Academic achievement and stress - US vs UK

Having read the NY Times article, I must say my own instinct is to side firmly with the Asian American parent group. I think there is a tendency on the part of many middle class Americans to overvalue the social emotional element of the tween and teen years, to romanticise or sentimentalise childhood, and to overlook the value of challenge and work as components of social and emotional development. Sometimes a self proclaimed advocate for 'childhood' is under the surface a parent who doesn't want to see his or her child experience failure and doesn't understand that resilience is a very valuable personality component.

I disagree with the explanation offered of immigrant anxiety to see second generation children make it into the middle class. Many immigrants from Asia and south Asia (and from Ireland and Russia and Nigeria, etc) come from educated, middle class backgrounds themselves and they are surprised at the complacency, the certainty that life will always go on exactly as it is, that lots of American middle class parents seem to have. Some parents will push a child to take challenging courses because they see it as a character builder for the child, and because they know that the competition back home will eat their children for breakfast when they arrive in NJ or Chicago or Houston or LA if they allow them to slack at their schoolwork, as they see the American parents' approach. And some cultures simply place a great value on academic focus and mastery. This is true for many sub cultures within the group labeled 'American' as well as many (but not all) immigrant cultures.

The unexamined American middle class assumption that is clearly expressed in the article that people all over the world are willing to sacrifice their children's well being to get a place on the exalted plateau of American middle class life is startling reading for someone whose family enjoyed a solidly middle class life in Ireland or India or Russia. Not all immigrants are the huddled masses.

Many come from systems where the final exam determines your future and see in the American system a much kinder, gentler and incredibly straightforward approach where teachers really support understanding and skill development, and that facilitates all the values the parents wish to inculcate a solid work ethic, a consistent, disciplined approach by the student, a habit of approaching teachers when they don't understand material it often contrasts greatly with the experiences of parents in their own school years, in systems where teachers and students alike are overwhelmed by the pressure of finishing the prescribed coursework and studying seven or eight subjects in preparation for a two week exam period at age 17 in which they will churn out perhaps ten essays in five hours daily, day after day.

The American system by contrast makes success easy. There are parents who see everything laid on and geared for success the lovely facilities, the teachers with their positive attitudes, the simple math involved in 'do your homework daily and hand it in and you will get an A simply for meeting the homework expectation' apart altogether from the work grade it's gobsmacking to see how easily the grades that a college admissions officer will see add up, while in your own native system the fact that exams are held in the middle of hay fever season can make or break your hopes.

Wrt the Palo Alto article -
Suicide is a strange phenomenon, and I agree with the suggestion that among teens suicide clustering can be fueled by social media, glamorisation, and even by media. In my own community a suicide cluster among people in their 50s and early 50s has recently occurred, or perhaps (God forbid) is ongoing. I am not really sure anyone can definitively say that outside forces like school pressure are responsible for individual decisions to take one's own life, apart from a sort of normalisation of it that arises when it seems to happen and generates a huge amount of love and sympathy. (Not that condemnation is the answer, however).

I think the Palo Alto article illustrates the importance of the personal quality of resilience -- to experience failure and to realise the earth is still spinning despite that is extremely important, and I suspect many of the groups singled out in the NY Times article understand that. I also think the PA article underscores the importance of spending actual real time with children and teens, something the children of the very poor and the very rich and busy do not enjoy.

I know many very well off young people who have been brought up by a succession of nannies and babysitters, and at the other end of the scale, teens left to their own devices because parents have checked out for many reasons or are too busy holding down several poorly paying jobs to be able to spend time with them. Parents who are too caught up in their own lives and their own needs are never going to do a good job, even if how they express that doesn't involve living vicariously through their children's achievements. I know one family in particular in which the only way the teens can get their father's positive attention is by engaging in 60s style rebellion and self destructive or attention seeking behaviour and substance abuse. One of the DCs was suspended from school for piercing her nose in class. So another element well illustrated by that article is the importance of good parenting as opposed to neglectful parenting, or ego driven parenting. Praising for effort as opposed to tangible achievement is probably a better way to encourage children than focusing on the end product so to speak.

