Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday? I told them the same story my adoptive parents had told me: My birth parents were unable to take care of a fragile, premature baby. They believed that another family would provide me with a better life. And so I was adopted and became my parents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When your family is formed by divine will, who are you to question it? To wonder about the family you never knew?

Like Matthew Pratt Guterl, I know what it is to be raised in the belief that your family represents something far greater than itself. Whereas my parents saw our adoptive family as proof of God’s handiwork, Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw theirs as a new kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, of race riots, of war,” one that could change the world by example: They would raise a family of white biological children and adopted children of color—“two of every race”—and all would live in harmony behind a white-picket fence. In Skinfolk, Guterl, a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, assigns himself the task of reckoning with the experiment his white parents confidently embarked on.

He describes them as serious Catholics, loving and “big hearted,” convinced of their own good intentions: Bob, a respected New Jersey judge, was “the wild-eyed dreamer”; Sheryl, a teacher turned homemaker, was “the practical one.” Reading the brief autobiographies his parents submitted to Welcome House, the first international and interracial adoption agency in the United States, Guterl notes that they shared a desire for a large family, concerns about population growth, and the belief that “recycling and adoption are methods of global repair.”

[Read: Rumaan Alam ponders the limits of parental love]

As their firstborn son, he grew up alongside his brother Bug (Guterl refers to some of his siblings by name, others by childhood nickname), who came from South Korea as a baby in 1972, two years after Matthew’s birth; Mark, his only biological sibling, born in 1973; Bear, the son of a Vietnamese mother and a Black American-GI father, adopted as a 5-year-old in 1975; Anna, a biracial Korean girl, who arrived from Seoul in 1977 at the age of 13; and Eddie, a Black child adopted from the South Bronx in 1983, at the age of 6. Guterl details the ways in which the siblings were known, observed, and sometimes fetishized within and beyond their rural New Jersey town. “The whole enterprise, in accordance with Bob’s wishes, is meant to be seen,” he writes:

We are seen, and we see things … I begin to note a troubling public surveillance of our whole ensemble, our various skin tones on display. I watch as cars drive by, and see how quickly the heads turn to see the wide world of rainbow at play in our picket-fenced front yard. A game of catch. A throw of the football. Choosing up teams for Wiffle ball. With Blackness added, our performed comity means something more.

Reading this passage made me think of my own upbringing in white spaces, constantly watched and watchful. My parents believed my race was irrelevant, insisting that people cared only about who I was “on the inside”; I didn’t tell them about the slurs and barbs I heard throughout my childhood. For the Guterls, however, calling attention to the racial makeup of their family was partly the point—how else could they lead by example? Bob’s sermonizing at the dining-room table introduced the children to their parents’ mission and helped indoctrinate them early on: “We understand that our multiracial composition is a critique of the present, our color-blind consanguinity an omen of the future.” The children were expected to acknowledge and celebrate one another’s differences, and also, somehow, to transcend them.

The reality, of course, is that transracial adoption has no intrinsic power to heal racial prejudice, and Guterl and his siblings were never going to neutralize or escape its effects, much less undo the harms of white supremacy. Young Matthew discovers firsthand that the world won’t be changed by families like theirs: He is cornered and terrorized by a group of white kids because he has a Black brother; he later notices that their parents apologize to him, not to Bear. In middle school, he is so distressed at being called “N—— Lips” (again, he is targeted because he has Black siblings) that he takes the shocking step of getting cosmetic surgery on his lips. By the time he is in college, he knows that he can rebel, play pranks, even get caught speeding, and not worry that the hammer will fall on him the way it might on Bear or Eddie—not that his parents give the boys “the talk,” precisely: “Racial disparities in policing … are regular subjects of conversation at the breakfast and dinner table. Bob feels, though, that there should be no formal, separate syllabus” for his Black sons.

Throughout the book, the sibling we learn the most about, and the one Guterl seems closest to, is Bear: near enough in age to be his “twin.” Bear comes to the Guterls with a small bag of belongings and a photograph of the family he was separated from after leaving Vietnam—his older half brother’s arm on his shoulder, his mother and half sister to their left—an image that leads Guterl to reflect on “the great sorrow that he has been ripped from that set of relations with such tremendous and severing force.” By high school, Bear is a popular football player and solid student—unlike Guterl, who is aware that he lacks his brother’s star power yet also has an unearned advantage in his whiteness. Bear may be loved and widely admired in their small town, but neither his own successes nor his adoptive family can exempt him from the racism of their fellow residents. Bear “is a Black,” one of Guterl’s white friends says to him during senior year—and then comes Eddie’s turn: “But your younger brother is a n——.” Guterl freezes at this “detour into American racism,” unexpected but not unfamiliar to him.

