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Nope. This happens in my school district at ALL of the High Schools. And other area's that I know as well. This is very pervasive around the country particularly in the High Schools that are applauded for their high test scores.

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.

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+:


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....").

I will. But maybe one reason the homework is taking 5 hours a day is that she is starting it dead tired at 8 or 9:30 PM. The high school day typically ends about 2:30 PM, and I think many students need to cut back on their time-consuming extracurriculars so they can get much of their schoolwork done in the afternoon or at very least start it in the early evening.

Yes-- and no coincidence that suicides HERE are a large (and largely unspoken) problem as well.

We're a hot spot in a state which is known to have a high rate of adolescent mental health problems, basically. EVERYONE who isn't "in crisis" (meaning-- in need of hospitalization to prevent action on a suicide plan which is obviously in progress, not just imminent) gets to wait between 3 to 8 weeks for a first appointment with a mental health professional-- of any type, and with insurance and a referral from a medical professional. The demand for adolescent mental health services is still higher, and the waits are correspondingly LONGER. "Needs help managing stress" means you'll wait for about 12-20 weeks. That's not to see "the person of my choice" by the way-- that's to see ANYONE. The only people who get a fast pass are those who are involved with the court system.

The majority of my DD's friends have seen a mental health professional-- and some of them have been seen at urgent care/ER for what sure seems to me to be somatic stuff. It's a regular occurrence, honestly.

This is an area where the county population totals are about 100K, and where the high-school adolescent population is a bit tough to determine due to the university, but is probably estimable at ~3-4K, anyway... we regularly see 3-10 teen suicides annually here. REGULARLY. Each of the "high performance" public high schools has a couple a year. In a graduating class of less than 300 each, that's a LOT.

I'd estimate the "average" there during the decade-plus we've lived here is about 6 in the county each year. Some years less, some years more. It's a smallish group, and a tight community with a lot of active involvement-- this year alone already, my DD has known 2 of those kids, and she doesn't even go to the B&M schools with them, so she knows them purely through extracurriculars/community service. These are GOOD kids, not kids with "problems" per se. This is heartbreaking-- my daughter knows at least a dozen peers who have attempted suicide during their teens, some of them more than once. I've reported mental health problems repeatedly, and estimate that at least 90% of them are stress-related.

I think a lot of parents here pat themselves on the back that the number of teen suicides here is far less than the number of national merit scholars, and that therefore all is well.


If you try to get off of this "success track" with your kids, the entire system often conspires against you (as noted in the anecdote about my colleague's DD). Which brings me right back to--- I don't live in McLean, and outwardly, my community would SEEM to have quite little in common with it... but I recognized what this author was saying. A lot of what she was saying.

Most towns have the "honors student" bumper stickers-- for reference, my town has "My child won the Nobel Prize." That kid was a public school student here. Really. It's that kind of town-- but I don't think it's unique anymore.

We're not even the HIGHEST pressure zip code in the state, honestly.

Not a localized problem at all. As others have mentioned, this is prevalent in my area and makes headline news frequently

I happen to know that Palo Alto High has done a lot to change the culture of their high school in the past 3 years because of these suicides. I don't have a whole list, but one change was to move the whole school year back to start in mid-August so that the semester would be over before winter break. This allows the H.S. students to really take a break over the holidays rather than spend it studying for finals, and it gives students/teachers a few more weeks of the school year before AP tests.

My H.S. is trying to make some of these changes but it's slow. And some of the changes, while good for the average kid don't help my MY student. Starting next year H.S. will officially start at 8 instead of 7:30, BUT in order for my son to stay in marching band he will have to be at school at 7am. And marching band is one of the few things that is keeping him happy in H.S.

There is already a model for this problem and how difficult it is to solve: Deaf education. There is no contest that the best environment for deaf kids is immersion at a school with a natural sign language (like ASL). The problem is that the frequency of congenital deafness in the population is so low, and it's made worse by the magnet effect -- families with genetic deafness migrate to big cities with deaf communities, leaving even lower frequencies in the smaller towns.

People have been trying to solve this one for many decades. First there were residential schools, usually one per state, which meant that deaf kids were away from their families for months on end. Then there was mainstreaming, which was an educational and social disaster for deaf kids. Now there is a mix of programs. Unsurprisingly, it all works better in the high-population areas.

What I'm saying is that the current system obviously is broken, but that doesn't mean there's an easy fix if only there were the political will. This is a thorny problem that will always be difficult to solve.

I agree completely about cutting back. But the problem is that she can't if she wants to look HG+ and get into Stanford. The tiger parents and everyone around these kids are sending very unsubtle messages saying that they will be total losers if they don't go to an elite college.

Do you remember A is for Admissions, that book written by a woman who used to work in Dartmouth's admissions office? Here's what she has to say about activities:



And of course you have to have a sky-high average and amazing SAT scores. This stuff is mind-boggling, and it's also child abuse.

Right-- and locally, some of the changes that OUR schools have made to-- well, to protect students of more modest ability from their parents, to be completely truthful (though, as I noted earlier, maybe they ought to clean up their OWN houses a bit as well)--

make life even rougher than it used to be for the HG+ kids.

* sophomores may take ONE (and only one) AP class.

* ONE foreign language only

* Juniors and seniors may take up to two AP classes, and seniors may take 3, but only with permission from the superintendent's office.

* dual enrollment credits are limited to 21 total credit hours during the high school career.

There're a lot of those kinds of restrictions now. This is what leads to places like "your 12yo high school sophomore has outstripped what we can realistically offer her-- have you looked at just enrolling in the local community college instead?"


The equally sad part is that it doesn't seem to have made THAT much of a difference to the kids who are being ground by this particular millstone, either. Now they don't take the AP classes, but parents still expect them to take the EXAMS and earn 5's. So it really just means "afterschooling" for them, which may be even worse.

I'll add that the pressure starts very young, at least around here. When my daughter was in the hospital for an appendectomy a few months ago, her roommate (a kindergartner!) was doing homework in the hospital while she still had IV lines in her arm. The little girl's mom said that if she didn't keep up, she'd get too far behind. This five-year-old was expected to write paragraph-length journal entries every day as homework, and she had a variety of worksheets she had to do. She attended a local public school, not a prep school.

I once called a local high performing public school in our district because I was thinking of putting my son's name in for their kindergarten lottery. I changed my mind after they told me that kindergartners were given a minimum of an hour of homework every night.

So again, it all seems aimed at making everyone look highly gifted.

But I'll also add that the schools (including the colleges) add to the problems. The tiger parents are bad and so are many of the schools.