Great Expectations

Bethesda-area parents and schools apply tremendous pressure on kids to achieve. Are the benefits worth the price?

By Pamela Toutant

Amy, a senior at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, is sick—again. Amy (not her real name) missed school today, something she says happens once or twice a month because she gets a recurring cold.

Why does she get sick so often? “I get up between 5 and 5:30 every morning and I’m at school by 6:30. After school I do clubs and other activities. I get home between 8:30 and 9 most nights. A lot of times I miss my family dinner. I usually eat it by myself while I’m doing homework in my room or I don’t eat. I typically get done with my homework at 1:30 in the morning. At best, I get four hours of sleep a night.”

Amy is stressed to the limit—and it shows. “A lot of things get on my nerves,” she says. “I’m really short. I snap.”

One of the things that makes the stress bearable is that Amy’s not in it alone. Virtually all of her friends feel like she does, she says. Indeed, tens of thousands of Bethesda-area students are driven to get great grades, star in sports and other extracurricular activities, and make themselves stand out from the crowd—all in the name of getting into a great college and getting ahead.

 “I drive myself so hard because I have to,” Amy explains. “I’m expected to by my parents, other parents in my community, other students, my tutor and my teachers.”

The question is, “Why?” Why do we, as a society, put so much pressure on kids? Why is it so important to so many parents that their children excel at so many things and get into the best colleges?

Bethesda Magazine interviewed students, parents and experts to find out the answers. If we are to judge by the number of teens whose busy academic and extracurricular schedules held out no hope of a weekday interview, or the response of a Georgetown Day School student who declined altogether saying, “I am way too stressed,” then clearly, many kids are feeling the pressure. The teens we interviewed told us of the satisfaction they feel when they are successful, but they also told us about the price they pay for that success in affluent Bethesda’s highly competitive environment.

Says a senior at Georgetown Preparatory School: “Achievement is more important than I would like it to be. Sometimes I think to myself, ‘Here I have four years of my life when I don’t have adult responsibilities. Yet here I am slaving away to get into college.’”

Bethesda psychologist Robyn Miller is worried about what the stress is doing to kids. “Kids clearly have too much pressure on them,” Miller says. “Many of them are over-scheduled and exhausted, which leaves little time or energy to explore who they are, learn to cope with their emotions, or to develop relationships. Many of them think, ‘When I get into a good college, then I’ll be happy.’ However, their problems don’t go away, they only get postponed.”

Adds Silver Spring neuropsychologist William Stixrud: “We have all been swept up in this ‘mass psychosis,’ or a set of beliefs relating to achievement that is grossly out of touch with reality. The fact is that I.Q and academic achievement are very modest predictors of a person’s success or happiness in life.”

Am I good enough?

Influenced by the sensibilities of the 1960s, the question, “Who am I?” preoccupied the adolescence of many of today’s parents and, some might argue, followed them into adulthood as well. But in a significant shift in focus, the signature question for young people these days appears to be, “Am I the best?” Or, expressed in a slightly different way by a sophomore at Sidwell Friends School, “For us, there is a lot of the sentiment, ‘Am I good enough?’”

For the current generation of kids, this question has been posed over and over again by the adults in their lives through the relentless ranking and culling that takes place at younger and younger ages—the elementary school honor roll assemblies, the private school acceptances or rejections, the select sports teams, the gifted and talented designations. Says a sophomore at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda: “Sometimes my parents say, ‘I don’t know how you handle the pressure.’ But it’s normal for us. We’ve had pressure since elementary school.”

While the catchphrase ‘question authority’ was the youthful mantra of many of today’s parents, it is difficult to imagine today’s teens rising up against the three or more hours of nightly homework, the two- to three-hour sport practices five or six times a week; and the tutors, shrinks, coaches and personal trainers who keep it all propped up. “Parents and kids these days are mostly in sync with expectations for achievement,” says a junior at Sidwell Friends. “Kids want to do well. And to do well in this environment, you have to conform.”  

Where is the pressure coming from? 

The drumbeat of great expectations has become so ubiquitous it has become the equivalent of surround sound. “The whole environment contributes to the competitiveness and stress: parents, school, peers, colleges,” says a Sidwell Friends junior. “It is everywhere.”

But nowhere is the pressure more potent than in the home. In many ways, parents govern how much pressure their kids feel—by how much pressure they exert directly, by how often they put their children in pressure-packed environments, and by how they help their children deal with the pressures around them.

