“You can push your kid to be a straight-A student, but in the end, is it worth it?” Psychologist Dr. Madeline Levine asked an assembly of Palo Alto, Mountain View and Los Altos parents in Spangenberg Theater April 9.

Levine’s lecture, based on her book “The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids,” focused on the pressures afflicting upper-middle class adolescents.

Levine commenced her talk by citing the results of a study (Luthar & Sexton) conducted in 2002 on moderately affluent children with families of incomes between $120,000 and $160,000. The seventh-grade boys and girls in the study exhibited “unexpectedly high” levels of anxiety and depression, while the girls had twice the normal rate of depression of girls their age, Levine said.

“So how come kids who have been having all these advantages are faring worse?” Levine said. She denoted school and extracurricular stress, parental pressure and upper-middle class culture as several possible reasons. Levine called for parents, schools and communities to stop placing unnecessary pressure on their children.

Levine said that part of the reason why parents emphasize the success of their children arises from community culture. “I think upper-middle class families feel vulnerable,” she said. “We are met by aggression and not by compassion. It’s about the fear of not being treated kindly. There is some degree of denial. We don’t want to think that our kids are terribly stressed.”

Some parents said that the culture of a community distorts the message it sends to their kids. “We really want our children to become happy, resilient adults,” Gunn parent Erica Weirich said. “However, the culture has twisted this into pressure to perform, and falsely directs this toward certain kinds of success, such as getting into a particular college.”

Levine delivered her most controversial line while discussing the stress schools cause. “I don’t like AP courses,” she said. “I don’t like the kill and drill courses. They’re not about learning. They’re about taking the test at the end.”

Denise Clark Pope, director of the Stressed Out Students (SOS) project at Stanford, agreed with Levine. “ Students and teachers feel pressured to cover a great amount of material because it will be on the test,” Pope said, who is currently launching a new version of SOS with Levine geared towards parents and youth. “We often see high stress levels in students who take more than one AP at a time.”

Levine mentioned several high schools in California that have effectively eliminated AP courses from their curriculum. “Schools without AP courses can make a deal with the UC [University of California] system to get special credits/weights for some courses that are as rigorous as an AP course but do not have the AP title,” Pope wrote in an e-mail message. “I see the benefits to certain schools that eliminate AP courses and strike this deal with the UC system. Students would feel less pressure to take courses simply because they have AP in the title. Teachers would be able to concentrate on material and skills that they believe are important without feeling pressure to cover everything that will be on the tests.”

Levine concluded her lecture with several simple parenting suggestions that could help solve the problems of pressured youths. “I’m going to tell you to make sure your child sleeps,” she said. “Make sure your child eats.” Levine addressed “over-involved parenting” when she said, “I’ve talked a lot about backing off. Have a day a week where you don’t talk about your kid’s grades.” Pope added that “parents need to talk to their children about what success truly means. Students often think their parents define success as the college they get into or their GPA.”