The correlation between how happy a child is and where they go to school is zero, according to psychologist and author, Madeline Levine. So why are students and parents stressing so much about education that, according to Levine, tutors in some areas can charge from $800-1500 an hour, and one-third of young adults have an anxiety disorder?
The opening night of the fourth annual conference of SOS, the Stressed-Out Students Project, took place Friday, May 11 in the Kresge Auditorium at Stanford University. After the opening night, teams involved in the study attended workshops with an experienced coach on Saturday and will reconvene for a post-conference debriefing in Fall 2007.
SOS, which was founded and directed by Denise Pope, author of Doing School, has developed interactive workshops for 25 middle and high school students to examine the sources of this rise in student anxiety, cheating, and stress.
The opening night featured two well known psychologists and authors, Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege and Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee and an upcoming book, The Blessing of a B-.
The conference also had commentaries from Pope as well as three high school students, including Paly senior Zev Karlin-Neumann.
Both keynote speakers were remarkably funny and brought new perspectives to both parenting and teaching. Levine spoke about her research in exploring the rise of emotional problems in suburban teenagers.
“Definitions of success are miserable,” she said.
Emphasizing the problems with parents’ expectations, she described a four-year-old boy who told her he was learning Chinese because he wanted to go to Harvard. She talked about how intellectual parents expect their kids to have remarkable IQs and the ability to be good at everything.
“Statistically a child won’t be as smart as you if you are extremely smart,” she said. “Unlike what some parents think, IQ is not additive.”
Levine also discussed the problems with pushing kids to excel at sports and other extracurricular activities.
“Only 1.9% of kids get an athletic scholarship.” she said, pointing out the unrealistic hopes of parents and students.
Both Levine and Mogel discussed, as Mogel called it, “the dark side of good parenting,” where parents often compromise their kids’ well being by getting too involved.
Many parents nowadays are so focused on getting their kids into the perfect school, with the best possible teacher and setting that their kids are being raised in a little bubble, according to Mogel.
“You want your kid to have the crabby, uninspired, unenlightened fourth grade teacher,” Mogul said, emphasizing the fact that students need to get used to real life with different types of people.
Mogel also described some college deans’ terminology of teacups and crispies. Teacups are the students who have been living in a bubble their whole lives and have had their parents take care of everything for them. Mogel used an example of a girl who asked her mom to send her a roll of quarters in the mail so she could do her laundry.
Levine also discussed the problem with these kinds of students as they never develop the coping skills to handle life on their own. She used an example of two students who had a paper due the next day. The one who gets their parent to write it for them does not use the opportunity to build the confidence in themselves that they can work independently and deal with these kinds of situations. Essentially, parents may feel they are helping their kids by relieving them of stress, but they are really stripping them of an important life lesson.
The crispies as described by Mogel are the students who have been pushed as early as preschool to get perfect grades and be good at everything. By the time they reach college they are not challenging the professors and only looking for good grades to get themselves into graduate school or a successful job.
Both speakers emphasized how this pushing from parents and teachers influences students to simply “do school” instead of learn. Furthermore, it teaches students a principle of ends justify the means by putting their integrity and moral values aside to get the grade or score they need. According to Pope, studies have shown that two-thirds of high school students admit to cheating and that in some schools the percentage is as high as ninety percent if copying homework is considered cheating.
The three student speakers also gave an interesting perspective on the stress of balancing their education and family life. Karlin-Neumann discussed the parental and teacher pressures that Paly students often feel. He noted an exercise his Spanish class did where they had to complete a sentence that had “my parents” in it. Many of the students said, “Grades matter to my parents.”
Not only did the conference give significant insight into the prevalence and seriousness of the stress among teenagers, but all the speakers also offered many tips and pieces of advice which can improve both the lives of students and parents.