Crash Course

"Standing to the side watching this?" one of the moms ventures timidly. A few of the parents have sheepish expressions on their faces.

"I have a feeling his parents might be tugging on his sweat shirt as well," another mother says.

"Every one of those adults -- they want what's best for Andy," Lobdell says, pointing toward the group gathered at Andy's feet. "But what they're looking at is, 'What are my needs?'"

He's barely halfway through this 80-minute workshop, but he's made his point.

"I never imagined what it looked like," says one of the moms in the audience.

Lobdell nods.

"I know."

He makes eye contact with each person in the room. "Now, what can we do about this besides feeling momentarily depressed?"

THE INSIDE JOKE AMONG THOSE PARENTS, and the 100 or so other folks who have come from as far as New York and Toronto to attend the day-and-a-half-long Stressed Out Students (SOS) conference, is that the program is held on the palm tree-dotted campus of Stanford University, repository of overachiever angst. At a session the next day, a former Stanford admissions official will tell a crowd of parents, students and educators the story of how a father once begged an admissions official to fake an acceptance letter because he feared his wife would commit suicide once she learned their son had not been admitted.

But no one can deny that the Stanford name lends the proceedings a level of credibility. More than 400 people, from 35 public and private middle and high schools, have gone through the program since it began in 2004. The majority of these schools are in California, but representatives of campuses in Chicago, New York, Massachusetts and Canada, also have participated. Schools that want to participate must submit two essays describing their interest in SOS and bring a team that includes an administrator, teacher, counselor, parent and student. Once the team members arrive at Stanford, they are assigned a coach who will help them develop a workable plan for tackling the stress problem. The coach will meet with them throughout the school year as they try to make the plan work.

The program was developed in part by Denise Clark Pope, a high school English teacher turned Stanford lecturer who spent a year observing kids at one of the country's top public high schools and was appalled by what she witnessed.

Her book -- "Doing School": How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, published in 2001 -- was one of the first to explore the culture of overachieving students. (Last fall, Alexandra Robbins chronicled a similar phenomenon in The Overachievers, a book based on the year she spent following students at her alma mater, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda.)