Amazing Girls

Note from Anastasia: While I've had to put the Youth Talks podcast on hiatus for now in order to focus on making Ypulse a viable business, luckily a couple of the teens from the podcast have decided to write periodic posts to Ypulse. This first post is from Kate. From her Youth Talks bio:

"Kate is a lover of film, literature, swimming, cartoons, humor, long walks, bears, and donkeys. She likes to write, make cartoons, and has developed a passion for video. Other times she just likes to be with her family and friends, swim, read, or sleep."

You will see more posts from Kate over the next couple of months. If you want to make her day, leave her a comment!

Kate wrote this post in response to the recent New York Times story (it's in their paid archive now) on "Amazing Girls":

"Be yourself" is a piece advice that has come out of the mouths of parents, teachers, and pop icons for a long time. For high school girls, this is not good enough. According to the New York Times, teen girls can be themselves as long as they're perfect. The Times follows girls who attend a prestigious high school in the very affluent Newton, Massachusetts. These girls are under pressure to push themselves past their limits in order to get into elite colleges and universities. Like the Newton teens, many girls feel the pressure to do it all: AP classes, honors, perfect test scores, sports, being thin and pretty, performing arts, jobs, clubs, and maintaining a healthy social life. They are pressured to do all this as though it's easy.

When I read this article, I felt baffled and depressed, but then it began to make sense to me. I have witnessed high expectations put on girls at my school. The main reason why everyone is stressed out is that more people than ever before are going to college, especially girls. They are pressured to outdo themselves at school so they can get into elite colleges. The college process has become more tedious and selective since colleges are also dealing with the "echo boom" (children of the baby boomers). Parents play a big role in the pressure, but teachers can also have high expectations for some of their top students. I personally know some girls at my school who are pushed by their parents to work hard, usually with the subtext that they want their children to have better opportunities and sometimes they feel that getting into top schools will give them that.

I’m all for women having access to higher education and being successful, but not if they can't have lives of their own. There is insane pressure to be perfect in high school. Adolescence has always been a tough stage of life, but now unrealistic expectations make this worse. Teens should open themselves to challenging classes and extra curricular activities that interest them, but they also need to live, sleep, and have fun. They are at the peak of their curiosity and self-discovery, so why do parents, teachers, and other authority figures put such burdens on them?

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