As far back as Mozart, whose soaringly meticulous music was believed driven by his elders, children have felt pressure to excel and compete fiercely at early ages.
Nowhere is that truer than in modern-day America, where high school hoopsters have jumped directly to the NBA without going to college and academic honors can be as vital as air to the non-athletic.
In this country, stereotypes of the cloying stage-door mom and the oppressive Little League dad have been around for decades.
As technology seems to be driving life at an ever-widening throttle, the push to compete seems to be accelerating in children’s lives. Increasingly, entree into the best schools and best jobs is reserved not for mere achievers, but for overachievers, and society showers the hard-charging with accolades and attention.
On occasion, however, that push to succeed can backfire tragically. That was the case with 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, who died Thursday in a plane crash while trying to become the youngest pilot ever to fly coast-to-coast.
The idea, her parents have said, originated with her father but was enthusiastically embraced by Jessica. She clearly loved flying. Even so, Jessica’s endeavor serves as an extreme example of how the intense competitiveness of American society has filtered down to even its youngest members.
Sometimes there is a price.
“We’ve made childhood obsolete,” said pediatrician Anthony Delach. “Everything is about having a winning team, winning attitude. Unless we curtail this in some way, we’re going to continue to have more stress, more frustration, more sense of failure.”
Delach is in a good position to understand the problem. Last fall, the south suburban doctor caused a stir when he complained that an official of a youth football league in Palos Hills was helping youngsters obtain a prescription diuretic to cut weight.
It might be an overstatement to imply that the youth of today are being whipsawed into aggressiveness from all directions by pushy adults. Sometimes the motivation comes from within. The kid who spends hours on end pitching to an imaginary batter on the garage wall may be a natural jock. Likewise for the young chess prodigy who’ll battle endlessly with a computerized Bobby Fischer.
But enough troubling incidents have surfaced in recent years to turn heads, and to lead Delach to conclude: “It’s our fault as adults.”
There was the football coach at Libertyville High School who faked his own murder as an inspirational tool just before a big game. The Steinmetz High School academic decathlon team was stripped of its state title last year after it was discovered that its coach sneaked a peek at the answers and fed them to team members.
Though he insists it’s not a chronic problem, Bret Fahnstrom, a parks official in Oak Park, remembers the youth basketball game he was coaching in which the father of a star player was riding his son so hard from the stands that he had to be asked to leave.
“You could just see it in the kid’s eyes–he was falling apart,” Fahnstrom said.
Indeed, Rich Grodsky, the director of parks, forestry and recreation for Evanston, said enough problems have erupted with overzealous parents that the city recently took steps to minimize competitiveness in basketball, flag football and softball programs for grammar school-age youth. Scores are no longer posted or published, and playoffs have been eliminated.
“Some parents are living their sports lives through their kids,” Grodsky said. “We’ve had yelling, challenging referees on court, verbal attacks on kids so strong they might as well have hauled off and struck them. It’s a real small minority of parents, but it’s out there.”
Clearly such behavior is inappropriate. Though most parents don’t lose control, all face the challenge of deciding how far to go in encouraging and motivating their children.
“The parental dilemma is when do you push and when do you say it’s not so important that my child be an A student,” explained Pat Tolan, an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It’s hard to tell when you’re moving from helping your child to hurting them. Where do you step over the line?”
Modern life offers many examples–in gymnastics, ballet, music and even in academia–of children being pushed rapidly. Sometimes it’s too fast, sometimes appropriate.
“The tricky thing is to judge what’s right for your particular child,” said Mark Stein, a clinical psychologist at the University of Chicago.
“A child can be 4 and (not toilet-trained) and be viewed as behind when he’s really developmentally normal,” he explained.
The media play a role too. Newspapers and television surely would have hailed Jessica’s feat had she succeeded. And parents increasingly derive their images of proper development from what they see in the media, which often highlight extremes rather than the norm, Stein said.
Mark DeLong, director of Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, which deals with gifted children, said parents usually get into trouble when they see their kids as “projects” and try to steer them into a path the parents wish they themselves had taken.
“Children like to be challenged in areas that are of interest to them,” DeLong said. “For example, the kid who really likes mathematics will be engaged, fascinated and soak it up.”
But few childhood activities–in school, sports or hobbies–carry the inherent risks involved in piloting an airplane.
To some experts, a mission such as Jessica’s seemed a foolish indulgence.
Piloting a plane, noted Michael Bailey, an associate professor of psychology at Northwestern, requires not only technical skills but considerable experience to be able to react promptly to quick developing emergency situations.
“It’s great to encourage a youngster,” Bailey said. “But I’ve never seen anyone enable a child to do something this dangerous.”
