What Changes During Adolescence?

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Academic pressure is real, widespread, and can harm teens' mental health.

Well-meant parental advice to reduce stress can feel to teens like more pressure.

Start a conversation. Ask your teen, “How important do you think your grades are to me?” Then just listen.

A close parent-teen relationship is one of the strongest buffers against the impact of academic pressure.

“If I don’t get into a good college, my life will be ruined.”

“If I don’t get into a good college, my life will be ruined.”

In more than 30 years of working with adolescents, I’ve heard some version of this more times than I can count. I hear it especially often this time of year when high school seniors are working on college applications. I understood it differently, however, when the teenager overwhelmed by academic pressure was my own child.

During her senior year, my daughter was taking many AP classes and spending 20 hours a week on extracurricular activities. She was doing all this because she believed she had to get into a “good college.” She was often sleeping fewer than six hours a night, was increasingly irritable, had circles under her eyes, and seemed miserable.

My wife and I are both therapists. My wife specializes in stress management. So we did all the “right” things: we encouraged our daughter to sleep more, take breaks, see friends, study less, and try meditation.

She wasn’t interested. The more we pushed, the more she resisted. All we accomplished was a series of big fights, which cost her even more sleep and left her feeling even more stressed and further behind.

We wondered what we were doing wrong.

What we eventually realized was that sometimes the most helpful thing parents can do is stop trying to change their child’s experience long enough to understand it.

The pressure driving my daughter wasn’t just in her head. It came from her friends, her school, and our town. The environment surrounding many of our teens is a pressure cooker.

In a survey of more than 270,000 high school students between 2010 and 2023, the nonprofit Challenge Success found that “students consistently report overall workload, homework, tests or........

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