[Read: America soured on my multiracial family]

The family meets crises that further highlight their disparities and test their bonds. An adolescent Eddie begins to “act out” in escalating ways, and Bug nurses growing anger toward Bob and Sheryl. One night, violence erupts between Eddie and Bug, and is “handled” by Bob alone—he calls Eddie’s therapist, who arranges for his admission to a nearby psychiatric institution. There, Eddie is observed, tested, medicated: “He fights it, of course, but the plot has grabbed hold of him,” Guterl writes. “And never, ever lets him go.” Eddie is in the pipeline, and moves through one disciplinary institution after another—“reform schools give way to jails and then prisons”—while Bug’s alienation from the family intensifies.

Many years later, Bear is the one who assumes primary support of Eddie, even while himself recovering from a violent assault by two white racists. By then, Bob is dead, having spent years consumed by “the need for repair and reconnection,” confused and crushed by Bug’s resistance to being reincorporated into the family. Guterl writes that his father regretted how his choices affected Eddie, and never stopped questioning what might have been had he never called the therapist and enlisted “the world—as uneven, as broken, as treacherous as it is—in the disciplining of his son.” Yet though racked by “considerable, late-in-life anguish,” Bob remained indefatigable in another sense, a firm believer in the power of their family until the end. Guterl describes his farewell letter to them all as a “paean to the foundational, even generic ideas of family, togetherness, and solidarity, in which he encourages forgiveness and begs us to stay together.”

I was interested in reading Skinfolk in part because I believe that the stories of those who have lost or gained siblings through adoption have much to tell us about families—their inner workings as well as the social expectations and tensions that shape them. As a child, Guterl had no more ability than his adopted siblings to determine the structure of their family; his life, too, was remade and ruled by Bob and Sheryl’s experiment. When I began reading his memoir, I did not think that I would find in him, the white son of white parents he has always known, a fellow seeker. But his urgent need to probe choices that he had grown up being told to believe were uncomplicated felt unexpectedly familiar.

Questioning the family mythology, that bedrock you share with those you are closest to, is no easy task. For years I had denied my wish to know more about my birth parents and my own past, and when I finally admitted it, the depth of my need and curiosity staggered me. So did the fear: How could I tell my adoptive parents that the story they had steadfastly believed, the story they had given me, was likely untrue and no longer enough? Who was I if not their contented, loyal daughter, their gift from God? I might never have searched had I not gotten pregnant with my first child, someone who I imagined would one day have her own questions about our missing history: If I could not look for answers only for myself, perhaps I could search for the two of us. Once I had begun, I found still more company in a long-lost biological sister who had believed me dead, and craved the truth even more than I did.

Guterl’s search, perhaps undertaken on behalf of his siblings, does not shy away from challenging their parents’ mission. That entails examining not just the failure of their experiment, but also the limits of their father’s ability to grasp why and how the “endeavor begins to unravel.” When Bob blames Bug’s estrangement from the family on the adoption agency, the Korean orphanage, everything and everyone beyond the white-picket fence—“Not us. Not this place. Not what has happened at our home”—Guterl suggests that this picture is incomplete: For Bug, being part of the Guterl clan, and especially accepting Bob’s overpowering vision of what the family represented, seemed to require a painful and, in the end, impossible denial of self. The historian of the family, Guterl wants to convey his perspective on the tangled truth of what has happened to him and the people he loves, aware from the start that his search—and what he uncovers—may cause him and others pain.

Though at times I felt held at a bit of a distance—Guterl is a careful writer and has clearly tried to respect his relatives’ wishes regarding their privacy—he rarely tries to protect or exonerate himself. In a late chapter, he, his brothers Bear and Mark, and their sister, Anna, reunite in 2002, a year after their father’s death. They spend the day together, and return to the house filled with a sense of camaraderie; as Guterl notes, “some of the old magic is back.” But by now, we understand that this family was never magic.

Later that night, the usual racial banter has returned, one of the comfortable grooves from our past. Anna says something in her sometimes-imperfect English—a habit when she is speaking fast, or emotional, and the sort of thing we all made sport of before. I jokingly correct her, the kind of move I made—we all made—for years without a thought. And that night, when we are all so saturated with feeling and drink, the familiar joke lands all wrong. Anna leans forward, finger pointing—at me and also at what I signify, at the vast edifice behind me.

“That is racist, and I can’t take it anymore.”

