Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book “Over the Influence: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back” was recently published by Alcove Press. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and X.
Create a game plan for your life, rack up impressive grades and other achievements, and make sure you look great, too.
That’s another a day in the life of many American teenagers — and the pressure is leaving some of them totally burned out, according to a survey by researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Center for Digital Thriving, Indiana University and Common Sense Media published Thursday.
Some 81% of teens ages 13 through 17 feel pressure that leaves them feeling badly about their game plans, achievements, appearances, social lives, friendships and/or how informed they are about issues, the survey found. They said the pressure comes from parents, teachers and other adults in their lives but also from themselves. Social media makes the pressure worse for most teens, but some said social media can also help lessen it.
The survey, which was conducted in fall 2023, found that 27% of teens said they were burned out. But “teens also told us that feelings of burnout can come on strong around finals, for example, and other moments when performance pressure is high,” said Emily Weinstein, executive director for the Center for Digital Thriving and lead author of the study. So it’s possible that burnout rates at those times are even higher. (The survey of 1,545 teens ages 13 to 17 had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.)
A different survey also published Thursday found that 33% of children ages 10 through 18 feel like they have to be perfect. Those who feel this way are much more likely to be stressed, anxious and sad, according to the research by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation.
How adults pressure kids
“Adults — parents, teachers, coaches — are clearly contributing to some of the negative pressures teens feel, even if we don’t mean to,” Weinstein said.
The reason parents push kids to excel in classes and extracurricular activities — starting in middle school — is often so they’ll get into a good college, Jennifer Breheny Wallace warned in “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It.”
The impulse to encourage kids to achieve is understandable because it’s become much harder for young people to get ahead. Wallace pointed out that millennials earn less and have less money than people their age did in past generations. Parents, she wrote, therefore “feel a tremendous burden to prepare them for an increasingly competitive world.”
But overdoing it isn’t healthy.
“In my practice, I see anxiety, depression and perfectionism in teens whose sense of self-esteem and self-worth is tied to achievement,” Melissa Greenberg, a clinical psychologist at Princeton Psychotherapy Center, told me.
“And more, I see the effects of this lasting into young and even middle adulthood, where people find themselves compulsively working — and feel guilty or self-conscious when they have to take breaks to tend to very reasonable wants or needs outside of work.”
Why ‘mattering’ matters
Most of us don’t want our kids to feel this way. Wallace wrote that a way to protect kids’ mental health is to focus on “mattering — the feeling that we are valued and add value to others.” An important message to send children is that they’re valuable because of who they are — not how they perform.
“Consider the difference between seeing your child at the end of the day and asking, ‘Hi! How are you?’ versus, ‘Hi! How did your test go?’” Greenberg said. Asking how kids are doing communicates that their well-being is of primary importance.
What’s more, she said, “if this is a normal part of parent-child communication, then it will also feel more natural for a child to come to them if they are struggling and distressed.”
Wallace said it’s also critical for kids to feel that they’re making important contributions — for example, helping their family by doing chores and helping other people by volunteering.
When choosing such activities, Greenberg said, “it’s important to distinguish between volunteer work done for accumulating hours (as a requirement for school or a club, for example) versus volunteer work that is pursued because you feel like you are having a meaningful impact on the world or people around you. That is also very important for self-esteem and self-worth.”
Applying the brakes and modeling good behavior
While parents are often the source of this pressure, Greenberg told me sometimes kids internalize it because it’s the norm among their friends and at school.
“I have talked to teens who are suffering from anxiety and stress related to achievement pressure who tell me that their parents have told them to slow down and take it easy, even that they don’t care where the teen goes to college,” Greenberg said. “This is important for the teen to hear, but I have observed that it has surprisingly little impact on the teen’s behavior or outlook.”
Achieving this balance requires making sure kids get enough sleep and have downtime for pleasurable family activities such as dinners or trips in nature.
“When adolescents don’t have the skills to decompress, they are more likely to turn to unhealthy coping strategies to manage the stress and anxiety they feel, such as drugs and alcohol,” Wallace wrote. “Giving permission to rest communicates to our children that they are worthy of protection, that their being, their physical and mental health matter.”
Sometimes, parents should therefore step in to prevent kids from taking on too much. For example, Wallace said one teen who already had an ambitious schedule wanted to take on an additional Advanced Placement course, but his parents worried doing so would be too much. They compromised and decided he could take the course over the summer when he had more time. His mom said she believes ensuring he had balance in his life is part of what helped him get into his first-choice college.
It’s also important, Greenberg said, for parents to model this behavior by leading balanced lives themselves because kids often pick up messages about what makes people valuable in our society by observing those around them. (Here’s how parents can practice self-care.)
In addition to not burning out themselves, parents need to ensure teens feel connected to other people while balancing their schoolwork and extracurricular activities with the rest they need for their physical and mental health.
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