The Danger of Pressuring Kids Early

My View

For too many children, the intense pressure for early achievement is damaging their physical and mental health. Millions of American children are on prescribed drugs for attention deficit disorder, primarily because this condition hurts their ability to sit still and pay attention in school, affecting course grades, standardized test scores and, ultimately, their prospects for admission to selective colleges.

Dr. Leonard Sax, a medical doctor and psychologist who wrote about troubled teenagers in Boys Adrift and Girls on the Edge, told me: “A kid in the United States is now 14 times more likely to be on medication for ADD compared to a kid in the U.K. A kid in the United States is 40 times more likely to be diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder compared to a kid in Germany. A kid in the United States is 93 times more likely to be on medications like Risperdal and Zyprexa used to control behavior compared to a kid in Italy.”

To Sax, this all means we now use medication “as a first resort for any kid who’s not getting straight A’s or not sitting still in class … a uniquely American phenomenon.”

A Funnel Phenomenon

One might say that 21st-century society has turned a college rejection into a clinical disease. Now, more than ever, it views a degree from an Ivy League university or another highly selective institution as a prerequisite for a good life. But with the number of openings at such colleges barely increasing, intensely involved parents essentially are trying to push an ever-growing number of kids through an ever-narrowing funnel.

Let’s stop and ask: Is the sacrificial expenditure of money, wrecked family dinners and kids exhausted from organized activities producing better, more productive or happier adults? Is it helping people bloom?

For most kids, it’s doing the exact opposite. The pressure for early achievement in school and outside school has an unwitting dark side: It demoralizes young people. By forcing adolescents to practice like professionals, to strive for perfection and to make life choices in their teens (or earlier), we’re actually causing them harm. We’re stunting their development, closing their pathways to discovery and making them more fragile. Just when we should be encouraging kids to dream big, take risks and learn from life’s inevitable failures, we’re teaching them to live in terror of making the slightest mistake. Forging kids into wunderkinds is making them brittle.

Crippled by Fear

This topic is of particular importance to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, author of the best-selling 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I had an opportunity to discuss with Dweck the changes she’s seen in her years of teaching college freshmen.

“Kids seem more exhausted and brittle today,” she told me. “I’m getting much more fear of failure, fear of evaluation, than I’ve gotten before. I see it in a lot of kids — a desire to play it safe. They don’t want to get into a place of being judged, of having to produce."

And these, she reminded me, are students admit-ted to Stanford, one of the country’s most selective universities. These are supposedly the early “winners” in life, yet the optimism of youth has been warped into a crippling fear of failure.

But it gets worse. Adolescents worldwide are experiencing depressive symptoms in their teenage years. While other causes of death are declining for teenagers, suicide keeps climbing.

Adult Control

What’s hard to understand is that this increased anxiety seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the world. The changes don’t correlate with wide-spread famine, systemic poverty, security threats or any other events that normally affect our mental states. Rates of anxiety and depression among American adolescents and young adults were much lower during the Great Depression, World War II and Vietnam war — when the U.S. had the military draft — than they are today. Instead, the changes have much more to do with the way young people experience the world.

More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Children today spend more hours of their life in school than ever before. Outside school, they spend more time than ever being tutored, coached, ranked and rewarded by adults.

During the same half-century in which children’s anxiety and depression have increased, what researchers call “free play” (and most of us call goofing around) has declined, while directed activities such as organized sports have risen steadily in importance. In all these settings, adults are in control, not kids. And this, it appears, is a recipe for unhappiness, anxiety, psychopathology — or worse.