The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Overwhelmed, Sad and Lonely

Posted on | July 8, 2015 | 58 Comments

 

The children of the American elite class suffer from a form of oppression that most of us can never understand. Parents whose privileges are a matter of having the right resumé — Ivy League diplomas, etc. — are keenly aware that, in order for their child to follow in their footsteps and become members of the soi-disant “meritocracy,” the child must get into their school’s “gifted” program, must maintain a perfect GPA, must achieve certain scores on the SAT, and must accumulate the kind of extracurricular and school leadership positions that will make their college application a winner. If Dad went to Yale and Mom went to Harvard, their child would be deemed a disappointment if she weren’t accepted at either of the parental alma maters.

To attend a mere state university? This will not do. She might as well be living in a trailer park and working the day shift at Waffle House.

Those who inhabit the affluent uplands of 21st-century America have problems the rest of us cannot imagine. When you’re near the top of the mountain, it’s a long way down, and there are limits to what elite parents can do to prevent their child from suffering the stigma of downward mobility. Money can buy a lot of things, but money alone will not inoculate your child against failure, especially if your idea of “success” requires your kid to have perfect grades, be senior class president, win the state science fair, be solo violinist in the school orchestra, and spend her summers helping famine victims in a Third World country. This results in an over-scheduled childhood, with parents in the role of Doctor Frankenstein and their child as a sort of laboratory experiment to produce the future Harvard student.

 

If you have to jump through all those hoops to prove how elite you are, are you really so elite? Or are you merely a well-trained hoop-jumper? If a child has outstanding natural ability, and also has a genuine appetite for achievement, is it really necessary for parents to push, push, push kids this way? And what happens when you send such a kid off to a school like Stanford University (annual tuition $44,757) where all the other kids are Frankenstein experiments, too? Not surprisingly, many of these little monsters can’t cope with the pressure:

From 2006 to 2008, I served on Stanford University’s mental health task force, which examined the problem of student depression and proposed ways to teach faculty, staff, and students to better understand, notice, and respond to mental health issues. As dean, I saw a lack of intellectual and emotional freedom—this existential impotence—behind closed doors. The “excellent sheep” were in my office. Often brilliant, always accomplished, these students would sit on my couch holding their fragile, brittle parts together, resigned to the fact that these outwardly successful situations were their miserable lives.
In my years as dean, I heard plenty of stories from college students who believed they had to study science (or medicine, or engineering), just as they’d had to play piano, and do community service for Africa, and, and, and. I talked with kids completely uninterested in the items on their own résumés.

That’s from Julie Lythcott-Haims who not only recognizes that there is an emerging crisis among America’s elite youth, but realizes that this problem is not limited to the children of the elite:

In a 2013 survey of college counseling center directors, 95 percent said the number of students with significant psychological problems is a growing concern on their campus, 70 percent said that the number of students on their campus with severe psychological problems has increased in the past year, and they reported that 24.5 percent of their student clients were taking psychotropic drugs.
In 2013 the American College Health Association surveyed close to 100,000 college students from 153 different campuses about their health. When asked about their experiences, at some point over the past 12 months:

  • 84.3 percent felt overwhelmed by all they had to do
  • 60.5 percent felt very sad
  • 57.0 percent felt very lonely
  • 51.3 percent felt overwhelming anxiety
  • 8.0 percent seriously considered suicide

The 153 schools surveyed included campuses in all 50 states, small liberal arts colleges and large research universities, religious institutions and nonreligious, from the small to medium-sized to the very the large. The mental health crisis is not a Yale (or Stanford or Harvard) problem; these poor mental health outcomes are occurring in kids everywhere. The increase in mental health problems among college students may reflect the lengths to which we push kids toward academic achievement, but since they are happening to kids who end up at hundreds of schools in every tier, they appear to stem not from what it takes to get into the most elite schools but from some facet of American childhood itself.

This is excerpted from Ms. Lythcott-Haims’s book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, which will almost certainly find an avid readership among elite parents who went to Harvard or Yale and who therefore probably don’t have a lick of common sense. If you need an expert to tell you how to avoid turning your kid into a stressed-out psychological basket case, how “elite” are you? I’ve read enough books and articles about parenting to understand that all the truly useful advice from experts tends to confirm what any good parent knows from ordinary common sense.

