The New York Times reports on two new studies about the influence of money on education. On a geeky level, I'm thrilled to see data that clicks so well with my anecdotal observations. It also supplements the research summarized here.
The first study by Sabino Kornrich and Frank F. Furstenberg, “Investing in Children: Changes in Parental Spending on Children, 1972–2007,” found that spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
The rich are spending way more on their children's education than they did in the past. Rich parents are investing more than ever in tutors, after-school enrichment programs, camps, and private schools. The gap between them and their poorer peers grows every day.
But all that enrichment is making kids miserable. The intensive enrichment is coming out of parental anxiety, and the kids pick up those vibes. (I can't tell you how many of Jonahs' peers have serious anxiety problems.)
Research from Suniya S. Luthar, professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College finds that upper-middle class kids are reacting all this enrichment and pressure in unhealthy ways. She found high levels of substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls. They were more at-risk for these problems than inner-city kids.
Upper middle class kids are feeling the stress of their parents. The anxiety of falling out of the middle class. The backup plans for average middle class kids do not exist any more. There is the perception that there are fewer and fewer winners in this new economy. And kids and parents are freaking out.
Apt. 11d 
Have you read this/
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/05/fatally_ill_child_teaches_us_how_to_mother.html
Kind of puts a whole different spin on all that super-achievement stuff, doesn’t it?
I thought what she said about focussing on your child’s future instead of your child’s present was really telling . . . It’s given me a lot to think about.
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Another link to add to the theme: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/05/_tiger_mom_study_shows_the_parenting_method_doesn_t_work.html
(Tiger mom parenting results lower achievement & depression in children, according to the headline).
(though this one is about Asian parents, specifically, and a group that might not reflect the average Asian parent demographic — poor, less educated families were the main subjects).
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But does Suniya Luthar find rising levels of substance abuse among upper middle class children? There was plenty of substance abuse at Ivy League colleges in my day, and in Scott Fitzgerald’s. And the stories about the Latin Quarter in the fourteenth century suggest it was the same then.
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Yes, I too have long heard that the level of substance abuse among upper middle class children (“rich” children) is high, in my circles explained by money. That is, the rich kids have the money to buy drugs, unlike the middle-class kids. They also have cars, and, sometimes, apartments, beach houses, pool houses, . . . .
(One of my worries about the elite east coast boarding schools).
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A study by Suniya Luthar: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3524830/
Bj, I would not worry about substance abuse at elite east coast boarding schools. Students caught with (stuff) are routinely kicked out. Most elite schools offer “sanctuary,” which means friends can report friends for substance abuse without fearing they will be kicked out. (Or students can report themselves.) “Calling sanctuary” offers a safe harbor. A sanctuaried kid gets counseling for substance abuse. Teens are curious; quite a few will experiment without a serious habit. Generally, a second offense means expulsion, although students will often withdraw before facing a disciplinary hearing.
The worst things are thought to happen off campus, on vacation or at friends’ homes. Parents don’t search their children’s rooms for contraband; boarding schools do.
One should worry about the academic pressures at elite boarding schools. Eating disorders, as well.
(the original of this comment might be in the spam folder. I can’t tell if the comment just disappeared or not. fill in “stuff” with d or a )
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I have a comment in the spam folder. I’ll give up on that for now.
Have you seen that the College Board canceled the May SAT in South Korea?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578472313648304172.html
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Sorry. Fixed. Dealing with the blog problems is first on the agenda for Monday. Thanks for being patient!
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I worry about the pressure for different reasons. I think the pressure for students to go to the “right” college not only robs them of their childhood and gives them disorders and problems most adults couldn’t handle, but I also think they’re not really learning along the way. They’re going through the motions; they’re getting As because they can memorize stuff or they have a fabulous tutor. They’re getting into Harvard because they’ve been doing x and y activities since they were 9. They’ve spent no time thinking about anybody but themselves, so therefore haven’t learned empathy, which leads to all the current kinds of political issues we’re seeing. And worse, they haven’t learned what *they* really want. They’re kind of hollow inside.
My son, who probably doesn’t (and didn’t) have enough pressure (that parental guilt will last a long time), at least has a lot of qualities I would like to see in others: compassion, empathy, understanding of difference. He has no clue what he really wants to do and he’s headed to state school, not Ivy, but I think he’s learned a lot. There are more kids like that, but they get brushed aside for the kids with the As and the portfolio of activities. I’ll take a C kid with some interesting life skills over a kid with straight As almost any day. Not true for everyone, I know, but I hope it’s true for some people out there.
