Originally Posted by CFK
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
....Those kids are real. They are desperately trying to keep their heads above water, and my DD just keeps her mouth shut about how easy she finds it, and offers a shoulder to cry on when they can't measure up to those impossibly high expectations....
You might be seeing a localized problem. Or your daughter was just in a very poor school fit. My kids were educated through three school districts in two vastly different geographical locations and we never saw this.

Yup. It's a large-scale problem around here. The pressure has even been responsible for a number suicides. The commuter rail tracks are close to one of our local hyper-pressure high schools, and they had to make major changes to them a few years ago because four students killed themselves in six months, and a fifth one was yanked off the tracks by his mother while the police helped stop the trains. Public or private, the pressure is insane. They talk about looking for signs of suicide and they have outreach programs and lots of counselors, but no one seems to want to address the root problem, which is the pressure. frown

Just google suicides palo alto high school if you think I'm making this up. You'll find even more stories of dead kids than what I've described here. This little gem says it all about what happens when everyone has to look HG+:

Originally Posted by Interview with local concerned teen
After the January suicide I mentioned, which took place at Meghan’s high school right before finals, a female senior hung herself at her friend’s house. Returning to school to take finals during this time was difficult for Meghan and many of her fellow students. These teens were [told that they] could speak to their teachers about rescheduling their exams, but some, like Meghan, didn’t want to risk negatively affecting their resulting grades.

For Meghan, a typical day begins at 7 a.m. She wakes, has breakfast, and gets to school. She then prepares to turn in homework and take a test or quiz in at least one course almost daily. After school, she participates in two hours of daily lacrosse practice. She then gets home, eats, showers and is finally able to begin her five-plus hours of homework. She starts at 8pm and goes to sleep at 1 am. (This isn’t accounting for the time for the entire week every three weeks that she doesn’t get home until 9:30 because she is working on her school paper commitment. Nor does this include any time she tries to have with friends socially, or downtime to just be with family and herself.) This schedule, Meghan says, is quite common for most of her classmates at [Palo Alto HS].

Tiger parents should really be paying attention to this stuff, but I suspect that denial runs deep in that crowd ("my kid would never hurt himself because....").

Last edited by Val; 04/03/14 09:51 AM. Reason: Fix inaccurate wording