Being No.1 takes a toll among youth

Life in the Fast Lane Causes High-Achieving Teens to Consider Suicide

Top Teens Worry and Work Their Childhood Away in World Full of Guns and Gangs, Rampant Cheating, Rising College Costs and Drugs

These are the first three lines on a press release from Who's Who Among American High School Students. Somebody in the press office is working awfully hard to make us wonder what smart kids think.

For about the last eight years, I've noticed a pattern in these annual releases, which supposedly unveil the attitudes of the nation's highest-achieving juniors and seniors.

You think you're going to hear about how many hours they spent prepping for college boards. Instead, you find out more than half of them constantly feel stressed out, or a fourth have considered suicide.

I used to blow them off. I know a lot of smart kids who care a great deal about their grade-point averages, but haven't fallen into drugs or cheating, and who aren't suicidal.

But I have to be honest. Some small part of the findings rings true.

Rampantly Depressing

A friend of mine teaches at a top academic high school. She tells me her students don't have time for anything ''fun'' in class. They don't want to try anything offbeat or creative. They just want to know what it takes to get their A.

She says they don't seem very happy.

A veteran school administrator says some parents of smart kids seem obsessed with their kids' performance, as if it's a matter of their own prestige. They will accept nothing less than the right school, the right schedule, the right grades and the right college choice.

He says their kids don't seem very happy.

I stop by to see a friend. Her high school daughter looks up from the kitchen table and smiles wearily. She is deep into her nightly routine of at least three hours of homework. Not only does she not seem happy, she does not seem inspired or curious or enthralled or any of those other things we used to think happened when one was getting a marvelous education.

And finally there's the really, really smart senior in an intense college-prep program. She tells me she does not sleep well. She wonders whether she can ''handle it all.'' She is at the top of her class, Ivy-bound and miserable.

Lost generation

Us.

Overextended. Pressure-driven. Fast-track. Name-in-the-program successful.

I can actually remember a time when it was sort of charming to be an undecided major in college. Some people even took a year off before they enrolled. Others set out on grand adventures to ''find themselves.''

And sometimes they actually did.

Today, teen-agers don't have time in their schedules to wonder whether they're lost.

But that's OK. Mom and Dad would probably take away the keys to the Jeep if they did.

Those laid-back, adventuresome days are gone. But there was nothing so wrong with them. So what if the world has changed? The emotional makeup of young people hasn't.

The part of their lifespan that should be filled with risk, courage, creativity and exploration has been boiled down to a table full of homework and early acceptance at the right college.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say they ''work and worry their childhood away,'' as Who's Who does. But let's admit David Elkind's Hurried Child is now checking his watch as he runs through adolescence.

When one day he sits late at the office, miserable over work demands, forgetful of his dreams but still salivating for the next promotion, we'll know we prepared him perfectly for his career.

But terribly for his life.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

Published Nov. 16, 1996.