Breaking the Burnout Cycle

You, parent, are under a tremendous amount of pressure: financial, social, and otherwise. There are so many factors in today's society that lead you to parent differently (and more) than any previous generation we've known. It's a heavy cost. If you have teenagers in high school, and especially if you are a member of Gen X (the "textbook" sandwich generation), if you are a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are an immigrant, you are feeling pretty burnt out.

Whether or not you have the time, resources, or interest in figuring out how you ended up here, if you can keep your head above water just long enough, your instinct is to make sure your kids will never be in this situation. You hope the world will be different, but you also know that you need some sort of insurance policy on your kid's success just in case.

Investing in their education is the way you do that. It may be with money - private school, expensive extracurriculars, tutors, even moving to a strong public school district with a culture of academic achievement. But it can also be through time and energy - always encouraging, pushing, begging them to get good grades and take hard classes, committing to extracurriculars, doing all the things. You invest your attention - you pay close heed to what other parents are talking about, what other students are doing, your child's grades, and what it all means for college. You are hyper-vigilant.

But did you know that your best intentions may be setting your child up for the kind of burnout you are currently feeling?

Reading your behavior around their education, your kids get the message loud and clear:

My parent's happiness and peace of mind depends on me grinding away at academics and extracurriculars. Because college.

As you ponder how to get off the hamster wheel you're stuck on, let's also consider the "hamster wheel training" you are providing for your kids.

Burnout starts early.

While we're at it, let's investigate our language here. Many suggest, and I agree, that instead of speaking of burnout - an individual experience from which the individual must recover through their own efforts - what we should really be talking about is exploitation - a collective condition caused by an exploitative system that we must collectively understand, reform, dismantle, and struggle against. Together.

And is the college process exploitative? You betcha.

The application process to US colleges is not about rewarding the best and the brightest, it is not a meritocracy, it is not about who deserves what because of their intellect or achievements.

It's a system by which colleges meet their institutional priorities. Often those priorities center around money. Yes, even for public institutions.

It's true that a student's academics and extracurriculars signal whether they would be a good fit for the college, academically and culturally. But the most selective colleges could fill their classes many times over with the amount of these "good fits" that apply. So truly, this system uses students to further to goals of the institution.

And the myth of merit leads students and their families to believe they must give 100% 100% of the time in order to beat out the competition and gain admission. They burn themselves out just to get in.

You could argue this is an unintended consequence of how our higher education system works. Whether there is an evil puppetmaster behind all of this or not, it's clear that this is a system that works very well for colleges and they have very little incentive to change it.

So what do we do? I'm not suggesting we boycott college, though some may rightly be questioning whether they even need an expensive college degree to pursue the life they want.

What I am suggesting is that we get informed. Educate yourself on how this system works, so you can adjust your behaviors accordingly and "right-size" the psychological prize of a brand-name college for you and your kids. Prepare them with the tools to stay focused on what's meaningful to them, to define success on their own terms, to live in integrity with their values, and to set and maintain good boundaries.

In short, all the things you are doing to combat burnout - teach those mindsets and tools to your kids before they have to learn them.

And if you want help integrating these lessons into your student's academic life, follow me on Linkedin and join our community of like-minded parents over on Circle. Helping kids take the path of self-discovery as they navigate high school is my passion, and the more people I can help get into college without losing themselves in the process, the better.