Plus, how to raise “healthy achievers” in an unhealthy world.
When I met Jennifer Breheny Wallace last fall, and she told me she was writing a book about the unrelenting pressure on teenagers to achieve, I thought, Finally! My girls are older now, but the idea took me right back to the intensity of their high school years, especially during the always-fraught college application process. Jennifer’s book, Never Enough, contains deep reporting and research, and should be required reading for parents who want the best for their kids, but aren’t sure what exactly that means.
One thing is certain: Many young people are at their breaking points, and the current competitive rat race — especially in affluent communities — is simply unsustainable at this pace.
To dive deeper on this essential topic, Jennifer and I took the stage at the 92nd Street Y on Sept. 14 to peel back the layers on this problem and what we can do about it. You can watch our conversation right here:
And if you’re eager for even more insight, read on for an earlier Q&A I did with Jennifer about the excruciating pressure kids can face in an “increasingly competitive world,” the very real dangers of that pressure, and how to raise “healthy achievers.”
Jennifer, this book seems long overdue. But the pressure cooker kids are under seems to get more intense every year. How did you get interested in writing Never Enough?
Ever since my children were born, I’ve been noticing how different their childhoods were from mine. Homework was much more demanding. Sports and extracurriculars were so much more intense. Weekends were so much busier. I remember standing on the sidelines of my then eight-year-old son’s travel soccer game one cold and rainy afternoon, looking around at the other parents, and wondering: How is everyone else pulling this off, year after year, and with multiple children? Why are we even doing this?
When I was in school, my classmates and I wanted to achieve. But achievement didn’t define our childhoods the way it seems to do today for too many students. Then the Varsity Blues scandal hit, and I knew I had to spend time digging into this seismic shift in childhood. How did we get to the point where parents were now going to jail to get their kids accepted to a highly selective college? I wasn’t buying the narrative that parents wanted bragging rights or a bumper sticker for their car. My instinct was that there was something much deeper going on here.
As a journalist and a parent of three teenagers, I wanted to learn more. I’ve seen achievement pressure up close in my own home and in the families around me. So, while I wrote this book for educators and parents, I also wrote it for myself. I wanted to know how to raise healthy, joyful achievers in an increasingly competitive world.
In your introduction, you address the question of privilege and whether we should be focused on the suffering of “the top 20 percent of Americans.” I love the quote that follows, by a researcher named Suniya Luthar: “No one is putting pain on a scale; a child in pain is a child in pain, and neither chooses their circumstance.” In fact, this group of students seem to be an at-risk population — and research bears that out. What can you tell us about that?
For decades now, researchers have been studying how adverse childhood experiences, such as living in poverty, increase risks to a child’s health and well-being. In recent years, a newly named “at-risk” group has emerged at the other end of the economic spectrum.
Two national reports, one from the National Academies of Science and another from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have found that students attending competitive public and private schools — those with generally high standardized test scores and rich extracurricular and academic offerings — are experiencing higher rates of behavioral and mental health problems compared with national norms. These students are two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety and depression, and more likely to abuse substances than the average American teen.
Not every teen attending these competitive schools are suffering, but what these reports are saying is that there are increased risks for the students who attend them.
In your reporting, you went in search of healthy strivers — students who were doing well despite the pressures in their environments. Tell us about that.
Yes, I wanted to know more about the students who were thriving despite the pressures of our achievement culture. I wanted to know what buffers they had in common to cope with the stress. What did their parents focus on at home? What was school like for them? What, if anything, do these healthy strivers have in common?
I found that these healthy achievers had a lot in common, and I detail it all in my book. But, in short, the kids I met who were thriving emotionally and academically had a sense that they were valued by their parents, schools, and the larger community for who they were deep at their core. They felt like they mattered.
Can you tell us more about “mattering”?
Mattering was first conceptualized in the 1980s by the legendary social psychologist Morris Rosenberg, who conceptualized self-esteem. Rosenberg found that when adolescents know that they are loved and valued for who they are at their core, they enjoy a kind of protective shield that buffers against the stress and anxiety in their environment.
