Please note – although this episode is not about suicide, I do read a portion of a teenager’s suicide letter at the beginning of the show. If you’d rather, you can skip ahead about 1 minute.

“Dear Family, Friends and whoever reads this:

I really didn’t want it to come down to this, but it was something I felt I had to do. Living in Newport Beach is like living in a bubble.

So much pressure on kids to do good, and a lot of kids make mistakes. One slip up makes a kid feel like the smallest person in the world. You are looked at as a loser if you don’t go to college or if you get a certain GPA or test score.

All anyone talks about is how great they are or how great their kid is. It’s all about how great I am. It’s never about the other kid. The kid who may not play a sport, have a 4.0+ GPA, but displays great character.

People don’t understand how to be selfless. If failure happens it’s something like not going to college or not getting an A in a class or on a test.

Nobody seems to understand, they only see people on the outside.

To me the school of Corona del Mar is not a public school. It is treated like a private school. So much pressure is placed on the students to do well that I couldn’t do it anymore.

There is never a moment to brake. Finals have pressured me immensely along with a lot of other people. I want you to know my parents were not the reason for this.”

Those words from Patrick Turner, a sophomore from Newport beach California who took his life in 2018, could have been written by countless American teens over the past couple of decades.

My goal in this episode is to give you something to think about, to consider. I’m asking you to take a step back and maybe see your child’s future from a different point of view. Perhaps with different goals in mind... Stay with me.

Shortly after this tragedy, the principal at a neighboring high school wrote in a letter to students and families, “This competitive culture has significantly impacted our young adults. We endlessly discuss test scores, National Merit Scholarships, reading scores, AP scholars, comparisons to other school districts and this is when we start losing our collective souls – and our children.”

The impact of this drive to succeed is not surprising to the experts studying or treating these kids for crippling anxiety, major depression, and self-harm.

There’ve been books, articles, studies, and lots of calls to action about this generation of kids that are literally dying for success.

Mountains of research show an “unusually large proportion” of teens who come from upper-middle class homes and attend “high achieving schools” have mental health issues on the same level as kids living in poverty, foster care or abusive homes –

We’re talking about the blue-ribbon schools in the wealthier neighborhoods – the ones that resemble a private school more than a public school.

Maybe your kid attends one of these schools – maybe you’re in that upper middle-class category.

Well, listen to this – research shows that they are living in an environment of “toxic stress” - stress that means these kids are significantly more likely to smoke, binge drink, use weed and hard drugs, and the girls are least likely to abstain from sex than any other group of kids in the country!

They’re also just as likely to be involved in criminal activity as kids living in poverty – just different types of crimes (the affluent kids are more likely to steel from parents and commit random acts of vandalism - where the kids in the inner city are more likely to get in trouble for carrying a weapon for defense).

And, it gets worse as our high-achievers enter college – full-time college students are 2½ times more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for substance abuse and 40% of college students in 2021 were diagnosed with mental health disorders (anxiety being the most prevalent at 31%).

Those numbers should rattle our soul.

How and why is this happening?

Why are these kids, who to the outside world seem to have it all, so much more likely to have mental health and substance use issues – why are they in so much pain?

Like Patrick said in his letter, “Living in Newport Beach is like living in a bubble.”

“All anyone talks about is how great they are or how great their kid is.”

“So much pressure is placed on the students to do well…”

“I couldn’t do it anymore.”

And I totally get that. I lived in a similar bubble with my husband and son for 20 years – not in Newport beach but across the country in a smallish city in the southeast. We even jokingly referred to our area of town as “the bubble”.

Blue Ribbon schools and private schools and lots of parents and teens trying awfully hard to be as close to perfect as possible.

And the pressure is unbearable for many kids and parents alike.

But the research shows that it’s not the affluence that puts these adolescents in the “at-risk” category, it’s the overall environment of constant comparison and competition and the all-encompassing and crushing pressure to be successful at any cost….and look good doing it!

It’s a simple fact that upper-middle class parents, as a group, are just generally hyper-focused on success – not only for themselves but for their kids as well.

For example, a counselor from one high-achieving high school says she’s had parents of entering freshman walk into her office and want to plan out their kid’s entire 4 years of high school – classes, clubs, extra-curriculars, everything…because they have a top college picked out (usually Ivy League!) and they know what it’s going to take to get them in there!

From her point of view the parents at her school don’t seem to care about how much sleep their kids get or their mental health – they just want to make sure they’re at the top of the heap.

