Wednesday, April 09, 2008
How to be a Go To Mom
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The pressure they are under can be overwhelming. Suicide, alcoholism and other self-destructive behavior is on the rise in their demographic. They are not victims of corporate burn out or battered veterans returning from Iraq. They are our children.
“It’s a pressure cooker in there,” observes a mom of a teenage daughter about her local high school.
Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, an expert in adolescent psychology, sees growing numbers of children seeking help with depression, anxiety, binge drinking, substance abuse, eating disorders, unhealthy sex and cutting in her Chestnut Hill, MA practice. She says many of her patients are children of highly successfully parents who are fearful of letting their parents down and turn to risky behavior to relieve their anxiety.
Steiner-Adair, an instructor in the Psychiatry Department at the Harvard Medical School and Director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at McLean Hospital, adds that the behavior is happening at ever younger ages, to the point that she is seeing more lying, cheating, and smoking among middle schoolers.
“The pressure to excel, combined with a fear of disappointing parents, leads otherwise honest kids to cheat in school,” she says. Steiner-Adair says that lying, text-messaging test answers, selling intellectual property, and cheating with handheld computers is at an all-time high among high schoolers.
Steiner-Adair, who wrote the book Full of Ourselves: Advancing Girl Power, Health, and Leadership, says that girls are at particularly high risk as they face the added pressure to achieve the nearly unattainable standards of beauty set by Hollywood and the fashion industry. In fact, recent studies have found that girls are now outnumbering boys in alcohol use.
A growing number of the area’s top local high schools have recognized the problem and are trying a variety of solutions. Programs include such spa and summer camp like offerings as yoga, Pilates, and ultimate Frisbee. In addition to such stress busting activities, several districts have begun to reexamine the amount of home work they assign each night and to limit the number of tests students are given on a single day.
For parents, increased isolation from one another makes the job of parenting more difficult than it was for our parents’ generation. “The challenge of being a parent has changed; we’ve lost the mom to mom connection that is so important.”
Steiner-Adair believes technology has exacerbated the problem. “Things like cell phones have in some ways made us much more connected to our kids,” she says. “But technology has actually… weakened the connection.” The key, says Steiner-Adair, is to start the conversation early on, years before your children enter the maelstrom of adolescence. “How you react to them in elementary school will determine whether they turn to you when faced with tough decisions later on.”
Restrain from offering unsolicited advice, she says, and instead ask what your kids think about a situation that is troubling them. In fact, asking for your kids’ advice in some of your own daily struggles can help them figure out their own strategies for dealing with conflict.
Anything to take the pressure off.
Hear more of Dr. Steiner-Adair’s strategies on how to be a “Go-To Mom” at her upcoming lecture:
Wednesday, April 9th
7 p.m.
the Dover-Sherborn Middle School
55 Farm Street in Dover, MA
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