Mattering is the deep human need we all have to feel significant, seen, and understood by those around us. As long as we live, this need to matter never goes away. Researchers call it a meta-need or an umbrella term, encompassing feelings of belonging, connection, self-determination, fairness, pride, and mastery. When you have a high level of mattering – when you feel like you are valued and known for who you are at your core by your family, friends and community and when you get a chance to add meaningful value to family, friends and community – it leads to thriving.
Today, however, we are facing a mattering deficit with record rates of loneliness, anxiety, and depression among our country’s youth. Research suggests that as many as one-third of adolescents in the U.S. do not believe they matter to others in their communities. When we don’t feel like we matter, we can turn inward: We give up, drink or use drugs to escape, and self-harm. A lack of mattering uniquely predicts depression, suicidal thoughts, and other mental ills. When we don’t feel like we matter, we can act out in destructive ways that make others take notice. A lack of mattering is a strong predictor of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and most tragically, suicide. Research suggests that as many as one-third of adolescents in the U.S. do not believe they matter to others in their communities.
To matter we need to feel valued, but we also need the opportunity to meaningfully add value to others. The more we add value to others, the more we feel valued – a healthy cycle that protects our mental health. Mattering won’t solve everything, but it could go a long way toward alleviating so much of the suffering we see today among our youth and adults.
How do mattering and achievement pressure overlap?
When we talk about pressure, anxiety, depression, and loneliness in our kids, what we are really talking about is an unmet need to feel valued unconditionally for who we are deep at our core, away from the trophies, the likes, and the acceptance letters. Unfortunately, too many kids today feel like their value, their mattering, is contingent on their performance, as in they only matter when they get good grades, when they make the A-team in sports, and when they get likes on their social media accounts. I heard this time and again in my interviews.
To be clear, mattering is not separate from performance. When we matter, we are more likely to show up at home and school in positive and healthy ways with a kind of healthy fuel that motivates us to reach higher, to go further, and to bounce back from setbacks.
Tell us about the extensive research and reporting that went into this book.
With the help of a Harvard researcher, I surveyed 6500 parents across the county to find out what parents were feeling but maybe not saying. Parents were extraordinarily generous and honest with their responses. At the end of the survey, I asked if they’d be willing to be interviewed for the book, and if so to email me. Hundreds of parents reached out.
Then, for three years, I traveled the country, meeting with families in places like Washington State, Maine, Ohio, Wyoming, Florida, California, and more. I met with parents, students, educators, psychologists, and leading researchers. With the help of a researcher at Baylor University, I conducted another survey, this time with 500 young adults, ages 18-30, to find out what they wish their parents knew about their high school experience.
These many conversations have stayed with me and shaped me as a parent in ways I can’t begin to count. I’m so grateful to the people who let me into their homes and lives and trusted me to tell their stories.
What is the most surprising thing you discovered while writing Never Enough?
The #1 thing we can do to help a struggling child is to make sure the adults in that child’s life are psychologically healthy and that they have strong, reliable sources of support. Psychologists say this directive has turned child development upside down: To help the child, first help the caregivers.
Researcher Suniya Luthar called parents “first responders” to our kids’ struggles, and paying constant attention to their roller-coaster feelings and social and academic pressures can take a toll. All the ways we are overstretched — work deadlines, financial anxieties, meeting our child’s every need – can deaden our ability to be sensitive, responsive parents. It can make us less attuned to our children’s emotional cues. The risk here is that our kids can misinterpret our stress and impatience: they internalize the belief that something must be wrong with them. A feeling of not mattering, researchers note, is often rooted in small actions that accumulate daily.
In other words, kids don’t need parents who take self-sacrifice to the extreme. They need parents who have the wisdom, energy and psychological bandwidth to call out the unhealthy values of achievement culture for the threats they are. It seems counterintuitive. But to care for our kids we must first care for ourselves, researchers note, because a child’s resilience rests fundamentally on their caregivers’ resilience.
You believe social media is part of the problem, but doesn’t tell the whole story. Do you think there’s been too much focus on the impact of social media platforms? Didn’t so much change when they and iPhones came into the picture?
iPhones are certainly an accelerant and a magnifier of this “never enough” feeling our kids and we adults are grappling with. But social media doesn’t get to the root of the issue. The root is that our kids need to feel valued for who they are at their core. When this universal human need to matter goes unmet, we will see the struggles we are witnessing in our youth and adults.