And, she says the rates of extreme anxiety with the students there, are off the charts.

So, if you’re not living in one of these bubbles and your kid doesn’t attend one of these “high-achieving” schools, you may think this doesn’t apply to you or them.

Not so fast.

I would argue that you can find at least a few, if not more, of these kids at high schools in almost every neighborhood – affluent or not.

The stand-out athlete who’s been groomed by parents and coaches since little league and counting on a full-ride to the state university, so he can go on to the big leagues, the NFL or NBA…

The kid who wants to do right by his hard-working immigrant parents and be the first to go to college, and live the American Dream for THEM

The kid whose parents want her to do better than they did, have a brighter future and not work in a factory their whole life.

The pressure to succeed is just largely clustered within the more affluent neighborhoods but these kids are everywhere…

Why do parents push for success and overlook the toll it takes on the kids?

We consider our kids a reflection of us… and of our parenting.

And whether we’re upper-middle class or not, we want them to do well in life – maybe better than us – at least in part, to reflect that we’ve done a good job raising them. (the old “meet my son, the doctor” cliché)

Plus, of course, we genuinely and sincerely want our kids to have a great future – to be successful – to be happy – and many of us consider being able to make a good living a central part of that success and happiness

And we usually feel the only way to ensure that future success is by going to a good college.

And getting into a good college requires a high rate of success in high school – a near perfect or perfect GPA, soaring test scores, lots of extracurriculars, community service and more to pack that college resume.

Although the experience I had in our bubble wasn’t about getting the kids into an “elite or Ivy League school”, the pressure was still great.

The focus was more on the two rival state schools – parents who went to one or the other, would push for their kids to go there as well and at least one of them was pretty hard to get into.

But of course, huge bragging rights went to the parents whose kids went to Duke, Vanderbilt, Loyola, UVA, Suwanee, any school considered to be more exclusive or more expensive.

And there was lots of talk about the “fall back schools” – the ones that still look good and sound good, but anyone can get in. That’s where a lot of the “average kids” wound up.

The poor parents would almost apologize in the same breath that they mentioned the school when someone inevitably asked, “so where’s junior going to school in the fall?”

You’d overhear parents every spring – parents whose kids were at least a couple of years away from college, gossiping about the ACT and SAT scores made by so and so and which college or university someone did or didn’t get into.

The first time I heard one of these conversations I literally panicked (I had no idea I was supposed to be thinking about this already – he’s just in 9^th grade).

Maybe I should say, I’m a proud first-generation college (and law school) graduate. My parents, who did very well for themselves financially, were too poor to go to college in the early 50s.

And I took the 10-year route to a college degree, first to junior college, then opening a couple of businesses and while running them, driving back and forth to classes at night – really just so I could get my degree and go to law school – kind of on a whim, really.

So, all of this talk of college and getting my son into college was a bit foreign to me.

Of course, I wanted him to succeed and do well, but we were still trudging through ADHD and dyslexia and getting homework turned in on time. I honestly couldn’t think all that far ahead

But it’s clear from my own experience and from the research that our society’s measure of success - by way of materialism and status - has hijacked our better judgment as parents.

The narrow measure of success that has been planted in our heads (good grades = good college = good job = successful life) and that we are forcing on our kids, is literally ruining their mental health.

All of this makes me think of the frog in boiling water – we don’t really know when this collective insanity crept in or exactly why – it seems to have happened slowly, over time but really began to make a noticeable impact on our kids over the past couple of decades

Since then, application numbers have increased at top colleges and acceptance rates, therefore, have decreased – making these schools seem even more elite and maybe more of a “prize”

No matter how we got here, we now find ourselves in this highly competitive college marketplace, with lots of parents, kids and schools thinking the only route to success is through the college doors of the most grand college or university they can gain acceptance into.

For some wealthy parents, as we saw just a couple of years ago, it’s worth bribery and fraud charges to get your kids into certain colleges

So, what do the teens say about the pressure to succeed?

According to a 2018 Pew Research Center Report which surveyed over 10,000 teens age 13 to 17,  61% say they are under great pressure to make good grades.

High school counselors at these high-achieving schools see this pressure and anxiety play out every day.

They see students who are at the very top of their class, excelling in AP classes and honors classes, losing sleep, not eating and literally working and worrying themselves sick. These are the really “at risk” kids. The pressure valve will either be released, or they’ll eventually blow.

