The headline in the New York Times this morning: Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen.
UCLA does this survey of hundreds of thousands of 17 and 18 year-olds every summer, and the results come out the following winter. It’s a great indicator of where hearts and minds are moving. (Both liberals and conservatives have been bewildered in recent years by the data that suggest that young people are becoming ever more accepting of homosexuality, and increasingly less accepting of abortion. Adult lefties and righties tend to couple either acceptance or rejection of both, and are both heartened and worried by this apparent inconsistency of the young.) Because I teach college freshmen (or frosh, the preferred gender neutral term), I’m keenly interested in the results of the survey each year.
But based on this year’s data, the headline ought to read: “record level of stress found in college freshwomen.”
Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened…
For many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.
The gender gap on that question was even larger than on emotional health, with 18 percent of the men saying they had been frequently overwhelmed, compared with 39 percent of the women.
There is also a gender gap, studies have shown, in the students who seek out college mental health services, with women making up 60 percent or more of the clients.
“Boys are socialized not to talk about their feelings or express stress, while girls are more likely to say they’re having a tough time,†said Perry C. Francis, coordinator for counseling services at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “Guys might go out and do something destructive, or stupid, that might include property damage. Girls act out differently.â€
Linda Sax, a professor of education at U.C.L.A. and former director of the freshman study who uses the data in research about college gender gaps, said the gap between men and women on emotional well-being was one of the largest in the survey.
“One aspect of it is how women and men spent their leisure time,†she said. “Men tend to find more time for leisure and activities that relieve stress, like exercise and sports, while women tend to take on more responsibilities, like volunteer work and helping out with their family, that don’t relieve stress.â€
With what I call the “Martha Complex” very much in the news once more thanks to Amy Chua, it’s important to remember that perfectionism is gendered in our culture. Chua, the infamous Tiger Mother whose rigid parenting style has ignited international debate this month, raised daughters, not sons. And the evidence from the UCLA survey is that even parents who are far less controlling than Chua are ending up with anxious and exhausted daughters. With nearly 4 out of 10 girls (compared to fewer than 2 in 10 boys) reporting being “frequently overwhelmed”, it’s not alarmist to say that we have a major crisis on our hands.
I’ve said it, Courtney Martin’s said it, and a lot of others who write about girls have said it one way or another: we’ve succeeded in expanding opportunities for our daughters, and we’ve also saddled them with an ever-rising number of obligations. In the aftermath of “Reviving Ophelia” and other Nineties era books that focused on a crisis of self-confidence among teen girls, we’ve responded with more attention, eager to help young women become more successful. But that well-intentioned help, filled as it is with constant reminders to our girls of what they can be, is often interpreted as yet another reminder of all the things they should be.
The percentage of young women suffering from anxiety, depression, and the other side effects of perfectionism will only increase until we address the root problem. The root problem is people-pleasing: the sense that happiness and fulfillment come from meeting the expectations of others. We teach our daughters that they can be professional athletes and run for president, but we still teach them that their dollies have feelings and that their Barbies’ plastic heads hurt when bumped. We teach them to get good grades, but too often we teach them that the real reward of good grades is seeing pride and satisfaction in the faces of parents and teachers. We raise our girls to be successful, but to do so while being keenly attentive to the needs of everyone around them. So when they feel stressed, as Linda Sax notes, these young women tend to throw themselves into ever more volunteer work, piling people-pleasing on top of people-pleasing, like alcoholics taking shots of whiskey to cure hangovers. The vicious cycle produces the predictable result we’re seeing on measures like the UCLA Frosh Survey.
This is the same problem that Black Swan explores (and look at that film’s popularity among high school and college-aged women!) This is the same problem of what I call the Paris Paradox, the pressure to be “sexy” but not authentically “sexual.” Our girls are achieving more than ever before. But too many are still performing, still trying to please parents and peers, pastors and professors, coaches and boyfriends. With more places to perform than ever before, the fruit of the campaign for equal opportunity, that means an ever-rising sense of pressure and competition.
Equal opportunity for boys and girls has turned into unequal obligation. And as the new frosh survey shows, the cost of this unequal burden is not just hurting prima ballerinas and the daughters of Tiger Mothers: it’s hurting a huge and rising percentage of young women. This is not the fault of the feminist movement, it’s a sign that the feminist movement is not yet complete. It will not be complete until we lift the burden of relentless people-pleasing off our daughters, until we change how we socialize our girls to act in the world, until we teach them that their own pleasure matters more than winning praise.
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This has been a weird year at school for me. About a third of my top academic class (grade 12) didn’t hand in the major paper. There’s a lot of apathy that I blame, in part, on high unemployment. Why bust your ass to get into school if it’ll get you nowhere. These are guys and girls. But at the same time, there’s an unusually large number of girls who left the class part way through because they’re too stressed out. One started losing her hair from stress. Others are cutting themselves or randomly weeping. They aim for perfection, but since they can’t get it, they give up entirely. It’s all black and white thinking that’s sending them down this dark spiral.
