Parents and grandparents always believe that they once were just as or more athletic, smart, and hard working than their kids are today.  However, that is not the case as the bar of competition has been raised since the previous generations.  Kids nowadays are fighting for a spot at top colleges as young as six years old.  Parents want their child to be the “super star” and be better than everyone else.  Parents start making their star work really hard when they are really just a kid.  Parents will go the distance to make their child have a tutor for each of his or her classes so they can guarantee that their child will receive and A.  This idea is used in both school and sports like when parents make their little eight-year-old practice every day.  It’s really not right for the kids to be forced to love something instead of living to their desires.  In high school, this is very evident when you see kids pressured by their parents to continue working very hard. If the kid isn’t performing well, he or she will get disciplined.  This can be blamed for college acceptance rates because they are decreasing as much as 25%.  For example, in 1973 the acceptance rate for Stanford was 31%, but now, the acceptance rate for this year was just 5.05%.  Since more kids are being forced to be the best they can be, college applications are increasing and the number of spots in the colleges stay constant causing a decrease in acceptance rates.   This makes lives harder for both types of kids, the ones who are stressed out from their parents and the ones trying to work hard and not just study all the time. 
However, life was definitely still difficult back in my parents’ and my grandparents’ time.  For example, there wasn’t great technology like we have now such as cell phones, computers, and T.V.  Simple things like contacts weren’t wearable and comfortable until now.  Our parents and grandparents didn’t have the Internet and Google to help them with homework.  They had to go to a library or seek help from their parents instead of doing a quick instant search with millions of pages and answers.  They also didn’t have simple forms of communication like texting because it simply didn’t exist.  In all, life was definitely difficult back in my parents’ and grandparents’ age.  But, compared with life now, kids would love to have a stress free fun life like they had back in the mid 20th century.
Although there weren’t the technological advances we have now, kids today have to live more difficult lives than in the past.  Parents expect their kid to always have good grades and sometimes they get frustrated and pressure the kid to be better.  Or, if the kid is underperforming in his sport he may be yelled at during or after the game.  Kids face so many more pressures than they may have in the past.  Homework and classwork were in smaller loads and easier to do than today.   College acceptance rates are down and kids are pressed to make these colleges with very slim chances of actually getting in.  Overall, kids are faced with more pressures and adversities than ever before, resulting in stress and more difficult lives.