In 2012, Savannah, a sophomore in a well to do community in Connecticut, was anxious and depressed. She was very bright, mostly an A student and was under tremendous pressure to push hard to get those grades to be accepted into a top college.

And on New Years’ Eve that year, she’d reached her breaking point.

She went to her bedroom, picked up a pair of scissors, and before she could really decide what to do with them, her father managed to get them away from her.

She later said that the competition at school and the pressure she was under was just too much.

Savannah’s mother, Genevieve, takes some of the blame saying she remembers talking to her by 8^th grade about finding her passions and getting involved in things that would pad her college applications.

But she says she was led to believe that parents are supposed to push their kids to achieve – to overcome obstacles.

She now knows…you can push too hard.

Genevieve’s realization prompted her to get together with some other parents at Savannah’s school to bring in a psychologist to submit the entire student population with the Youth Self-Report.

This assessment measures the students’ “internalizing symptoms” such as anxiety, sadness, and depression, including somatic complaints like stomachaches and also covers issues like substance use.

The results were that approximately 30% of the students rated above average levels of internalizing symptoms - the national norm is 7%

Not surprisingly, their rates of alcohol and drug use were also higher than the national average.

Parents - who are really trying to do what they think is best  - are unwittingly – along with the schools and the community at large - playing a role in literally traumatizing their kids.

Again, this is trauma on the same level of that which kids suffer from abuse or poverty.

This trauma happens when parents, school, and communities overfocus on success.

When parents put so much emphasis on success, without considering the child’s needs, desires, talents, passions, and capabilities and without making allowances for mistakes (and fixing mistakes when they make them)…they may be trying to insure a certain future for them – but it’s to the detriment of their mental health.

This type of parenting, where the child’s autonomy is ignored and they are pushed far beyond their capabilities, is happening during adolescence, when kids are working really hard to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world – they’re developing a sense of self.

But if the adults around them don’t appreciate and nurture who they’re becoming and instead, push them to be something “more” or “better” and to reach certain almost unattainable “goals”, they can develop a false sense of self – bend to the parents’ wishes to make sure they maintain their love and affection…

On top of that, their self-esteem (based on this false sense of self) is completely tied up in achieving…and they don’t ever feel like they can achieve enough to “live up to their potential” and they feel their parents’ love is conditioned on this very narrow definition success.

Depending on the circumstances, scientific research tells us that these teens can develop all kinds of mental health issues.

Many of them become perfectionistic because of this fear of failing and being rejected.

They become very self-critical and set unrealistic goals for themselves - and according to the research, perfectionism in adolescence, is as a risk factor for suicidal ideation and behaviors.

If that’s not enough, these over-pressured, over parented teens may lack a sense of responsibility for their actions, lack confidence, independence, motivation, and flexibility.

They’re more likely to have narcissistic tendencies, an increased sense of entitlement

They may be less likely to develop age-appropriate relationships.

And they most often develop depression, anxiety, feelings of low self-worth, general dissatisfaction with life and feelings of powerlessness, sleep issues, eating problems, poor coping mechanisms, and addiction.

These kids who are taught early on that there’s only one path to success – excelling in academics - determine there’s just no way they can do it (they have learning issues or don’t test well, have test anxiety…) they just give up and feel like total failures.

Some of them check out emotionally and others check out of life altogether.

None of this sounds much like success, does it?

The real shame is, many of these kids learn to hide their issues well  - or their parents decide to ignore the signs.

The kid who on the outside looks like they have it all figured out (great grades, star athlete or musician, president of this or that, honors, and accolades all over the place) they could be hurting the most.

If parents are aware of the problems, they often don’t discuss it with anyone and may not even reach out for help because of potential stigma or fear of letting other people know their kids aren’t measuring up (or that they aren’t measuring up as parents). So, there’s a lot of needless suffering.

Unfortunately, this also denies the entire community the opportunity to start a larger conversation and work for change.

All this pressure on our teens to “succeed” – often at the cost of their mental health or their very life - maybe we need to reexamine our definition of success

Author and adolescent neuropsychologist William Stixrud is one of many experts who believes parents, schools and communities push a much too narrow view of success on kids.

He calls it a “shared delusion” – that the only way to true success is a 4-year degree at a top-tier college or university.

He points out that as far as income, job and life satisfaction, if you go to any 4-year college and graduate – it doesn’t matter which one.