“I think that most of the pressure on kids comes from their parents,” says an eighth-grade student at Westland Middle School in Bethesda. “A lot of kids are nervous about showing parents their grades.”

Adds a junior at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, “…I know a lot of parents who are really hard on their kids, yelling at them when they get Bs. Some kids cry at school when they get a B plus. Some parents go insane not only pressuring their kids about grades, but also wanting them to take a lot of extracurricular activities. The motivation for good grades for a lot of kids at my school is to keep their parents from yelling at them.”

Many of today’s parents grew up in environments that were much less stressful. Less was expected and required of them. So what has changed? Why are today’s parents so much more demanding—and anxious—than many of their parents were? The answer is multifaceted.

The rise of the meritocracy, which awards opportunity based on merit rather than social position or wealth, has had a profound effect on shaping the current achievement ethos and our children’s day-to-day experiences. While not completely leveling the playing field, particularly for low-income kids, it has succeeded to a large extent in democratizing anxiety, especially concerning college admissions. “In the old days, money got you entry,” says a Whitman parent. “But now, try as you might, all the money in the world can’t buy your child a 2400 on their SAT. This makes affluent parents very anxious.”

For recent arrivals to the middle or upper middle class, there is great fear of backsliding. Parents often feel that there is no margin for error, especially by the time their kids are in high school. “Even by middle school, our kids’ lives are seen through the college prism,” says Chevy Chase mother Diane Blizzard. “It used to be enough that your child was well-rounded and intellectually curious. Now, there is unrelenting pressure to package them as ‘mind-blowing’ creatures.”

Like all cultural trends, the intense pressure bearing down on kids and kicking up parental anxiety cannot be removed from the larger social and economic context. Brad Sachs, a family psychologist in Columbia, Md., and author of The Good Enough Teen, explains: “People have fewer children who then must carry more of the burden of family expectation. And when people have children later in life, it can make them feel they want a bigger and quicker return on their investment. Every decade the economic gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ gets wider, and parents understandably fret that their children won’t be on the right side of the divide.”

The fact that so many Bethesda-area parents are so highly educated adds to the pressure. In Money magazine’s 2005 list of the most “educated cities” in the U.S., Chevy Chase ranked first with 48 percent of adults holding graduate degrees, Bethesda was second with 47 percent and Potomac ranked fourth with 45 percent forming, in effect, the meritocracy’s iron triangle. (Brookline, Mass., ranked third with 46 percent.) Parents here value education for its own sake—and for what it can help their children achieve.

“Because of all the highly educated parents in this area, academic achievement has been elevated above all else,” says a Whitman parent. “Parents’ self-esteem is on the line. In typical Washington fashion, these parents are launching college campaigns that begin years before their kids need to apply. They don’t see it as their child’s life; they see it as their own.”

Adds Veneeta Acson, a Chevy Chase study skills and organization tutor: “I think that a lot of this focus on achievement comes from our parents’ generation who taught us that we had to achieve more than they did. But it was easier for us to accomplish this and please our parents by not only graduating from college but also by becoming doctors and lawyers and PhDs. How can our children do ‘better’ than we have done? Our children would like to achieve more than their parents but are hitting an achievement wall.”

Even though many parents know that excessive pressure is harmful to their children, they push their kids to work harder and faster because so many other parents are doing the same, in effect, creating an “achievement arms race.” If your child is taking two advanced placement (AP) classes and you run into an acquaintance at the grocery store who tells you that her daughter is taking four APs, it will likely trigger anxiety. “Like everyone else around here, I am not immune to getting swept up into the frenzy,” says one Bethesda mother.

Adds another Bethesda mother: “One night when I discovered that my son hadn’t done his homework, I lost it. I yelled at him, but worse, I told him I was afraid that he was going to be a failure in life if he didn’t take school more seriously. All this pressure on my children to be constantly working and achieving brings out the worst in me.”

For parents whose children have learning disabilities or ADD (attention-deficit disorder), the focus on achievement can be particularly painful. “I think that the message around here is if your kid doesn’t go to a top-tier college it must mean they didn’t work hard enough or they aren’t smart enough,” says a Bethesda mother who attended Ivy league schools herself and whose child is gifted, but also has a learning disability and ADD. “This can be isolating when you know your kid isn’t going to go to one. I constantly need to work on having a positive image of my child as having gifts outside of academics and sports, because not much else is valued by the community.”

