On Monday night, another teenager walked on to the railway tracks and into the path of an oncoming train. He is the fourth teenager to commit suicide since spring of this year. A fifth was saved just in time earlier this year. All of them are students at the nearby prestigious Gunn High School. Gunn is located in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area. At least one of the kids was doing very well academically and well liked at school. I can’t begin to fathom the anguish of the parents of the dead teenagers.
When I was reading about the suicides earlier this year, I was struck by a comment from one of the adolescent counselors. I searched for the article (published in the local San Jose Mercury News), but it is now hidden behind a paid archive. Luckily, I found a cached version on Google. He said:
“Kids are expected to do better than their parents,” he said. “But if you look at where we are, how do you top Silicon Valley? Especially in Palo Alto, where the majority of the community has extremely huge salaries. Most families have college degrees, if not Ph.D. or M.D., and houses with enormous square footage. So how is the next generation expected to do better than that?”
I don’t think anyone yet really knows why the teenagers committed suicide. But if this counselor is right, is this what we aspire for our children ? That they be better than us academically, materially and in their careers ? How do we continue to think, justify, and rationalize that these lead to more satisfying lives ?
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