Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I wish I could say that realization leads to change in parenting
style. No, it's just this ever-present awareness, not necessarily ever
acted upon, that it might not be so good. Then there are 50 questions
designed to prove that the world is a more dangerous place. And guess
what. In some ways it is; there's more car traffic. But in many ways it
is not.  And of course, it's just the perception that it's more
dnagerous because one kidnapping in another part of the country
reverberates on the airwaves for years and winds up consuming a lot of
our brain space dedicated to worry. It just seems more common. But
sometimes it gets parents thinking. And I often hear from them later,
(I always give out my email address) that they're taking baby steps to
a different style of parenting. Or theyre having more fights with their
husband over the parenting. Some communities are worse than others. 
  

    
The term Lisa mentioned, "psychiatric scapegoating", is a phrase first
coined by Thomas Szasz, as far as I know.  Are you using it in the
same sense?  If so, do you also consider mental illness a myth?
  

    
Heh, my pediatrician said that too, about the bruises. I spent a lot
of time when my kid was little telling other parents that yes, it was
OK with me that she was on the playground equipment. She was a great
climber. I also refused to put her up on anything she could climb
herself, and to get her down from anything she had climbed *up* on,
unless she was truly stuck. It was not hard to tell the difference.

There's an amazing array of stuff out there designed to protect kids
from harm. I get the sense that some people are trying to raise their
children in padded cells. But how is a kid going to learn to protect
herself from bumps if she doesn't learn that bumps hurt?  I think
there's a point where you're doing your child a severe disservice by
not letting her learn this stuff in a safe but not TOO safe space.

We put away the knives and the poison, and protected power cords and
outlets,  but we didn't pad anything just because it was hard.  Well,
we did have a rubber alphabet mat doubling as a rug during the crawling
years, but that didn't keep the kid from crawling to the edge and
bonking her head on the floor. 

I wonder sometimes, how would any of our children do in a survival
situation? (and also, how would *I* do?)  There are some terrific
children's books about kids who did have to survive on their own:
Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen; My Side of the Mountain and Julie of the
Wolves by Jean Craighead George; Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott
O'Dell; Call it Courage by Armstrong Perry, to name a few. We've had
some interesting discussions about Hatchet recently.  

I guess the message of survival books is that the world *is* a
dangerous place, but a person can be strong and clever and responsible
, and survive and thrive. We are, after all, supremely adapted to live
here. 

Sometimes I wonder how much all the emphasis on teaching kids about
"stranger danger" is contributing to our problems. If we raise kids to
believe that everyone is a potential threat, they're going to have a
hard time turning around and feeling a sense of community and trust
later. 
(jennifer "slipped")
  

    
Heh. I told Maggie I would always help get her down but I would never
help her get up. and I never ask her to stop doing something because
I'm afraid she'll get hurt; I ask her to stop because "It scares
Mommy." I told her dad straight out that I'd rather she got a broken
arm than go through life fearful.

When she was very young she liked climbing and at the same time she
was cautious and made sure she knew where she was going. So she'd be on
the equipment and pause, and some other mom (after looking around to
find this poor child's neglectful mother) would remove her, which
caused her to scream because a) she was *fine* and b) she was in her "I
do it myself!" mode anyway.

I also freaked out a bunch of moms at the gym; we'd leave the gym and
she'd go tearing off toward the parking lot, and I'd be sauntering on
behind, and moms would be throwing themselves at her trying to tackle
her because obviously she was going to get smushed by a car, and then
she'd screech to a halt at the curb and wait for me before she entered
the parking lot.

I was pretty lucky with her; she didn't go under the sink to eat
poison or anything. I did babyproofing to the extent she wouldn't die
-- electrical outlets, toilet lock -- but I didn't pad the world the
way I've seen some parents do.
  

    
(I also sent my kid to gymnastics as soon as she was out of diapers -
to a gym that was not highly competitive but did have a full range of
real equipment. I figured they'd teach her how to fall...)
  