I believe kids can feel very connected to parents even when they are working hard towards a specific goal in school that appears to be generated by the parents. There are other personal factors involved in the relationship of parents and teens besides parents guiding teens towards a certain educational goal that con contribute to a positive experience for all of using your time efficiently. The importance of parents sharing a hobby or commitment to volunteering were not mentioned, but this can often serve to connect a teen to a wider purpose in life, can give a sense of self worth apart from academic achievement, to appreciate the advantages he or she has over others, to limit the sort of navel gazing that teens can often indulge in, and to bring parents and teens closer.

It's good for parents too, to be involved in community service. It can give them a good sense of perspective, and can take the spotlight off their children when casting around for something to fix. The happiest families I know are those involved in the local food bank and those who make their children volunteer in the library, those who do shifts at the local church homeless shelter. Their teens are just as focused on academic achievement as many others in the community, but they have made a connection to the wider community that has taught them many valuable lessons about themselves.

Maybe I am lucky to live in a community that is very mixed in socio economic terms. I get the impression that Palo Alto is not a place where a food bank feeds many families or overnight shelters take care of 100-150 guests nightly.

Experts can wring their hands all they like about the danger of internalising parental priorities, but (pushy?) parents in affluent communities are also hoping their children internalise their attitudes when it comes to the very easily available hard drugs, alcohol and pot. Many have seen preaching along the lines of 'just say no' fail dismally and have opted for a much more subtle approach. Many parents have siblings or members of their wider families whose lives have been destroyed by drugs or alcohol, etc, maybe members of the Vietnam War generation. In many cases the alternative to the teen party scene is the teen sport/band/orchestra scene or the teen honours class scene and ideally the scene where teens are doing all of that. Having a positive peer group is part of the motivation behind some of the pressure to participate in extracurricular activities and keep grades up. Participation in sports is jeopardised by alcohol or drug use. Schools can administer tests and are in close contact with local police.

There is far more devastation wrought by addiction or risk taking with various substances than by pressure to stay in the honours track or not get cut from lacrosse or soccer. There is also a lot of unbearable social isolation and unhappiness caused when students fail to connect with one or other group. A friend of mine sent her children to the local excellent RC high school, and they were among the very few not to take part in the hard partying scene there. For $15k each per year, her children should have been happier.

America is above all a society where the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer in recent decades. Most parents and grandparents have seen union jobs disappear even in cities that were historically strongly unionised or with a strong ethnically based mutual help ethos, and everyone is conscious to a greater or lesser extent of the lack of legal protection for employees. Employment at will is a reality for most parents in white collar professions and careers, and access to jobs is now mediated by HR departments. Many have faced sudden unemployment and an ignominious trip home from an office with all their photos and their stapler in a cardboard box, to face the family later that day with bad news. People who live with that level of insecurity feel they are neglectful parents if they do not try to ensure their children get to universities that maximise their chances of solid careers and uninterrupted prosperity.

It obviously depends on location, too. My son is in a state with a strong economy and is in a blue collar job where there is high demand. He makes more than many white collar workers.

You can do many courses in junior college that will lead to decent jobs -- my local one offers paralegal qualification, fire science (firefighter), EMT (ambulance/medic), all sorts of medical billing specialties, associate degrees in nursing, preschool teacher training. A friend of DS's did EMT but has now joined the Army as a medic. These jobs pay more than minimum wage, but apart from the unionised firefighter jobs they won't pay enough to afford to buy your own home in many parts of the country. It's the death of unions and union pay rates that has made four year university degrees so important.

I'm with SenecaF.

We all know exceptions, Seneca but they're exceptions - not the rule. It's true that there are people in trades or military or perhaps something creative who do very well. But for most white-collar career paths/office jobs, you do need a Bachelor's degree.

In the US a 4-year degree is the bare minimum unless you want to work for the minimum wage.