If you care enough about your kids to read books about parenting, and if you’re intelligent enough that you’re actually able to read and comprehend books about parenting, congratulations — you’re probably going to be a good parent and your kid’s probably going to be a good kid. Intelligence is a highly inheritable trait, and the combination of nature and nurture (a naturally smart child being nurtured by smart parents) usually produces good results. Maybe you jumped through all those hoops necessary to obtaining an elite education and actually enjoyed all that hoop-jumping. Maybe your own child will naturally wish to replicate your path to meritocratic success, and you have the experiential knowledge to provide them guidance in this regard.

Both common sense and expert advice, however, would caution against the kind of control-freak attitude known as “helicopter parenting,” where children are so vigilantly supervised that they never develop the resourcefulness and sturdy confidence necessary to cope with the disappointments and hardships of ordinary life.





 

Category: Education

Comments

58 Responses to “Overwhelmed, Sad and Lonely”

  1. Quartermaster
    July 8th, 2015 @ 2:05 pm

    I’ve seen the syndrome at the “Cow Colleges” as well. One of my classmates wanted to major in Engineering. His father expected him to major in Biz admin. He resisted for the first 2 quarters, but dad won out by the end of his freshman year.
    A number of kids at Tennessee Tech were there because of parental expectations. This isn’t isolated to the faux-elite colleges and universities.
    By the by, I wouldn’t have minded going to grad school at Stanford, but wasn’t the slightest bit interested in going as an Undergrad. Places like Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT are good places for a grad student, but they ain’t so great in the undergrad programs.

  2. Art Deco
    July 8th, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

    I recently had occasion to look at a video of a talk given by Megan McArdle (an alumna of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago) where she discussed her life immediately after completing business school wherein she said her career was damaged by having (at age 28) remained six months too long with one stopgap employer and then having to compete with “freshly minted MBAs two years behind me” and finding herself non-salable. It’s the sort of tale that causes you to ask “do you have a feeling there’s a lot of stuff going on we don’t know about?”.

    Private research universities like Mrs. Suderman attended account for just north of 6% of the enrollment in baccalaureate granting institutions, and the majority of that is to be found in institutions like Syracuse and Lehigh which are not superlatively tony. The high class private colleges (e.g. Wellesley or St. Lawrence) have a sum of enrollments even smaller. And we’re all living in a world where freshman matriculations each year account for maybe 30% of a given age cohort. These sorts of anxieties are pretty 1%.

  3. DeadMessenger
    July 8th, 2015 @ 3:01 pm

    She might as well be living in a trailer park and working the day shift at Waffle House.

    Here’s another problem. A lot of parents see the above scenario as unacceptable. But in my mind it’s not a bad thing at all, inasmuch as the kid is (a) living, (b) living on her own, and (c) working.

    Mike Rowe makes some good points about the availability of blue collar jobs. And what is wrong with being a plumber or a machinist or a car mechanic or a clerk at Wal-mart? Someone has to do those jobs, and they are gainful employment. Imagine the many ways your own life could possibly suck without, for example, any plumbers, and you start to get a real appreciation for blue collar workers.

  4. OrangeEnt
    July 8th, 2015 @ 3:02 pm

    ” is it really necessary for parents to push, push, push kids this way?”

    You know what happens when you do? They get off at Willoughby….

  5. Dana
    July 8th, 2015 @ 3:19 pm

    What’s wrong with being a plumber? Ewww! You have to stick your hands in other people’s poop!

  6. Dana
    July 8th, 2015 @ 3:26 pm

    Our esteemed host, the father of six children, wrote:

    If you care enough about your kids to read books about parenting, and if you’re intelligent enough that you’re actually able to read and comprehend books about parenting, congratulations — you’re probably going to be a good parent and your kid’s probably going to be a good kid.

    In my humble experience, what makes a good parent is being a good person yourself. If you don’t want your kids to use drugs, then don’t use drugs or get stinking drunk yourself! If you want your sons to respect women, then you treat your wife with love and respect. If you want your kids to be self-sufficient in life, then you go to work, on time, every day, and do the best job you can. If you want your kids to grow up with a decent moral and ethical basis, then you take them to Mass every Sunday. (Not send them to Mass, take them to Mass.) But, most critical of all, don’t have your children reared by day care workers!

    If you do those very simple things, you won’t have to be a helicopter parent; you’ll rear children you can trust.