    
"Sometimes I wonder how much all the emphasis on teaching kids about
"stranger danger" is contributing to our problems. If we raise kids to
believe that everyone is a potential threat, they're going to have a
hard time turning around and feeling a sense of community and trust
later."


Well put!  We are culturally conflicted, so privatized in a mass
consumer society, yet expected in some situations to turn engrained
patterns of social behavior on its head and work for some collectivist
good when all our conditioning is geared toward personal success,
personal security/safety, and personal acquisition.
  

    
There is a fine line with "Don't talk to strangers" because when the kid
gets lost, he/she will have to ask a stranger (maybe a cop, but still a
stranger) for help.  My general rule of thumb is
a) if you have YOUR adult around (mom, dad, grandma, etc.) you can, and
should, talk to whoever you want to talk to.
b) if you don't get a good feel/vibe from someone, you do not, and should
not, talk to them.
c) If you are without your adult and you NEED an adult, go first to a cop,
then to a person working in the place you are, thirdly a mom with kids.

So far, this advice has proven sufficient and useful for my two kids.

Kids Iknow who have been taught Stranger Danger techniques have literally
cried cowering in a corner of a store because they didn't know that they
could talk to a stgranger (person at the service desk at the store) to help
them find mommy/daddy.  (okay, only one kid I know did that).
  

    
"if you don't get a good feel/vibe from someone"


I remember being sixteen in the early '70s when I began hitchhiking
twenty-five miles into Seattle and back home.  I hitchhiked for the
rest of my teen years, including a trip to San Francisco, but mostly in
the PNW. Since this topic seems to be mostly about insularity creating
a new American "wimpiness" in our young, the issue of risk becomes
central.  

Parent's today want to insulate their children from all manner of
perceived danger...and, yes, there is a price that our kids pay.  When
hitchhiking, I did get "bad" rides from those who were drunk, fresh out
of jail, looking to play head games, etc.  These were, by far, the
exceptions. 

What I learned was an ability to very quickly read the driver (and
those in the car); I discovered how to comport myself in a
non-threatening manner; and, I did my best to relate to people from all
walks of life.  I learned a great deal about how to react to vibes in
a way that helped keep me safe.  Yet, I must ask myself why, when my
own son was a teen, I never encouraged him to hitchhike.  In part, the
culture of hitchhiking was far more diminished in 1996 than it was in
1971.  And to be honest, I didn't want him to face the same risk as I
had faced.

I now live in a rural county in the PNW that just buried a Sheriff's
Deputy two days ago.  She had immersed herself in a neighbor's
situation where the 28 year-old son was acting more and more disturbed.
 The mother of the man wanted him committed, but as an adult they were
unable to officially commit him.  The deputy was obviously not
sensitive enough to the man's vibe, yet thought she could help.  When
the man snapped, the deputy and five others were shot dead and two more
wounded.

I had an interesting conversation with a politically conservative
colleague of mine here yesterday.  We both agreed that this was a fault
of both liberal and conservative thinking.  Namely, there was strong
evidence that this man should have been in an institution.  The reason
he wasn't had to do with a conservative penchant not to spend taxpayers
dollars.  Likewise, there was the liberal penchant to honor the rights
of adults against the State.  Yet, in both cases, this man has already
cost taxpayers far more than if he had been in a mental institution,
and, by ignoring his very evident madness, the state allowed him to
impose a known insanity on many innocent people.  To me that man was
like an ugly psychic tornado that ripped through our community killing
an unlucky few.  Unlike a storm of nature, however, this travesty could
have been prevented.

There are clearly thresholds in the extent to which we protect our
children and ourselves from potential harm.  I think what Hara is
suggesting is that overprotection leads, unwittingly, to harm.
Underprotection has its danger too, as shown by the man in my county
who claimed that he killed because God told him to.

Hara, how does the idea of personal/social risk management, in this
larger sense, fit into your thinking?  
  