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“They’re getting into Harvard because they’ve been doing x and y activities since they were 9. They’ve spent no time thinking about anybody but themselves, so therefore haven’t learned empathy, which leads to all the current kinds of political issues we’re seeing.”
And yet the young are politically more liberal than older adults. Weird, isn’t it?
http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/03/the-generation-gap-and-the-2012-election-3/
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I take issue with both Laura/GM’s and Amy’s comments.
Re Laura’s comments, I think the kids who are getting into the top universities are actually pretty cool people. I’ve already told the story of the 4 kids I interviewed for my Ivy alma mater, but I’ll tell it again. They were all highly qualified kids, but the one who really stood out to me had started an organization to help Haiti post-earthquake, and she had a non-traditional major I’m sure people would laugh at here, but she seemed to have *thought* about the world a bit, and I enjoyed talking with her, and I even had her send me the website for her organization. She was also the only one of the 4 I interviewed who had a shot of getting in (she was wait-listed).
I think the problem may lie in the people who train and work and network etc. to get in to elite universities then *don’t* get in. They don’t get in because they are more ambitious than thoughtful (though there are plenty who are ambitious *and* thoughtful).
Overall, I am sure the young are more liberal than older adults, but I also think that Amy is hinting that liberals are selfish and lack empathy, and I think that’s a way over-simplification. I think more than anything young people feel powerless. In fact, I’m shocked how powerless they seem some times. I suspect it’s that feeling of powerlessness that attracts them to liberal politics, especially socially liberal politics (drug legalization, abortion rights, recognition of same-sex marriage). Eventually a lot will become more conservative, but it’s related to their same feeling of powerlessness. Having felt scarcity of power, when they do have some, they are compelled to keep it, and conservative politics gives them the rationale not to share.
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Wendy, I didn’t mean to make it sound like there weren’t good, thoughtful kids getting into Ivy schools. There are. I teach many of them. But both on the HS side and on the college advising side, I’ve seen kids who are just doing things because that’s the script they’ve been given. And in fact, I feel like the good, thoughtful kids often don’t get in, as you say. And it seems unfair. I also see kids turn down or don’t even consider perfectly good schools because they’re not Ivy. Even some small liberal arts schools. Which I think is a shame.
And at the kind of school I’m teaching in (private, elite, very expensive), there are quite a few kids who go to an Ivy and continue hanging out with the same kinds of kids. I see it on the other end of the spectrum, too. Kids who could get into a better school, but who want to hang with the same types of kids they did in high school. I guess more broadly speaking, I think we can all get out more and spend time with people different from us. And I feel like for many of my students, the extra attention, classes, activities, etc. just put them in touch with the same kinds of kids (because only the wealthy can afford those things).
And, of course, I hope that me and my colleagues help them be more thoughtful in our classes, but it doesn’t always turn out that way. We don’t always break the bubble.
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Three thoughts.
1)Rich parents are investing more than ever in tutors, after-school enrichment programs, camps, and private schools.
When is it “investment,” and when is it “child care?” The truly rich may have live-in nannies who look after children after school and during vacations, but other two-career families must find other alternatives. Between 1972 and 2007, most mothers took on paid employment, which required more elaborate arrangements for child care.
2) I would make a distinction between extracurricular activities controlled by the parents and activities controlled by the child. Many, many teens choose to quit band, for example, even though their parents spent money on expensive instruments and lessons. (Hi, Amy P!) The students who are truly devoted to music, who choose to give up other opportunities rather than drop band, are probably less stressed than the kids who want to join the anime club, but can’t, because, well, “It’s important for college applications.”
3) I blame the SAT. Really! The SAT should bring back analogies, if only to make it more difficult to cram for the SAT. SAT tutoring sessions seem to take up enormous spans of time in high school students’ lives. I guess they memorize root words, vocabulary and testing tricks? (My kids haven’t done it, so I’m guessing.) Each analogy requires the knowledge of four vocab words, not one. Make it obviously a waste of time to prep for the SAT, and give that time back to the teens.
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I think the child care point is an important one too. Up until high school, as an upper-middle-class kids, my own after-school “enrichment activities” were 1) half-hour piano lesson once a week; 2) organized softball in the spring; and 3) sitting around watching Batman or Gilligan’s Island, reading whatever I felt like, or playing outside. I had a lot of activities in high school, graduated at the top of my class, and went on to a not-quite-Ivy, but it seems to me kids with my skill level today are doing way more stuff at an early age. Geography bees, science fairs, sports teams that travel, more after-school classes, etc. Some of this seems to be related to the fact that there’s no one home for that couple hours of lightly-supervised down time in the afternoon.
