Teens cope with pressure to succeed

With his head in his hands, 16-year-old William To stared at his computer screen as a wave of fatigue rolled through him. He glanced at his watch - it was 3 a.m. Scrambling to finish his five-page essay after a long day, William longed for sleep but was forced to keep writing.

"There are weeks when it seems like everything is due at the same time," he said.

Because many teens today strive to live up to increasingly high expectations concerning school and college acceptance, stress levels among adolescents have risen greatly.

According to a 1999 study conducted by Reuters Health, nearly two-thirds of U.S. teens admit to being stressed at least once a week, and one-third feel stressed on a daily basis. Experts say that a possible reason behind the anxiety is that parents, teachers - and society - expect teens to excel at everything from sports to school.

"When you do so much, something's going to give," William said. "Either schoolwork won't be up to par, or you won't go out as much."

The requirements needed for a solid college application have increased and become harder to accomplish. In addition to high grade-point averages and SAT scores, students now have to participate in extracurricular activities and obtain as many leadership positions as possible.

"The whole philosophy on college has changed," said 17-year-old Ping Matthrey, who attends Gunn High School in Palo Alto. "It started out only being white males that went to college, but now, everyone gets out of high school and goes to college, so there's more competition."

Susan Linn, associate director of the Media Center for Children at Harvard University's Judge Baker Children's Center, feels that the reason for this increased pressure lies elsewhere.

Many parents today expect their kids to strive to get accepted into "designer" colleges that are well known, such as the prestigious Ivy League schools, Linn said.

Ping's parents fit that profile.

"My parents want me to go to Stanford," Ping said. "And when I don't get straight A's, my parents get more strict. But luckily, I don't really get grounded."

At a time when students feel bombarded by all the qualifications needed for college, some, like William, sacrifice sleep in to lengthen their days. But lack of sleep only hinders performance in other areas, experts said.

According to an article by WebMDHealth, bad sleeping habits can affect a child's health, mood and productivity later in life. Because teens have so many things to do, they try to maximize their waking hours to accomplish everything that needs to be done.

Many teens give up their healthy dose of nine hours of sleep to get all their work done, but there are others who choose a different, less honorable route.

Cheating has resurfaced as a seemingly easy way out for students who feel overburdened.

"Things are so tough now that people will do anything to get ahead of others," William said. "They know that cheating is wrong, but as long as they think they can't get caught, no one will know."

Many students say they cheat in an effort to save time - from copying a friend's homework to spying on a classmate's test during class.

"There are lots of pressures on kids today in that some ways the message we're sending them is that the ends justify the means," Linn said. "That the results are more important than the way they got there, which certainly leads to cheating."

Of course, students know that cheating is wrong. But some experts say that students today put their ethics aside when it comes to gaining an extra hour of sleep, or getting an A on a test.

Cheating has become an increasingly difficult issue to address as it becomes more popular, and in some ways, a little more accepted.

Late last year, students at Saratoga High School were caught circulating a test. Though cheating is certainly not unique to Saratoga, school administrators used the incident to address the problem in the future. Ethics classes were proposed, and there were many conferences between students, parents and the administration in efforts to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

Because teens today are so in touch with - and have easy access to - the media, seeing all the cheating and dishonesty affects what they think is right and wrong. Linn believes that there have been a rash of exposés about corporate corruption, such as the Enron debacle. And those don't set a good example for kids today.

"I hope that kids will take a look at the culture and values, and think about what they really want," Linn said. "Hopefully there are kids out there that believe that material objects aren't the most important things in life."