Let’s talk about other reasons this generation is dealing with so much pressure? Why has achievement pressure reached a boiling point today?
I interviewed sociologists, historians, psychologists, and economists to answer this very question. There are several reasons, but the ones that resonated the most with me is the economic changes we are seeing and how these macroeconomic forces impact our parenting and by extension, our children. When I was growing up in the 1970s, life was generally more affordable. Real estate was more affordable. Health care, higher education, and even groceries were more affordable. There was slack in the system. Parents felt reasonably assured that their kids could live a zigzag life and still wind up OK.
Most children back then could replicate their own childhoods, if not do even better financially than their parents. But today, nearly two-thirds of Americans no longer believe that. White middle-class children born in 1940 had a 90% chance of out-earning their parents. For children born in the 1980s, their chances of out-earning their parents fell by 50%. Fast forward to today, and millennials, on average, have lower earnings and less wealth than past generations did at their age. Whether or not we are aware, parents are absorbing these macroeconomic conditions and becoming, in the words of Tom Curran at the London School of Economics, “social conduits,” preparing kids for a hyper-competitive future of steep inequality and fewer guaranteed social safety nets.
Parents have always been responsible for launching the next generation, but this task has never felt so fraught. Today’s parents are facing a stark reality. And it’s coming out in how we parent. Parents today strive to ensure their kids’ futures by weaving what sociologists call “individualized safety nets” for each of their children. That’s at the root of intensive parenting — this idea that we need to protect our children from an uncertain future. But this well-intentioned safety net is hurting too many of the children it’s trying to protect and directly contributing to the anxiety and depression we are seeing in our youth. This is not to blame parents. It is to help them contextualize their fears and anxieties so they can feel less alone. Today’s intensive parenting style isn’t a personal choice that individual families are making alone in their living rooms. Parents are responding to the extreme inequality in our society, the crush of the middle class, globalization, and hyper-competition.
Who’s to blame? Schools that want to brag about the number of kids they’re sending to Ivy League colleges? Colleges that want to brag about how selective they are? Parents who get caught up in the stickers they have on the back of their SUVs? Kids who are worried about being successful in a rapidly changing world? Or all of the above?
We are all caught in this achievement trap, what I’ve nicknamed Childhood, Inc. None of the individual adults are to blame. We are caught in a system that exploits kids. Schools and colleges want to distinguish themselves. Coaches need a year-round salary so kids are pushed to specialize. These pressures we are feeling are bigger than any one family, any one school, and any one community. But, there’s something we can do about it. In the end of the book, I write about taking action at home, at school, in the larger community, and in higher education. It will take a collective effort. And it’s already happening. I’ve highlighted those places in the book.
How do you think the recent Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action will impact this whole issue? Will that and the announcement by a number of schools to get rid of legacy admissions help or hurt?
As long as class sizes at the most selective universities stay stagnant, we will continue to see this pressure. Despite the enormous increase in applicants, most colleges have not increased their enrollment. Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits argues that universities with nonprofit status and tax benefits should be held accountable to operate like charities — by educating more students and drawing more students from the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. Many highly selective colleges and universities have large endowments that could be used to expand enrollment, which would relax the competition for all students.
What can we do to bring down the temperature for these students? The youth mental health crisis is out in the open, and everyone seems familiar with it. But is anyone paying attention? And do we have the courage to do anything about it?
Children’s mental health is the #1 concern among parents today. Parents are looking for a healthier way forward — how to encourage their kids to achieve without crushing them. What I have found in my reporting is that there are actions we can take now in our homes, in our classrooms, and on the athletic field to buffer against the increasing anxiety, depression, and loneliness too many of our young people are feeling.
These actions require shifts in thinking and behavior — not huge shifts but small, everyday actions and messages we send our children. Parents understand now more than ever that home needs to be a haven from excessive pressure, a place to recover from so many demands being placed on their kids. Mattering offers the pathway to healthy, joyful achievement. It offers a new lens for how we can communicate to our kids about their worth, their potential, and their value to society.
