Illustration by Linzie Hunter
True story: My daughter was taking the entrance exam at the Rossman School, an elementary school in West County. She was shooting for senior kindergarten. As I waited along with other parents for our darlings to complete their “entrance exams,” a man built like a whippet and wound up like a top paced the lunchroom. We started to chat. He asked me what grade my child was entering; I asked him the same question. He wondered what I thought my daughter’s chances were. Pretty good, I said. He asked why, and I explained that she could read and tie her shoes; she had a bit of a legacy (my grandmother had been the principal of the school for two decades); and she’s Chinese.
The man stood stock still and, in a voice too loud, exclaimed, “Chinese? Of course she’ll get in! Chinese—why didn’t I think of that?”
Has the world gone mad?
Nope. But the pressure on kids could drive them over the edge.
“Every generation worries about kids,” says Dr. Tim Jordan, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician. “That’s nothing new. But this intense pressure so early on is new. It wasn’t that way when I was a kid. This generation is dealing with too much, too fast, too early—and parents are scared to death that their kids won’t be able to compete.
“The bar is so high, and it’s so high so early,” he continues. “The pressure is about being in the right preschool, the right grade school, the right high school, even to the right college. You are talking about these things when kids are in kindergarten or the first grade.”
The ways in which a parent can expect a child to excel are unlimited—for starters, academia. Peggy North-Jones, a well-known child psychologist and project coordinator with Parents as Teachers, says some parents are putting their children on schools’ waiting lists when the child is in utero. Others wait until the delivery.
“We don’t take applications at birth,” says Rebecca Glenn, head of the Forsyth School. “We don’t encourage that kind of neurosis.”
Still, it happens. The competition for junior kindergarten can be fierce.
“What you are expected to know when you walk in the first day is what most of us didn’t know until we were almost in second grade,” explains Jordan. “You are expected to read, or you are behind.”
There is no question:
More children are stressed out
Of course, getting in is just the first step. “Parents do have to be careful not to put unrealistic expectations on their children as far as school is involved,” says Pat Shipley, head of Rossman School. “The children need to feel successful about themselves, but the parents want them to be successful sometimes beyond their abilities, and that causes pressure—being overprogrammed and having unrealistic expectations on them. The parents are well intentioned. They want to be doing the right thing.”
So often, though, they aren’t.
“I see 9-, 10- and 11-year-olds with a lot of anxiety,” says Mary Jo Corcoran, parent coach and director of the Ladue Early Childhood Center. “It’s definitely getting worse.” The feeling is echoed by Anita Chastain, head of the Chesterfield Montessori School. “There is no question: More children are stressed out,” she says, insisting that competition is not appropriate for elementary-school students.
Yet the drum beats on. Outside school is the world of sports—be it the school basketball, baseball or volleyball team; a select team for which the child is chosen; or tennis, golf, speed or figure skating, ice hockey, horseback riding, swimming, gymnastics, karate, tae kwon do ... If blessed with athleticism, the child’s teams are select, the practices are near dawn or past dusk and weekends are spent schlepping child and gear to other states in pursuit of grand prizes.
“The sports programs now are set up like major-league sports,” Jordan says. “You have select teams when kids are in first and second grade; they get professional coaching on the side, and they are playing 12 months of the year.” Recently Jordan ran into a friend whose son plays on a select team. Speaking as a pediatrician, he noted that the little boy needed time off, that playing the same sport for an entire year put him at risk for injuries. The friend laughed and said, “You don’t get it. You can’t take two weeks off, or you lose your spot on the team.”
Dr. William Doherty, author of Take Back Your Kids, estimates that approximately 12 hours a week of free time have been lost and the amount of time spent on organized sports has doubled.
To school and sports, add extracurricular activity that’s supposed to round out the young person, be it taking (and, of course, mastering) a musical instrument, excelling in chess or pirouetting into a baby prima ballerina. Don’t stop. Don’t inhale. There is now pressure to perform extraordinary charitable activities in the community, be it selling rubber bracelets for a cause, building a park for disabled youngsters or organizing activities in a retirement center. All are admirable undertakings, but childhood only comes once in a lifetime. When does a kid who’s shooting a competitive 18 holes and trying to save the world get to simply play?
Not often—and that’s a problem.
“People are really questioning whether children get enough time to play,” North-Jones says. “Play is a source of brain development, intellectual development, creativity, self-concept. But that’s free play, not structured play.”
Jordan concurs: “Kids need time to think, to daydream, to process their day, to play. Playing has its own intrinsic value. Watch a 2- or 3-year-old: They don’t need flashcards or Mozart tapes. They learn by playing.”
But with the pressure to excel, the notion of sitting idly contemplating nature doesn’t carry much weight.
“We are a multitasking society,” North-Jones points out. “It is very hard for us to stay in the moment. To me, one of the beauties of childhood is that you stay in the moment. When you are looking at a worm crawling along the ground, you can look at a worm crawling along the ground for 15 minutes. If someone is saying to you, ‘But that is not going to get you into Harvard,’ there is a real issue there ... Our culture has lost respect for the concept of hanging out.
“What is happening doesn’t mirror in any way what child-development specialists say children need,” she adds. “They need downtime. You develop a good sense of self not by being pressured but by being successful. You can be successful in the sandbox.”
The man who momentarily rethought his decision to have a child that was biologically his? His kid didn’t get in. And, yes, my daughter did.
