Parents only want the best for their children. But sometimes academic success comes at a price, warns psychologist Oliver James

THE middle classes appear to be driving their teenage daughters potty by - however unwittingly - putting them under too much academic pressure. The sharp increase in emotional distress amongst this group is one of the most counter-intuitive trends in modern life. Given that comfortably-off young women enjoy greater opportunities and freedoms than at any time in history, you really would have thought that boys and low-income girls would be far worse off.

Scientifically, the trend was first properly nailed down by Glasgow University researchers Patrick West and Helen Sweeting. They measured levels of anxiety and depression in two very large (5000-plus) samples of 15-year-olds, one in 1987 and the other in 1999, the second being Scottish.

Among the bottom social classes, girls' rates rose only a little but in the highest income groups, the rise was from 24% in 1987 to an astonishing 38% in 1999 - more than one-third of the most privileged and successful. Contrary to popular perceptions of a teenage male emotional apocalypse, there was no significant increase in problems among boys, but for the girls, rates of the kind of distress that can require hospitalisation rose threefold (from 6% to 18%).

You might suppose that the success high-income girls usually achieve in their results would have boosted their mood when they got them. On the contrary, they were just as likely to be distressed.

What on Earth is going on? Why are these girls at a much greater risk of severe emotional problems, despite having access to all the hard-won opportunities created by feminism and the benefits of affluence?

The answer begins with the fact that in recent years, girls have been outperforming boys in almost every academic subject at every educational stage. In 1987 there was virtually no difference in how well the genders did at GCSE (standard grade equivalent), but by 1999, a gap had opened: whereas 43% of boys got five or more at grades A to C, 53% of girls did so. The period of greater success by high-income girls precisely matches their increase in emotional distress.

Something toxic had entered the social ecology and the study went on to identify it: the main worries that were increasingly troubling the high-income girls were family problems, schoolwork, exams and their weight. Furthermore, high-income girls found the time leading up to exams more stressful, and only recently began to do so. In the three months before exams, greater distress was more likely only among the high-income girls, and only in the later study.

That they are so obsessed with their bodies and their academic performance, proves the girls are badly infected with what I call the affluenza virus. This entails placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame. Studies from 14 nations show that people who do this are at greater risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. Just talk to some teenage girls from wealthy homes if you don't believe that they are riddled with the virus.

Eleanor Kennedy, 17, attended a highly competitive all-girls comprehensive and got excellent results in her GCSEs (the English equivalent of standard grades). Yet she wasn't happy with her results. "All my friends did better and I felt terrible."

"You're such an idiot because you did really well," interjects her 16-year-old friend, Jessica Wear, who knows plenty of other similar high-achieving girls. "I've a friend who's incredibly stressed out yet she got 10 A stars in her GCSEs. There's just so much competition between girls in all ways now: how you look, the way you dress, how clever you are, everything."

Charlotte (not her real name), now 16, goes to a private school which is consistently at or near the top of the exam results league table. "I became anxious and depressed from about the age of 13," she says. "I was obsessed with body-image and always worrying about other people's opinions - whether they liked me or thought I was attractive."

Research shows that if you are surrounded by very clever people, it tends to lower your self-esteem. Valerie Walkerdine, a British researcher who conducted a small, in-depth study of high-achieving girls in the 1990s told me: "For the majority of middle-class girls, high performance is regarded as average. If she does well she would not see herself as particularly outstanding because achievement was what was expected. By contrast, a working-class girl who does well would be held up as a good example by friends and family. The talents of middle-class achievers are largely unsung."

These points should apply as much when comparing high-income boys with low-income ones. But then again, there seems to have been no change in the pressure on them to do well since 1987. That has only happened to high-income girls, causing the affluenza virus to run amok.

Eleanor Kennedy's mother, Joanna - a leading litigation lawyer in her 50s - can scarcely believe the change that has come about since her own childhood. "The pressure on girls to perform academically is a zillion, trillion times greater than it was when I was 15. I went to a convent, where very few girls would be expected to go to university. They really did used to say to us, We are training you to be the wives of ambassadors'. Even then I asked, Why not to be the ambassador?'"

As parents we imagine that in battling to get our daughters into the best schools and encouraging them to do well, we are guaranteeing their future. In fact, in all too many cases, it seems we are simply driving them crazy. It is particularly striking that - as many parents will confirm - you can bang on at your son to do his homework without making any impact but if you get on your daughter's case, she seems to be much more affected.

Girls' increased vulnerability to academic pressure - particularly among the better-off - may partly result from a greater desire to please. Having watched other parents interacting with their children when her own daughter was small, Joanna Kennedy observes that "docility was prized in girls whereas it wasn't in boys at all. That's a good girl' was awarded only to obedient, docile girls, from a very, very young age."

