Morning:
6°c
Much soul-searching here this week after a 17-year-old student at Palo Alto's Gunn High School was killed by a commuter train. All the evidence points to suicide and many are asking how much the Valley's intensely competitive culture was to blame.
“Does living in the bubble' of Silicon Valley infect our teenagers with such intense stress that the only way to get relief is to end their life?” wrote blogger Myrna L on the influential Silicon Valley Mom's Blog, for example, in a post titled Are We Killing our Teenagers?
Several other local teens have killed themselves in recent years and, as in the most recent case, few people noticed that these children were depressed or anxious beforehand. There's a reason for that, believes Bay Area psychologist Madeline Levine, whose 2006 book The Price of Privilege has become required reading among child advocates in the Valley.
Children in driven, affluent American communities like ours are “afraid to not get good grades”, says Levine. They are also afraid of being unpopular and of their parents, she says. And they're very good at masking their fears.
These children's parents are often in denial too, a director of a counselling service Philippe Rey told the local weekly paper.
“This community has such a deep drive for perfection,” said Rey, “that a lot of people suffer in silence because we're so afraid to admit that there's a problem with ourselves or with our kids.”
Gunn High is regularly ranked as one of the top schools in the country. Parents will move house simply to be in its catchment area, which means paying hugely inflated prices for their homes. They do that because they want their children to flourish, of course. But many here are trying to broaden what it means to be a success beyond appearing perfect in all things. We need to remember, they say, that while we might have chosen to live in the “bubble”, it wasn't a choice our children ever made.
* “Boldly went and liked it,” says my friend Sara's new Facebook status. I think that makes it official: less than a week after its release, I'm now the only person in the Valley not to have seen the new Star Trek movie.
* Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is saying his company could be eclipsed at any minute. Why the modesty all of a sudden? Maybe it's the release of British mathematical genius Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram Alpha search engine. More likely, it's the three separate government probes that are investigating the search giant's market power.
