the Practical Parent
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The First Year of High School
by Michael Simon, MFT
I was recently interviewed by a high school journalist on the topic of being a freshman. I decided to reprint a portion of that interview here, as educators begin their second month of working with their new freshman classes, and parents begin to understand the challenges for their first-year sons and daughters.
How do freshmen feel when they first enter high school?
Usually, a mixture of excited and scared…with an emphasis on “scared.” But the whole deal about being a first-year student, and being in high school in general is the sort of unspoken code that you’re not supposed to show how scared you are and how lost you feel. I can’t tell you how many first-years used to show up in my office feeling really upset and thinking that they must absolutely be the only person that felt overwhelmed, stressed or just lost about how to keep up. In fact, that person was probably the fifth person that day that came in and said the exact same thing. Also, how you feel about beginning a new school in general is influenced by so many different factors like: Are you going to a school that you wanted to? Are your friends going to the same school? Is this a “new” school for you, i.e., did you move to the school from out of town or did you know about this school and always plan to go there because your older sibling went there or you know people who go there now? Did you have trouble in middle school? Do you even like school? Did you just leave behind a group of friends? There are so many things that help determine how you feel when you first enter high school, and most of whether you’re excited, scared, worried or angry has to do with things that many parents, teachers, administrators and even students themselves don’t adequately appreciate. It’s tough being a first-year student, I think.
Medically-speaking, are freshman brains more undeveloped than those of seniors, for instance? If so, how does this influence their behavior?
Well, yes. Most first-year students are 13 or 14 years old and since brain development requires time, it is just true that most 17-19 year-olds are more mature, from the perspective of brain development, than most 13-14 year-olds. This difference in brain maturation influences a ton of things. The brain develops, in general terms, from the back of the brain to the front of the brain. The frontal lobes (or what is called the prefrontal cortex) is an area of the brain that is primarily active in what neuroscientists call “executive functioning.” Executive functioning includes important abilities like: the ability to plan and strategize in advance for events on the more-distant horizon; the ability to put off immediate reward and gratification for future gain; the ability to multitask and still keep long- and short-term goals in mind; the ability to weigh different choices and use good judgment; the ability to troubleshoot, in advance and on-the-fly, and a host of other functions that an “executive” running a large organization would need to have. One way of defining maturity, from the perspective of brain science, would be to say that maturity is a relative state of brain competence reached when the connections between the more centrally-located brain functions having to do with emotion, rewards, pleasure and memory are made with the prefrontal cortex, so that our feelings, our memory of what to do, and our ability to organize our experience and not just do what feels good in the moment is maximized. For girls, the maturation of the brain is fairly complete by 24 or so, and for guys, this maturation occurs by about one year later. Yes, that’s right. From the perspective of brain development, maturity doesn’t really occur until about 25! This process of making connections between the limbic system (the center of our emotions) and the prefrontal cortex takes a long time, and requires lots of experience and usually lots of mistakes. So, that’s another way of saying, yes, of course, younger folks have less well developed brains. That’s not because young = stupid. It’s because young = not enough time. On the other hand, as any honest adult will tell you, living a long time doesn’t auto-matically make you wise, kind or mature in other senses of the word.
What are some positive qualities of the freshman student that other students might not have?
Great question. Freshman can be really fearless, despite their insecurities. You might think, “what the heck, nobody really knows me here…I can re-invent myself!” You get the chance to try new friends, new looks, new attitudes, new clubs, sports and activities that you might not have tried out in the past. Now this is what sometimes gets Freshman the reputation of being “flaky” or changeable. But this is an incredibly positive opportunity in my opinion, that you sort of get “permission” to try on lots of different roles and approaches to your life before you find out what works for you. Freshman are natural explorers, and it’s a great thing when they exercise this ability.
The Challenges of Private School
by Michael Simon, MFT
Status anxiety, something so universal that it rarely gets mentioned directly, is a kind of deep anxiety and suffering about what others think of us; it’s about whether we’re judged a success or a failure. Status anxiety is an intensive and pervasive worry about whether the world loves you. Author Alain De Botton notes that “we see ourselves as fortunate only when we have as much as, or more than, those we have grown up with, work alongside, have as friends or identify with in the public realm.”
Thanks to the Internet, television, film, radio and mass-market books, teens now have virtually the entire world to identify with, when it comes to figuring out whether they’re a winner or loser. It is exceedingly easy now—perhaps more than any other time in history—to see who is judged “successful” and what kinds of goodies are awarded to those people.
The job of a teenager is, especially in high school, to develop a unique identity. Teens can’t help but care deeply about status because status is about the value accorded to their identity in the world. In my travels across the United States, I have found that many American high school students, especially those in the independent school world, almost regardless of geographic location, socioeconomic status, cultural and ethnic background now feel that they have the right to be rich, to have high-profile publicity, celebrity looks and high status jobs. Who can blame our teens? Their mindsets are partly the expression of belief that everyone has equal opportunity to acquire status in America. And the desire to be rich, look great and have high status matters so much to teens because they are in a period of life where they desperately need the approval (and love) of the wider world. As De Botton wrote, “the desire to be successful, to be accorded respect, to be noticed and to have what is noticed valued is hard to escape.”
I’m not saying that having a “good” life through the acquisition of status rewards should or can be avoided. But parents ask me all the time whether the problems of adolescents are unique in the U.S., for example: drugs, binge drinking, Internet addiction and issues of sexuality. They’re not unique–well, not exactly. But it’s worth noting that these problems are starting to become more common in other countries as consumerism becomes a part of those cultural and national psyches. In addition, globalization and the Internet are exporting American culture and values throughout the world.
The roads to misery are legion: violence, poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, depression and other mental illnesses, the loss of loved ones and so on. These are sometimes unalterable tragedies, through which we become aware of power and powerlessness. It is not hard to suffer or feel miserable if you experience these in your lifetime. But the misery caused by the anxiety over status is something changeable through awareness of its causes alone. The suffering over status is not something necessary, even though it is ubiquitous. Part of the beauty (and difficulty) of parenting teens is that we are still close enough to help them understand that there is more than one way of being “successful” at life.
