Parent Cafe
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<p>May be fewer suicides (I honestly don’t know the stats), but there is plenty of teenage implosion that results in hospitalization for actions such as cutting, drunk driving, etc. At our high school, we had 50+ students hospitalized (in psych wards) this year alone. I think that is a startling statistic.</p>

<p>In my own work, I see “perfect” kids, of “perfect” parents, who fall apart from the stress of unreasonable expectations. The kids who heal best are the ones whose parents simply lay off. OK, so little Johnny won’t be a doctor like dear old dad, but at least he isn’t dead.</p>

<p>If kids are self-motivated to work four and five hours a night on homework, after being at school till 6 for play practice, sports, yearbook, etc.tec.etc., it’s their choice. But too many feel enormous stress to compete in a high stakes academic world that causes them to lose all the joy in life. After all, for most people, we surely hope life is more than just another test or exam.</p>

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<p>CGM:</p>

<p>Nobody questions that there are kids who are hurting. </p>

<p>Some are hurting because of too much pressure; some are hurting because they are deprived of material resources; some are hurting because of parental neglect or broken homes. The author of the article sees one kind of kids who are hurting: those whose parents can afford to send them to psychiatrists/psychologists. If someone who is used to dealing with kids from inner-city neighborhoods or pockets of rural poverty were to write an article, it would be a very different article and would ascribe the pain of the kids to very different causes. </p>

<p>What I questioned in my original post was whether this was a growing trend or the result of greater use of psychiatric services for problems that have been around for a long time.</p>

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<p>CGM: It is food for thought. We may not see the troubled kids described and our kids may not know anyone like them, but then again, they probably do. Take a high school counselor to lunch and bring up this article, you’ll get an earful. Even middle school. I had a counselor friend tell me that last year an 8th grader came in to her office, collapsed in a chair and told her she wanted to kill herself because she failed a test. One test. </p>

<p>It’s also the case that for some kids the collapse doesn’t happen while they’re still home and pretty much sticking to the program. It’s when they get to college that they fall apart; the pressure of getting into college is off but a whole bunch of other pressures have been piled on. The mental health clinics at universities are busy from what I’ve read. </p>

<p>I do think that a big clue to some of the problems of the kids the psychologist is seeing lies in the words “family history.” An acquaintance has a daughter who in high school was definitely a perfectionist type: straight -A student, CIF track star, president of a service club…She was accepted into a service academy and seemed fine at first. Within the year,though, she was hospitalized with a life-threatening eating disorder. Her mom said she went through a similar problem when she was that age.</p>

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<p>There are plenty of parents who put too much pressure on their children; some children also put too much pressure on themselves.
I actually knew a perfectionist when S was in middle school. It was her mom who would have to tell her to stop working on perfecting her umpteenth <em>first</em> draft of a paper; when she was in high school, she would bring back her papers to her middle school teacher because she felt the high school teachers’ comments were not helpful enough, in other words, not critical enough. But she made it through college with flying colors.</p>

<p>I am also leery of ascribing the mental health issues in college to reaction against the pressure students felt while in high school. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, there is also a developmental issue. For example, a young man I know, a mediocre student whose parents put no pressure on him, suffered a breakdown in an undemanding college. It turned out he is bipolar. Mental health problems such as these tend to manifest themselves at the age when young people are in college.</p>

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<p>Wow, am I really THIS old? Thirty years ago, if memory serves, it was well established that high school was a time of transition, a time where MOST students fell down a lot and learned from the experiences. There were only a few “most popular, best student, etc.” types, and these were regular fodder for “whatever happened to” stories. Out of this was born the desireability of being a “bright well rounded kid.”</p>

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<p>I am THIS old and remember that in the 60s, teenage rebellion took the form of protest marches and sit-ins and smoking dope and not trusting anyone over 30.</p>

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<p>marite - That is TOO FUNNY! But I didn’t go in for that protest stuff – I had a MOTORCYCLE!</p>

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<p>NewHope:</p>

<p>Oh, taking after James Dean, were you? That was the symbol of the slacker ethic in those days, right?</p>

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<p>Very good Marite! Actually Marlon Brando was a more significant influence – a slacker for sure, but more proactive than (the on-screen) Dean. I was drawn to Brando’s message that “it’s OK to be rebellious so long as you’re confident in the role.”</p>

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<p>Our society – and the educational system in particular – creates situations that foster adult overinvolvement because the people who run things think that the trees (markers of achievement such as standardized test scores) are more important than the forest (helping kids to grow up into independent young adults).</p>

<p>It starts with the first homework assignment in elementary school that consists of a project obviously too complex for a child to complete without close coaching and assistance from an adult. Parents have no choice but to step in and help.</p>

<p>It ends with high school science contest projects that are performed in professional laboratories as the offshoots of established research programs, rather than being true independent work initiated and completed by the student with readily available materials. In my local school system, a student won third place in the prestigious national Intel science contest with a project entitled “Oxidized LDL metabolites upregulate expression of the adhesion molecule CX3CL1 in primary coronary artery smooth muscle cells.” I’m sure it was an excellent piece of scientific work, and I do not mean to criticize the student in any way. But it’s obvious that she did not do this project in her kitchen.</p>

<p>Maybe we would be better off if students still did science fair projects in their kitchens.</p>

<p>But it’s not parents’ fault that they don’t.</p>

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<p>Another nod for REVIVING OPHELIA. It was first given to us by my sister in-law who is a senior admnistrator and former president of well-regarded private schools.</p>

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<p>Take this onto the sports field</p>

<p>In recent years, we have parents who scream at kids, good players, from the sidelines, hit refs</p>

<p>We have stage moms </p>

<p>We have the pagents</p>

<p>In our local soccer league, we have silent saturdays…the kids like it, parents can ONLY clap…no advice, no “get him”, no yelling</p>

<p>So much IS our fault…In sports, its more noticable, so more action is taken, but you have those “helpful” parents behind the scenes in many families</p>

<p>We talk about “self motivated” kids…I really wonder about that</p>

<p>If we parents had a chose, would we not work overtime, not mow that lawn…we do it becuase we have to for a variety of reasons, that is very different from being “motivate” its more Obligated</p>

<p>I agree, marian, somethings are out of the parents control, but much is, what if more parents said, hold on, why is a corporation helping my D in a contest…if she wants to do research that is one thing, but for a contest…hmmmm</p>

<p>It is almost like having a person come in and shoot the free throw during the game instead of the kid</p>

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<p>Here’s a quote from Wade Horn who’s a shrink and in the dept. of Health and Human Services talking about the ME generation (mine), “they spent the 50’s being spoiled, spent the 60’s having a decade-long temper tantrum because the world was not precisely as they wanted it to be, spent the 70’s having the best sex and drugs they could find, the 80’s acquiring things and the 90’s trying to have the most perfect children. And not because they felt an obligation to the next generation to rear them to be healthy, well adjusted adults, but because they wanted to have bragging rights” Figures that our kids are turning out the way they are, I guess.</p>

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<p>Yeah marite…you left out the wanton sex and great rock n roll… </p>

<p>Doris Lessing observed that the parents of sixties teens were damaged by the effects and deprivations of WWII. She believes that war time stress makes for ineffectual, inattentive parents whose children (like the current 50 somethings) are more likely to go right off the rails.</p>