November 3, 2004: Features

Age of angst

By Marsha Levy-Warren ’73

Marsha Levy-Warren ’73 is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City who works with adolescents and writes frequently about adolescent development and identity formation; this semester, she is teaching a Princeton course on that topic. In 2003, Levy-Warren spoke at a Reunions panel in a packed lecture hall on “Childhood Achievement: Are We Burning Out Our Kids?” PAW asked her to elaborate in our pages.

In my clinical practice, I have seen a young man named Paul, a bright student with caring parents who attends a highly competitive private school. He is 15 years old, and he already feels burned out.

Paul and his parents came to talk about his struggles to motivate himself to do his homework. The parents did not know how much to push their son, and Paul did not know whether he needed pushing or space. His parents hated battling with Paul; they worried about his future and were concerned about the constant tension in their relationship. Both parents had attended prestigious colleges and graduate and professional schools, and they wanted their children to travel the same path. They felt they always had offered Paul and his siblings the best opportunities, and could not fathom why he was having trouble.

Paul was frustrated with what he saw as his inability to get started, but equally frustrated with his parents’ preoccupation with his school performance. He felt that it required intense effort to do his work, have a social life, and pursue the extracurricular sports and music he loved. He no longer knew what he wanted. He was keenly aware of how competitive the world is, and felt that he might not be able to maintain the pace required to be successful. He worried about disappointing his parents, but also about not being able to figure out his true desires.

I have seen many students and families confronting the intense pressures such as those faced by Paul and his family— concerns related to college admission, competition, and the way a young person views himself or herself in the world. Our “quick-fix” attitude, our overemphasis on achievement, and our intense focus on admission to a top college as the essential ingredient for a satisfying life all serve to buttress a growing use of psychotropic medication among our children and an increasing sense that our bodies are changeable – both of which profoundly affect young people.

People are in a far greater rush than ever before. Between the impact of the highly stimulating mass media and the sense of urgency about whether our children will be able to support themselves, we have a generation of young people who feel pushed, frightened, and overwhelmed much of the time. We need to take stock – to think through what we hope to accomplish in raising our children, and make sure that our parenting reflects these goals. How are we to help our children define for themselves what is important, but still convey our values and priorities as their parents? What can we do to decrease the stress on our children, but still encourage them to strive?

Paul’s parents were right, of course, to appreciate the difficulties in gaining admission to what they viewed as “good” colleges. But in my view, pressure on families is intensified by the narrowness of definitions of what constitutes a “good” college, the emotional and time demands on students trying to gain admission to these colleges, and the enormous conflict that our teenagers feel about how to balance these concerns with the rest of their lives.

As parents, we pressure our kids to be “successful” because we feel that this is the key to happiness. And by success, we often mean independence, financial security, and competitive advantage. To be admitted to elite colleges, students must be competitive; to help them become competitive, parents hire tutors and press their children to participate in numerous athletics and other extracurricular activities. Overscheduling of children sometimes begins with competitive concerns related to preschool admission! It is a cycle that often results in young people being enormously overstressed.

This point of view conveys a lack of balance. When parents and others who are influential in children’s lives give academic and extracurricular performance the highest priority, insufficient attention often is paid to the development that comes from downtime. Children and adolescents usually need time to relax and to reconstitute their energy and focus after spending many hours in school and on the athletics fields, before beginning their homework. In the past, children might have played outdoors or talked on the telephone with friends. Today, American kids tend to go online for instant-messaging, play computer or video games, watch television, or listen to music. The form such downtime takes varies, as does the amount required — but for the most part, we need to accept that it is a critical part of the developmental picture. How much time young people need, what they do with that time, and how they determine when they are ready to get down to doing homework is an ongoing process that is best established by conversations between parents and their children. Kids need to hone their scheduling skills, to determine how much time their various activities require, and what they need to do to feel revitalized when they come home feeling tired from a day at school. There also should be a greater openness to students taking downtime between high school and college, and to use this time as a period to explore and reflect.

Our children generally need help in figuring out how to regulate themselves; to assist them, we need to learn more about their individual needs and proclivities. It is far more difficult to learn how to eat, sleep, establish good personal hygiene, relax, and be productive than any of us might at first appreciate — especially today, when there are more options than ever. Establishing relevant routines and personal habits takes many years, and the more that we can discuss these matters with our sometimes-reluctant children and adolescents, the better.