The Guterl parents’ view of adoption as an “engine of ‘reform,’ ” strong enough to override racism, set up an assignment their children couldn’t possibly fulfill. For all that Guterl has learned by the time his sister confronts him, and for all that he has come to question about how they were raised, he, too, still needs to be disabused of some assumptions. His thoughtless jibe and her pent-up hurt testify to the complexities and contradictions of the endeavor their parents enlisted them in. And he finds the encounter especially distressing because of that tension: His deep love for his sister—for each of his siblings—is what sometimes prevents him from seeing the chasm between their experiences. “As children in a family meant to undo racism, we were asked to learn—and to unlearn—race,” he writes. “To see one another as siblings—to see beyond our skin—but also, dissonantly, to see one another as color-coded … Those parallel lessons are, in the end, impossible to suture together.”

The scene made me think of my own family, and one night in particular, when my father and I were watching the 2015 Women’s World Cup. My mother joined us and asked if the athletes on-screen were Korean or Japanese, and my father replied: “Does it matter? Who can tell the difference?” I had been their child for 30-odd years. I was accustomed to biting my tongue for the sake of family cohesion. I don’t know why I couldn’t do it that day, but I still remember the trembling anger and anxiety I felt as I called someone I loved, who loved me, to account. My father, shocked, eventually apologized, but not before he told me, “It’s just hard for me to see you as Asian.”

Transracial adoption will never empower adoptees of color or our white family members to sidestep the realities of privilege, bias, and racism; as Skinfolk shows, we will meet and experience these things in the most intimate of ways, within the microcosm of our own family. Reading Anna’s challenge to her brother, one that may have been decades in the making, I knew where all my natural sympathy as an adoptee lay. My response to Guterl’s description of his agonizing confusion and self-doubt, which kept him awake for hours that night, took me by surprise. It made me catch my breath and wish that I could see or speak to my adoptive parents, both of whom are now gone, and simply feel close to them again. I know what it is to confront a painful and unwanted distance between you and those you love; to want to believe, if only for a moment, that your will alone can bridge it.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “Two of Every Race.”

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Last week, Columbia University became the latest school to announce that it would no longer require SAT or ACT scores for undergraduate admissions. The school’s decision was “rooted in the belief that students are dynamic, multi-faceted individuals who cannot be defined by any single factor,” the college said in a defense of its policy change.

The SAT has faced heavy scrutiny for privileging rich families, which can pay for test-prep classes for their kids. Some believe that dropping the test is an ethical move toward equality in selective college admissions. Others argue that Columbia is replacing one metric skewed toward rich students with a bundle of metrics that are even more stratified by socioeconomic status, such as high GPAs, internships in Nicaragua, and expensive traveling soccer teams.

My concern is that this elite-college policy—carried out in the name of equity—might billow the embers of a teen-anxiety firestorm. After all, when a college makes one test the core of your application, you’ll cram for that test. When the same school says your assessment is based on an infinitude of talents, it’s a tacit suggestion that ambitious students spend 100 hours a week cultivating as many résumé-stuffers as possible.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary rise of teen mental distress in the United States. I’ve studied the literature on social-media and smartphone use and considered the rise of loneliness among young people. But the Columbia news made me think I’ve overlooked a key factor that helps explain why adolescent distress is rising not only in the U.S. but also in many rich countries. It’s pressure-cooker schools.

A 2022 paper by Dirk Bethmann and Robert Rudolf, both professors at Korea University, points out a curious paradox: In the 21st century, rich countries are beset with sadder adolescents. This finding runs counter to one of the fundamental rules of economics. Global data strongly associate wealth and happiness for adults, because citizens of richer countries tend to have higher subjective well-being than those of poorer countries. But Bethmann and Rudolf found a “paradox of wealthy nations,” because advanced economies seem to manufacture happier adults and unhappier adolescents.

One explanation might go like this: Richer and more complex economies require more rigorous and intense education, putting more pressure on kids to be high-achieving perfectionists. Adolescents go through a kind of happiness slingshot, in which stress early on springs them toward greater wealth and well-being later in life. Bethmann and Rudolf wink at this notion, writing that although “a higher learning intensity tends to increase a student’s academic achievement,” it tends to reduce leisure time, sleep, and subjective well-being.

Bethmann and Rudolf also found that higher standardized-test scores and student assessments of academic competition were strongly correlated with teen anxiety. If you take two countries that are equivalent in almost every way—same GDP, inequality, life expectancy, air pollution—the nation with higher test scores and more student competition will have more anxious and depressed teens.

The Bethmann-Rudolf hypothesis echoes international evidence that has repeatedly uncovered a negative relationship between (1) a culture of obsessive student achievement and long schoolwork hours, and (2) student well-being:

After an education reform in Germany led to more instructional time, a 2018 study found that increased school hours “significantly reduced adolescents’ self-rated mental health status.” A 2018 analysis of Taiwan “cram schools,” which often focus on helping students pass standardized tests, found that these programs reliably increase academic achievement at the cost of increasing rates of depression. A 2018 study by Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren at the London School of Economics found that schools around the world with higher test scores and more homework typically see the same trade-off: higher achievement and lower well-being, possibly because of greater “parental-achievement pressure,” which encourages students to feel more competitive. A 2022 study of seventh to 10th graders by Korean researchers found that students whose peers were randomly assigned private tutoring after school reported more depressive symptoms. One possible explanation is that teens without tutors became more worried about their relative academic success and spent more time on schoolwork to keep up.

