Six Penn students committed suicide in a 13-month stretch, and the school is far from the only one to experience a suicide cluster. Some students blame the pressure to appear effortlessly perfect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/stress-social-media-and-suicide-on-campus.html
Ever since the internet came into our daily lives, I feel like we live in fear of making the imperfect choice or decision. It’s gotten to we can’t book a hotel or go out to dinner without “doing research”. When my son was in middle school, it honestly didn’t occur to me to map out his classes as part of a strategy toward getting into the “best” colleges, nor was I researching ACT/SAT practice books. Reading CC now, I feel like a slacker parent.
If we, as adults, are feeling this need to get everything right, I have absolutely no doubt that we’re passing this expectation down to our kids.
I read this NYT piece this morning and had just finished going through the comments section when I clicked to CC’s latest posts, wondering if I would see mention of it. The published NYT comments on the article are just as enlightening, as the article itself.
As a parent, I often feel that I am walking a thin line when it comes to wanting what is best for my daughter in broadest context of a life well lived. Our girl is bright and self-motivated, but also prone to being very hard on herself when she does not meet her own expectations. We live in Hawaii and she has not grown up in a pressure cooker environment. Her high standards seem self imposed, but I can’t help feel that our praise of her achievements have, on some level, encouraged her behavior.
She is a rising senior and we leave tomorrow to meet her and visit schools in the northeast. She has been gone most of the summer and other than a few dozen texts and a 20 minute skype session on her birthday, we have just let her be. She works so hard during the year with honors courses and leadership responsibilities in her chosen extra curricular activities, that we decided to forgo the expected summer enrichment programs and just let her have an open ended experience staying with friends in Italy and now, in New York City. That decision on my part required a leap of faith that an unconventional experience wouldn’t read unfavorably on her college applications. Just being aware that I was basing a decision how it would look on her application, made me step back and realize the unspoken expectation that I have put on her to excel and be the best that she can be.
In a few weeks, she will take on the most rigorous senior course load offered at her small private school. She will self practice and take the SAT for the 3rd and last time in October to see if she can bring up her score a bit. She has, on her own, decided that she would like to attend a small, liberal arts college where the atmosphere is collaborative rather than competitive. She knows herself well enough to understand that the Ivy leagues are not for her, even as one of the teachers who will write her recommendations has encouraged her to apply at Yale. After reading the NYT article, I am reminding myself to hang back during the school visits and keep my thoughts to myself, unless asked. I want her to feel free to decide if each school we are visiting will be a good fit for her. Can she imagine herself spending four years there? Will she be happy there? Is it the sort of place where she will thrive among true peers? Above all, I think our kids need to feel that they are loved and valued for who they are; and that who they are is so much more than their GPA, SAT score or acceptance or rejection letter.
Very sad article - I doubt it is endemic to the Ivy league - we have a generation of Peter Pan children who have yet to grow up living on our college campuses. It’s no wonder they are depressed and confused and anxious as they confront at age 17-18-19 what typically kids have confronted at age 14 or 15.
I’m so relieved to learn that Kathryn is doing much better at Penn after her difficult first year. Thank God her roommate noticed her state of mind and contacted the dean; thank God the dean took action and arranged for counseling; thank God Kathryn took a leave and was hospitalized.
The pressures of social media are an interesting point to consider. But are they that much more limiting, more anxiety-producing, than the rigid stereotypes of perfection that were held up to past generations in ads, movies/TV shows, magazine articles, toys (Barbie!), etc.? At least today there’s more openness about sexuality and related issues. I think there’s also more acknowledgment today that high school and college won’t necessarily be “the best years of your life.”
I agree that young people often think they are failures, rather than that they have failed at something. I think that’s true of older people, as well. How much of that is related to social media? The practice of putting on a false front (but not realizing other people do the same thing) goes back a long way.
Terribly sad when young adults who seem to have everything going for them, so much potential, commit suicide.
One of S’s high school classmates/fellow NMF, a student at a top 20 U., died during finals week this spring. There have always been students with a history of depression/anxiety, but academic stress/quest for perfection definitely seemed to be big factors in his case. (I know my kids do not handle stress well and are not as energetic/driven as their academic peers. This is one big reason they “aimed lower.” I sometimes wonder if S’s classmate had gone to State U., if it would have been a better experience for him, and most importantly, he’d still be alive.)
Not everyone can take that kind of competitive atmosphere.
Not everyone feels good about going from being valedictorian and Mr./Ms. Everything at his/her high school to being just another middle of the pack or even below average kid among so many other “perfect” students.
The social media images add to the problem. While everyone knows that they are creating the best (but incomplete/false in many ways) image of themselves, they forget that everyone else is doing the same thing, and somehow believe that those “perfect” versions of their classmates are yet another reality they can’t measure up to. That only leads to more self-doubt and hopelessness.