This is just not true. I know plenty of people, including fairly young people, without degrees who are doing well. One of them is my son.

It certainly helps.

But my point is that looking at Gates and Zuckerberg as examples of not needing a university degree is a bit daft. I mean, I have a friend who makes a very good living working in television, even though he dropped out of school after the 8th grade (about 14 years old.) I would never tell my kids "Hey it's OK if you want to stop going to school... Vincent is doing just great in Hollywood!"

In the US a 4-year degree is the bare minimum unless you want to work for the minimum wage. Where you study and especially what you study does make a difference.

I don't think you need cultural capital to get into an Ivy League.

The schools discussed in the articles are all non-selective state schools (you only need to live within the school district boundary to secure a place) and I wonder whether this worsens the pressure, particularly for students who are less academically inclined but whose parents are highly ambitious in terms of their DC's academic achievements. By contrast, perhaps the early selection in the UK via the 11+ or 13+ exams (which of course has its own set of issues as not all children develop at the same rate) means that those under the most pressure academically (students in selective schools) are better able to handle it.

I suspect there is a misapprehension about public high schools in the US vs private schools in the US lurking in that paragraph, that is fueled by the British disparity between private and state schools.

In the US, selection occurs at the level of real estate prices and zip codes. High house prices, high income = high local taxes, spent on the public schools, libraries, park facilities and programmes, and there is an expectation that the public schools will reflect the academic and sporting aspirations of the taxpayers, and do their bit in keeping the school district desirable and house prices high. Public high schools can be far superior to private high schools, though there are usually excellent private high schools in any given city. In an affluent area, public high schools can send off dozens of students every year to the Ivy League and the excellent universities that are in the bands below that level.

Private high schools tend to be Catholic in many parts of the US, and parents sometimes send their students there for reasons that have nothing to do with academic results. They may prefer a smaller school, or uniforms, or religion in class, or a perception of better behaviour and more effective discipline, or in some cases they like the idea of a network. Just because there is an excellent private school nearby that your student has a good chance of getting into (entrance exams are really not that difficult; my opinion is based on personal knowledge of students who got places in a really excellent local private school) doesn't mean it is a no brainer to send your child there, in many better off communities.

I went through the completely exam dominated Irish education system, and my DCs were/are in the American system, with the gpa/exam combo determining grades/SAT/ACT/common app/university applications featuring multiple essays, form filling, expectation of being a terrific all rounder and future President, and I know which system I would prefer.

DD3 has just completed her ten university applications, and it has been a rough few months for her, as schoolwork and a heavy homework load proceeded apace alongside hours spent writing and perfecting essays with titles like 'Why?' for the purposes of her university applications. But I would still prefer that to the looming Leaving Cert, a single exam on which rides the rest of your life, at the end of secondary.

A friend of DD2's went abroad for a semester during high school and attended a very expensive (but not selective) girls' school close to my old school, and reported insane levels of stress related to the Leaving Cert.

Stress certainly exists in American high schools. But the choice of good universities is much wider than that in Ireland or even in Britain. If there is something in particular that you want to do, and you are willing to apply to 14 or 16 places, you may get lucky with your biomedical engineering plans. There is a wide band of very decent universities below Ivy League level, where graduates will emerge with a good chance of getting a good job, depending on the major. Finance grads from say the University of Iowa, with appropriate personal qualities can do very well for themselves.

American universities also offer the beautiful concept of liberal arts education, where you do core coursework for two year sand spend two years on your major. You don't have to decide at 17 what you want to do for the rest of your life. DS started out thinking aviation, dumped that owing to cost factors, decided a psychology track would be his best option, and ended up with a degree in Biology and minor in Chemistry. American students for the most part have options, and can find what interests them best while they are in university.

Many American students get extra coaching, tutoring, have parents willing and able to ferry them around their region for travel teams in various sports, or to music or art classes, or to special music camps, or the right summer camp, or to residential sport camps the entire boys' varsity soccer team in my DCs' public high school used to spend summers in the U of Michigan soccer camps from age 10 onwards that cost a lot. However, there are also many students who put in the work and dabble in a sport or two and do some volunteering and still get into great universities.