But not everybody feels that achievement is overemphasized. One mother whose children attend Westland Middle School and B-CC says, “I definitely support encouraging kids to reach their potential. They should be encouraged to excel. I don’t think that we are pushing them too much or too hard. I want my children to learn how to climb the stairs.”

Mothers on the frontline

Mothers, who are usually the ones on the frontline of their children’s day-to-day care as well as their educational and extracurricular pursuits, may be especially vulnerable to anxiety relating to their children’s standing.

Whether a woman decides to work outside the home—or stay at home with her kids—“she will naturally look to her kids to validate” her choice, says psychologist Sachs. “This conundrum is likely to foster an even greater need than usual for her children to reflect well on her. She may also understandably have a strong desire to have her daughters, in particular, take advantage of the opportunities she may have been denied.”

Add the usual ingredients of midlife angst, and mothers and fathers can unconsciously contribute to unrealistic expectations for their children. Says Roni Cohen-Sandler, psychologist and the author of Stressed Out Girls, “Parents of teens are at a stage in life when they are re-evaluating choices they made in their careers. They may be disappointed in how things went for them and as a result ask: What can I get my kids to accomplish?”

Pressure from schools

Amy, from Churchill High School, says school, not her parents, is the biggest source of pressure and stress. “My parents are actually more lenient than my school; they just want me to try my hardest and leave it at that,” she says. “My school puts a lot of pressure on us. The message from the school is that the harder you work, the better you make us look. Appearances seem to be the point.”

A sophomore at Sidwell Friends says, “We get so much homework at my school that it is hard to get nine hours of sleep. Sleep deprivation is my biggest issue. At my school a lot of people sleep during their free periods.”

Adds a junior at St. Andrew’s: “My parents don’t pressure me much. Most of the pressure comes from my school. People look down on you if you aren’t involved in a lot of things. The faculty really respect the kids who don’t get home until 10 at night.”

The St. Andrew’s junior said students recently met with school administrators to discuss how much stress they feel from the workload. “The advisors said we just needed to plan our time better, but they never decrease the work.”

Many parents say schools are major players in the achievement frenzy. “Private schools feel the pressure from parents and then apply it to the students because getting kids into good colleges is important for their recruitment efforts,” says Blizzard of Chevy Chase.

And when it comes to the public schools, Potomac mother Joyce Yokely expresses an opinion often heard from other public school parents. “It is hard to know who exactly is fueling the pressure on kids. Teachers are under a lot of pressure from the county to push kids along and up. They encourage kids to be taking advanced classes beginning in elementary school. And then high schools in the county compete with each other about test scores. Parents are not entirely to blame.”

Adds a B-CC father: “Because of the over-focus on grades and achievement, schools are drumming out the enjoyment of learning. This prompts kids to make choices not on what interests them, but based on getting to the next rung. It all begins in elementary school with the excessive amount of homework.”

Carole Goodman, principal of Blake High School in Silver Spring, says she recognizes that pressure on kids “seems to get worse every year. While our goal is to help kids meet their potential, you walk a fine line in pushing kids to the point of burnout. The key is to challenge them and then offer support for kids who are struggling.”

Have public schools gotten too caught up in the achievement arms race? Goodman acknowledges that “it feels good when one of our kids gets into a Brown or Stanford. And I’d love to have one of our students get into Harvard or Yale, to have that notch in our belt. But the most important thing for us…is to serve the best interests of each child.”

Josh Wollman, a Chevy Chase resident who is Sidwell’s director of admissions, says, “Kids come to Sidwell seeking academic and other challenges. Some kids really seek out that challenge and thrive on it; for others there is a harder balance. We do need to remember that these are kids. But let’s remember, Washington is a fast-paced environment. When parents enroll their child at Sidwell, they are making an educated choice.”

The consequences

A junior at a private school says her bulimia started when she was a sophomore. “There was constant pressure from my teachers. I felt controlled by them, like they had control over my time and my life. I would get really stressed out in my classes from taking tests and finishing all of the homework. I was desperate to feel that I had some control over my day, so I would set aside a time when I would pig out and then throw up. I looked forward to that time every day,” she says.

Experts express concern—bordering on alarm—about the consequences of the achievement arms race.

