Stress and suicide among high achieving, affluent kids

Parent Cafe
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An article in The Atlantic this month explores the reasons for a cluster of teen suicides among two high-ranked high schools in Palo Alto, Ca. The community is working on solutions that address the roots of the problem, including “tiger parenting.” If you haven’t seen it, the article is here. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-silicon-valley-suicides/413140/ I apologize in advance to the moderators if this has already been posted elsewhere.

The part of the article that hit the spot for me was the discussion of closeness between parents and their children. Some parents base their relationships on the child’s achievements, rewarding them emotionally when they do well and punishing them emotionally when they do not.

Anyone else have this problem at home? How do you suppress pride/shame from your reaction when dealing with your child’s achievements? What are ways to express disappointment without making your child feel less loved?

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I have never been ashamed in relation to my children’s achievements or lack of achievement. And while I am often proud of their achievements, and sometimes express this, they seem to understand that what is most important to me is who they are, not what they do. I’m not sure how I conveyed this to them, but it appears to have worked.

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Sometimes it’s not so much the parents, but the overall community that contributes to kids’ stress and sense of failure/achievement.

Palo Alto is a pressure cooking bubble. Well-to-do, highly educated & accomplished parents raising children with high expectations of their educational and career achievements. I’m sure there are similar bubbles in parts of LA, NYC, etc.

I went to high school not too far away - a high school which now some Caucasian families avoid because of academic competition among its Asian students, all bound for Stanford, Yale or, worst case scenario (lol), UCLA or Berkeley.

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My kids are well-adjusted and they know they are loved. I don’t intend to show disappointment in a way that makes them feel less deserving of love. If I am disappointed, it’s usually not the grade itself, but it’s because they haven’t applied themselves or given the subject their full attention. I don’t fly off the handle because they got a “B” – heck, in some classes, a B is a reach. LOL. It’s the lack of “reaching.” It’s the work ethic piece that drives me nuts - the same way as them not picking up after themselves or being respectful at dinner or turning in late homework or not turning it in at all. I feel as if it’s unbecoming character - a laziness or a slack that is totally inexplicable given that they are otherwise so privileged to have everything else handed to them.

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katliamom: So true! Sometimes I think I chose this neighborhood to avoid “bad” schools in other parts of the city, but what I really did was sign my kids up for an academic rat race.

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Every day, I thank my lucky stars that we didn’t stay in NYC and send our kids to one of the exam schools or move to one of the more sought after suburban districts. Our kids worked hard and did well. From time to time they’d do some really silly lazy thing, and I’d remember that I did a few of those things myself back in the day. I think older son knew we had high expectations for him - he was certainly capable, but we also let him pursue his interests. He was lucky that school was easy for him and even without trying he could get decent grades in the subjects he disliked. Younger son had more issues (mild LDs), but ended up pulling it all together on his own by the end of high school.

There was some stress among the high achieving kids at the high school, but nothing like what I’ve heard about elsewhere.

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I have battled major depression since I was a young teen. I know how to put on a happy face when I’m dead inside. I absolutely understand how nobody knew these kids were suicidal.

I have an extremely close relationship with my parents and that’s probably the only reason I survived my high school years. I had suicidal thoughts but never acted on them or self harmed. What I did do was stop eating. Not as a way to harm myself but because I just couldn’t eat. The thought of food made me sick. I dropped down to 120 lb (I’m 6’) and my parents got me into treatment.

I didn’t do the rat race. My boyfriend was ultimately a high school dropout and I hung out with the kids who dressed all in black and didn’t care about passing school. They cared about getting high and playing video games. Those were my people (still are). I still took AP classes and got good grades and test scores (somewhere in the ballpark of 3.8 gpa and 33 act) but I left that high pressure environment behind when I left the classes. I also missed a lot of school because I just couldn’t get out of bed. Or I’d go to certain classes and then skip the ones I didn’t want to go to that day. (I’m not saying this was a good idea.)