Abundant scientific evidence suggests that repeated exposure to this kind of experience creates a markedly greater tendency among girls to want to please authority and to be compliant. They become far more law-abiding as teenagers and adults, whether it be obedience to traffic regulations or committing fewer serious crimes.

Above all, this people-pleasing makes them much more vulnerable to school cultures and societies in which academic success and thinness are highly valued. Placed in a very competitive school environment, within a looks-obsessed society, it seems to be harder for girls to avoid becoming perfectionists.

The perfectionist feels that her best is never good enough. She sets impossibly high standards, rigidly imposing them with a fanatical intolerance of mistakes. She has an intense fear of failure and is plagued by self-doubt. Even when she does achieve goals she feels dissatisfied, focusing on what she got wrong or belittling the scale of her success. Her main concern is to do better than others rather than the pleasure, in itself, of carrying out a task. Her self-esteem relies heavily on an affluenza-infected need to win, whether at work or play.

Despite their outward success, these girls are prone to depression and obsessive thoughts. "If I do something less than perfectly I will think about it for quite a long time," says Charlotte. "It's petty, but in my mock GCSEs I got two As and A stars a higher grade in the rest. One of the As was in maths and I really cried for so long. It was my best subject and I didn't get the top. Why not?', I obsessed."

Girls like Charlotte are extremely likely to have had perfectionist mothers from a generation frustrated by not being allowed to attend university when young. Discouraged from fulfilling their career potential, they poured these unfulfilled ambitions into their daughters rather than their sons because they identified with them more. In some cases this has simply righted the wrongs of previous generations but it has also created many perfectionists.

Although consciously these mothers only want the best for their daughters, in practice they tend to treat the girls as agents for satisfying their own ambitions, by making their love conditional on performance and by being excessively controlling - a parental care which has been shown in many studies to induce the symptoms of affluenza.

Sometimes, a woman who is herself a high-achiever may have high hopes for her daughter as a result of witnessing her own mother's lack of opportunity. "I have this vision of a 1950s woman who had no choices because she was still economically dependent on a man," recalls Joanna Kennedy. "I wanted to encourage Eleanor to do well enough to have choices."

But while some of today's disturbed high-income girls may have had perfectionist mothers, it would be very unfair to blame it all on them. The care mothers provide is heavily influenced by social pressures and it only creates the potentiality for a problem; what happens in the wider society determines whether that potential is fulfilled.

SInce the 1987 study, concerns about weight have massively increased. It has become normal for young women to be irrationally critical of their bodies. But girls from fee-paying schools are more at risk of eating disorders than those at state schools and high-income girls are even more likely to desire to be slimmer (whatever their weight) than poor ones. Perfectionism, scholastic success and eating disorders very often go together.

While West's study did find a threefold increase in affluenza-infected worries about weight among the boys compared with 1987, they were still less than half the girls' levels (rising from 6% to 18% for the boys compared with 29% to 38% among the girls). This could be because boys are less likely to be the vehicle for their mothers' aspirations, and also because there is less pressure from TV and commercials on them to be thin.

FOR the rise in weight-worries among girls since 1987 is almost certainly due to an increased consumption of images of wafer-thin models and celebrities depicted in magazines and on television. Of course, all women are exposed to this, but studies show that such images have a greater effect on girls made vulnerable by affluenza-inducing care.

Most importantly, we parents are so riddled with the virus ourselves that we have lost sight of the true purpose of education. You should not ask your children to learn in order to be able to earn. Rather, it's about encouraging scholarship, inquisitiveness, finding out what interests them. We must let go of the idea that our children's performance is a judgement on us - not use our kids to keep up with the Joneses.

Like all doting parents, my wife and I can bore for Britain about the creativity and zest for life of our five-year-old daughter. If only we virus-afflicted adults could have bottled some of that joyfulness from our own childhoods. It sickens me to think there is a serious risk this wonderful exuberance will give way to fearful concerns about schoolwork and her appearance in the eyes of others. I want her to succeed and to feel good about the way she looks - but not at any price.

I hope she will develop the same nonchalance towards exam results that sons seem to have. This is fostered by accepting her best as good enough and even, as in Denmark, not panicking if she seems to be a bit of a slacker. The key seems to be to avoid trying to impose interests on them, and instead wait to see what they come up with. Of course you have to point out that to get from A to B they will need exam results but it has to be them who makes the decision to forego some pleasure in the teenage present in order to enjoy their adult future.

Easier said than done, I know. But that just goes to show how much the problem is coming from us, not them. If you relax a bit more about the exams, oddly enough, they might start to show more of an interest.