Do you put pressure on your teenage son?

Adolescent depression has become a major, growing concern. And not just for teenagers with unhappy home lives or obvious difficulties. More and more, teens with all the advantages of financial stability and supportive parents say they feel insecure and anxious, succumbing to self-destructive behaviors like substance abuse and self-injury.

But why?

The book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids talks about the “toxic brew of achievement pressure and isolation from parents.” Author Madeline Levine says that even though these things “appear to be mutually exclusive (somebody has to be putting the pressure on), they are not… We can be overinvolved in the wrong things, and underinvolved in the right things.”

Levine continues to talk about how parents can become overinvolved by pushing their children to achieve, and forgetting to connect with them on other terms. Parents need to create more dialogue, spend more quality time together, show empathy, and listen instead of lecturing about average grades.

A major theme of the book is that “The most important task of childhood and adolescence is a ... 

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