(Page 2 of 2)
"It's definitely different from our day, are you kidding?" said Ms. Liu, adding that the pressure to outperform has increased for teenagers even in the short time since her oldest daughter, now 24, was in high school. "The hype of college has really put a lot of pressure on them; it's a different life," she said.
Desirae Clodfelter of, Kernersville, N.C., was a volunteer at a camp for orphans in Romania.
It leaves many adults slightly awestruck. "Everyone on every admissions committee I know says, 'Thank God I'm not applying to school these days,' " Dr. Damon of Stanford said. "How do these kids do so much by age 16?"
Alvin Rosenfeld, a psychiatrist and a board member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, said parents are at least in part responsible for the busyness of teenagers.
"Parenting has become the most competitive sport and the gold medal is getting your kid into Harvard," said Dr. Rosenfeld, an author of "Hyper-parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). "There is no human being who can be who kids say they are," he added. "Everything's on steroids."
Well, not everything. The number of high school students competing in this Ivy-oriented decathlon tends to be limited to a thin slice of the most ambitious, said Joseph L. Mahoney, a psychologist on the faculty of Yale University, who recently collaborated on a study titled, "Organized Activity Participation and the Over-scheduling Hypothesis."
It is only "a small extreme subgroup that is highly involved in these activities," according to Dr. Mahoney's research, which he said will be published this year. He said 6 percent of high school students spend more than 20 hours a week on extracurricular activities, which doesn't include homework. "There is a general association: families that have higher incomes, more affluent families, have youth that participate" in extracurricular activities "for a greater number of hours," he said.
While some students may rely on parents to pay for their volunteerism — for example, Putney Student Travel, a private company, offers a five-week summer program of seminars at Yale and a trip to Cambodia to address poverty issues for $6,990 — others must work to help scrape together their own financing. Rosary Abot, 17, a senior at Loretto High School in Sacramento plans to travel with a school group to the Philippines this summer to work with malnourished children and their mothers. To help her parents pay the $1,500 cost, she worked as a baby and a cat sitter during the school year.
Rosary, like many students interviewed who have committed to summer volunteer work, said her primary motivation was altruism; impressing colleges was secondary.
Suniya S. Luthar, a professor of psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, coordinated a recent study that looked at the overscheduling of affluent children and teenagers. The research showed that the adolescents listed "fun" as their primary reason for engaging in so many activities, followed by the sense that it was "good for their future" and finally, because "adults want me to."
Dr. Luthar noted that "the number of hours of activities per week had very little to do with their feelings of stress or depression or anxiety.
"Maybe we're putting too much emphasis on the number of activities per se," she said. "Being in activities can make you feel efficacious, connected, useful. It can almost be a cathartic release for creative talent."
Indeed, while some parents and educators wring their hands over the hectic lives of teenagers, the students often assert that the more they do, the greater satisfaction they feel. Dr. Mahoney of Yale said his study indicated that, generally speaking, the busier the child the more he or she was flourishing.
"Overall the kids that are participating do much better than not in terms of happiness, self esteem and achievement," he said.
But Lee Stetson, the dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, advised that students should not strive to achieve busyness for the sake of busyness.
"This is a delicate balance," Mr. Stetson said, explaining that "sitting in a hammock reading a good book is also important." The point for colleges is that when students find themselves with "extended time off — like summer — doing something productive that is growth experience can be positive.
"That's more the measure," he said. "We don't want them to feel frenzied to fill every moment.
Desirae Clodfelter, 18, a senior at Robert B. Glenn High School in Kernersville, N.C., plans to follow this busy school year, in which she has been an officer in student government and has volunteered to fight global poverty through NetAid, a nonprofit youth organization, by returning to Romania for nine weeks to work with orphans.
She has no regrets about her busy summer, which will be similar to previous ones. A couple of summers ago, she had set aside one Saturday to be her "free beach weekend." But it ended up conflicting with a first aid training course for volunteer work with the Red Cross. Her friends went to the beach without her. "I got my certification so it paid off," Desirae said.
"I don't have as much time with my friends," she added, "but I guess it's give and take."
