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In high school, Jayden dials A podcast worksPlanned school events, and Made a movie. This was on top of doing her homework and applying to college. But sometimes, he still feels like he’s not doing enough.
Jayden, now 18, would watch kids his age on YouTube talking about their packed routines — “I worked out, I meditated, I read my Bible” — and he’d think, “Oh my God, I need to be so, so productive.”
This type of productivity anxiety is probably familiar to many adults. For example, I think I can stress myself out watching reels of parents somehow cleaning their house while the kids happily play in the background.
But according to A new report By the nonprofit Common Sense Media and researchers at Harvard and Indiana University, the pressure to live a prescribed, optimized, perfect life descends on teenagers, resulting in Symptoms of stress and burnout Closely associated with people older than a few decades.
Of the 1,545 teenagers surveyed by the researchers, 56 percent felt pressure to have a “game plan” for their future lives, while 53 percent felt pressure to be “exceptional and impressive through their accomplishments.”
The findings challenge stereotypes of young people today lazy And entitled iPad kids who just want to watch videos all day. In fact, researchers have found that many teens have internalized a drive to succeed at the expense of their mental and physical health: Some reported that they didn’t prioritize self-care practices like getting enough sleep or talking to friends because they were “productive.” “
And more than a quarter of teens say they’re burned out, a feeling that’s been likened to “an overused machine in a factory.” […] You’re doing the same thing over and over and you don’t feel like you really have a purpose.”
This kind of statement is annoying to hear from kids still in high school. The report’s authors believe that may help explain their findings High levels of depressionAnxiety, and sadness in young people. Rising rates of such mental health problems are often blamed on smartphones and social media, but the Common Sense report paints a more complex picture: Teens exist in a culture obsessed with achievement and success, where traditional markers of “making it” (a house, a steady job, a savings account) feel more out of reach every day.
Social media can exacerbate these obsessions, allowing kids to compare themselves to more “successful” teenagers (a depressing idea in its own right). But this is part of a larger problem, which has no easy solution.
What’s needed is “a shift in what matters,” Jayden said. “There needs to be a big emphasis on time to explore.”
Teenagers are already stressed about their future
The report’s authors began by studying technology’s impact on adolescent mental health, said lead author Emily Weinstein, executive director of the Harvard Center for Digital Thrivingwhich studies the role of technology in human life.
But teenagers told them they needed to widen their lens, to see what was happening in young people’s lives. Researchers asked a nationally representative sample of 13-17-year-olds about six possible sources of stress in their lives: perceptions of a “game plan,” grades and achievement, appearance, social life, friendships, and activism.
Children came from across the country and from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and researchers specifically reached out to Black and LGBTQ+ adolescents to ensure their experiences were representative. Children with higher family incomes experienced more stress around achievement, but there were no consistent differences by race.
Teenagers are more stressed about their grades and their career plans than about friends or looking good, researchers have found. And “this forward feeling that you should have a plan for your future and you should already be working toward it” has been a theme in the team’s research for some time, Weinstein said. She remembers a former teen counselor in the group who worried that she “joined LinkedIn too late.” The girl was still in college.
Social media can feed this pressure. “Before, you saw things on talk shows about these really amazing, talented, gifted kids. Now, you go to TikTok, you can find 10 of them,” Dial said.
But the teens told the researchers that the top source of stress about success and future planning was the adults in their lives, said Sarah Konrath, one of the report’s authors and a professor of philanthropy studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. Parents, teachers, and coaches may be “doing everything they can to help teens, but not really understanding that we’re pushing teens to internalize some very unhealthy attitudes and behaviors.”
These behaviors include skipping sleep, exercise, or hobbies because they don’t fit into the larger plan. An 11th-grader told researchers that she loves books, but sometimes second-guess herself because “sometimes I feel unproductive when I read.” In interviews, teenagers repeatedly expressed guilt about taking a break, Weinstein said that “if you’re not performing, if you’re not trying, if you’re not doing something productive in some way, somehow it’s almost morally wrong.”