“When kids are over-focused on others’ expectations,” says psychologist Cohen-Sandler, “they can’t get in touch with what they really feel, what they feel passionately about and so they become estranged from their inner life. They begin going through the motions, which makes them very vulnerable to depression, cutting and eating disorders, among other things.”

Neuropsychologist Stixrud says there is a strong link, for example, between stress and depression. “Stress, which is exacerbated by sleep deprivation and excessive pressure to achieve, makes kids more vulnerable to depression,” he says. “We have to get out of the mind-set that working harder and harder is the key to success. Stress is terrible for the brain. Chronic stress negatively affects cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s major memory center, which then eventually shuts down the creation of new brain cells.”

According to University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, there is an epidemic of depression in America. The average age of onset two generations ago was about 35 years old; now it is 14. This trend was highlighted in a 2003 survey by the American College Health Association, which found that more than 40 percent of college undergraduates reported feeling “so depressed, it was difficult to function” at least once during the year, and 30 percent said they were suffering from an anxiety disorder or depression.

And in a well-publicized poll of Harvard University students conducted by the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, the numbers were even higher, with “an overwhelming majority of Harvard undergraduates [struggling] with mental health problems.” The Crimson went on to say that “eighty percent of undergraduates felt depressed at least once in the past year. Ten percent said they had seriously considered committing suicide.” When Harvard officials were asked to hypothesize about the reasons for the high incidence of mental health problems on campus brought to light by the Crimson poll, they noted the pressure students face before arriving at college as a significant contributing factor.

The stress connection: alcohol, drugs and casual sex

Many local teens say the pressure to achieve is a significant factor in underage drinking and taking drugs. Sounding like an adult with a demanding job, a senior at Georgetown Prep says, “The great pleasure that comes from drinking and drugs is that you can’t think about anything. When you are preoccupied with work all the time, it is nice to relax.”

“There is so much stress about exams at my school that when they are over, a lot of kids go out and get really smashed,” says a 16-year-old Bethesda girl. “There are usually one or two big parties and things get really wild. It’s like we have all just been barely holding it together and then we fall apart.”

A Churchill senior adds: “Eating disorders and drinking are the two biggest outlets for stress at my school. The drinking is not social drinking, it is binge drinking, the kind of drinking you do to forget. A lot of it is a rebellion against their inner selves: the good student, the perfect person. People want to be someone else for the night.”

Psychologist Sachs says “there is a close connection” between the pressure to achieve and the use of alcohol and drugs. “Because one of the effects of alcohol and drugs is the feeling that you are absolved of responsibility, it is not surprising that large numbers of over-responsible kids would seek them out,” Sachs says.

He also sees a connection between achievement pressure and the trend of teens engaging in casual sex. “The over-focus on achievement impedes the development of crucial relational skills such as intimacy, mutuality and trust,” Sachs says. “When the unrelenting emphasis is ‘Getting’—getting an A, getting into a particular college, or getting a blow job—it should come as no surprise when we see an increase in sexual encounters among teens that are devoid of emotional content, and involve ‘getting’ more than giving.” 

Are girls more stressed than boys?

The effort to level the playing field for girls has, for the most part, been successful. But one unanticipated side effect of this is that many girls now believe that because they can do something, they should do it. And this, according to Cohen-Sandler, author of Stressed Out Girls, often leads to girls feeling overwhelmed. In addition to being overextended, “Girls are more vulnerable than boys to the pressure to achieve mainly because they are socialized to please others and meet others’ expectations,” she says. “When you add to this the fact that there is more pressure on girls to have a perfect body, it creates an exhausting state of chronic vigilance. This is one of the reasons girls are now using alcohol at the same rate as boys for the first time ever. They are using it to self-medicate, to escape from the stress.”

A sophomore girl at Maret School concurs: “Girls are definitely more stressed out,” she says. “Girls are usually harder workers. If they get a B minus on a test, they will be upset about it for hours. Guys brush it off.”

Says a sophomore girl at Sidwell Friends: “My stress compared to my guy friends is definitely higher. Guys don’t let it get to them as much. They seem to spend more time doing things like sports and music so all the focus isn’t on academics.”

And a junior girl at St. Andrew’s adds: “There is a lot of pressure on girls to be thin. That’s half the battle of getting through the day. Constantly comparing myself to all the skinny girls really affects my schoolwork.”

