As fifteen-year-old Perry shuffled into my office, with his parents trailing tentatively behind, he glanced at me with a strained neutral expression that I’d found usually masked either great anger or great distress; in Perry’s case it was both. Although anorexia (厌食症) is a disorder most often associated with girls, Perry was the third in a line of anorexic boys I had recently seen.
Perry refused to eat with his family, always claiming he wasn’t hungry at the time and that he preferred to eat later in his room. New menus, gentle encouragement, veiled threats, nagging, and outright bribes had all been tried, to no avail. Why would an otherwise healthy fifteen-year-old boy be starving himself? The question hung urgently in the air as we all talked.
Let’s be clear from the outset: Perry was a smart, good kid, shy, unassuming, and generally unlikely to cause trouble. He was getting straight A’s in a challenging and competitive public school honors curriculum that spring. And he later told me that he hadn’t gotten a B on his report card since fourth grade, in some ways he was every parent’s dream child.
But beneath his academic success, Perry faced a world of troubles. One big problem was that while Perry was a strong achiever, he was not at all a happy one. “I hate waking up in the morning because there’s all this stuff I have to do,” he said. “I just keep making lists of things to do and checking them off each day. Not just schoolwork, but extracurricular activities, so I can get into a good college.”
Perry was gifted enough to jump through the academic hoops that had been set for him, but it felt like little more than hoop-jumping, and this ate at him. But that wasn’t his only problem.
Perry was well-loved by his parents, as are most of the young people we see. But in their efforts to nurture and support him, his parents inadvertently increased his mental strain. Over time, they had taken on all his household chores, in order to leave him more time for schoolwork and activities. “That’s his top priority,” they said almost in unison when I asked about this. Although removing the chores from Perry’s plate gave him a bit more time, it ultimately left him feeling even more useless and tense. He never really did anything for anyone except suck up their time and money, and he knew it. And if he thought about backing off on his schoolwork well, look how much his parents were pouring into making it go well. Sandwiched between fury and guilt, Perry had literally begun to wither.
1. This passage is narrated from the point of view of ________.
2. According to the passage, Perry’s two biggest problems were ________.
3. The primary purpose of the passage is to ________.
4. The word “inadvertently” (Para. 6) most nearly means “ ________”.