When it came time to go to college, I turned down UMich because I didn’t want to go into that cut throat environment. I chose a better fit for me that was less high pressured but still challenging.

My point with all of this is that I was lucky. Very lucky. I had means of escaping the high pressure environment and I was lucky to have parents who recognised what was going on and got me help. If I lived in a pressure cooker like Palo Alto I probably wouldn’t have survived.

Even now, in my mid 20s, it’s a struggle. I struggle every day. I have gotten better about advocating for myself and my PhD advisors know about my depression and are the most supportive people imaginable. But just two weeks ago a major episode hit and I had to once again go and get my meds adjusted. It’s still a struggle every morning to get out of bed. Having a dog whose life depends on me helps.

I don’t know what the answer is but we need to do something.

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For as long as I can remember, we’ve told DD that the only way she might disappoint us is if she doesn’t try to do her best – the coming in second or last is OK as long as she gave it her best shot. And there were occasions when we were able to demonstrate that we meant just that.

We STILL have a kid who gets anxious when she isn’t the best.

Part of that is that she probably inherited a predisposition to anxiety.

If there is an environmental component, I wonder if it might go all the way back to her earliest years – back when we cheered just for crawling up the stairs or learning a new word. I wonder if she might have gotten “hooked” on our praise as her “drug” of choice. And what human ever gets more praise than they did when they were a toddler? Is it possible that for some kids, the rest of life is just one big let down? How do you fix that? How do you avoid it?

It’s a hypothesis, anyway.

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Very long article so I just skimmed it, but what makes them think the root of the problem is tiger parenting rather than mental illness? I thought depression and suicide struck every socioeconomic environment. Is there really a higher rate at this location, or do the parents just expect that things like that don’t happen here?

Addiction, abuse, gambling…all manner of human ills seem to be distributed among all social classes.

1 Like
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Yes, but different stressors can greatly aggravate or moderate mental illness.

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MomofJandL: I think the distinction is not clear between mental illness and depression caused by environmental pressure. Apparently, Palo Alto, being affluent and all, the assumption is that these kids have access to mental health professionals/counselors more so than other communities that are less affluent but with no frequency of suicide clusters. The profile of the kids used as examples in the article does not fit your stereotypical kid with issues - some of them are the most popular kids around with many friends, activities, great grades.

Perhaps as parents, we blur the lines further. I’m lucky my kids have a sense of humor about my tiger ways. But I have often thought, with much guilt, about the disproportionate interactions with them that are school/achievement related versus interactions that are “hey, how are you doing?” If my kids weren’t so centered or had a proclivity to mental illness, would my interactions be nudging them to the brink so to speak.

High school is hell. I have to remind myself of that all the time.

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I decided when my children were very young (infants?) that I was not going to talk to them about “expectations” for academic achievements. I had a theory that it was highly unlikely that they would not intuit that learning and knowledge are important to me and my husband: the house filled with books, the parents reading the books, the parents with advanced degrees, things the parents talk about. And I also thought it highly likely that they would inherit my and my husband’s predisposition to anxiety. Both things ended up being true. And my daughters confirmed, sometime during their teen years, that even though we never said “school is important!,” they got that message. So, I feel guilty enough for giving them the genetic inheritance of anxiety and depression; I’m glad I didn’t pile it on by talking about achievement.

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Wasatchwriter, I don’t know how to get the kid unhooked from the “praise” drug. But an equally helpful question is how do you express disappointment with their effort (or lack of effort)? Do you avoid showing disappointment entirely? And isn’t that, too, a form of coddling, a variant of the “praise” drug? For many reasons, I don’t think the kids who are committing suicide were living the life of “precious snowflakes” at home.

I think you are on to something with your theory.