Are we raising a generation of workaholics? 

One of the costs of the achievement frenzy for local teens is having too little social time with friends. “Sometimes I find that I can’t go out on the weekends because of homework,” a Whitman sophomore says. “We do have time for a social life, but kids are thinking quite a bit about academic priorities.”

“Kids are under enormous stress and by late high school often don’t have time for friends,” a Whitman mother says. “My son often turns down opportunities to go out on the weekends because he is just too tired.”

Because of homework and extracurricular activities, the teens we spoke with say it is rare for kids to spend social time with friends during the week. And even when they get together on the weekends, like budding workaholics, the preoccupation with work drones like white noise in the background.

“People are so used to sacrificing time with friends for schoolwork,” says a Georgetown Prep senior. “Spending time with friends gets more and more rare. Then when we are together we are thinking to ourselves about how much work we have to do.”

Although many of the teens we spoke with reported that they can count on two or three close friends to give them unequivocal support, the hyper-competitive environments in which they spend their days are having an effect on the overall tenor of friendships as well. “People are so competitive that you get mean to kids along the way,” says a St. Andrew’s junior. “We aren’t developing skills to work with people, but to step over them. You don’t so much want to be with people, you want to be better.”

Adds a Sidwell Friends junior: “It is hard to be happy for friends when they win at something or are doing well. Then you might think, ‘You are going to take my spot at Columbia.’ This creates a weird vibe with friendships because we are all competing for those spots in Ivy League schools.” 

Although many teens talked about sacrificing their social lives in pursuit of achievement, there were exceptions. “I try to balance my life,” says a B-CC senior. “I try to get the best grades possible but try to use the weekends to refuel. I spend a lot of time with friends. High school is definitely fun.”

Adds a B-CC junior: “Even though my parents don’t like it, I value my social life over my academics or extracurricular activities. But most of my friends put academics first.”

Is it worth it?

What if the high anxiety about our children’s achievement, particularly academic achievement, is unwarranted? What if, as journalist Gregg Easterbrook maintains in his October 2004 Atlantic Monthly article “Who Needs Harvard?” that the conventional wisdom about the make-or-break-your-life college acceptance is wrong, and that in the scheme of things, the difference between attending a name-brand college and a lesser known one is minimal?  (Easterbrook’s story is available at www.theatlantic.com/doc/200410/easterbrook.)

If we are to believe Donna Middlehurst of Chevy Chase, a Field School mother, a shift in the over-focus on Ivy League colleges has already begun. “As things get more competitive and kids with stellar records aren’t getting into Harvard, we are coming to realize that there are lots of good colleges. The sheer numbers of kids applying are forcing sanity on us.”

For slightly different reasons, Basil Nikas, a businessman and B-CC and Westland father, concurs that the Ivy League is losing some of its shine in the real world. “Corporations are looking for well-rounded students, they are looking for talent, and it’s not so important to them where they find it.”

And what if neuropsychologist Stixrud, who is currently working on a book about why pressuring kids to achieve is counterproductive, is right when he maintains that, “There are so many other factors [besides IQ and academic achievement]…like self-confidence, resilience and passion that are ultimately important. In fact, in a study done on valedictorians, it was shown that by their late 20s, most had climbed to only an average level of success in their chosen professions. What really distinguishes highly successful people is that they are highly motivated by their own desires. It is the spontaneous enjoyment of an activity coupled with hard work that leads to success.

“Fear that their kids will be left behind and that others will get all the good things in life leads parents to think that starting their kids earlier and pushing them harder is the answer,” Stixrud continues. “But there is no evidence that this works. On the contrary, evidence suggests that letting kids play when they are young and protecting them from pressure ultimately leads to higher functioning.”  

But perhaps the perspective of Amy, the stressed out Churchill senior, is the most persuasive one of all. When asked what advice she would give her younger sister, Amy said: “I would tell my sister to try your hardest, to do the best you can. I would tell her to have fun, especially on weekends. You owe it to yourself to have fun. You only have your childhood once. You have to grow up too quickly.”

Pamela Toutant has also written for Salon, Redbook, Ms. Magazine, the Washington Post and Washingtonian. She lives in Chevy Chase. To read Toutant’s story, “The Secret Lives of Teens,” which appeared in the September/October 2005 issue, go to www.bethesdamagazine.com and click on “Story Archive.”