College students are under more stress than ever before. In part, it has to do with parents’ conscious and unconscious expectations and an educational system that pushes them toward high achievement and intense competition. High school students are pressured to achieve perfect grades and perfect test scores on college entrance exams to even be considered for elite colleges. In addition, they’re forced to think about the future in an adult-like manner for which they aren’t prepared. They’re also working in adult-like internships and jobs to get a leg up in the job market even before they’ve been able to explore their many options in university. This intense focus on the future isn’t normal, or healthy, for high school and college-aged students who are developmentally focused on the present.
Unfortunately, this inability to be future-thinking also increases their chances of suicide. Suicide is an action taken by a young adult who can’t see past their current adversity or distress to a brighter or more hopeful future, which makes their pain in the moment less bearable and more desperate. As adults, because we have working prefrontal cortices, we not only can see that tomorrow can be better, but we also have perspective that helps us to navigate adversity and stress.
Environmental stress is also toxic for adolescents and young adults who are overwhelmed by technology and social media that focus on perfection, parental and personal high expectations, and a comparison culture. They’re intensely aware of an unstable job market and political and economic system that makes their futures feel more uncertain, peppered with global warming, which suggests there may not be a future at all.
What Parents Can Do
So what can we, as parents, do about this crisis? It starts in the early years. Children aren’t born resilient. As parents, we help them build resilience, not through toughness, but rather through tenderness, sensitivity, empathy, and our physical and emotional presence. We need to prepare our kids for a stressful adolescence by being as present as possible in the early years to lay the foundation of emotional security they‘ll need to withstand the stress, adversity, competition, and pressure they’ll face as young adults entering college.When they’re under 3, and even throughout their childhood, we can help to regulate their distress, sadness, anger, fear, and excitement by helping them process how they’re feeling without judgment, criticism, dismissal, or rejection. We also help them become resilient by providing them with a sense of safety and a sense of perspective about what’s really important. We can model for them that we’re imperfect and struggle, too, but emphasize that we’re always focused on what’s important—family and relationships—not money, status, and high achievement.
The best time to prepare our adolescents for young adulthood is when they’re young and under our roof. This doesn’t mean that we can’t provide them with much of the same empathy, sensitivity, and emotional processing when they head to college, but we’re more limited, then, because they’re often physically far away.
- increased moodiness,
- increased and chronic sadness about the past or anxiety about the future
- hopelessness or despair about the future
- social isolation or social difficulties
- reduced physical activity
- sleep issues (too much or too little sleep, problems going to sleep, and problems staying asleep)
- eating issues (binge eating, weight gain, or extreme weight loss)
- a drop in their academic performance
- increased alcohol or drug use
- lack of motivation to engage or participate in activities at school
- roommate problems (they are living away from home, which is a secure haven, and are now forced to live in a small space with someone where there may be conflict).
The first stop should be a well-trained psychodynamic therapist, not a CBT or DBT therapist (this is only for kids who are non-verbal and have difficulty expressing their emotions verbally). If they can talk about their feelings, then find someone who is trained to help them talk about their feelings in depth rather than just focus on symptom relief. And lastly, don’t rush to a psychiatrist for medication (this should be the last resort), unless you have tried talk therapy and they are already advanced in their depression and anxiety, in which case medication may be necessary to get them back to a place where talk therapy can have an impact.
Ultimately, a big part of the solution to the mental health crisis among emerging young adults is to change our ways as adults, parents, and educational leaders. We need to take a good, long look in the mirror at what we are doing to our children in projecting self-sufficiency, independence, and resilience on them before they have even developed a sense of security and safety in their environment. We are expecting too much of our kids and giving too little. We are creating a toxic culture in which they feel they have no alternatives other than to end their lives.
It’s not too late for the adults to fix this, but we need to act quickly to make changes—meaning prioritizing children over everything else in our lives, including material success and work, and allowing our kids to be kids. That means rallying to take the pressure off of them, both internally and externally. Only then can we hope to turn around this epidemic of suicide in young people.