Girls used to people-please, but at the same time, they also developed tight supportive communities for themselves. Now they’re doing the former, but have lost the latter to the myth of individualism. Getting help means you’re weak. That was something only guys bought into for a while, but now it’s more generally accepted. And it’s crap.
I agree we need to change how we socialize girls, for sure, but we also need to change what we prioritize in the world. We need to shift towards community-building and away from glorifying individual success. These girls feel so alone, and they think they’re the only ones struggling to juggle their work-load. Everyone’s smarter and prettier and having more fun. We don’t have to do everything on our own all the time to be successful. Succeeding is about helping and caring and being able to work together well and all that jazz that we just can’t do in isolation.
“It will not be complete until we lift the burden of relentless people-pleasing off our daughters, until we change how we socialize our girls to act in the world, until we teach them that their own pleasure matters more than winning praise.”
I agree that this is the task, but that the solution which rests in the society at large is monumental. Part of our problem lies in what sells and who has the money to buy it. The image of females is largely sexualized in every medium. Challenging limiting and demeaning imagery and treatment of women needs to be a part of the mix.
I’m so not surprised by this. It’s gotten worse in the years since I graduated high school in the mid-1990s. It all comes back to the same thing: am I having sex because I want sex or because I want to make the guy feel good? Am I dieting because I want to be healthy or because I want to get praise? Was I getting good grades because I really liked school or because I was afraid of disappointing my parents?
So how do you really untangle these different wants? Do you have a post about that?
Quote: “or many young people, serious stress starts before college. The share of students who said on the survey that they had been frequently overwhelmed by all they had to do during their senior year of high school rose to 29 percent from 27 percent last year.”
I see a key phrase here.
“…all they had to do…”.
Is this a collective and individual perception or is it the result of imposition?
So? My take on this is:
The world is increasingly complex. We rarely train our children how to think about and subsequently manage the stuff in their lives coming at them from all angles. Prioritising what is meaningful is half the battle to making decisions that put our lives in balance.
Another beef of mine is that our educational systems do tend to involve standards that can create a competitive culture of “Excellence” in all things. I think this is true for both males and females.
Some opt out completely. Some simply cannot meet the implied or overt standards. Others find the standards easier than others. The latter will more than likely depend on privilege, education, financial prosperity and an innate competitive temperament.
For women, there are added competitions including beauty, thinness, intelligence, community-mindedness and political savvy. They are at once asked to become active feminists and yet remain “feminine”. Many women believe they NEED to be romantically accessible, build a family, have a full time high paying career whilst negotiating sexual expectations from partners (and themselves), along with caring for aging parents, managing the demands of children (theirs and others), paying bills, buying property, managing investments, planning for retirement (long before actual retirement) and “keeping house” (or at least afford to have a maid).
Consumerism has played a big part in these “needs” in the modern woman’s psyche I think! The desire to have it all… whatever “All” is, is strong.
Perhaps its time educational facilities slackened the demands for clubs, fraternities, sporting achievements and so on. Maybe its time to relax the highly competitive nature of academia for everyone? At the very least, we probably need to give our kids effective tools to manage multiple demands on their attention so that they can find balance and a sense of personal power over their world again.
Essentially, we need to let our young men and particularly our young women rediscover the pure joy of learning simply for the sake of learning and discovery! It should not always be a means to a the “perfect career” but an opportunity – regardless of income and privilege – to engage in the wonder of finding out something one didn’t know they didn’t know!
Of course, this will require a huge change in thinking about how education is managed and delivered in affluent cultures such as ours.
“Both liberals and conservatives have been bewildered in recent years by the data that suggest that young people are becoming ever more accepting of homosexuality, and increasingly less accepting of abortion. Adult lefties and righties tend to couple either acceptance or rejection of both, and are both heartened and worried by this apparent inconsistency of the young.”
Yeah, WTF is up with THAT? I mean, I’m 20 and I figured it was an all or nothing kinda thing…doesn’t make sense (at least not to me)!
Great post Hugo. And I think a certain amount of the “expanding opportunities = required perfection” comes from the sexism illustrated in the kcxd comic regarding gender and math. I know that when I think about my physics degree and the STEM career that I do not have, much of my regret is not just from no longer doing something I love (which would still be true if I left library work), but an overwhelming amount of it is feeling like I have failed everyone for perpetuating the stereotype that girls are not good at math/science, belong in the humanities, etc.
Casey,
The less removed you are from the realities of choosing how to deal with pregnancy/raise children, and the more you identify with the child over the mother, the more likely you are to not see abortion as something that needs to be an option for practical reasons. It’s fairly common for girls/women to be anti-choice when they are still teens, but then become increasingly pro-choice as they become sexually active, older, and mothers.
I suspect a certain amount of the change has to do with the silence on abortion* (unless it’s being decried as evil) combined with very little talk about the dangers of not having abortion as a legal option – and the talk that does exist sounding very “back in MY day…”
Also, I blame lack of comprehensive sex ed.
*even the frickin’ Degrassi episode that had a character getting an abortion was self-censored in the US. wtf?