His argument is backed up by a 2013 Pew Research Center survey of college grads from the more expensive and elite private colleges and the less expensive “regular” state colleges and universities.

The survey showed that between graduates’ from the 2 different categories of colleges, the level of satisfaction as to their income, their job, and their life, was not significantly different.

Also, there was no significant difference in the time it took them to get a job or in the level of preparedness they had for the job.

Stixrud admits he was actually a real screw-up in high school (a C+ student at best) and even flunked out of grad school the first time around before he found his real passion.

He says the simple truth is that grades are not a predictor of success in life, and neither is the college you attend.

He feels that all the pressure to get a 7.0 GPA and go to the best schools simply creates too much fear, anxiety and competition in high-achieving teens and causes many to simply give up if they don’t feel “good enough”.

He says we’d all be much happier if we encourage our kids to work hard at what they love rather than trying to inspire them to succeed through fear.

Speaking of happiness, there’s research that indeed shows at least a correlation between having a degree and being happy. 94% of people with higher education reported being happy with their lives versus 89% of high school grads. So, that’s a bit of an argument for at least getting a 4-year degree somewhere.

And 2019 the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that college graduates do earn an average of about $26,000 more per year than high school graduates (with much lower rates of unemployment as well).

So, as many point out, on average, over the course of their lives, college graduates do earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more than those who don’t graduate from college.

But that degree comes with a steep financial cost these days, which has risen significantly over the past decade -  about $107,000 for 4-year degree at a public institution and $219,000 at a private college.

And 62% of college grads graduate with at least $28,000 in debt, which can take years to pay off and can cause many to put off other obligations like buying a home.

A related question is, how many teens feel the pressure to go to college – not just the best college – any college – when they’re not ready, not prepared, too immature, or it’s just not for them?

Probably quite a few.

I thought this statistic was bogus – I had to research the original source and it’s true. 30% of college freshman drop out during their first year of college. 30%!

We don’t know why but we can at least guess that some of them shouldn’t have been there to begin with.

Experts like Dr. John Duffy writes in his most recent book, Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety, that these kids go off to college being led to believe it’s what they SHOULD want to do – that everyone in their right mind should want to go to college and get a great job and make lots of money and live this dream.

Then they get there, and they feel empty inside. They either feel like something’s missing or it’s not the be all end all they thought it was going to be…they’re bored or see it as a waste of time or whatever.

So, they feel like failures IN college but would have felt like failures if they didn’t GO to college. It’s a no-win situation when we force feed our teens that there’s only one route to a “successful life”

Recently, while getting my hair cut and colored, I started talking to the young lady washing my hair. She told me she had been accepted into several top colleges and was planning on pre-med and going on to med school.

I was like, wow, so are you working here to save up some money? And she said, “no, I’m apprenticing to learn a trade. My parents told me that college was great but that I should also learn a trade, just in case.”

I was shocked, to be honest. I thought what parent of a kid who has a desire to go to college and medical school would insist that they also learn to cut hair?

Well, after researching and preparing for this podcast, I can tell you what kind – the smart, supportive, and open-minded kind.

If this young lady for some reason doesn’t make it all the way through college (and as we just learned, the statistics say there’s a real chance of that) she’ll have a great career to fall back on (talented hairstylists in higher-end salons can easily make over $90,000 a year and much more in larger cities).

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel is a huge proponent of “the trades” as it’s called, ( because, as he says, college isn’t for everyone, and trade school isn’t a “vocational consolation prize”.

He points out that the cost of college has risen faster than the cost of healthcare, real estate, food, and energy and that we’re loaning money that these graduates are having a hard time paying back while there are millions of trades jobs that need to be filled…many of which pay well above the general average salary for college graduates, including plumbers, electricians, dental hygienists, and various medical techs.

There are so many alternatives to a successful life and career other than a 4-year degree, much less one from an elite college.

There are online courses, certificates, bootcamps, 2-year degrees, apprentice programs, trade or vocational schools, community colleges, Instagram influencer, YouTuber, gamer, entrepreneurship - people make a living and have a great life many different ways!

And of course, we all know the stories of the hugely successful entrepreneurs who either never went to college or went and later dropped out (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Richard Branson) – obviously, these guys are brilliant, motivated, ambitious and would be standouts in the crowd whether or not they were college graduates.

But I’m confident there are plenty of less than famous people who’ve done quite well – if not on such a grand scale - without a college degree.