Many students who are not at hoity toity summer camps are also aware that the band of university they will be applying for is 'very selective' and from an early age. I would suspect that there are very few students who end up being accepted at Ivy League schools whose parents didn't steer them in that direction from an early age. The steering doesn't have to be Amy Chua-style explicit or direct exhortation or pressure. But I know several families who are American of all backgrounds, as well as Irish, Nigerian and Russian immigrant families whose children have known from an early age that in their families, members apply to a certain band of universities, and the sort of time commitment for homework, and the sort of motivation to get the grades necessary are understood. It's just a quiet assumption made by people who know from their own experience of other school systems that their children have what it takes, or in the case of American families, knowing that their children are bright.

I do not consider this a bad thing. There are children in the 'hood who are told in kindergarten that they can be anything they want to be by their teachers. This sort of thing makes me cry, because no, these children will not be what they want to be unless someone takes them firmly in hand and makes them do the necessary work, and it is very likely that they know nobody who understands what sort of work goes into getting a student to the point where they send off an application to Cal Berkeley or even to Eastern Kentucky with any hope of success.

In the last few decades, the prospects for those in the US without a degree have diminished rapidly. People who are now doing ok without degrees are possibly the last generation who will be able to get by without one.

Gates and Zuckerberg both dropped out of Ivy League universities. They had the cultural capital to get in, and the genius to drop out.
Far more numerous are the graduates of mediocre universities saddled with crippling student loan debts stuck in dead end jobs with stagnant salaries.

I think that adult-directed learning in groups is a major cause of stress.

DC need time for self-directed activities in which they pursue things they enjoy at their own pace.

Compare to couple best Univs in Seul or Tokyo, the stress and tough level of either US and UK are way less. Many times for these Univs there are unnecessary stress due to the modules structure and the mass competition to gain the scholarships and the best results which will be used to show off once applying for the jobs. In Asian countries all marks/results are always public and every single child/parents/relatives/etc know the ranking of the child in the class/school/Univ

My back of envelope calculations in USA...

Available approx. 15,000 freshman spaces at Ivy League colleges each year.
For approximately 3 million US-native kids who start their first year of university.
Or 1 in 200 spaces.
I think that's similar to Oxbridge, approx 0.5% of British youth who got to Uni at all go to Oxbridge, and they aren't necessarily the best and brightest.

Out of the 4 million or so born each yr in USA.

About 1/3 of those 3 million who start will never get a Uni degree.
The % of USA population who have at least one 4-yr-Uni degree has been consistent for decades at around 37%.

The thing about the US system is that for every kid that is supposedly Living in an Ivy league bound pressure cooker, there are hundreds of kids who are leading well-rounded, less pressure lives and will still get into decent universities and be sucessful.
This is our experience in central London with a 12 year old DD at an independent school. We live a normal family life without lots of pressure to be "the best" or "successful". I think maybe one of the differences is that both DH and I are both from London, grew up here, went to fairly well known independent schools ourselves, both travelling alone on the tube. We are relaxed and it works perfectly well. The most competitive parents we have come across, who know nothing about and do nothing in their local community are Americans. Maybe that's just the particular ones we've met. Its perfectly possible to have a normal, well balanced life, taking part in your local community and not be eaten up by pressure in London. If people scratch the surface and get out of their bubble, we're all here, we do exist, lots of us!

I have many (US) cousins who are doing well without having been to Uni at all. In a place that has house prices to rival Greater London.

Shall we just point out that neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg have a Uni degree?

Bottom line is, most American kids really aren't bothered about getting into Harvard, etc. They know that hard work whereever they go will being them success

This really is true. Many of the public state universities are excellent (and much less expensive). Also not doing well in high school is not the kiss of death for a high-flying career. My daughter did not have a stellar high school record so she went to our local community college for two years, then transferred to a large state university, where she did well. Like many careers, it's her performance on the job that counts now, not where she went to university.