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There’s some research supporting the unhelpfulness of too much praise. Alfie Kohn covered a lot of it in his book Punished by Rewards: http://www.alfiekohn.org/punished-rewards/ which I read back when it was knew and it influenced a lot of my thinking, though I never convinced anyone at my kids’ schools to back off on awards. This covers some of the same ground, but is more geared towards teaching younger kids: http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Can-Learn/dp/0684824728. I learned to observe what my kids were up to, rather than praise it.

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@momofjandl:

All of the ills you talk about are distributed among all classes, including depression and suicide, but they are not genetic factors or distributed evenly. For example, alcoholism and drug use are in all social classes, but if you look at the clusters, alcoholism and drug use are heavier in economically deprived areas (just talk to cops and social service agencies in rural areas where they used to crow that drugs were a problem of the inner city and minority communities, guess what, not any more).

Things like depression and suicide are magnified by environment, and pressure is a big one. We often, for example, give accolades to the achievements of Asian kids academically, they are held up as a model minority, yet studies of Chinese and Korean kids in the US (and Korean kids in Korea itself) show rates of suicide well above the statitistical norms, and the pressure they are under to succeed is one of the big reasons. It was more than likely true in prior generations among strivers (the Jews come to mind), but back then suicide was something that was considered a moral defect so it wasn’t talked about much, so it is hard to judge). Likewise, the suicide rates at elite schools like MIT and Ivy Schools are often very high compared to other schools, when kids run into issues suicide and attempted suicide at not unknown. There is a line between healthy pressure , that allows a kid to achieve, and the kind of pressure of ridiculous expectations. The best pressure is when a kid has internalized what they are doing, and is working hard to achieve their goals and dreams, where it isn’t about what the parents want or expect. By the way the same thing happens with competitive athletes and in the arts, it isn’t talked about much but from what I heard from the SAB (School of American Ballet, one of the most elite ballet programs around) parents, suicide and suicide attempts and depression are not uncommon, have seen the same thing in the music world.

To give you an idea of what the pressure does, there was an article by this guy who runs something of an oddity, it is a mega church in NYC (I think it is Presbytyrian). One of the the things that makes it odd is a lot of those who belong are younger, and many of them are very accomplished young people, went to the right schools, how power jobs. In an article the minister explained that they are there because many of them felt hollow, that the expectations placed on them to succeed, usually by their parents, had left them in this competitive rat race, and according to the article many of them were battling depression, ills like drug addiction, and more than a few either thought seriously of suicide or had attempts. A friend of the family goes to that church, and he said that for the first time, these people were hearing a message that there was more to life than success, of achieving “for the family”. He himself does peer counseling there (I can’t think of someone better to do it, by the way, guy is an amazing music teacher, but also is one of the sweetest, genuine people I have run into) and he said it takes a lot of work to get them to where they realize they have the right to a life of their own,that success has its limitations.

In terms of my son, the way we dealt with it was to try and encourage him to do and try things, we tried not to overpraise him (which is ridiculous), and to celebrate with him when he wanted to celebrate. The only time we stepped in was if we felt he wasn’t trying or putting the effort in, a couple of times with music we felt he was sliding a bit, coasting, and we stepped in at that point, to make sure he upped his practicing and so forth. It wasn’t because we wanted him to win some competition, or be the concertmaster or whatever, but rather he was complaining about his lack of progress, and we pointed out he hadn’t been practicing. One of the biggest things I honestly feel is that the goals set are worked out with the kid, telling a kid what they have to do because a parent thinks that is the right thing is not necessarily a great way to go, I always found it worked better when it was mutual.Being in the music world, I saw a lot of kids who had been forced into it by parents, who achieved a pretty high level of playing, but there was nothing more sad then watching them play.

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I remember hearing about the complexity of praise back when my children were toddlers. Rather than say, “that’s great, that’s so pretty, that’s the best thing in the world” when given a drawing by your child, you could instead say something less praise-like but more specific to what they’ve given you like, “look at that big tree you drew!”