Bethmann and Rudolf point out a deep irony of this trade-off. In the 20th century, reformers fought to reduce the workweek and rescue kids from the scourge of labor. In the 21st century, we’ve intensified the demands of the school week. In many OECD countries, teenagers study longer than the permitted legal working hours for adult employees. The legal maximum workweek in South Korea is 52 hours, Bethmann and Rudolf report in their paper, but roughly one in four 15-year-old students study 60 hours or more a week. The hardest-working decile of students in several European countries also put in 60-hour weeks. And, as the authors note, anxiety rates in many Western countries are just going up and up.

Now, what about the U.S., specifically?

Forty years ago, the most anxious kids in America were those in low-income households. Beginning in the late 1990s, that flipped, according to the researcher Suniya Luthar. In a series of studies, she found that rich teens in high-achieving schools were the most anxious and depressed. One possibility she explored was that the most rigorous schools created an environment where kids worried too much about how they measured up to their peers in grades, activities, and college admissions.

“I have for years thought that one of the main causes of the increase in adolescent depression was an increase in school pressure,” Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist who studies adolescent behavior at Temple University, told me. “When I talk to kids and we talk about sources of stress, they mention school pressure more than likes on Instagram.”

Some parents might respond that a little school pressure at 17 is a fine price to pay for decades of higher salaries and career success. If that’s true, this phenomenon is classic delayed gratification: pain now, gain later.

“Maybe these problems will go away when these young people grow up,” Steinberg admitted. “But also, maybe they won’t go away. We know adolescence is the main time when chronic depression begins. And if school pressure is making some kids depressed and borderline suicidal, I find it hard to argue that it’ll be all right if they can afford a bigger house 20 years from now.”

Let me try to meet ambitious parents and teens halfway. My parents put academic achievement on a pedestal in our household. And so do I: I think hard work, thoughtfulness, and cultures of excellence are values worth cherishing, and I want to pass down those values to my own kids. But I hope we can all acknowledge that sometimes this value system unhelpfully conflates intelligence with self-worth. Many parents may be worshipping healthy values in an unhealthy way.

Imagine, by analogy, that you’re a parent who is generally interested in your child being healthy—that is, eating the right foods and engaging in youth sports and playtime. You move to a neighborhood where the parents hold the same value—fitness is good—but they take it to extremes. At 5 a.m., every high schooler in the neighborhood participates in a grueling private HIIT class. Parents closely track their kids’ body-mass index and blood pressure. A while back, one parent entered their child in an international weight-lifting contest, it created a cascade of anxious mimicry, and now all the kids participate in international weight-lifting contests. Each month, one of the kids in the neighborhood is awarded Fittest Kid, and parents display these FK honors with living-room trophies and bumper stickers on their car. Over the years, the neighborhood has produced several bodybuilders and elite athletes, along with high rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. This has drawn the attention of researchers, who have concluded that the community has designed a culture of physical achievement that is both highly successful and indisputably crazy.

Yes, that example is kind of weird. But how different is it, really, from the way many status-obsessed parents and teens have come to treat academic excellence? A healthy virtue can be maximized to the point of toxicity.

The school-pressure hypothesis doesn’t rule out the role that social media and smartphones might play in the rise of teen anxiety. Teen distress is very likely the result of many different causal streams mingling together. For example, perhaps school intensity creates a culture of competition that raises the salience of status: “Am I doing enough to be more valuable than others?” Status anxiety carries over to social media, where precious leisure time is spent in virtual competitions for even more quantitative rewards—just another platform for being tested, where precisely counted “likes” stand in for grades. Meanwhile, the combination of school intensity and phone usage squeezes out offline leisure time, leading to fewer friends and hangouts, not to mention less sleep. All of this makes kids, especially those predisposed to anxiety and mental-health disorders, less capable of coping with the world’s chaos and more likely to tell a counselor that they can’t deal with existential stressors, such as climate change and school violence.

A good reason to scrutinize smartphone usage among teens is that it’s a very plausible contributor to youth distress. But pinning this whole thing on phones might lead us to overlook the other ways that modern life might be contributing to a more miserable childhood experience. “Sometimes I just think, my God,” Steinberg exclaimed at the end of our call. “Like, shouldn’t we care about giving kids a good experience of being a kid?

S Korean feminists are determined not to let President Yoon Seok-yul reverse the progress they made in the past decade.