    
Scott, I personally don't feel we are dealing with political issues in
the incident you cite. Your rural neighbor who snapped...this is
something (deep individual psychopathology) also totally not related to
what I'm prepared to discuss. But you said something that hits home,
earlier. We each make a private response to issues that affect us all.
Whatever the real danger, why is it that we seek to protect only our
child and not all children? This is where distrust is already 
manifest. Because the parental thinking tends to be, noone knows my
precious one as well as I do or know shat s/he needs or can look after
him/her. The trust is already eroded. This is the manifestation. We've
privatized the classrooms—-parents being the "hall monitors," so to
speak, overseeing the kids' homework--because we no longer trust
institutions to do the job to our satisfaction.

Sharon, you said something that confuses me. You said you don't stop
your kid from doing something because you're afraid she'll get hurt;
you stop her because "it scares mommy." If I'm understanding you
correctly, I'm not sure I see much difference. Either way, your fears
are limiting your child's behavior. What if she doesn't have the same
fear thermostat you do? Wouldn't it be much better if you said, wow,
what you're doing takes a lot of courage (or strength or whatever). I'm
really impressed. I could never do that. Tell me how you learned to do
that. And tell me what you do. That way you get to review what she
knows and assure both of yourselves that she can handle herself. 
  

    <scribbled by memetic Sat 13 Sep 08 10:51>
  

    
that's weird ... the post <185> was supposed to go to the <media> conf
...

anyway, have read most of the book, should finish it off this evening.
 I've also been reading snippets to my wife as we I went along. 
Overall we strongly resonated with it: we have a daughter who will be a
junior in college this fall, and my wife was dragooned into being the
President of the board at the independent school where our daughter
went to High School.

Some reactions:

1.  Certainly some of the extreme stories were entertaining (probably
most outrageous: kid taking a parent on job interview!), though I have
to wonder at some of the statements, such as: $600/hr tutors ... at
first I assumed that had to be a typo but it was repeated again later
.... $60/hr I can believe (even it if it is a bit rich) but $600? 
That's $1.2 million a year for a 40 hour week!!!  Even I'd come out of
retirement for a gig like that!!!

2.  Seems like there are at least three big issues of social import:

 a) the most extreme examples consume an excessive amount of admin and
health resources in schools and colleges.  If it's really only 2 or 3
in a thousand as some of the college admins indicated, then telling the
parents to pound sand might be the best bet.  

 b) the much bigger problem is the much larger group of kids where the
parents aren't "bulldozers" but rather "helicopters".  There the
primary damage is to the kids and secondarily to society through
developing a substantial cadre of kids who lack basic toughness.  

 c) what makes a) & b) much worse in many ways is that with respect to
the normative "status indicators" (such as attending an elite college,
entry into the professions, etc) overparenting works... thus we will
have (and probably already have to some degree) an elite with weakness
of character and an over representation of mental disorders.  

I'd also add that the wimpification of America didn't start in the 90s
with overparenting of the sort described.  I remember well seeing it
when I went of to an elite college (MIT) in 1971.  Perhaps a bit over
half of the student body was from upper middle class suburbs of Boston
and New York.  One of the hallmarks of those kids is that they were
mostly wimps.  I was quite shocked to discover, for instance, that
almost none of them had been in a fight, at least not since they were 6
or 7, unlike in the upper working class place where I was from where
it was just a given that boys from age 10 to about 15 fought, a lot.  

It seemed to me at the time, that having won fights was less important
than having lost some.  Getting one's ass beaten once or twice seemed
to me at the time to have been important to understanding that a little
mixing things up wasn't all that big a deal.  Those that hadn't come
from that kind of "normal" (at the time) culture seemed way timid. 

They seemed "hothouse"-like even then, and were vastly less willing to
do anything very adventurous from heading out to an "inner city"
nightclub, take part in a cross country hitchhiking journey, or go out
and taunt the campus police about some petty grievance.

