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South Bay Accent - Feb/Mar 2015

62 South Bay Accent This page and opening spread: shutterstock State of distress Adolescence is normally a time of heady emotions and self-discovery, and it’s natural for kids to worry about making friends and doing well in school. But experts say youngsters are experiencing academic anxiety in increasingly higher rates and at younger ages, as well as showing more severe symptoms. “In the last five years it (student anxiety) has been going through the roof,” says Palo Alto Preparatory School Director Christopher Keck. “The problem has quintupled.” Keck founded the private high school in 1987 to offer an alternative environment for students, so he sees kids firsthand facing difficulties in more traditional schools. But colleagues around the South Bay echo Keck’s message. “As much as we try to put things in place, more challenges come up for kids,” says Saint Francis High School Principal Patricia Tennant, whose Mountain View school has been proactively working on the issue. “Literally, there are more cases of kids with high anxiety than 10 years ago.” If growing up is hard to do, then Silicon Valley students face a particularly brutal journey fueled by competitive college admissions processes, a standardized testing industry that makes SAT prep classes the norm, club sports teams with travel schedules that put even the pros to shame, not to mention a glut of technology that has reshaped how kids interact. Mix those up and land them down in a valley renowned for wealth and aggression, and the results are troubling. “Academic pressure is higher in many affluent families,” says Dr. Brendan Pratt, a licensed psychologist at the Pratt Center, a Los Altos clinic specializing in psychotherapy, psychological testing and educational support. Pratt says that the academic anxiety problem has continued to worsen and suggests an interesting genetic component with local implications. Anxiety can be “60 to 70 percent inherited,” Pratt remarks. “It’s hard to make it here if you’re not smart and driven. Anxious, brilliant, quirky—those are traits that many software developers have, and those do well in Silicon Valley.” He adds: “If you have two parents who both were at Stanford and were anxious, they’ll likely pass it on.” In neighboring Palo Alto, Adolescent Counseling Services offered therapy and preventative education to almost 10,000 individuals this past school year. “Although academic stress has been around for quite some time, I believe that it has been growing over the last few years,” say Roni Gillenson, ACS on-campus counseling program director. “Students continue to strive for more and more and don’t learn healthy coping skills along the way. The message seems to be either reach a 10 or you fail.” “Silicon Valley is filled with successful adults,” says Erik Carlson, head of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School in Saratoga. “The American dream of years past was that each successive generation would ‘do better’ than the previous generation. If your mom founded a company that went public and your dad is CEO of another, what can the next generation possibly ‘do better’? Unless we redefine ‘do better,’ the American dream expectations crumble without a soft landing for the child.” The downside of stress Madison is a Sunnyvale fourth-grader with top marks and a quiet demeanor. (Child and parent names have been altered to protect their identity.) Of all the kids in the class, reports her teacher, Madison is the last one who should be worried about upcoming report cards. But when the teacher asks students to write a note about what they’re expecting, she gets a jolt. “I’m going to pee in my pants,” Madison writes. This perfect-seeming little girl is anxious beyond her years. This quest for perfectionism isn’t unusual and is an easy-to-ignore warning sign. “Parents and teachers may see only the upsides of anxiety for a long time,” The South Bay is full of parents who expect their kids to follow in their footsteps and attend a ‘top’ university.


South Bay Accent - Feb/Mar 2015
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