Can you really have it all?

kevin | Decision Making | Sunday, April 1st, 2007

There is an article in the Sunday New York Times called “For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too” that tugs hard at my parental heart strings. I’ll cut right to it, a quote deep in the article that speaks to my fatherly and middle-aged sensibility . . . [read]

Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”

You’ll have to read the article to get the flavor of life, at least as it’s snapshotted, at the top of the socio/economic/educational/opportunity ladder. Over time, whatever imbalances the girls profiled in the article experience will get sorted out, hopefully without too much damage accrued along the way. But “anorexia of the soul”! That’s a bell ringer. In the incessant crush to have it all, do we run the risk of finding ourselves with nothing?

Here’s a clip from the article . . .

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be “what any young person can be” when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

How a 17 year old girl is to sort out what seem to be such wildly conflicting demands is beyond me. And no, I don’t think you can have it all.