STRESSED OUT
Experts recommend moderation for students who face intense parental pressure to excel
Dave Murphy, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 8, 2005
As the boy played behind the bushes at his Redwood City school, his obviously agitated mother grabbed him, abruptly escorting him to her car.
"She asked him what he thought he was doing and proceeded to tell him all in one breath that he would never get into a good university or have a good job if he spent all his time playing and goofing around," said Jim Dassise, a parent who watched the episode unfold. "He should be more like one of his friends, who spent his time studying and having good grades."
The boy was about 9 years old.
Moraga resident Cynthia Brian, an acting and media coach who works with children all over the country, has seen the same sort of pressure -- sometimes self-imposed. "At 7 or 8 or 9," she said, "they're already talking about, 'This is going to look good on my resume.' "
Harried schedules, international competition and unrealistic expectations aren't just for adults anymore. The pressure on students to get exceptional grades and build Harvard-quality resumes has gotten so bad that Stanford University has an annual Stressed Out Students conference this week to help intermediate and high school parents, teachers, administrators and -- most of all -- students.
"They're making themselves sick," said Denise Pope, a Stanford School of Education lecturer and founder of Stressed Out Students. "And we're complicit in that."
Pope, author of "Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students," said even young students quickly understand that the real parental pressure is for grades, not knowledge, so sometimes cheating is the simplest path. Teachers cheat, too, inflating grades because it's easier than fighting with parents.
"A lot of these behaviors start when grades start being given," Pope said. In other words, in third or fourth grade.
The pressure comes from adult anxiety and competitiveness, said Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author with Nicole Wise of "The Over-Scheduled Child" and the former head of the child psychiatry training program at Stanford's medical school. Top colleges demand great grades. School funding demands good test scores. Both place demands on students.
"It's not about parents who are over the top," said Rosenfeld, who practices adult and child psychiatry in New York and New Jersey. "It's about a cultural pressure that's endemic."
Pope said she and her husband, Mike, limit each of their three children - - ages 8, 6 and 3 -- to one or two extracurricular activities. "I think kids are overscheduled in school and out of school," she said, "and both of those contribute to stress.
"There is severe parent peer pressure out there. There are more resources than ever before that are available to our children, but that doesn't mean you have to use all those resources."
Rosenfeld said harried schedules also take away the free time that is essential for children to be able to fantasize and create.
"If Einstein's parents were alive today, poor little Albert would get a comprehensive evaluation and end up on Ritalin," he said. "Deprived of his daydreams, he might not discover the theory of relativity, but he certainly would focus more fully on the complex demands of fourth-grade math."
Concerns about childhood pressure are hardly new. One popular book from 1981 was David Elkind's "The Hurried Child." But if children were hurried then, they're frenetic now.
A University of Michigan Institute for Social Research study of 3- to 11- year-olds compared the children of 1997 with those of 1981. The ones from 1997 had 12 fewer hours of free time a week, less frequent family dinners and vacations, and virtually no conversations that involved the entire household.
A 2003 survey of 460 parents of 9- to 13-year-olds by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, one of the Stanford conference's sponsors, shows how torn parents from San Mateo and Santa Clara counties can be. When asked to list items that made them moderately or very concerned about their children, the most common responses were school performance and feeling stressed.
Often the children's schedules and parental anxieties mirror what is happening in the parents' careers, said UC Berkeley Sociology Professor Arlie Hochschild, who has studied and written books about family dynamics and workplaces. Intense competition and technological advancements have made jobs less secure, and as parents work longer hours, they put their kids in more scheduled activities.
Brian, the acting coach, said that exposing children to a variety of activities -- even offering a gentle nudge -- can be healthy, but too many parents expect their kids to excel. "If they're not everything to all people, they're nothing."
Parents also face unrealistic expectations, she said. "Every single organization or extracurricular meeting believes it's the most important thing on the planet."
Her son and daughter are in college now, but Brian got off the extracurricular parental treadmill years ago.
"At one point, I was gone every night of the week," she said. "Finally, I thought to myself, 'This is absolutely crazy. I'm doing all this so my kids can be part of XYZ, yet I don't have any time to spend with my kids.' "
Even one activity that has been around for generations -- after-school sports -- has gotten more intense and time-consuming, said Jim Thompson, executive director of the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nationwide nonprofit agency based at Stanford. Many California schools cut back on sports after Proposition 13 passed in 1978, meaning that kids have to be shuttled elsewhere.
There are also fewer opportunities for children who aren't top athletes, as the number of baseball teams, for example, dwindles by the teen years, Thompson said.
"Rather than youth sports being an educational function," he said, "it becomes a screening function."
The level of competition inside the classroom has stepped up as well. Rosenfeld said many parents push for perfect grades so their children might qualify for Stanford or an Ivy League university.
Stanford lecturer Pope said the pressures often lead students to cheat. And if their teachers don't look the other way, their parents will.
"Even in the face of hard, cold evidence," Pope said, "the parents will be in denial."
Research in 1999 by Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity, found that cheating is common at many universities. In his survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses, one-third admitted to serious cheating on tests, and half admitted to cheating on written assignments.
"A lot of these kids who cheated their way through high school are cheating their way through college," Pope said. "And it doesn't work."
E-mail Dave Murphy at dmurphy@sfchronicle.com
I have never considered myself a prejudiced person.
