The kids are not all right, says Marin author/therapist

Friday, December 22, 2006 | by dan pine

Madeline Levine calls it her "worst moment" as a parent.

Her youngest son had worked hard in one of his high school classes, going into final exams with an A average. He ended up with -- horror of horrors -- a grade of B-plus.

"I laced into him," recalls the Kentfield psychotherapist. "He crawled into bed, sobbing. It took me a few minutes to get that I was making a terrible mistake. I had yelled at him because I was afraid some opportunity would pass him by."

Levine saw then that even she was not immune to certain negative forces now unloosed in the parenting universe. That incident and other troubling trends inspired her to write "The Price of Privilege," a book about a new generation of unhappy kids brought low by parental pressure and material advantage.

Apparently, she struck a nerve. Published last July, the book is in its ninth printing. At every stop on her cross-country book tour, she says, organizers have had to set up extra chairs and turn on the P.A. so overflow crowds could hear her.

Levine invariably cites the statistics: 30 to 40 percent of adolescents from affluent homes experience psychological symptoms ranging from depression to drug use to anorexia. Ten to 15 percent of depressed teens attempt suicide, some successfully.

"There is a tipping point, and I think we're at it," she says of the mental health crisis in affluent teens. "If it's not your own kid, it's your sister's kid or the kid down the block. Parents are scared to death, and with good cause."

Levine says she lucked out with her own "three fabulous sons." She credits the Jewish community at Congregation Rodef Sholom with playing a role in her kids' overall sense of well-being.

"All my kids were bar mitzvahed," she says. "All three have been to Israel and all three feel far more Jewish than I would have expected. There couldn't have been a better group of people to inspire my kids than at Rodef Sholom.'

She says her family now tries to have Friday night Shabbat dinners because, "as I wrote [the book], I looked around and decided to take my own advice."

Having treated adolescents for most of her 25-year career as a Marin-based psychotherapist, Levine has seen a steady increase in teen clients reporting serious psychological problems. Much of it, she concludes, stems from relentless parental pressure to achieve, either in sports, academics or other competitive fields.

"Most of us were raised to believe education is your ticket," she says, "but the research shows that the school you go to has a zero correlation with how happy you are in life. If all they get is pressure on grades, then the other tasks of self-management and community fall by the wayside."

Levine cites the usual suspects as contributing to the problem of unhappy teens: violent and hypersexualized media, rampant consumerism, divorce. But she says good parenting trumps those bad influences.

Levine insists she is not against having high expectations of one's child nor is she opposed to parental involvement in their kids' lives. But she does draw a line.

"What's really damaging is intrusion," she adds. "I mean the psychological manipulation of kids by guilt or shame to have them capitulate to parental demands.'

Growing up, Levine never had to worry about the pernicious influence of money. There wasn't much. Her grandparents came from Russia and Lithuania, her father was a cop, and during her school years, Levine was too busy doing homework and working minimum wage jobs to get into trouble. Times are different now.

"There's been a lot of loss and disconnection," says Levine. "In the Chassidic community you have a million anchors. If you hightail it to California you have no anchors. We are overinvested in our kids because we're incredibly lonely."




"The Price of Privilege" by Madeline Levine ($24.95 HarperCollins, 246 pages).