01/18/04

Experts urge families to slow down.

In the mid-Eighties, education experts began warning parents that their schoolchildren needed to work harder to be able to win acceptance to a good college and compete in the work world. Parents began believing all these activities were giving their kids some advantage over other children.

"Upper middle- and middle-class parents are very education conscious, thinking they're launching their kids into adult life and that usually translates into college," says adolescent psychologist Dr. Mark McConville, whose clientele consists of teens attending the many private schools on Cleveland's East Side. "There's a level of anxiety in the culture that makes a parent feel that if their ninth-grader is not doing his homework, he's going to ruin his life and close off opportunities for himself."

McConville says that type of scholastic pressure is too heavy a burden to put on a 14- or 15-year-old because "developmentally there's no way at 15 you have any notion of what it will feel like to be 25. And at 17, 18 and 19, we're making our kids feel like they have to know what they're going to do in their adult work life and most kids don't. And when they don't know what they want to do, they often feel inadequate," he says.

Sociologist Annette Lareau says that historically, every generation aspires for the next generation to do better - to be better educated and make more money. For the parents of today's parents, the ability to attend college was assurance that their children would succeed them in ways they could only imagine. Unfortunately, Lareau says, for today's middle-class children, doing better than their parents will be hard, if not impossible.

"We are living in a period of economic decline, of tremendous economic uncertainty and I think parents are worried about giving their children every advantage because of this," she says.

But, she continues, giving children every advantage isn't always a good idea.

"Middle-class kids tell me, My parents say I can do anything.' Well, I think they're essentially being oversold. They're being told they can do anything when, in reality, they can't. People get sick, have car accidents and tragedies; bosses aren't that flexible and there's a tight job market." Lareau has noticed that when middle-class kids are in their twenties they have "this sort of long period of disappointment, wandering around, being angry with their parents, going to therapy, trying to find a place in life.

"They've found out the hard way that life is harder than what they've been told." This sense of entitlement, she contends, also erodes a commitment to other people's concerns and the public good.

Adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld of New York City concurs, pointing out that too many high schoolers are involved in community service because they know that's what colleges are looking for.

"They're checking off the boxes and don't give a darn about the indigent or the homeless they are working with," he says. "We're raising a group of kids that feel like frauds. I see kids all the time, who did everything right, checked off all the right boxes, who are coming back from the Harvards, Yales and Princetons, but they don't know who they are."

For children to be competitive in today's world, Rosenfeld asserts that they need "to be able to create, children need time to reflect. And to reflect, you have to have downtime.

"And that's what's lacking - a sense of balance." - D.K.