Like Payne Lindsey of Atlanta. He’s a director, documentary filmmaker and podcaster with wildly successful podcasts including Up and Vanished, Atlanta Monster and Dead and Gone – he’s very well respected in the investigative journalism world. He attended college off and on for years but hated school. When his dad finally cut him off at 23, he started creating and directing videos.

And again, are we defining success by money and prestige alone?

Or is success more individual – figuring out for ourselves how we each define it and reaching a personal point of satisfaction?

My stepdaughter, for example, couldn’t care less about how much money she makes. She’s actually quite brilliant and did go to very good private college and graduate school – she has a master’s degree in social work.

She helps integrate African refugees into this country and runs a farm with her boyfriend. She did not go to college to make money.

They live in an old farmhouse so far out in the countryside of Virginia that they have to stand in one corner of the kitchen to catch a bar to use their cell phones. They literally have a land line.

But they don’t have time to sit around and stream Netflix anyway because they’re too busy sheering and birthing sheep, making their own mustard and preserves and gathering eggs from the henhouse.

So, how do you measure success? What do you teach your teen or tween about success? How will they know when they’ve gotten there?

The research is definitive – we’ve got to back off our teens, as parents, as a society.

This myopic view of success – good grades, good college, good job = success.

First of all, it’s making our kids miserable and, in some cases, ruining their lives – the opposite of what we want for them.

Second, it’s simply not true. Success isn’t dependent on graduating from the most elite college. It isn’t even dependent on graduating from any college necessarily.

Success is defined by each one of us, individually by setting and achieving our own goals, and making mistakes and overcoming obstacles along the way, finding happiness on our own, very personal, terms, not according to our parents or society.

Some of us live to work hard and earn a good living. Some of us live to help others – money be damned. Some of us live to learn or live to have fun or live to create.

Our kids’ futures are and should be important to us.

But we have to accept that the picture we have in our heads of what we want for them or hoped for them might not be the best thing for them. It might not fit them as an individual.

Let’s accept our role as their guide; someone who will honor them for who they are, separate and apart from us, with their own views, interests, talents, and abilities - their own dreams and longings . Let’s work with them to help them figure out their own path to success, rather than choosing it for them.

My son had a really hard time from primer all the way through middle school at a private Episcopal School – the one so many parents in our bubble sent their kids…the type where the parents pay a lot of money so their kids can be under enormous pressure to do “rigorous course work” and graduate with an International Baccalaureate degree – the kind with 100% college acceptance and literally no room for accommodating kids with learning differences.

My ADHD, dyslexic, dysgraphic child with major anxiety was totally spent by the end of 8^th grade. And frankly so were we - both our pocketbook and our nerves.

We put him in our public high school and within a year and a half all hell broke loose (it’s called adolescence with ADHD, learning issues, anxiety, depression, and a mom who didn’t have a grip on her own emotions at the time).

What ensued between 10^th and 12^th grade is a story for another episode (or several). There were no AP classes, no accolades, no proms, no high school graduation ceremony. We spent 2 years trying to keep him alive and get him mentally healthy.

But by the time he was 18 things were much better and we still had hopes he’d be able to go to college. We’d planned on it actually. Even after everything he and our family had been through, I was still clinging to this college dream for him…as if his learning issues and anxiety would just disappear once he enrolled in college.

My idea of success – for him – has always included a 4-year college – not an elite college – any college…and in 2019 I had not quite let go of that idea.

But at the end of that year of counseling he had made up his mind. We all met with his therapist where he broke the news to us that he was not going to college. He wanted to move to Colorado, teach snowboarding and work in the marijuana industry.

Yeah.

I literally grieved.

If I’m really honest, 3 years later, I’m still a little sad and somewhat concerned about his future. I want to know he can make good money and not stress about paying the bills.

But I have now accepted that for him, at age 18, with his combination of ADHD, learning issues and major anxiety, college would have been disastrous - to his self-esteem and his general happiness, which we had been fighting for, at that point, for a good 3 years or more.

So, instead, at 21, he’s been living independently, IN COLORADO, for over a year now, working in a snowboard shop and snowboarding or hiking in the mountains on his days off.

He lives in a fabulous condo with 3 roommates, has a big group of friends, cooks gourmet meals, cleans and washes his own clothes, spends precious little time playing video games, rarely drinks alcohol (he does like his weed though). The best part? His anxiety is at bay, he’s not struggling to get through assignments and turn in homework, he's quite happy. And from where I sit, he looks pretty damn successful.