Wealthy suburban teens struggled more than poor city kids

Suniya Luthar thought she had the explanation. A psychology researcher then at Columbia Teachers College, she had been studying teenagers growing up in poverty in the inner city and finding high rates of anxiety, depression, heavy drinking, and drug use. Poverty, she assumed, was doing the damage.

Then one of her graduate students stopped her cold. How do you know it is poverty, the student asked. What is your control group. Maybe teenagers from wealthy families are suffering just as much.

It was the question that redirected Luthar's career. She ran the same survey among teenagers in Westchester County, the affluent New York suburb, and got a result she had not expected. The suburban teenagers reported more anxiety and depression, along with more heavy drinking and illegal drug use, than the poor inner-city teenagers.

She had first blamed poverty for the distress she saw in the inner city. At first, as Peter Gray, an evolutionary psychologist who studies childhood, retells the story, Luthar called the Westchester pattern the problem of affluence. She concluded that pressure, not money, was the cause.

She began to identify what Luthar called "high achievement schools." The group included private prep schools and public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, but they shared the same pride in test scores and in how many graduates went on to elite colleges. That pride translated into pressure on students to earn top grades, post top test scores, and then stand out even further.

The pattern held beyond family income. Less affluent students who attended those schools suffered just as much as their wealthy classmates. And some wealthy teenagers escaped the worst of it. The difference, Luthar found, was how much pressure came from both the school and the parents to perform.

The protected teenagers had parents who genuinely did not care how they performed in school, who enjoyed them for who they were and would have accepted it if they chose not to go to college. The pressured teenagers carried the damage forward. When Luthar and colleagues followed them into college, they continued to struggle at much higher rates than students who had arrived with less pressure.

For Gray, the lesson is that grades, test scores, club presidencies, and spots on traveling teams are narrow achievements with little connection to adult life. The teenagers were not breaking under wealth. They were breaking under the demand to achieve.