Adrift Amid Peer Pressure
Richard Hersh calls it the culture of neglect: kids grow up overly dependent on their peers—"in essence, kids raising kids"—without developing a strong sense of self. A RAND scholar, former director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education, as well as former president of Trinity College and William Smith and Hobart Colleges, Hersh contends that adults—parents, neighbors, teachers, professors—have inadvertently done children and adolescents an injustice. They allow them to be socialized by television, the Internet, and by their peers rather than by caring, demanding, and mentoring adults. At the same time, the adults view kids as helpless, sheltering them from a wide range of experiences, "the risk of failure and being hurt being so great."
Both forms of deprivation weaken the young from within, so that kids go off to college socially and emotionally fragile, manifest in a rising tide of distress: anorexia and bulimia, along with depression, physical violence, alcohol and other drug abuse, and suicide attempts. Approximately 40 percent of females now experience an eating disorder at some point during their years of college, data show.
Missing in action is a rich internal life independent of peers. Hersh sees residential college life perpetuating and intensifying an adolescent pattern of overreliance on peer approval. It also, he says, elevates the body over the mind. And that combination subverts the developmental challenge of finding something far more durable: a stable identity.
The way New York psychotherapist Steven Levenkron sees it, the adults essentially outsource parenting. Levenkron has been treating young women with eating disorders for more than 30 years. He wrote one of the first books about anorexia, The Best Little Girl in the World, in 1978, and he has written textbooks on treatment of the disorder. Why is it, he asks, that some girls succumb to the peer pressure and some don't? "Those who aren't mentored by parents are not inoculated against peer pressure. They wind up turning to their peers and to the media, to the outside society, for guidance on how to appeal to men." Without a strong, healthy attachment to parents, kids become fair game for what he sees as destructive messages about femininity from Hollywood.
But the damage goes especially deep because contemporary adolescents "have no language for reflection," he says. "They don't know how to think about hurts. That makes them feel alone in the world." Anorexics, he contends, have only a very primitive language. "They can talk your head off about body measurements and fats. It's all transacted with about 12 words."
From Comparison to Cutthroat Competition
It's bad enough that teens are swaddled in software and bound by a branch of consumer culture crafted exclusively for them. But there is something about herding them together 24/7 that actively distorts their thinking, specifically about bodies. As a result, America's universities have become incubators of eating disorders. Attending a residential college actually warps perception of self in relation to others, finds psychologist Catherine Sanderson. At a time and place where people should be getting smarter about everything, they are getting a lot less smart about themselves.
A professor of psychology at Amherst College, Sanderson looked at perceptions of the norms of thinness among women at Amherst, Princeton, and Smith colleges. When women arrive at college as freshmen, they believe that all the other women at their school are highly motivated to be thin—much thinner than they themselves want to be.
Mistakenly, they assume that other people's statements accurately reflect their behavior. They know that they themselves talk the talk in the dining hall and other public places—but privately slip out later for a bag of Doritos. They feel ashamed and isolated, without realizing that almost everyone else is wolfing down chips in private, too. Students develop a false impression of the norm.
But the damage is done. The feelings of shame and isolation lead almost directly to bingeing and purging and other forms of disordered eating. "The more women perceive themselves as different, the more symptoms they show of anorexia or bulimia," Sanderson finds.
"The problem with college is that the norms are in your face," she notes. You eat in a common dining hall, exercise in a common fitness center, shower together, and get dressed together. "The togetherness surrounds people at the key life period in which this stuff matters."
Norms matter especially at times of transition, such as going off to boarding school or starting college. In order to make it in their new environment, students look to others there to figure out what's normal. We all navigate the social universe by making comparisons to others, but researchers have long known that widespread insecurity (Will I get into Harvard? Is my family coming apart at the seams? Do I even have an identity of my own? Why do I feel so different from everyone?) exacerbates the process, turning comparison—with peers, with media figures—into cutthroat competition.
In such environments, misperception accelerates over time. Asked what they weigh, freshmen say "around 130," exactly what they believe other women weigh. But surveyed again the next year, after gaining about five pounds, the same women say—accurately—that they weigh 135. However, they think others weigh "around 125." "You're gaining weight and you know it, yet you believe that other women are losing weight," explains Sanderson. It's ironic, she notes, that this is a topic about which college actually makes people stupid: The more time they spend in school, the less accurate they become in their perceptions.
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