It's long been a pet peeve of mine that this aversion to fighting by
young teen boys has spread from a few effete suburbs to most middle
class areas, and it has been another substantial factor in the
wimpification of America.
  

    
jim, thanks for your comments. i totally agree that overparenting
isn't new. as i discuss in the book, it was once something we would
laugh at, occurred among a few "precious" kids. but then it suddenly
became THE style of parenting for the middle and upper-middle and upper
classes. that's quite a switch. the upper-middle and upper classes
often sent their kids off to boarding school as a way of getting them
out of the way so parents could play at adult things. now the parents
send the kids to boarding school and follow them there; they buy a
house nearby. 

i wish i could report that the examples in the book are extreme. maybe
i just live in an extreme environment where this takes place. $600 an
hour tutors? i spent several hours three years ago talking to at least
three who make such money, working for one of the widely known
test-prep and tutoring companies. i wouldn't be surprised if the rates
are higher now. how about the $15,000 to $30,000 IGAP, or ivy
guaranteed admission programs of counseling, test prep and tutoring?
that just did not exist 10 years ago, and they are available to anyone
all over the country. this is everyday stuff in new york and the many
places around the country where i've had the privilege to speak...and
to listen. 

failure is incredibly important. it is necessary to know that you can
fail at something and survive. besides, our brains are wired so that we
learn more from our failures than our successes; and this makes great
evolutionary sense. in almost every way, our brains are more sensitive
to negative info than positive info. if you are never allowed to fail,
then you not only don't develop coping skills, you become risk-averse.
you live in fear of making a mistake. this is not what our culture
needs to thrive. this also breeds depression, because you are living in
fear and focused on something negative. success hinges less on getting
everything right than on how you handle getting things wrong.

and perhaps just one cavil. i deliberately do not describe the wimp
phenomenon as a lack of toughness, which suggest a certain kind of
harshness as the remedy. it's not "toughness" (whatever that is) that
these kids lack. it's resilience. it's resilience that makes you
strong, that makes you able to survive. these kids are fragile,
brittle, afraid of making mistakes, and, because of the absence of
coping skills, overwhelmed by even minor difficulties. 
  

    
I'd say that a subset of kids lack both resilience AND toughness which
are indeed two separate though related things.  It's not only
economics that makes a disproportionate number of our military
volunteers come from places other than middle class and up suburbs.  I
can't prove it, but I wouldn't at all be surprised to find that even
the sons and daughters of affluent people in small towns and rural
areas volunteer at a rate well above wimpy suburbanites of lower
economic levels.  

I also liked your section on "mastery".  Thinking back, one of the
strong positives in my life was the Boy Scouts.  Scouting in those days
included the mastery of all kinds of skills: knots, map reading, tent
pitching, firewood processing, open fire cookery, marksmanship, first
aid, morse code etc.  None of the skills was what you'd call real
difficult, but they took some effort and concentration to master them. 
And it's not like I use most of them that often (though in the last 90
days I've had use of a bowline, a sheetbend, and a square knot), it
was the development of real skills that were "real".  We used them
regularly in the scouting context.  If you stuck with scouting until
you were 14 or 15, you'd amassed a goodly body of techniques and were
quite confident in your ability to make a go of it 
on your own in a pinch.

On the flip side, you allude to it in passing but not in detail, it
seems this overparenting by some (do you by chance have any data on how
many?) is matched by astounding underparenting by others.  Like so
many things in our society we seem to be developing a bi-modal
distribution where one chunk is more "accomplished" than historically
while the other, large chunk of the population is less so; with fewer
than historically in the middle.  I've known middle class and even
upper middle class parents who have so thrown in the towel that they've
let a 14 year old girl have her visiting boy friend stay in her room
for a week (with the not surprising result of a pregnancy!) or a 16
year old girl whose mother allowed the girl's 21 year old dope dealer
boy friend to move in, and this was a person who could be described as
on the shabby side of upper class.

