One of the reasons that I love the Chron's Outlook section is because it has interesting opinions written by people that aren't on the paper's payroll (and therefore may be of remote interest). Today's Outlook section had an solid piece on the pressure on the young to succeed:

Here's the recipe for success these kids have learned: Get high SATs and a high GPA so you can go to this college so you will get this kind of job (and perhaps find a partner with a comparable job) so you will make a lot of money and live happily ever after. The part that's never spoken — and would be disavowed if put into words — is that money will make you happy.

These children's parents (and I count myself among them) are the first generation to have grown to adulthood in largely carefree economic times. We have not lived through world wars or a national financial catastrophe. Many of us saw our families go from frugal to fairly prosperous. Lately, however, we've seen great reversals of fortune in industries from automotive to steel to high-tech, local businesses failing to compete with big conglomerates, and blue- as well as white-collar jobs being outsourced overseas. Economic changes have been hard to predict. As one of my friends has asked, "What career do you advise your child to go into today?"

My parents did not pressure me much to go in one direction or another. If they were guilty of anything (and I don't believe they are) it was underestimating my abilities instead of overestimating them. When I told them that I wouldn't be graduating with honors, Mom said "Alex, I never thought in a million years that you would graduate at all."

It wasn't that Mom thought I was stupid. Rather, she knew that I hated school much as she did and felt like I was a prime candidate to drop out. To be honest, I felt the same way going in to college. My parents never compared me to my higher-achieving brother and instead judged me on my own merits and (for the most part) my own priorities.

High school counselors as well as independent consultants agree that competition to get into elite colleges has increased dramatically in recent years, and that many state colleges also have become more selective. Many parents could not get into their alma maters today. Sheer numbers are part of the issue: There is a population bulge in this age group; students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, partly because of the ease of the common application and partly to cover more bases. Participation in SAT prep classes is at an all-time high. Collegeconfidential.com, a Web site I was tipped off to by a high school senior, reports that the Ivies reject many applicants today with combined SAT scores of 1550. (Compare that with the stats reported during the last presidential election campaign: Bush's SAT score of 1206 was good enough to get him into Yale; Gore's 1355 took him to Harvard.)

Young people absorb this pressure from the air they breathe. They soak it up at home, at school, in books and magazines. It comes from parents, relatives, teachers and now even from their peers. And it can start at frighteningly young ages, like the 10-year-old girl who worried to me that she was not smart enough to get into a really good college. Then there was the 11-year-old whom I asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. She replied in a nanosecond: a law clerk, and then a partner, and then a judge and then a member of the Supreme Court.

I remember in sociology class, the teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. A majority of the students said either lawyer or an aerospace engineer (note: in the shadow of the Johnson Space Center, a disproportionate number of us had parents that were aerospace engineers). She made a good point about how important it was for us to evaluate more options.

For my part, I wanted to be a teacher at the time. I'd wanted to be an aerospace engineer like Dad when I was growing up, but when my brother decided that was what he wanted to do it freed me up to explore other options. While trading emails years later, David said that he felt Dad wanted him to go in to computers, which is what I did. I'd always wondered if he wanted me to be an engineer like him.

Another change comes in the form of increasing pressure from peers. One father whose child had been excited about her early-decision acceptance to an excellent, but not Ivy League, college in November told me that his daughter was having second thoughts, after hearing a friend go on and on about getting into a more "prestigious" school. I have heard high school students make disparaging comments about community college. One counselor described seniors collecting acceptances and then advertising them to their peers "as an ego trip." As he rightly observed, "One kid's safety school is another's first choice."

As has been documented here before, I was ill-fit in many ways for Clear Lake High School. The materialism and elitism there drove me completely nuts at times. But after various discussions with Audrey and Ed on the subject, I've come to the conclusion that Lake was leaps and bounds better for me than Kingwood High School (their alma mater). Despite its good reputation, for all the things that Clear Lake was hypercompetitive was not one of them. In anything, the opposite was the problem: students thought their parents' money and influence could overcome bad grades.

The school of choice for most Lake graduates was UT or A&M. Apparently at Kingwood that was considered second-rate. That's one problem I didn't have to deal with. For that I am thankful.

The article also makes some really good points about finding what happiness means to each of us:

Sometimes what I hear is almost eerie: Young men and women who seem incapable of separating their own aspirations from those their parents hold for them. There are Americans who no longer make a distinction between needs and wants, even between expectations and entitlements. I have heard young men in my office express anxiety about their earning potential, especially in the eyes of their future mates. And I sometimes have to wonder whether their concern is not neurotic, but rooted in present-day American reality. Perhaps they are perceiving in their contemporaries an inability or unwillingness to adapt to whatever life holds for them.

[...]

There is another price that relentless striving can exact, and this is perhaps the most pernicious one: a joylessness and weariness that shows up in children as young as middle school and can last the rest of their lives. In many of these situations, a disturbing undercurrent develops in the parent-child relationship. Even from very young ages, kids can smell a rat. They know if they are being called upon to realize their parents' ambitions and make them look good regardless of the price.

Whatever happened to young people charting their own courses? Marching to a different drummer? As fellow therapist Neil Schiff said when we were discussing this issue recently, "Whatever happened to ordinary? To just making a way through life?" These days, ordinary is equated with failure. Yet only a small percentile (in SAT terminology) will be the superstars that many parents have trained their kids to expect to be. The majority of us and our children are destined to be ordinary, normal, regular folk. In superstar-think, this means being a loser. Maybe we need to resurrect that long-lost virtue, humility.

While I've quoted extensively on the article to the point that you might think that the rest of the article isn't worth reading, if the subject is of interest to you, don't let my liberal quoting stop you.