So, does your life seem busy and hectic? Well, we have news for you. Many of today’s mid-adolescents are busier, and they’re not enjoying it any more than you are!

The Reality of Their Lives
As David Elkind wrote in his classic study, The Hurried Child: “Today’s child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress—the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations.”

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wrote about the stress felt by students at prestigious universities: “Their main lack is time. Students boast to each other about how little sleep they’ve gotten and how long it’s been since they had a chance to get back to their dorm room.”

Adolescents’ lack of time in high school and college is a consistently mentioned plague. For some, this is fueled by a desire to have a full résumé. Most kids competing for spots in elite colleges and universities are well aware the game is less about brainpower and more about tenacity and sheer determination.

By their junior year of high school, many want (most of them say “need”) more money, which almost always means finding a job. Research has shown that getting even a part-time job exponentially adds to the level of stress and busyness in the life of a mid-adolescent.

According to the American Psychological Association, students who work 20 or more hours a week during the school year are “more emotionally distressed, have poorer grades, are more likely to smoke cigarettes, and are more likely to become involved in other high-risk behaviors, such as alcohol and drug use.”

The Sources of Stress
A popular assumption is that adolescents, being older and more street-wise than children, are less vulnerable to stressors. Because of the added burdens of abandonment, social fragmentation and being forced to live in layers, kids are even more prone to stress with fewer triggers needed to push them over the edge.

Three pressure points, while perhaps not overwhelming for all students, seem to have a significant impact on the emotional equilibrium of most. Let’s examine them in turn.

1) The Stress of Success
The pressure to succeed is the source of much stress. The quest for success leads students to an elusive, but powerful, sense that they are never quite good enough. When students do something well, they believe it’s only a step toward adequate performance; failure stalks them at every turn.

We encountered few students who allowed themselves to do their best in a given arena and then let the chips fall where they may. When someone did well on a test or had a great tennis match, the time for celebration was short-lived. The pressure to continue to reach loftier heights was the defining sentiment.

As one student remarked, acting as a spokesperson for several others in a small-group setting, “We feel an incredible pressure to succeed in every area, or it all will fall apart.”

When we asked what specifically would fall apart, the group could not say; but they were convinced the statement was accurate.

What they are striving for is not the thing itself but rather what they believe the accomplishment will bring with it. Performance, then, is not about the touchdown, the “A” or a role in the school play. It is about how others will perceive them.

2) Home Sweet Stress
Students’ interactions with their parents can be a major source of stress. A fight with a parent or step-parent just as they are walking out the door can produce a brooding mood that lasts much of the day. They don’t like to talk about it much, but they are easily discouraged if there’s an unresolved conflict at home.

Kids desperately want what they know they cannot have. On one side, they want parents to be great, nonjudgmental friends, who affirm everything they do; and who leave them alone. On the other, they want parents who care enough about them to be—well—parents.

Even mid-adolescent logic can, when summoned to do so, see these two desires cannot coexist when it comes to parents. There is no way a parent can be caring, involved, nurturing, and draw boundaries for them—and at the same time be a great pal and fan who never interferes in his or her child’s life. However, this paradox is what mid-adolescents believe is possible—and preferable.

3) The Stress of Relationships
The most delicate, and yet easily disguised, source of stress for kids is their desire to keep people happy. They may not seem to care about how others react to them, but that is an act. They care deeply about what others think of them.

Much of the time their self-focus and self-centeredness keep them from reading the cues available to them. They may wear dismissal by an adult or a student they don’t like as a badge of assertive honor, but inside, they know they’re taking a risk and desperately want everyone to respect and affirm, if not outright like, them.

The Mask of Busyness
Just below the surface, today’s kids feel a sense of loneliness and isolation that betrays the confidence with which they present themselves, even to one another.

The busyness they embrace keeps them from having to reflect on their dreams, their relationships and their lives. The resultant stress only serves to compound the desperation they feel that somehow, in some way, they might be able to work hard enough or play hard enough to free themselves from the burden of loneliness and fear.

Certainly, they are tired, and many are angry. Both of these, however, are symptoms of a deeper threat to their well being and ultimately to their ability to progress through mid-adolescence.

At their core, they long for the safety and freedom of childhood and have no clear vision of what adulthood will be like. As a result of the abandonment by adults and adult institutions they have faced throughout their lives, most kids carry inside them a powerful defense mechanism that keeps them running as fast and as hard as they can. They know no other way to cope with life.

The quicker they move, the less vulnerable they are to ridicule, critique or even examination. Kids know they must put on a mask of confidence, even arrogance, or they will be chewed up by those who would find them out.

The adults who love and care for them should not be fooled. Yes, they are busy. Yes, they are stressed. However, in the midst of their blur they want someone–you or me–to take a break from our adult form of busyness long enough to show them through our words and actions the one thing they want to hear from us: “You matter to me.”