At the same time adolescents are dealing with how they fit into the scholastic world, they — and sometimes their parents — increasingly are pressured by concerns about their bodies: whether they are thin, fit, and stylish enough to fit in socially. In my clinical practice, I have seen a 13-year-old girl, Jessica, whose parents were concerned about her eating habits. They said that she was extremely picky about what she ate and ate very little, and that she complained that her parents were “trying to make her fat.” Jessica’s pediatrician suggested antidepressant medication, and her parents agreed to it. When I met Jessica, I found her to be a slight girl who looked younger than her years, an excellent student who worked very hard in school and as a competitive gymnast. She seemed sad. She also was well on her way to developing a full-fledged eating disorder.

The number of girls I see who present pictures like this one is significantly on the rise. In our body-oriented culture, thinness, fitness, and youth are exaggeratedly valued among adults. We have become a society that believes bodies can and should be changed to suit societal fads. This form of narcissism depreciates the unaltered body, and normalizes pressure to superficially change our natural physical states. The body’s integrity is devalued: Adults get televised “extreme makeovers” and change their looks through surgery and laser treatments; teenagers follow suit and tattoo and pierce themselves. A recent study by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association found that 1.1 million teenagers use performance-enhancing sports supplements. These behaviors are regarded as within the realm of normal, or at least typical, behavior. Such alteration of the outer life, without adequate consideration of the effect these changes have on the inner life, demonstrates the kind of disconnection between mind and body that we see in eating disorders, drug abuse, or acts of self-mutilation, such as cutting oneself. Increasingly we cannot feel what we are doing with our bodies or what we allow to be done to our bodies; adolescents experience cutting not as painful, but as a relief – a way of mastering their confusion and offering some kind of clarity and release.

According to Medco Health Solutions’ Drug Trend Report, the number of children 19 years and younger on behavioral medications increased more than 20 percent between 2000 and 2003. Medicated teens tell me that they don’t know which of their feelings are real, and which result from prescribed drugs. Medicating kids is another quick fix; children and families often do not seek psychotherapeutic treatment despite ample evidence that drugs alone are inadequate treatment for mental-health difficulties in children. At the very least, kids need counseling to help them understand what it means to them to be on medication — what it means to experience a changed phenomenological experience of themselves when the sense of self already is in transition. Often, children and teens feel that medication is used to help them comply with standards of behavior that are expected by others, or to subdue feelings that either they or others find to be excessive. But in the long run, external regulation of this sort has to give way to internal regulation.

Most of us deeply want our children to be able to care for themselves in a consistent and loving way; we need to show them how we care for ourselves, and engage them in thinking through their own care. We want them to be resilient in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties — something they will realize as they achieve competence, and then confidence, in a variety of areas — not just in school, but also in interpersonal relationships, in train stations, on athletics fields, mountaintops, and in laundromats. Children and adolescents need to know and accept their strengths and limitations; to learn who and what they are, they require the time and encouragement to explore the world as broadly as possible.

We also want our children to be able to make decisions for themselves — so we need to convey to them that we have respect for what they know, and act as resources for what they have not yet learned. We have to let them know that they know more than we do about what it is like to be a kid today, and to express curiosity about their lives. In so doing, we convey that they own their own experiences.

Finally, we want our children to feel passion, excitement about the world, and compassion for others. In this regard, our actions speak louder than our words. The way we live, the latitude we give our children in finding out what and who they love, the space we help them create to search the world in whatever ways they choose — these are the ways in which we convey the value we place on the more ephemeral aspects of life.

Institutions such as Princeton also have a role in this journey. I hope that college can be seen as a time to step off the treadmill that so many of our children are on when they reach this point in life. College can be a time of true exploration, when intellectual, social, political, and interpersonal values and interests can be mined and developed. To this end, I believe that grades need to be de-emphasized, so that our students are encouraged to venture into previously uncharted intellectual territory without feeling that they are risking their GPAs. Our definition of “education” needs to be expanded explicitly to include the kind of emotional and social development that comes with trying new activities in the creative and physical realms — whether a young person tries that at Princeton, another college, or no college at all. This period of life should be a time of real learning, not simply more achieving.