Is this the key factor? Or might it be something else?
When I was in college, I had the security of knowing that if I dropped out or flunked out, I could take 6 months of courses at a hometown business school, easily get a job as a secretary or bookkeeper, and earn enough to support myself in a shared-apartment situation with roommates. I had high school classmates who had done exactly this instead of going to college at all.
Today’s young people don’t have this same sense that there are alternatives to college. Might that also be a factor contributing to the feelings of desperation some of them have if success eludes them?
I don’t think it’s simply about social pressure. It’s the intolerance of any mistakes. When I was in HS and college, it was pretty routine for a teacher to allow you to throw out one bad test grade, or excuse you from a couple of homework assignments not turned in. Now, your grades can be monitored every single day, down to the fraction of a point. Getting caught with pot meant a stern lecture from a teacher/principal, maybe a day or two suspension. You got “grounded” by your parents. Now, it’s “zero tolerance”. There are 9th graders worrying whether that B in an AP class is going to ruin their chances for attending an Ivy, or whether the fact that they only took 2 AP classes instead of the possible 4 will.
I’m a parent and I find reading some of these cc threads about college admissions strategies exhausting. I can only imagine how the kids feel. And all of us claim “it’s what my S/D wants” and, of course it is, because we’ve been hammering at them to “do their best” and “aim for the best” all their lives, as if anything below that would surely cause them unhappiness. And we try to prove it by over-praising them for their successes, to drive home the lesson that success=happiness.
This comes on the heels of my finishing the book Overachievers. I’m beginning to think American high school kids have the worst of all worlds. Not only are they expected to excel academically to compete with top kids from Asia, who are increasingly clamoring for our top colleges and going for our high paying jobs, but they also have to conform to existing cultural norms of being pretty, athletic, fashionable and popular.
We often read about kids in South Korea or China and how hard they have to work in high school, but at least those kids only have to worry about academics and nothing else. Our kids also have to excel in sports, volunteer, join clubs, be pretty, fashionable and popular. A loser is someone who doesn’t get invited to any parties on a Friday night, doesn’t do any sports, and also someone who doesn’t get into a top college. Meanwhile there are only 24 hours in a day. Once again I blame the stupidity and madness of “holistic admissions”. This is a direct consequence of HA.
The pressure doesn’t end there. Once you get to college you also have to continue excelling academically, play sports and volunteer to get into med school/law school, since these schools are now also using HA. Holistic Admission needs to go die for our kids to have their lives back.
I compare my life as a teen vs my kids’ life, I think I had a lot more pressure than them growing up. My kids have safety net that I didn’t have. Our kids generation is more coddled and looked after than our generation. We, as parents, are a lot more accessible to our kids than our own parents were. I really don’t think kids today have more pressure than some of us had growing up, and we didn’t commit suicide.
The strategies themselves are quite exhausting as well, from my own high school experience. The kind of effort it takes to “do everything right” for the sake of appealing to admissions committees, compared to the effort to “work to your full potential,” is quite ridiculous, and the payoff in terms of real value is meager. That’s really the major problem with perfectionism.
Though this is true, it really misses the point. Life in the United States has always had a safety net that was plenty strong - unless you come from poorer countries, you were in no danger of real crushing poverty. And perfectionist parents really aren’t all that much help, even if they are available - instead of being a form of support, they just make life troubles harder because they push their children further into depression.
With all due respect, I know I am not missing the point. There is pressure for every generation - war, depression, unemployment…How many young people strive for living above “real crushing poverty?” If we have “perfectionist parents” today, we had “hands off, I don’t even know what you are doing parents” of yesterday. What’s better?
Well in either case, the inability to understand real troubles, or to be able to offer sympathy, is very definitively a bad thing. That is essentially the result of implying that children today have it easy.
The problems are different, not easier.
I think there are too many kids, as evidenced here on CC with all the Harvard chances and community college allergies, who do NOT have a Plan B.
When I got married, I planned to divorce. So far, so good, we haven’t had to go through with a divorce 
When I went to HS, I planned to go to college, but I had an automatic in safety after I got my SAT scores. I applied to Ivies but knew I could go to the safety if I flunked out. I knew that if I flunked out of there, I could get a job.
When I had kids, I hoped they did well in school and were healthy. I have a kid with autism. He is doing pretty well now, but there is a lot of fear for his future. But we keep moving along, we need to, and get him to the best place he can be.
There are not that few jobs that people who have great potential as evidenced by their HS careers and admission have no hope if they don’t pass their Penn classes.
I have referred around one student per semester to the Dean of Students and/or the Counseling Center, at the state college I teach at. It is not necessarily fear of suicide, but often there is a problematic level of magical thinking - family crises, medical issues, missing class for reasons within or not within their control. Professors are NOT psychologists, and we spend very little time with our students on non-class related work, and even on class related work. I have been happy that I am mentoring a few students with special issues, and try to make their lives easier.
