Under pressure

Adults have many opinions about teenagers, and for the most part they're negative. Teenagers are unpredictable and mean, we say, or they're lazy and entitled, or they're self-involved¹, selfie-taking, Snapchat-addicted narcissists who don't understand how easy they have it.
It's easy to forget how challenging being a teenager can be, how the world seems ready to foist² adult responsibilities onto you without offering any adult freedom in return. [...]
But in the affluent³, high-achieving communities crowded around Silicon Valley, there is one aspect of teenagers' lives that parents treat with the utmost seriousness: their child's acceptance to an elite (preferably Ivy League) university.
When you're a teenager in these environments, with a family full of brilliant minds who worked their way through Stanford or MIT or Harvard, the pressure to succeed can become a driving force and a source of anxiety. [...]
We often think of work — and workaholism — as a problem of the adult world, and yet young people in these situations are driven so hard to achieve that they often crack⁴.

“By my senior year, I was student body president, editor-in-chief of the yearbook, and the leader of many community mental health initiatives. Combined with academics¹, this definitely wasn't always an easy load to bear. It was manageable most of the time, but when things went wrong and were out of my control, I often struggled² to take care of myself without sacrificing some of the things I was working on.”

“The stress and academic rigor of school set unattainable expectations of perfection. [...] Pressures increased as the need to get into prestigious colleges loomed¹ closer and closer; [...] Silicon Valley also prides itself² on being the valley of workaholics — students grow up in a culture that generally frowns upon³ doing things that aren't productive.”