The one thing these outrageously bad parents seem to have in common is
that they involve divorce or parents who have never been married.  I
was impressed that you were willing to say (even with perhaps more
hedging than was necessary) the extent of the damage done to kids by
divorce.
  

    
jim, yes, divorce can and often is followed by  neglectful parenting.
the data are clear. often the setback to the kids is temporary, a year
or two. parents tend to take their eyes off kids when they're going
thru their own difficulties of divorce. is it a requirement? no!!! but
it happens often enough to show up on long-term studies of kids by even
the most impartial investigators. 

the great tragedy is not that some kids are overprotected but that
these are kids from middle and upper middle class homes, where parents
tend to read to them at an early age, where parents talk to their kids,
where parents ask their children questions, where people read books or
other materials. these factors are the real factors that contribute to
achievement later on. the foundation is laid early. in one long-term
study, it's the first four and a half years. so the great tragedy is
that so much attention is lavished on kids who would do better if they
got less attention. and then many other kids get so little attention. 

i talk to guidance counselors a lot. they tell me their number-one
problem is overinvolved parents. and their number-two problem?
underinvolved parents.

it's funny that you mention the boy scouts. because something in that
experience symbolizes the difference between then and now. you're in
the boy scouts and you get badges of mastery. you have to demonstrate
competence. it's NOT a competition. and for each set of skills that you
master, you get a badge. and i  remember kids proudly wearing their
scout badges. badges of mastery. what blows my  mind is that today's
parents buy badges announcing their kid's vulnerabilities. to me, that
is the big switch. we're focused on victimhood, not strenghts. you can
buy badges that declare your allergy to peanuts. to milk. to eggs. to
whatever it is. you can buy kiddee tee shirts that have the picture of
a cow with a slash thru it, announcing your allergy to dairy products.

now all those parents who would pounce on me for my insensitivity on
this issue, please hold your fire. i am the mother of a son who is
DEATHLY allergic to peanuts. how did he negotiate life without being
made into a billboard for a quirky immune system? he learned—mirabile
dictu!—to avoid peanuts and other legumes and nuts. he didn't tell
anyone, he just negotiated life's experiences all by himself. if he was
in doubt, he just didn't eat something. this was not something that
dominated his life. 

the one time he actually had a life-threatening reaction was totally
my fault. i gave him a taste of some delicious vietnamese morsel
wrapped in a grape leaf and i had no idea there was an occasional
chopped peanut in it. yes it required a visit to the ER. the wild thing
was that he was actually  leaving the next day to spend a whole month
rock-climbing in the wind river range in wyoming, totally out of human
contact (no cellphones then). the ER doctor prescribed an epi-pen. and
for several years, my son carried one in his backpack. he didn't live
in fear of consuming a nut or legume. he assumed responsibility for his
own health and he developed a few skills for handling food-related
situations. 
  

    
i still regret having caused my son that difficulty, because the ER
had to give him a shot of adrenaline. that opens up the airways in an
instant. but the rush taxes the system and is a big stress on it. and
then you're exhausted for a day. so i felt like the world's worst
mother having caused my son's distress and then sending him off in not
tip-top condition, although i knew his general health to be just
fine...then and now. and they were going to spend a day or two on the
ground in wyoming before packing into the mountains for a month.
  

    
Finished the book a few minutes ago.  I noticed that the guy that
helps out at the tae kwan do school makes a comment not dissimilar to
mind that there is a pervasive lack of toughness, at least in the boys,
today.  Interestingly I see a lot MORE toughness in the girls these
days than of yore.
  

    

This is a fascinating thread, and has been very interesting to read.

I'd like to comment on some of the earlier posts regarding rural kids.  I'm
an executive in a Bay Area tech startup, and have been a consultant for
nearly all of my 26-year-long career.  I grew up in rural mid-Missouri on a
farm, which I still own today and have leased to the son of one of my former
rural schoolmates.  I keep in fairly close contact with many of my friends
from back there, among them being the wife of my closest high school friend
who is now the Principal of my old high school (that has about 25 kids in
each grade - fairly similar to when I was attending.  My class had 29 kids
in it from Kindergarten through 12th grade).  This is in our nearby town of
about 150 people, and ten miles form a town of 20,000.

First off, I do think both then and now that rural kids have much more
responsibility, both in chores, and in unsupervised time.  Both then and
now, there were many structured activities from sports to 4-H, and the
community was, and still is, very close-knit.

