The Pressure to Succeed

For decades, research has shown a rise in mental health problems among adolescents. Recently, lots of attention has focused on phones and social media. But the rise in mental health problems predates these technologies. Dr. Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician, researcher, and author of The Success Trap, argues that in many communities, the problems run far deeper than technology.

“I think it's academic demands, extracurricular demands, and achievement pressure that […] is unprecedented in this country, so I view it kind of as a problem that's kind of hidden in plain sight.”

In his research, the numbers are striking. “In the 18 high schools I looked at, every single school kid reported on weekdays an average of three hours of homework a night and two hours of extracurricular activities. They also reported getting six and a half hours of sleep a night, on average.”

That compares with the eight to ten hours of sleep recommended for teens to achieve maximum brain development. Chronic sleep deprivation can compromise adolescents cognitively and emotionally. In one school, Slavin studied, “more than half the kids had moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 80% had moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety”

He also asked students to rate 35 possible stressors, including family, health, economics, bullying, cyberbullying, school, and extracurricular activities.

Slavin says, the "top 12 [stressors] ranked in every single school I looked at were school and achievement pressure, and in the top three of everyone, it was pressure from self."

This last finding is particularly important. The problem isn’t just intensive parenting. Kids learn to pressure themselves. Over time, outside expectations can become an inner voice: “I need to achieve more, do better, and somehow prove that I’m good enough.”

Some parents’ concern may be an understandable response to a world they see as increasingly competitive. They want their kids to succeed, but the result can be harmful. Slavin continues, "I was talking to a mom whose seventh grader decided her goal for seventh grade was to be valedictorian of the class in that year or the eighth grade. It's like, so you're setting yourself up for disappointment if there are 150 kids in your class and only one of them is going to be valedictorian."

Slavin argues that what’s needed is balance. "I think we often treat these things as kind of a binary that you need to move to the other extreme, and I don't think that's the case. Help them develop reasonable goals. Recognize other attributes in their personalities and identities other than their scores and their grade."

Grades and scores matter, but so do kindness, friendship, compassion, and the other qualities that shape a young person’s identity and that they can carry with them into adult life.

Families can’t fix this alone. Schools and communities also need to reconsider what we demand of our kids.

— Dr. Michael Wilkes with a Second Opinion

The latest on Question Everything with Brian Reed: What would it take to actually fix America’s broken journalism industry? Using rural North Carolina as a petri dish, the podcast Scene on Radio spent its latest season, called “The News,”  diagnosing how American journalism is failing the public.