High Anxiety

"My problem right now is that I'm feeling like I'm not going to be able to get into a good school; I'm going to end up working at McDonald's," worries Katy. "I break down every day. It's horrible, all of this pressure from school. I always feel stupid all the time, because of these IB classes: I'm not taking enough, or I'm not doing well enough."

On the face of it, this off-the-charts stress may seem surprising. More than a decade ago, several studies, including the American Association of University Women's landmark "How Schools Shortchange Girls," found that girls were disadvantaged in school compared with their male counterparts. Since then, however, girls have made so many advances that the positions have entirely shifted. In our poll, for example, 44 percent of girls reported making mostly A's, compared with just 26 percent of boys, a finding that is amplified in national statistics. According to a 2004 report issued by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, high school girls now display higher educational aspirations than their male peers, and are more likely than boys to enroll in college immediately after high school. More girls than boys are valedictorians; more girls than boys participate in extracurriculars (except for athletics); far fewer girls than boys drop out of high school. In the past 20 years, girls have become much more likely than they once were to take advanced math and science courses, and to push themselves overall. In 2002, the majority of AP examination takers -- 56 percent -- were, like Katy, female.

In short, the strides for girls have been tremendous, and in this, too, Katy is representative. Last year she made A's in all of her classes, including biology, "where I got, like, 103." Her GPA is 3.94, and she ranks 23rd in her class of 450 students. All of which suggests that stress and achievement are related: Up to a point, it is the anxiety that girls like Katy are feeling that compels them to push themselves so hard and, as a result, do so well.

But there is anxiety, and there is anxiety. Notably, the 2004 federal report also found that even as girls are performing better and better, their enjoyment of high school is plummeting. In what may be the dreariest evidence of gender parity, federal statistics show that girls, who back when they were being shortchanged liked high school more than boys did, now dislike it at least as much as boys do. "The percentages of both male and female seniors reporting positive feelings toward school sharply declined from 1980 to 2001, with female students' positive feelings toward school declining at a faster rate," the report notes. This finding is deeply felt by Katy, who despite how well she is doing, despite how great her school is, how diverse, how high-quality, says with conviction that "the sooner I can get out of high school, the happier I'll be."

In a way, Katy's comment strikes, for a girl, a rare note of optimism, a passing hope that somewhere after high school life might be easier. This is unusual: Our poll also found that girls, by and large, expect that life is going to get worse, not better. Across a broad range of measures, girls' views of the future tend to be more negative than boys'. Just 51 percent think the best years of the country are ahead of us, compared with 65 percent of boys. Only 36 percent of girls think that when they are adults, Americans will be more moral than they are now, compared with 47 percent of boys. And 62 percent of girls think there will be another major terrorist attack in their lifetime, compared with 53 percent of boys. Boys are split over whether children today have a harder time growing up than their parents did, while 60 percent of girls feel that growing up is harder today than it used to be.

In general, girls just seem to worry more than boys do, with Katy an ideal example. "I shouldn't, but I worry about a lot of things," she said just before school started. She was sitting in the living room of the large and comfortable Gainesville house that she shares with her father, a lobbyist, and her mother, an editor who works a part-time schedule organized around the needs of the household. Superficially, Katy's concerns seem excessive, to say the least: a loved and lovely girl with an excellent mind and exceedingly conscientious work habits and a two-parent family and five older siblings -- three of them girls -- whom she values and admires. But family brings pressures of its own. Katy looks up to her siblings and worries that she will not do as well as, for example, her sister Jami, who took tons of IB classes and drove herself crazy but got into the University of Virginia and now, at 27, has a baby and a great job in public relations consulting.

"My sister is a genius," says Katy. "I have all these awesome brothers and sisters. I have so much pressure to live up to what they've done."

"Jami thinks now that high school stunted her growth," Katy's mom, Alice, reminds her youngest. "She told me last night that if she were to choose the most useful class she took in high school, it would be driver's ed. She said, 'It taught me a skill.' Everything else was just extremely stressful. She had to live on so little sleep. She was led to believe, by people she trusted, that if she did not excel in high school she could not possibly succeed in life."

"I think it's true," Katy reflects, "what Jami said about it stunting her growth."

In fact, because of Alice Haddow's experience with her older girls, she has adopted a different strategy with Katy. "I'm sure that if she was one of my older children, I would be pushing her as hard as she wants to push herself," says Alice. Having seen what they went through, however, she now sees it as her role to prevent Katy from pushing herself too hard. She and Katy's father, Mac, have told Katy that she can take only one IB class. If she does switch into IB history, she will have to drop IB anthropology. This dynamic -- Katy wanting to do more, her mom wanting her to do less -- is, Alice Haddow says, their "only source of friction."

"I tell Katy every day there are people who -- Albert Einstein was a high school dropout. Peter Jennings was a high school dropout," Haddow says. "We're just mired in a system that takes this position that huge amounts of stress are somehow beneficial." At the same time, she acknowledges that she has to work at not sending mixed messages. She used to e-mail Katy's teachers to check her grades. "I had to stop doing that," she says. It's a hard balance, too, for parents: You want your daughter to do well, but you also want her, emotionally, to survive. "Girls," notes Haddow, "panic if they're not approved of."

Whereas her sons -- well, that was a different kind of conflict. "You couldn't make the boys care about high school," she says. "They had no concerns whatsoever. Cajoling, yelling, any part of the spectrum in between -- they did not care."