Also, I believe that it's important when talking about rural areas in the
U.S. to realize how much more varied they may be, compared to suburban and
urban areas around the country.  Visit nearly any suburban area in the
country, which I have in my business travels, and you'll find much of the
same landscape.  From the franchised stores, to the types of businesses, to
the size and cultural makeup of the schools and local institutions.  Whereas
rural areas tend to be based on whatever types of agricultural or other
forces dominate that area.  Midwestern farm country is not at all deprived.
If anything, comparing the educations received by the kids of my friends
still back in the rural Midwest to the educational experiences of kids I've
seen in California public schools, I would say that many rural kids have it
much better.  With smaller class sizes and more attention by teachers.  My
friend the Principal is quick to point out that many schools today, both
rural and suburban, share many of the same problems and financial
constraints, but the social fabric of rural communities still plays a major
role in the shaping of kids' lives.

The posts above, claiming that rural students lack the skills to lead or
prosper in our modern society simply don't resonate with my experiences at
all.  Neither when I was growing up, when many of my rural classmates went
on to college, to today, when many of them, who stayed in our community have
had their children attending these same rural schools.  Many of them are now
finishing college and going on to very normal lives, some back in my home
county, and some moving to larger cities.

Again, I think that there's still a stronger community fabric in the
Midwestern rural communities I'm familiar with.  I don't know, however, what
rural communities are like in mountainous or forest areas, or in desert
communities, or in Southern coastal areas, etc..  I think while much can be
said about the franchise-intensive, cookie-cutter suburban sprawls found
around the developed world, there's still a lot of diversity among the rural
areas.  And much to much to make generalizations about.
  

    
quite often, parents suspect that their kids are wimps. perhaps i
should amend that: more often fathers suspect that their sons are
wimps. (they don't worry about it so much in their daughters.) and so
they enroll their kids in a martial arts course in the hopes that such
a course will toughen and dewimpify their kids. the ludicrous thing is,
the nutty parental involvement that turns the kids into wimps
continues. but it's as if the parents are outsourcing the remedy when
they are really the problem and the remedy is a needed change in their
behavior. 

don't get me wrong. i think the martial arts have great value. but
they are never going to accomplish what some parents expect when the
wimp-making parental behavior continues.

the overinvolvement of parents in the sports activities of their kids
is a whole book unto itself. 

jim, thanks for your post about rural communities. i do not have the
extensive experience, either personal or observational, with rural
communities. but even from my limited experience, especially knowing my
daughter in law and her friends who grew up on farms in western
michigan, i felt, and feel, that they do have many advantages over
urban and suburban kids. the ever-presence of chores on a farm give
kids many many more opportunities to develop a sense of contribution
and develop and demonstrate a sense of competence. and yes, their
communities have a social structure that plays a role in shaping kids.
it isn't just the closed nuclear family with all its foibles that kids
are exposed to.
  

    
I'm glad to read your report of flourishing farm communities, <jleft>.
 It is true my view is shaped by the rural regions in which I most
recently dwelt, all deserts, forests, and mountains.  The farming areas
I knew when I was younger lay east of the Rockies, and they were more
prosperous, but I was under the impression they'd been hit hard in the
'80s.
  

    
>  this overparenting by some (do you by chance have any data on how
many?)

Echoing this question...
  

    
i wish i did. in many middle- and upper-middle-class communities, it
is simply the new standard of parenting, hard to avoid because it is
widely enforced by this new judgmentalism among parents that we
discussed earlier. i've spoken in communities where it affects all the
parents. in a city like new york, it is ridiculously widespread, and
some communities (park slope in brooklyn) are even synonymous with it.
yet, a city affords parents more leeway in some ways, and i'm sure
there are parents who don't do it. i've met only one or two. 

how could there possibly be data on the phenomenon. who would be
collecting data on the phenomenon? it's not a physical health threat.
it's a style of parenting. cell phone makers pitch to it...they try to
sell parents phones with GPS to monitor their kids; i see the ads in
the newspapers. the ads have a way of perpetuating overparenting,
because it establishes it as the new standard. 

