Are today's teenagers overworked and ambitious SAT-machines? Rebellious and troubled children grown up too fast? Are they in need of intervention, or worthy of admiration? A spate of new books approaches America's longstanding fascination with that strange species, the modern adolescent, from a variety of angles. Which books get it right, or mostly right? None of them are a perfect mirror, but when their perspectives are pieced together they begin to form something resembling an accurate picture. 

      Privilege and Its Discontents

      First on the bestseller list are the "ring the alarm" type books which describe the phenomenon of over-stressed students from affluent neighborhoods and prep schools. "The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids," by Madeline Levine, looks at these ambitious teens from a clinical standpoint. Levine, a psychologist in northern California, describes teens with outward symbols of perfection, star athletes and top students, who have developed issues ranging from depression to eating disorders. This is a result of, what Levine calls, a lack of "sense of self." So over-programmed, so focused, these young people in Marin Country, California (the Westchester of San Francisco) had no chance to build resilience, to discover themselves, and to accept their own imperfections.

      To break the cycle, Levine advocates for the simple idea that parents should just let kids be kids. Although she steers clear of directly castigating the parents and communities that contribute to the problem of depressed affluent kids--she wrote the book to help them--her litany of personally-observed evidence builds the case that these kids are a damaged lot. And they're damaged not only because of their over-scheduled, overambitious lives, but because of a society that values money over love--or equates the two. Replacing time goofing off with the family with piano lessons isn't always a good idea, Levine says, no matter how big an edge it might give your child. Her case is strong enough to send the most competitive soccer mom on a Zen Buddhist retreat with her stressed-out children.

      The College Rat-Race

      Alexandra Robbins' "The Overachievers: The Secret Lies of Driven Kids," is a somewhat more sensationalized account of the same trend Levine describes. Indeed, it's easy to imagine stressed-out students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland reading Robbins' "expose" of their forerunners' "secret lives" as an affirmation of the melodrama that accompanies their stress.  "My school is so crazy they wrote a book about it!" they'll say, not sure whether they're complaining or bragging.

      Robbins' book follows a crew of teenagers at Whitman through their college application process in a series of suspenseful chapters, using the same pseudo-investigative techniques that she used for discovering sorority sisters' equally "secret lives" in a previous book. By building up the suspense as to whether student A will get into college, student B will flunk the exam, or student C will be happy at Harvard, she both fetishizes the students' anxiety and harangues the readers about what a shame it is that the students are so overworked. As a result, the book has the effect of raising our pulses ("Should I apply to Brown or Stanford? But really, what should I do?") more than our consciousnesses. Despite a final chapter detailing how the system should change, Robbins' breathless tone ends up validating all the hoopla that she claims is so damaging.

      Robbins misses something else that's important: how much of the students stress is an outgrowth of their raw teen angst: angst over the cross country meet, their instant message conversations, their parents, their love lives, and above all, angst about college. Teenagers are prone to theatrics, of course. They are insecure, hormonal, angry, and curious, and take everything a bit too seriously. Wealthy teenagers whose communities push them hard end up being particularly melodramatic and single-minded about schoolwork and college acceptances. Kids in poor neighborhoods are equally melodramatic about their own issues and goals. Is one group's stress more of an epidemic than another? It doesn't seem to occur to Robbins that adolescence itself might be spawning an epidemic of adolescence.  
 

Parental Angst

      Two recent books that cover less newsworthy aspects of adolescence are "I Wanna be Sedated," an anthology of essays by parents of teens, and "Notebook Girls," a shared diary passed among four girls friends from Stuyvesant High School. These books focus less on college obsessiveness and teen perfectionism and more on the classic teen formula for hope and escape: sex, drugs, and music.

      The essays in I Wanna be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers," vary in literary merit; the pieces by well-known authors like Anna Quindlen and Dave Barry are not as detailed or moving as lesser known ones like "Tia Tata" by Flor Fernandez Barrios and "Shopping for Kotex" by Jeffrey K. Wallace. But the big theme expressed through out the 30 pieces is universal. Each parent must absorb a series of words that would warm Dr. Levine's heart to hear: "You have to let them go." This painful lesson of parenting adolescents is learned by the parent of a girl who gets her first tattoo, the mom of a boy who refuses to do his homework (for a pleasant change, he's an underachiever), and more seriously, by a mom whose daughters run away together to live on the streets. To varying degrees, it's also learned by the dad who smokes weed with his son, all very innocently, as well as the dad of a high school drop-out who follows his son faithfully to punk rock concerts. And yes, amid all this, there's one mom who can't stop hovering over her daughter's college application. But--and this might be blasphemy to the some moms in Marin, Bethesda, and our own ambitious hometown--it's an art college!  

      The humorous but emotionally honest tone of these pieces reveals that these parents, like most parents, really do love their children for who they are--whether strong or silly, rebellious or immature--and not for what they achieve. But these are not essays about harmonious relationships. The authors confront seeing a child turn into teenager--a combative, would- be equal--and acknowledge that yes, it's a painful, dramatic, frustrating, and confusing time for everyone involved. More than once, parents in this book ask "Where did this person come from and what happened to my charming child?" But, by the time they have written these essays, most have found a catharsis in acceptance. The essays themselves aren't repetitive; they run the gamut of experience, geography, and subject--but what's fascinating is how so many of them boil down to that nugget of truth about adolescent rebellion and pain; it happens, and there's little one can do except try to ease its passing.

From the Mouths of Babes

      From the perspective of the teens themselves, their parents' cooing, crying, and fretting is probably just another annoyance, added to the pile of cares that already covers body image, test grades, the opposite sex, and weekend plans. "The Notebook Girls" was shared by a clique of Stuyvesant girls over several years. Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie-Pollit Cohen and Courtney Toombs shared their secrets and fears with each other and kept the faith through their teenage ups and downs. What the book offers readers (besides clueing parents in to the staggering amount of pot a group of high-achieving girls can smoke while still getting accepted to top tier colleges) is the usual group of important issues facing teens--but in their own words.

      These girls complain about being left out. They bitch about their parents and teachers not "getting it" or being stupid. They write eagerly about how much fun they had at impromptu gatherings where vodka and marijuana were flowing plentifully. They assess each others' boyfriends--and girlfriends. They accent their observations with doodles, photos, sarcastic quips and faux-ghetto language. This book, now being exposed to the world, was once their refuge for profanity-laced honesty, and they heap it on. They are quick to remind each other when their behavior is "not cool" (i.e. one of them is leaving the rest of them out with her new buddy), but are overwhelmingly supportive of each other--and especially each other's sexual freedom. The collective ethos is friends should hook up with whoever they want, as long as they are okay with it, and it doesn't make them feel bad.

      The book feels too inside-jokey and exhibitionist to be read cover to cover, and the girls' reproduced handwriting can be tricky to navigate. Still, it's important and refreshing to have such direct exposure to teens' voices: hilarious, confused, strident and introspective. While SATs and grades pop up throughout the "notebook," what's regularly on these young authors' minds is not whether they'll be accepted to the college of their dreams, but whether they're making a mistake by going all the way with a certain someone. In fact, their fixation on the dramatic ups and downs of their lives--summed up by phrases like: Boys are the worst!--sounds similar to the obsessiveness Robbins describes about college. And therein lies an important truth: toning down the "overachievement" craze may require the exact same cure as comforting a scorned-in-love sixteen year old. Instead of sweeping policy changes, a real transformation may simply require parents to look their teens in the eyes and say, "It may feel like it now, but this is really not the be-all and end-all of your life."

      Now there's a motto all of the authors in this group could agree upon. √