After all, we’re not looking for pretty drawings from them or to have them draw to please us, we just want them to keep drawing (or whatever the activity is).

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My neighbor is a professor with a PhD. Her husband is a top litigator with an Ivy law degree. When her son was in high school and grades, work ethic, etc., became a contentious issue at home, she made a really controversial decision.

Unlike almost all her friends, colleagues and people in her milieu, she decided she wasn’t going to push her son academically when he resisted. She wasn’t going to helicopter over his homework, classes or overall school performance. She did talk with him about what it was going to take to get into the state flagship university, or even into the school’s selective AP courses, for that matter. He knew what he needed to do, and knew what the consequences would be if he didn’t do it.

“I didn’t want our relationship to be defined by arguments over school.” she told me. You can imagine the kind of flack she got from within her high-achieving-bubble. From her own family.

The boy is a senior in high school, a B-/C student with unimpressive SATs but enough to get into some of the lower-ranked state colleges. He’s now apparently a bit disappointed at his options, but also realizes it was very much his own doing.

In reality, I think his options will be… very similar to his high-achieving friends, once decides to buckle down and really work.

Sure, he won’t get into any elite schools – but he can start at a state college or a community college and then transfer to the state flagship university – where many of his classmates, including the ambitious A students – will be enrolling.

I admire the mom for making the choice she made.

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Katliamom - I’ve got a son who is similar to your friend’s described above. I’m at wit’s end as what to do. The first child has been so easy to raise. She’s always worked hard and been industrious and resourceful. I’ve been so proud of her efforts, regardless of the outcome even when it was disappointing. My son on the other hand, lacks her maturity and I struggle daily to figure out why he’s always looking for short-cuts and expediency rather than doing the work the course demands. He’s very bright. Just lazy as I’ll get out. I used to think it was his age (he’s younger than most kids in his class by a year) but then I think back to my daughter at the same age and she was not that way at all.

A few months ago, after a long cry about it, I accepted the fact that I was far more emotionally vested in his outcomes than he was. I made an ultimatum. I told him I would cancel music lessons if he did not practice daily. I told him he could either put the work in that his teachers demanded, or I was happy to see him off to a community college (cheaper for me anyway). Unless he started caring, I said to him, I will divert my attention and resources to more rewarding pursuits. It’s very hard to see him make avoidable mistakes with time management and priorities. I try not to see his flailing as a failure, but as an opportunity for him to learn the hard way how life works. It is the most painful thing I’ve had to make myself do as a parent – letting him face the consequences of his choices. I just don’t have the energy any more, I’m too emotionally drained from the effort.

It feels very much like my relationship with him is based on emotional rewards. But it works both ways. He knows the game even better than me, and uses it to manipulate me as well because he knows I care way more than he does. No sane person can be this vested in parenting outcomes without a meltdown eventually. I had to check out, mentally and emotionally.

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The research says that parents should praise effort, not product. That deals with OP’s concern about encouraging hard work, but avoids the problem of raising children with an inflated sense of sense, a fear of failure, or an addiction to praise. So, for example, when looking at a child’s drawing, you might say “I can see how much work you put into your picture! Those trees are very detailed and I love the colors you chose.”

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@PragmaticMom, it’s hard on parents when two siblings are so different. (I have that situation with my two kids.) And I know that it’s hard to watch a child make poor choices – but hang in there. Our education system is very forgiving. If your son decides to rededicate himself to school in the future, he can still graduate from a good university. (And If he doesn’t want to put in the effort, maybe college is just not for him. There are many other ways to make a good living.)

I think it’s a good idea to cut off your son’s music lessons if he’s not practicing, but if I were you, I’d encourage your son to explore new hobbies. You never know what might spark his interest, enrich his life and, yes, make him reconsider school. One of my son’s friends was a failing high schooler until he got into working with his hands - metal and wood shop, etc. He ended up going to college for industrial design and has a thriving, successful business.