  7. Phil_McG
    July 8th, 2015 @ 3:48 pm

    Weird, isn’t it, that college-educated people look down on plumbers, but plumbing is a useful skilled trade that’s always in demand and many plumbers are their own bosses. While most university graduates end up in mediocre-paying white-collar mid-management positions at best and constantly worry about being outsourced.

  8. Fail Burton
    July 8th, 2015 @ 4:30 pm

    Having raised myself reading science fiction it’s amazing how consistent one theme is: highly technological urban conglomerations can drive people mad.

    Because of its high population density N. Y. City for decades had a reputation as an eccentric nuthouse. That finally only began to go away as other American cities rapidly expanded their own populations and started to experience the same weird behaviors. Other large urban centers around the world have the same reputations: Mumbai, Sao Paolo, etc.

    In 1986, Times Square had a movie theater which showed kung-fu movies 24 hrs. a day. If one can cater to that, what isn’t being catered to?

    If one wishes to social engineer a thing, I’d legally mandate an American population of 200 million and keep it there.

  9. concern00
    July 8th, 2015 @ 4:45 pm

    Certainly a better way to support yourself than…
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Knox

  10. DeadMessenger
    July 8th, 2015 @ 5:32 pm

    How many diapers have you changed? The more you change, the greater the statistical odds of this happening. 😀

    On a more serious note, when you have sick people in your house who don’t quite make it to the toilet in time, sick children, sick pets, or elderly parents with dementia you’ve taken care of AND you were raised on a farm shoveling poop and walking in poop and scraping poop off your boots before getting in your truck, you become like me, and you don’t really give a sh1t (yuk, yuk!) about poop anymore.

  11. DeadMessenger
    July 8th, 2015 @ 5:41 pm

    I didn’t read the linked wiki, because I’ve read all I need to know about her here.

    But I did scroll down to the first “Reference” item which says “Belle Knox opens up in a gripping new documentary”, which I thought was pretty funny.

  12. RS
    July 8th, 2015 @ 6:51 pm

    The problem is that too many parents view their children as accessories to their own lives and wish to display them like an original Warhol print. Most of late adolescent stress in this country would be eliminated if parents treated their children as individual human beings and not as accouterments to their own existence.

    (Been away in the Rockies without internet for three weeks. Did I miss anything?)

  13. Dana
    July 8th, 2015 @ 6:52 pm

    Plumbers don’t have to worry about finding work, electricians don’t go hungry, and HVAC techs always have it good. But they’re so very blue collar, doncha know?

  14. Quartermaster
    July 8th, 2015 @ 7:50 pm

    If we could devise a DNA test for voting DimoKKKrap, we’d have it made.

  15. Quartermaster
    July 8th, 2015 @ 7:50 pm

    Other than the country falling apart, nothing major.

  16. Jim R
    July 8th, 2015 @ 8:37 pm

    Where’s the line between pushing one’s children to do their best (which is usually just a bit better than they think it is) and work hard on the one hand, and making their lives a misery to them on the other? I really don’t know.

    I did some tutoring when I was in grad school. Many of my students were the junior high / high school-aged children of very successful parents who couldn’t abide that little Johnny or little Sally wasn’t on-track to go to their alma maters and on to grad / med / law / MBA school. O’ course, they couldn’t be bothered to work with their kids themselves, but they clearly were trying to get them – by their estimate, anyway – up to speed. Should they have bothered?

    Again, I don’t know. Sometimes, I wish that my parents had pushed me a bit harder. I make no doubt that there are kids who feel quite the opposite.

    What to do?

  17. RS
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:05 pm

    In other words, “same sh*t, different day.”

  18. Animal
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:10 pm

    And unlike politics, shoveling manure is at least honest work.

  19. Zohydro
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:13 pm

    I’ve read many very well compensated entry-level positions go begging for want of applicants with basic literacy skills who can pass a drug test, bathe regularly and don’t have facial piercings…

  20. Zohydro
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:14 pm

    ISWYDT…

  21. Daniel Freeman
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:27 pm

    The SCOTUS forced gay marriage down everyone’s throats — with a backdrop of Oregon confirming the $135,000 fine of that couple that had a bakery in Gresham, and throwing a gag order on top — and the SJWs are trying (and largely succeeding) to get the Confederate flag effectively banned as hate speech.

  22. Mike G.
    July 8th, 2015 @ 9:29 pm

    What parents need to do is stress the importance of doing well in school when the kids are young, not just to get into a good college, but also so they can have an easier time of it when they hunt their first job and start buying their own car insurance…paying some of their own bills.