Penn is not an unsupportive school. But if there are reasons that people put on a brave face (in one case, I believe college sports and performance were involved) though they should be reaching out for help, that should be addressed.
Did I mention I flaked out sophomore year, and went to the beach for three days on a long weekend? It really helped me, and it didn’t ruin my Penn career. The classes are hard, and if you have been coasting or getting tutoring at home (so many kids do so in HS in my town, I feel sad if the parents don’t spring for it in college), you WILL wake up. And what happens when you wake up is the key.
Regarding the article: I didn’t think Penn allowed freshmen to rush - the article mentioned Ms. DeWitt joining a co-ed fraternity early in freshman year.
And, cutting oneself is not directly linked to suicidal intentions. I’m not sure why it is played up in the article.
And finally, we have a plan if my son has to drop out of RPI due to grades or finances. We also have another plan if the second plan doesn’t work. Life is changing plans, or changing expectations, as we need to.
@rhandco " I didn’t think Penn allowed freshmen to rush - the article mentioned Ms. DeWitt joining a co-ed fraternity early in freshman year."
Freshmen can not rush first semester. I did not understand that either. Penn has a Spring term rush.
Consistent with what @rhandco said, when DD went off to Penn, one of the last things I told her was that in the unlikely event that she is failing, that she can call us any time, and come home, and we will welcome her back home with open arms, get her some rest, and help her make a new plan. There is no shame in trying a hard thing and failing. The shame is in being afraid to try. I did not think she would have trouble with her academics at Penn, but no parent does. I think that it is important that she knows that we have her back.
She is doing great there so far, but she knows that there is always a backup option, and that she can call us any time if she is having difficulty and we will support her.
I also told her that if she is doing well, but just does not like the school, she can just transfer. That was another backup option. So far she loves it, but again, I think there is value to the fact that she knows that we support her and she is not trapped there.
I think a lot of parents could do a better job of supporting their kids and pressure them less. I think that would reduce the suicide rate too.
Wow, I think I formulated 13 different replies reading 14 posts. One thing that jumped out is a number of people talked about the pressure to achieve “perfection” and “doing it right”.
There is no such thing.
It’s the internalization of looking at other people and trying to copy what they see that is killing kids.
What ever happened to following your own path? Has social media blotted that out?
I think we romanticize how much of that ever existed, @JustOneDad. There have always been a few leaders (trendsetters) and mostly followers. I think overall there are many, many factors that play into these issues. I suppose social media and the hyperextension of that superficiality plays a role, but it always existed at some level. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is hardly a new thing. Relating it to suicide clusters is trickier, I think. Following Tulane closely as I do, I know 2 of those 4 suicides mentioned are completely unrelated to this kind of thing. One was a murder-suicide of a law student couple, for example. Also, and this might have been the case at these other schools as well, there had been years without a suicide reported, and then suddenly a cluster happens.
Nothing has changed that dramatically at the school over the last 5 years or so, making one scratch one’s head for an explanation. I am absolutely not diminishing the travesty of it, and Tulane like many of these schools used the tragedy to seriously revamp its psychological services area. What was pretty standard (average) for a school its size has been upgraded to something more. I applaud that response at Tulane and anywhere else that does it. If indeed there are some new and unique issues that today’s college students are dealing with, then by all means let’s gear up to deal with them. To the extent that people are figuring out what these issues are as they go along, well then that’s the way it has to be sometimes. Still better to react and try than to sit around in committees and study groups trying to be exact, if there even is such a thing in an area such as this.
What caught my attention in the article was the paragraph
I find this deeply disturbing and would postulate this is indeed a major issue within this phenomenon of depression, if not the suicides. In the wise words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us”. Well, some of “us” anyway. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pogo+%22we+have+met+the+enemy%22&view=detailv2&&id=6BDE1637F3F18EF251C11B426444370962BCD1D8&selectedIndex=0&ccid=qDb3FLNg&simid=608009757360980302&thid=JN.fFoNoiyBm1L02L6kTUWJkA&ajaxhist=0
Okay. And I’d follow it up to point out that if you take away kids’ Facebook, they don’t know who they are anymore.
Oh, I am not arguing that the tools have not changed, they have. Dramatically. When we were kids we were on the phone all the time, right? Or hanging out in groups at some places. One way or another the information got exchanged and known. But for sure the tools are much more powerful now. And the reach of them may exacerbate the situation, or maybe in some surprising way it actually lessens it. I truly am not sure, and I don’t think anyone is yet.
As an aside, I wonder if “bulldozer parents” is a better description than “lawn mower parents”, if the idea is that they are trying to clear all obstacles for their kids.