there are many ways this new standard is perpetuated. new-mommy groups
on the internet. wow. i've seen directly how they can be a huge
influence in this. in some ways, they are among the worst, along with
all the good they do.

one mother who moved to the northeast from the southwest told me she
was shocked upon her arrival in suburban connecticut. i think she's in
the book. she said parents were much more relaxed in the southwest. but
that was two years ago. who knows now. 

i get correspondence from all over the country. correction: all over
the world (i have a good friend in sweden, a journalist, who wrote
about it there, who won a journalism fellowship and spent it with me
here in nyc, so i know about it in detail in scandinavia). is it all
parents? no. but once it takes over a community, a judgmentalism sets
in among the parents that helps spread and enforce it as the standard.
  

    
My error in mistaking my own experience for the way of the world
demonstrates the problem with advancing a theory on the basis of
anecdotal evidence.  As you pointed out in <76>, it makes no sense to
raise the hue and cry without confirming through data that there is
indeed something to cry about in the first place.  I see no solid
foundation here for establishing a correlation, let alone causality,
between the purported rise in psychological fragility and changes in
parenting styles.
  

    
Hara, you spent a great deal of Chapter 5: CHeating Childhood, discussing
the research into childhood that has been done in recent years.
there is a lot of researchon the importance of play, specifically by Jaak
Panskepp and by robert Root-Bernstein.  Can you tell us a bit of how this
research helped you in your own research?
  

    
(Where in west Michigan, Hara? I'm holding comment on jleft's post for
a bit here.)
  

    
where in western michigan? not far from holland.

jennifer, there is no question that the information is observational
AND supported by evidence. here's how this all began taking shape. in
2002, i "discovered" and broke the news story of a "crisis on the
campus," the huge rise in mental health problems among students.
serious disorders. depression. anxiety. panic attacks. eating
disorders. self-mutilation. this was something new, and schools have
data on it because there was an enormous increase in demands for
services and episodes of breaks and breakdowns. i was extraordinarily
fortunate to have direct contact with the entire network of campus
counseling centers and the directors and staff, the people on the front
lines of this.

when i asked them (hundreds of them, to be exact) what was going on,
what was happening, they all said the same thing. these kids have no
coping skills, everything has been done for them by their overinvolved
parents, and they are still carrying a cumulative burden of stress for
achievement. In the memorable words of Mark Reed, M.D., head of
counseling services at Dartmouth College, who addressed some of the
pressures: "It's more stressful to be a kid growing up these days.
These students experienced competition to get into kindergarten. They
are on a treadmill, develop portfolios and cultivate a few narrowly
specialized 'areas of excellence' to get into the best prep school.
Most of their self-esteem comes from a few areas of excellence. They
fail to develop an internal system to sustain them in all environments.
They've sunken under the weight of obligation at an early age."

That's one piece of it. The other piece is the direct parental
involvement to clear a path for these kids so they can focus on
achieving. Here, I knew well the literature on coping, and especially
the studies showing that even kids who seem to be genetically loaded to
develop anxiety do not develop anxiety if their parents step back a
bit and they are left to make their own accommodation to the world.

The effects on students and college campuses are great. One result is
that there is massive student disengagement across the country.
Concerned educators and administrators see this as a serious problem,
and the high rates of emotional disorders are one aspect of the
disengagement. You can choose not to believe this is an issue until you
see data, but I'm out there on the front line reporting what's
happening. 

There are several important initiative begun recently to address the
problem. One is the Bringing Theory to Practice Project, which connects
student learning to student health, and now involves over 300 colleges
and universities across the country, many receiving grants for
projects that improve the well-being of students thru initiatives
tailored to their own campus needs. Another is an initiative that is
sort of an outgrowth of that, begun by Princeton and New York
universities to set up a model of care that improves depression
treatment on college campuses.

these initiative have all the data they need. Overwhelmed students who
can't cope and rates of depression (to say nothing of the other
disorders) growing at an alarming rate.

this is a social problem that is really new and skyrocketing right
now.