    By the way, if you start them young, you won’t have to push so hard when they get older…they are already in the habit.

    What a lot of people don’t realize is that places of employment, insurance companies, ect are relying more and more on a student’s performance in school and even some of their extra curricular activities as a precursor for employment, rate of car insurance, suitability as a lessor or renter of property, etal.

  23. frugalscott
    July 8th, 2015 @ 11:12 pm

    Not to mention how much of other people’s figurative poop They have to put their hands in…

  24. Zohydro
    July 8th, 2015 @ 11:12 pm

    Whoa, dude! Gotta give us a Content Warning when reminding us of Our National Irrumation™ in the Obergefell ruling like that!

  25. arcadius
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:05 am

    I think you’re ignoring real differences between these jobs. Plumbers on average make around $55k which is fine and enough for a reasonably comfortable life. Mechanics make around $36k which is… still probably enough to raise a family, but the neighborhoods you’re going to have to live in are going to be sketchy. Clerks at Walmart? Well they’re paid by the hour but it works out to about $20k. That’s barely a living wage for one person let alone a family.

    You know as well as I that there’s a very good reason why parents push their children. Nobody wants to end up a clerk at f’n Walmart. Come on.

  26. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:22 am

    I know people not making one f’n penny a year, and who try to get the lame $20k Walmart job because $20k is a lot f’n better than $0k. In my area, jobs are hard to find. So then you expect them to what? Figure out another area that might have jobs, leave the place they’re staying now, be it mom’s or a friend’s, hitchhike to the new place, and live on the damn street until they can find somebody who wants to hire a now homeless person instead of one of the 75 unemployed MBAs they have on deck?

    In my area, when the big gubmint contractors left, thanks to the Occupant, those employees, a lot of them couldn’t sell their house because of the economy. They’re either stuck here, or leaving their house to foreclosure and ruining their credit. So they took jobs that were steps down, sometimes lots of steps down, and the people that would normally be in those jobs, like mailroom and shipping jobs for contractors that paid enough to live on, also had to take steps down, into Walmart and places like that. I know couples who both work at Walmart, and God bless ’em, they make enough to squeak by without having to be on the dole.

    So then when a hard-to-find better job opens, would you rather hire somebody who was working at Walmart, or somebody sitting on their ass sucking the government teat and not working at all.

    Frankly, I have respect for anyone willing to work, and work multiple jobs, to stay off welfare, even if that means having a day job at Walmart and a night job mopping up puke at the hospital.

  27. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:25 am

    And thank you for not using the Hebrew sans serif alphabet that I would have to then figure out. 😀

    p.s. I knew YOU would get it!

  28. HaroldJYoung
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:27 am

    Some New Features with theothermccain….. Go To Next Page

  29. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:29 am

    You called RSM “host”. Now the feministas are going to call you a cultist. : )

  30. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:32 am

    Drug tests? No facial piercings? Well, that excludes feminists, then. You may as well gone for the trifecta and added “blue hair”.

  31. Zohydro
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:36 am

    But were my grasp on reality so firm in these times!

  32. Zohydro
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:49 am

    Whenever I drive by my local office of The Ministry of Free Stuff™, I see all these types in abundance queued up at the door… It’s maddening!

  33. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:53 am

    You know, there’s still lots of simple, but good hearted people out there for whom the prospect of going to college never came to mind. I myself came from a long, LONG line of sh1t-kickin’ farmers, carpenters, milkmen, things like that. When I used to talk about college, daddy would say, “Less learnin’, more earnin’, little girl”.

    True story. I’m the only one in the known history of my family who went to college. Put myself through, and my copious numbers of relatives were all real proud. At a gathering, one of my aunts asked me to “say sumthin’ smart”. Everybody around stopped talking to hear what I said.

    So I said, “Uh… E = mc² ?” There was silence for a moment, then the crowd gathered around to hug me and high five me, and my uncle said, “Damn girl, you’s a genius! Bill, come over here and listen to this! Say it again, girl!”

    Also funny: a boy came to pick me up for a date in a dump truck. He bought it himself, and that was his only transpo. When my dad saw that, he was pissed about some guy picking up his little princess in a truck like that, and started to give him hell. The kid said, “I bought it with my own money, sir, and I’m started my own hauling business with it.”