Such attitudes can lead to lethargy, experienced by 27 percent of teenagers in the study — a condition characterized by “emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a lack of confidence that your efforts will make a difference,” the report’s authors wrote.
Public conversations about burnout typically focus on adults — Viral 2019 by Ann Helen Petersen BuzzFeed essay “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” was about people in their 20s and 30s. But according to the Common Sense report, many teenagers feel like they’re part of the burnout generation, and they’re experiencing the same. bad influence Many adults with fatigue do, lack of interest in previously enjoyable activities, and potentially higher risk of developing depression.
Besides providing a clue about what some driving might be Worrying trend When it comes to youth mental health, why today’s teens and young adults aren’t reaching certain milestones—eg starting date or Obtain a driving license — at the same rate as their elders. “They are adults in many other ways,” Konrath said. “Maybe the reason they don’t get a license is because they’re in school all day and they come home and do five hours of homework.”
How to Help Burnt Teens
While many adults want kids to put their phones down and go outside to play, we who are busy culture and obsessed with productivity, as well as the economic conditions behind them.
Young people today are less optimistic about their economic future than previous generations, Konrath said — they see what their parents are going through and worry about whether they’ll be able to afford a house one day.
They are a constant reminder of how unattainable the traditional markers of middle-class life are becoming, starting with Annual title Regarding the record number of students applying to colleges (which may soon cost $100,000 a year)
It’s no wonder teenagers think they should already be on LinkedIn. “Some aspect of childhood or adolescence is taken away from people my age,” Jayden said.
It will not be easy to recover what has been taken from them. Self-care behaviors like exercise and spending time with friends help — kids who engaged in them were less likely to burn out, the report’s authors found. But “just giving kids another to-do list” won’t solve the problem, Weinstein said.
Instead, adults need to look at potential root causes of stress and burnout, including a culture of “constant sizing up” kids. Enabled by apps That allows schools to immediately share every test score and assignment grade with parents, Weinstein said. They also have to consider the world children are growing up in, from climate change to school shootings. “When you’re a young person, a lot of times it can feel like people in power don’t have empathy,” Jayden said.
Jayden, now a first-year student at Stanford, has some advice for teens his age and younger who think they have life all figured out. “It’s much better to experience innovation and try new things than to try to figure everything out,” he said. You have the rest of your life to become an adult.
what i’m reading
USA TODAY columnist Marla Bautista writes about Evacuate his family Before Hurricane Milton, and the toll such disasters can take on children. “While the physical destruction gets significant attention,” he writes, “there is much more damage that you don’t see, including the emotional and academic destruction wreaking havoc on children’s lives.”
A primary school in the UK Encouraging children to play in the mud. Experts say it’s a great idea.
UC Berkeley researchers conducted the study How children respond to misinformation. Their studies are very funny and involve lies about aliens and zebras with dark glasses. They also recommend exercising children’s “doubt muscles.”
Discovered by my toddler TrumanA book about a brave little turtle (with an important guest appearance on a city bus). My older kids, as the season is appropriate, are in Books of mysteries, magic and the unexplained.
from my inbox
Instead of a reader email, today I’m going to share some perspectives from students that I didn’t get to include in my recent newsletter on kids and politics.
“I first got interested in politics in 7th standard National History Day year-long research project, an enthusiasm that was reinforced when I was in 8th grade during the 2020 election,” Hannah Cho, a high school senior and national chair of the High School Democrats of America (HSDA), told me in an email. “I still remember watching the inauguration unfold on TV over breakfast and being excited to discuss with my history teacher, Mrs. Link, President Biden’s inaugural address and Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, among other events that occurred on the historic day.”
HSDA communications director Rishita Nosam, 16, told me she became more interested in politics after seeing posts about Black Lives Matter on social media. Today, the biggest issues for her include gun violence, media protection, civil education and reproductive rights: “The government should not have the right to interfere with the decisions women make about their own bodies.”
Finally, I’d love to hear what you hear from the kids and teens in your life about the pressure to achieve or plan for the future. Are teenagers you know experiencing this stress? And what is the role of parents and caregivers in helping them navigate all of this? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.
