Opinion - Adult responsibilities are making kids too old, too soon

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says parents are too stressed out these days. The combination of work and childrearing may simply be too much for us.

“It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country,” Murthy writes. “Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support.”

And it is true. Parenting is difficult. Making a living is difficult. So is making the grade. But the fact is that we are doing a lot of this to ourselves. Even worse, we are doing it to our children.

As a society, we are putting more pressure on children, sooner than ever before.

For example, just a few months ago, my 14-year-old daughter casually announced, “Ivy Acceptance Day is coming up.” Admittedly, I didn’t know there was such a day. I never considered attending an Ivy League school, and I wouldn’t have been accepted if I had bothered to apply. She thinks about it and seems to be working toward it.

As is so often the case, she was teaching me.

“Some years, all eight Ivies release their Regular Decision notifications on the same day in one fell swoop, while in other years, the decisions come out over a couple of days,” the Web site Ivy Coach explains.

This is, assumedly, not the same type of coaching provided by William Singer before he “pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and obstruction of justice” for his efforts to get under-qualified children into over-selective universities. But students are paying attention to the extra pressure, which they won’t be able to escape later in life.

My daughter is an overachiever who drives herself hard. As parents, we are proud of that and proud of her. But how hard is too hard? There is no reasonable world where an eighth grader should be considering an Ivy, or any college. She should at least be able to enjoy a few years of high school first.

But that isn’t the world we have created for our children.

In the 21st century, American parents have pushed responsibility down onto the shoulders of children. In Virginia, many students can apply to attend a specialty high school. One prepares the students for life in the medical field. Another leads to an International Baccalaureate degree. Others immerse students in foreign languages.

Students load up on AP classes and try to exceed a 4.0 GPA. If they can be better than perfect, they think, they may catch the eye of an Ivy.

Oddly, I would have had a better chance, statistically, than my daughter does now of getting into a top school, even though my GPA was lower and I had fewer (far fewer) extracurricular interests.

When I was looking at four-year schools, in the late 1980s, “Harvard, Princeton and Yale admitted roughly 15 to 20 percent of applicants.” With my excellent grades at a community college, I might have qualified to transfer in. I could have boosted my odds by lowering my sights: In 1989, Cornell accepted more than 30 percent of applicants.

Today, Harvard’s acceptance rate is 3.6 percent, and that is up a bit over recent years. Cornell’s acceptance rate hovers below 10 percent. My time on the President’s List at my community college probably wouldn’t get me on campus at Ithaca now.

This isn’t about me, of course, it is about the rising generation. All the pressure is taking a toll.

Around one in five teenagers report feeling anxious and depressed. Those who make it into top colleges end up paying top dollar and often emerge deep in debt. Graduates may feel they are wearing what law school graduates call “golden handcuffs.” Sure, they have a great degree, but do they really want to spend their life using it?

This is no way to raise a generation, particularly a generation that will need to adjust to wrenching changes throughout the 21st century. Today’s teens will need resiliency to handle climate change, the growth of AI, a changing workforce and many other things we can’t even imagine yet.

“It’s worth remembering that Lincoln — and Shakespeare — had a lifetime to become who they were,” writes historian John Lewis Gaddis. “Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it and then retirement. There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.”

Moving the year up required several adjustments: It changed vacation schedules, closed pools, and left students standing in line for buses in the mid-August heat. If we can change the dates, we can change the culture as well.

We need to create an educational culture that will give teens a chance to breathe and explore. That will be better for them and for us.

Richard Tucker is a Virginia-based writer.

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