    That mollified my dad somewhat, who asked, “Wut y’all do with that dirt you haul away with it?” Dad needed some fill dirt for the farm. The boy said, “Dump it someplace where somebody wants it.” Dad asked for some, and the kid said sure. So dad said for us to go on out and have a nice time.

    Upshot: my dad traded me for some loads of dirt. 😀

    Somehow this relates to your comment, but damned if I know how.

  34. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:56 am

    It’s better that way these days.

  35. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:58 am

    Luckily, I don’t see much of that because I live in a place where it’s still considered shameful to take a handout. But we’re getting there.

  36. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 1:02 am

    You should’ve called it the People’s Republic of Oregon. Lol!

  37. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 1:08 am

    I think a simple verbal test would suffice. Just name any minority in the US today (except practicing Christians) and ask if they think that group is oppressed.

    If they say “yes”, you’ve got your answer without the time and expense of a DNA test.

  38. Dana
    July 9th, 2015 @ 5:16 am

    Alas! I do so very often strive to be polite, and now I’m a Kool-Aid drinker!

  39. SouthOhioGipper
    July 9th, 2015 @ 7:00 am

    These are the people that are supposedly my social superiors who will use the scientific method to craft an ecologically sustainable society of peace, prosperty and social, sexual and legal equality??? These over-bred, undereducated emotional weaklings? My God. I came up literally from the streets, never attended college and still managed to get myself in the position of being in charge of a large staff and a multi-million dollar business franchise and if one of these kids walked in off the street I’d send him down to the McDonald’s! Ouch.. I despair to think that institutions of power will shelter these beasts where they will have power of petty vengeance(like releasing my voting records to political opposition groups) power. ugh..

  40. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 9th, 2015 @ 7:36 am

    College in the old days was all about networking and connections…and Ivy League schools are still all about networking and connections.

    Nothing wrong BTW about “Cow Colleges”!

  41. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 9th, 2015 @ 7:39 am

    Working hard in physical jobs like fishing, farming, construction, logging can pay well (but have a lot of financial risk), but it is dangerous work and take a hell of a toll on a body.

    There is a reason Willie cautioned mothers to “have them be doctors and lawyers and such…”

  42. Finrod Felagund
    July 9th, 2015 @ 9:37 am

    +1 for the Twilight Zone reference.

  43. dustbury.com » Altitude adjustments
    July 9th, 2015 @ 9:53 am

    […] This particular ethic seems to have settled fairly well upon the next generation as well, and that’s good, because I couldn’t pull off that whole helicopter thing: […]

  44. DeadMessenger
    July 9th, 2015 @ 11:21 am

    See what happens when you associate with one a them McCain boys?

  45. Ilion
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:40 pm

    Myself, I think that the recent turning of the natural distaste toward “other people’s poop” into a social psychosis is one of the big reasons that so many “highly educated” people think they make themselves morally superior by not allowing their children to be see the light of day.

  46. Ilion
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:48 pm

    I’m a computer programmer … and I have been a janitor (and more than once … including when I really wasn’t trying all that hard to get a new job in the computer field).

    ?

    In America, it’s really not all that hard to stay off welfare when you consider being on welfare to be demeaning.

  47. Ilion
    July 9th, 2015 @ 12:54 pm

    The story’s be even better were that boy your future husband.

  48. Quartermaster
    July 9th, 2015 @ 1:29 pm

    Not a thing wrong with “Cow Colleges.” If you want to attend a good undergrad Engineering School in this country, you will attend a “Cow College.”

  49. The original Mr. X
    July 9th, 2015 @ 2:37 pm

    On the subject of turning natural distaste into social psychosis:

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/06/naked-men.html

  50. Grandson Of TheGrumpus
    July 9th, 2015 @ 3:40 pm

    It would take some work to find it, and I unfortunately don’t have any free time lately, but in the late 1950’s experiments were done w/mice and population densities.

    The mice started docile, but as the density increased they started turning on each other. They would attack “in gangs” (by that I think the experimenter meant “x to 1”…), rape, steal, etc.

    It didn’t seem to matter how abundant food and water were… just population density. Every other factor the experimenters could think of was controlled.

    Grampa Grumpus, who originally pointed me to the study might have referenced it in one of his journals, but there are a lot of boxes of them to plow through!

    I’ll keep an eye out for it, but if anyone else finds a reference,please post it! Thanks!

    Btw: it’s interesting that our “betters” want to willingly do this to the citizenry, no?