4 Troubled Teens Blog

The phrase "troubled teen" is most often associated with broken and underprivileged families, but for the last several years a new kind of troubled teen has been emerging from upper-middle class families. The stress of high expectations is pushing many teens over the edge.

"Twenty-two percent of girls from affluent families suffer from clinical depression, three times the national average, [Madeline] Levine said. And when [Denise] Pope researched her book, 'Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students', she found that 75 percent of high school students said they had at some point cheated on a test, and 90 percent had copied homework."

While many parents push their kids academically, they simultaneously try to protect their kids from feelings of frustration, sorrow, or disappointment, which hinders the development of proper coping mechanisms in adolescents, causing them to resort to things like cutting, or substance abuse to deal with their stress. Read more at News-Service.Stanford.edu.

Labels: stress, substance_abuse, affluence

Posted By: Aspen Education Group