Trust me, some summer camps are seen as status symbols with waiting lists to get in. They are networking opportunities for kids and parents - with children mixing with those of other like minded parents.

Don't get me wrong, camp is totally all about having fun and the kids have amazing summers and cry when it's time to go home. But when these camps charge $12-$14k for seven weeks per child, it is nothing short of having the "right camp" to be seen at.

It's a real eye opener with parents even offering to make significant donations to the camp / charity of their choosing so that their child can secure a place.

Camp is all about giving you independence, patience, social skills, decision making and leadership skills. It is the most amazing thing a child can experience, but I bet a very high percentage of Ivy League applicants spent some time at sleep away camp. It's part of an engineered process which starts at a very early age.

The thing about the US system is that for every kid that is supposedly Living in an Ivy league bound pressure cooker, there are hundreds of kids who are leading well-rounded, less pressure lives and will still get into decent universities and be sucessful. The high pressured society is entirely driven by parents choices--by where they choose to live, where they choose to educate their kids, who they choose to associate with (no different than class obsessed people here in the UK)

I grew up in the US, and attended an average private school, didn't get stellar Entrance exam scores but still managed to get a funded education at a decent university. I felt no pressure to be the best, did an assortment of extra curricular activities (theatre, newspaper, volunteer tutoring) b/c I wanted to, and not to create a stellar CV. My peers were similarly successful, and not a one was Ivy league educated.

Bottom line is, most American kids really aren't bothered about getting into Harvard, etc. They know that hard work whereever they go will being them success---where as class mobility is a huge limiting factor in the UK.

I know where I'd rather educate my kid...

It might help to have a broader geographical comparison here. I wonder how the claims of stress in UK/US systems compare with what happens in Korea and China. Anyone got experience of a direct comparison?

The summer camp DH worked at had one of his 7 year olds away for a day because there were papers he needed to sign as a company director.

I'm a Harvard legacy so you can imagine the pressure on me to attend an Ivy when I was growing up. I was a much much busier child than either of my DC. I played the violin in a travelling orchestra right through high school which meant that I only attended school p/t. The rest of the time I was off to DC or NYC for the weekend or away on tour in Calfornia or New Orleans or the Caribbean etc. On top of that, I had a near straight A average and near perfect SAT scores. I was 4th in my high school class- #1 only applied to Harvard and MIT (accepted MIT), #2 went to Stanford, #3 went to Columbia and I turned down an Ivy in favour of a Little Ivy.

I'm very glad my DC are growing up in Scotland and don't have the same amount of pressure that I did. I had to get top grades in classes I didn't enjoy (physics!) while DC can drop areas where they aren't strong by Highers time- lucky things! They also don't have the pressure of finding extra curricular activities that they will excel at. They can try lots of things out and find what they really enjoy. I didn't have that opportunity until college.

I work at a top summer camp in the USA and honestly, seven year olds "know" what university they will be heading to. This comes entirely from the parents!!!!!!!!!

I have comforted an eight year old girl who was totally exhausted. She attends an exclusive Manhattan Prep, comes home after one or two extra curricular activities, eats, starts homework at 8.30 and into bed at 9.30. She was crying because she failed to make the camp gymnastics competitive team and was worried what her parents would think.

Don't get me wrong, all this hard work is with the best intentions of the parents who want their child to go to the best colleges, but when there is pressure to be an A grade student as well as top in sporting and arts circles, I am not surprised something cracks.

There was an interesting article in the Huffington Post recently by an admissions coach, who said that universities are finding it increasingly hard to differentiate between candidates because they are all too perfect. Dropping a few points off your GPA and going travelling just to have fun (as opposed to intern or other worthy volunteering abroad) as a result makes for a more interesting and balanced applicant.

Perhaps in the UK we are a bit more prepared to let our kids have a bit more downtime and do things for fun than thinking about putting together an amazing CV for ten years down the line?