Book Notes

OverAchievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids

By: Joan Ruddiman
   Bookstores and the media are full of the stuff of college — prepping for, applying to, succeeding at — with self-help, commentary and criticism. This is as much a parent issue as it is one that consumes teens, with stress being the common denominator for all.
   Alexandra Robbins’s "The OverAchievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids" (Hyperion, 2006) tackles the hot button issues of college admission’s early decision, peer pressures, sleep deprivation and the absurdly early starting time of the high school day. Parents, however, will be most concerned with how they can support teens through these trying times. How significant is the SAT? Is the name-brand college essential for success? Where is the balance in sports and extracurriculars with academics?
   Parents, it is a tightrope you walk. Supportive is good, "hovering" — as in the "helicopter parenting" — is not.
   If you read just one book on this subject, "The OverAchievers" would be worth your time. Robbins investigated the world of high school juniors and seniors with visits across the United States, interviews with admission officers, high school counselors, and teachers. Most significantly, Robbins returns to her alma mater, the high powered Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland to interview eight students. She herself was an "overachiever," driven to do more, be more than the overachievers around her. She frames her study around students who willingly shared all aspects of their lives for a year.
   She introduces each with a moniker, preceded by "perceived as." For example: Julie, Senior: Perceived as the Superstar, AP Frank, College Freshman: Perceived as The Workhorse. Robbins also includes students who are perceived as the Flirt, the Slacker, the Popular Girl, the Perfectionist, the Teachers’ Pet, and the Meathead. Yet, as readers get to know the intimate details of these students’ lives, the perceptions are often far from the mark.
   Robbins spent most of her time with students at Whitman, but she emphasizes that the study is not about a high school but rather about how a culture of "overachieverism" has changed the school experience so drastically in the last 10 years.
   From Robbins’s perspective, the push for good SAT scores is a major stressor. The Scholastic Attitude Test pervades Robbins’s narrative as it dominates the lives of the students she interviews. Robbins does a good job with historical context — where the test came from and why — as well as how college admission departments use the SAT scores. But no matter how many times kids are told that the test is not THE factor in college admission, all but one of the students see their SAT score as the defining moment of their academic careers.
   The race for SAT scores is one part, however, of the bigger race for college admission. And it isn’t just college, but THE college. Students at Whitman, like many at high-flying high schools, feel pressure to make it into an Ivy League, Stanford, or other top tier schools.
   Parents and students need to read the research Robbins reports on the limited correlation of so-called prestige schools to success. A 1999 study by Princeton economist Alan Kruegar and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation researcher Stacy Berg Dale of data over a 20-year period found that the graduates of prestigious colleges did not earn more than graduates of other schools.
   As I was reading Robbins, the Wall Street Journal ran an article, "Any College Will Do." More than half of the chief executive officers of "the 50 biggest U.S. companies by revenue graduated from public colleges."
   Good old State U. looks pretty good.
   Fred Hargadon, the long-time dean of admissions at Princeton now retired, said in a local interview last year that it isn’t where students go but what they bring to college that impacts their success.
   Robbins interviewed Bill Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard. He said this idea that applicants have to do unusual things to distinguish themselves is "a misconception." The analysis Fitzsimmons offers is enlightening, as reported by Robbins. The bottom line is that the most common way to get into Harvard is plain old accomplishments on a day-to-day basis. "It’s not about gimmicks but about substance."
   Yet, Robbins’s crew of overachievers cram as much into their days as possible to pad the college resume full of not only what they do but what they do extraordinarily well.
   When Julie the track star runs her first meet at her Ivy League school, she collapses in despair because she is not good enough. Her teammates surround her with encouragement. "It’s for fun. Just enjoy it." This is a lesson Julie had missed but begins, slowly, to learn in college.
   Robbins, like others, expresses a concern that students are missing the big lessons while they are racing like crazy to excel in the little ones.
   Robbins takes on parents who push their kids to be all that they can to be — and perhaps, she suggests, all that the parents wish they themselves could have been. Colleges coined the term "helicopter parents" a few years ago as they began to deal extensively with parents who "hover" over all aspects of their "child’s" college life.
   Consider how parents in today’s world are able to hover over their son or daughter s life long before college. Parents are able to watch their toddlers at pre-school from their work computer via Web cam. Parents can check on their child’s homework via the school homework hotline and monitor their high schooler’s grades as they are posted online. A human resources specialist for a national company told me she has had parents attend the training sessions with their college graduates starting their first job — which must not be unusual as Jeffrey Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal noted this phenomenon in a column he wrote last year.
   The overly protected child has become the subject of research and social commentary. Robbins cites Jerome Kagan, the eminent Harvard psychologist, whose research indicates that parents who try to protect their children from stressful experiences can create anxious children. Northeastern University, Robbins reports, now offers a seminar for parents titled, "A Time for Holding On and A Time for Letting Go."
   David Brooks, cited by Robbins, writes, "Today’s young adults are the most honed and supervised generation in human history. If they are group oriented, deferential to authority, and achievement-obsessed, it is because we achievement-besotted adults have trained them to be."
   Brooks echoes an extensive analysis by Hara Estroff Marano in a 2004 Psychology Today magazine article, "A Nation of Wimps." Marano writes, "parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile." Child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University, says, "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experience. Through failure we learn how to cope."
   The experts’ point is that if we want kids to be good decision-makers they have to, at some point, make decisions. Robbins suggests limiting young children’s extracurriculars. Go a step further and encourage kids to decide what they want to do for fun and how they want to invest their time. This is good practice in learning to make informed decisions, and living with the consequences.
   Then when it comes time to shop for colleges, the students who know themselves well will recognize the wisdom of finding a good fit, not just collecting brand names. Robbins provides a host of evidence that there are "hundreds of excellent schools to which the majority of applicants can gain admission."
   That’s good news. Perhaps surprisingly, overall "The Overachievers" leaves a positive impression. The kids are certainly likable. Robbins cleverly wraps the research and data around stories of kids who are easy to root for. And as Robbins points out the problems in a "culture of overachieverism," she also offers specific suggestions for what colleges, high schools, parents and students can do to ease the stress.
   Robbins writes, "No student should wait for college to find happiness." Most teens and the adults in their lives would agree. Reading Robbins’s "Overachievers" can spark reflective conversations on how to achieve without the rat race of "overachieverism."
   Joan Ruddiman, Ed. D., is a teacher and friend of the Allentown Public Library.