Supergirl meltdown: How middle-class girls today are under unprecedented pressure to succeed

On the phone to a friend, the talk soon turned to her teenage daughter. At 17 she is beautiful, popular and doing well at school - yet, despite this, she is also, her mother revealed, increasingly unhappy.

'She's so worried the whole time,' my friend said. 'She's convinced that she's going to fail her exams, that she won't get into any of the universities she's applying for, that she'll never do well at anything . . . she gets so wound up about the slightest thing. I find her in floods of tears and nothing I say can convince her that she's going to be fine.'

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