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“there’s no one home for that couple hours of lightly-supervised down time in the afternoon”
Structural change how are ya?
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Wendy said:
“Re Laura’s comments, I think the kids who are getting into the top universities are actually pretty cool people.”
I was thinking some “kids today” thoughts about this thread, but I find myself not typing them because I was on campus yesterday with my baby in a stroller and the kids kept opening doors for us. A little thing, of course, but much appreciated.
I think the thing to remember is that they are in transition. On the negative side locally, our college students are terrible pet owners, terrible drivers, and the ones that live near us kept stuffing their garbage into our recycling container, never bothering to figure out why some trash containers are grey and some are blue. (And it is students rather than poor folk based on the contents.)
If you think back to what we all were like 20 or 30 years ago, I think we were probably very similar: a mix of good intentions, sincerity and boundless energy mixed in equal parts with ignorance and thoughtlessness. I think that is the natural state of persons that age. The only thing that can really be altered is the approach that we as parents or teachers take, but it’s not going to change the fundamental problem, which is immaturity.
Baby’s calling, so I can’t finish reading the thread, but I didn’t mean any nasty political point scoring by pointing out that the young are more liberal than the old. Some of my best friends are liberal! However, it is true that there is a style of selfishness that is identifiably liberal (think Sandra Fluke), just as there is one that is identifiably conservative (think Ron Swanson).
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Indeed, I think the child care issue is a big one. I know most of the families at my school are dual income, and it is in those families where the kids are more heavily involved in activities, not always of their choosing. I’m part of a dual income family, and we just juggled. We couldn’t afford the activities, so we’d run home, pick up a kid or two and go back to work. Or we’d arrange to work from home from 2:30 on, or, more often, our 11 yo was home by himself. We would call to check in and that was that. Would I have wanted him to be in an activity? Absolutely! He couldn’t even do sports in 6th grade (they didn’t allow it until 7th). Had he been in sports, he would have had practice until 4:30 or 5, a much more reasonable pick up time after work.
I don’t know what will change the dynamic. I feel the same anxiety the parents of my students do, but I don’t have the means to deal with it. Geeky Girl doesn’t have any interest in doing many of the things her peers do, but even if she did, we probably couldn’t afford it. Instead, we try to focus on her doing well at school, and we provide enriching activities as a family: traveling, participating in local activities, etc. Maybe when the demographic shift comes, and entrance into colleges isn’t as difficult, we’ll see the attitude change.
I did run into this article from a few years ago about the attitudes of students going into elite schools. Maybe things have changed a bit, but it’s an interesting take: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003263.html
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Wendy,
Abortion rights doesn’t really belong on the list of “youth” causes. One of the oddities of the current generation is that it’s more friendly to gay marriage than their elders, but less friendly to abortion rights. I suspect that the underlying reason is that abortion and being against gay marriage are both seen as mean.
“Separate data from the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life show that 50 percent of Americans under 30 believe abortion ought to be legal in all or more cases, compared to 54 percent of Americans in their 30s and 40s and 55 percent of those in their 50s and early 60s.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/states-are-cracking-down-on-abortion-and-legalizing-gay-marriage-what-gives/
cranberry said:
“When is it “investment,” and when is it “child care?””
I’ve been having similar thoughts. Are we sure that the stuff is 100% for the intellectual cultivation of the kids? I suspect that a fair amount of camps and activities are just intended to keep kids busy and out of trouble and because their parents have trouble figuring out what to do with them. I’m in the process of figuring out summer activities myself, and I’d have a hard time saying with a straight face that it’s all intended to get them into Yale. I’m not sure Yale is interested in the dress-making class and the quilt-making class that my 5th grader is going to be taking this summer. I think it will be good for her spatial skills and fine motor skills, but mainly we’re paying for it because she’s interested and it will keep her busy.
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” I think we were probably very similar: a mix of good intentions, sincerity and boundless energy mixed in equal parts with ignorance and thoughtlessness. ”
A good reminder, that it’s easy to get caught up in thinking things are different now than they were before. I started to write that I do think that things are much more competitive, for kids, at an early age. But then, I realized that I was only thinking about a very small subset of society, upper income folks who now live in a world where membership in the class isn’t guaranteed, where their competitors are national and international. But that group is a really small section of society.
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