For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

This well done article has elicted a number of good responses including a separate column responding to the article by Judith Warner here.
Ms. Warner writes:
These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.

I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.

And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.
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But I do think that figuring out at 18 – and not at 28 or 38 or 48, when the stakes are so much higher – that achievement for achievement’s sake is basically a zero-sum game is a very good thing. That increasing numbers of college-bound seniors are being forced to come to that realization is perhaps the one upside to today’s all-but-random college admissions game.

That is, if they have the eyes to see it. And some clearly do. I defer here to the words of Kat Jiang, a Newton North senior, who dismissed her precollege experience – and her perfect 2400 SAT score (“I was lucky”) in a video interview that accompanies Rimer’s piece online: “You can be good at a lot of things or bad at a lot of things, and it has virtually no impact on whether or not you are good at life,” she said.

Wish someone had told me that when I was her age.

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A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists — from Alice Miller to Madeline Levine — have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career.

Many, I think, never figure out how to handle the emptiness that comes when the rush of achievement fades away, or the loneliness — the sense of invisibility — when no one is there to hand out yet another “A.” The fact is: when you are narrowly programmed to achieve, you are like a windup toy with only one movement in its repertoire. You’re fine when you’re wound up; but wind you down, and you grind to a halt.
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We could also make the extraordinary article on the Harvard admissions Web site “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation” required reading for all parents, starting when their kids are in preschool. “Even those who are doing extraordinarily well, the ‘happy warriors’ of today’s ultracompetitive landscape, are in danger of emerging a bit less human as they try to keep up with what may be increasingly unrealistic expectations,” the authors, who include Harvard’s dean of admissions, write. “[T]he only road to real success is to become more fully oneself.”