The Pressure To Be Everything – Jennifer Oaten
We were sitting around the table as an executive team, looking at the College calendar for the year ahead, and someone said what we say every year. We need to cut back. There were too many events, too many activities, too many good things competing for the same weeks. We all agreed, as we always do, and then we looked at the list again and found it very hard to take off anything. Every event was there for a reason. Every one of them mattered to someone.
That conversation has stayed with me, because it is not really a conversation about a calendar. It is a conversation about a much bigger question, one that sits in our staffrooms and in your kitchens. How much is the right amount for a young person to be doing, and how did being busy become the measure of a life well lived?
Busy often means being actively occupied with work, commitments, tasks, or activities, leaving little free time or personal capacity. When our capacity is limited, it also means we have fewer opportunities to be still, reflect, process information, and think deeply. These moments are especially important for young people, as they support self-awareness, emotional growth, and the development of a strong sense of identity during their formative years.
I want to be honest that this is not a pressure the College stands outside of. We feel it too. We add a new opportunity because it is wonderful, and it is, and the following year we add another, and slowly the year fills up.
The strange gift of the COVID years was that we were forced to stop. The calendar emptied almost overnight. What surprised many of us, families and staff alike, was how much we quietly loved the space that opened up. There were unhurried evenings. There were weekends that belonged to no one but the family. We did not enjoy the reason for it, but many of us mourned the loss of that stillness when life sped up again.
The All-Rounder Ideal
Somewhere along the way, the picture of a successful young woman became a girl who does everything. She achieves academically, she plays a sport, she sings or acts or plays an instrument, she leads a committee, she volunteers, she holds a wide circle of friends, and she does all of it with apparent ease. It is an exhausting picture, and very few people could sustain it. Yet it has become the quiet standard against which many girls measure themselves, and against which many of us, as parents, measure how well we are doing our job.
I understand this pressure from both sides of it. As a parent, I always believed that giving your daughter the chance to try many things was one of the most important gifts you could offer her. How else does a young person discover what she loves? You cannot find what truly suits you without first trying several things that turn out not to fit. I still believe that. The opportunity to explore widely is genuinely valuable, and our Co-curricular program is one of the reasons families choose Santa Maria. I am proud of it.
The harder question is the one underneath. There is a difference between trying things in order to find what matters to you and trying everything because stopping feels like falling behind. One is exploration, and the other is closer to a treadmill that is hard to step off. The skill we are all still learning, the College included, is knowing when a girl has found enough of her thing that she no longer needs to keep adding, and can instead go deeper.
Where the Pressure Lands
It would be easy to assume that the problem is simply too many hours, and that the answer is a lighter timetable. After many years of watching girls move through this College, I am not convinced it is that simple. A full week is not, in itself, the enemy. I have known girls who were extraordinarily busy and entirely content, and others with far less on who carried a heaviness.
What seems to wear a girl down is rarely the schedule itself. It is the invisible expectation she carries, the quiet sense that there is always one more thing she should be doing, one more achievement that would finally settle the question of whether she is doing okay.
The feeling of never quite being enough is the real weight, and it does not appear on any timetable. When Mission Australia asks young people about the pressures they face in their own lives, school and study stress is named year after year as one of the things they find hardest to manage, and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that young women experience high levels of psychological distress at close to twice the rate of young men. These young women are not lazy. Many of them are doing a great deal. The trouble is that doing a great deal has stopped feeling like enough.
Choosing Depth
This is why, over the years, we stepped away from requiring our students to participate in co-curricular activities each term. We came to understand that many of our students already have full lives beyond the College gates. They have clubs and teams and music lessons and family commitments and part-time work. Choosing to do fewer things, and to do them properly, is not a lack of ambition. It is often a sign of a young woman who knows herself well.
Depth has its own quiet rewards. The girl who commits to one sport across several seasons learns resilience in a way that dabbling never teaches. The student who stays with an instrument long enough to play something difficult discovers a satisfaction that no taster session can offer.
None of this comes from spreading yourself thin. The real rewards, the deep friendships and the quiet confidence that grows from sticking with something, come from staying long enough for them to take hold. As parents, perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to give our daughters permission to choose, and then permission to let some good things go.
None of this means standing still, and it does not mean the College will suddenly empty its calendar, much as we talk about it each year. It means asking a better question than how much, and instead asking what, and why, and whether this particular activity helps a girl become more herself or simply busier. Your daughter does not have to be everything, and the truth is that no young woman ever could. There is real relief in saying that out loud, and it is a relief I wish more of our girls could feel.
So here is what I keep returning to, as a principal and as a parent. If we took something off the list, hers or ours, what might grow in the space it left behind?
- co-curricular balance, Featured, girls and overcommitment, girls school perth, parenting teenage girls, pressure to be everything, raising confident young women, Santa Maria College, school and study stress, Student Wellbeing, teenage girls wellbeing
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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