Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

The mental health of young people is shaped by many factors, noted Murthy, from their genes to their relationships to larger social forces, like messages in media and popular culture that can “erode their sense of self-worth—telling them they are not good-looking enough, popular enough, smart enough, or rich enough.” But the

They feel they only matter to the adults in their lives, their peers, the larger community, if they are successful.

I use the word “matter” deliberately here. Since the 1980s, a growing body of research finds that mattering—the feeling that we are valued and add value to others—is key to positive mental health and to thriving in adolescence and beyond. “Mattering”

Mattering is not mutually exclusive from high performance. When we matter, we are more likely to participate in positive, healthy ways in our families, our schools, and our communities.

Many of her friends felt the same way. “We live in a community where your grades, how you look, your weight, where you travel, what your house looks like—everything has to be the best, to be perfect, and to look effortless,” said Amanda.

her lack of self-control only reminded her that, yet again, she’d failed to measure up.

Her self-worth would go up or down depending on the number on the scale or the score on a test. “I always felt like I had to maintain this perfect image at home, at school, and online, so I wasn’t genuinely connecting with most people, especially my parents,” she said. “It was a very lonely time.”

Weekends brought fleeting relief. “My friends and I worked so hard all week that we felt like we deserved to let go,” she said. They’d binge drink, sometimes to the point of blacking out. Amanda said there was a tacit agreement in town between some parents and their teens that you could do whatever you wanted on the weekends as long as you were performing during the week. Some parents, she told me, would supply the booze and even join them in the drinking. Amanda’s parents had a different perspective: “They

On campus, she found an environment even more competitive than in high school. She struggled to maintain straight As. Her eating disorder worsened, her drinking picked up, and she dabbled with drugs to escape her shame at never quite measuring up.

“All of my life, I have felt like I had to be perfect, or people wouldn’t love me,” Amanda said. It’s a mindset that is so ingrained in her that she doubts it will ever entirely leave: “I still want to perform, I still want to achieve, but now I’m trying not to punish myself quite so much when I don’t.”

Much to her surprise, she found that the upper-middle-class suburban youth were doing worse on many of the study’s measures: they were significantly more likely to use alcohol, marijuana, and hard drugs than the average teen and relative to inner-city kids; suburban girls, in particular, were suffering from much higher levels of clinical depression, and both genders showed slight elevations of clinically significant anxiety relative to norms.

In the years since this groundbreaking study, Luthar and other scientists have discovered that what places a child “at risk” for clinically high levels of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse is not growing up in an upper-middle-class family, but rather growing up in an environment of unrelenting pressure.

Parents who “play the game” are left wondering whether their child is genuinely happier; parents who don’t, or can’t afford to, are left wondering how to overcome an unlevel playing field that disadvantages their child.

Adolescents become overly reliant on others for a sense of who they should be and how much they’re worth. And when personal worth seems to depend solely on getting ahead of their peers, kids may fail to develop a sense of internal meaning and purpose.

Many parents I interviewed said that they, too, felt trapped by hypercompetitive societal norms. An overwhelming 80 percent of the over six thousand parents I surveyed agreed that the children in their community were “under excessive pressure to achieve.” When asked

College fever has even trickled down to the pre-K set. Some New York families feel compelled to hire consultants to help their child get into a “good” preschool, so the kids are positioned for a “good” grade school that will feed them into a “good” high school . . . and so on.

In the United States, we are taught that we live in a meritocracy, in which success is supposedly earned through hard work and ability. Add in a little luck, the American myth promises, and anyone can climb the ladder of success. It is an appealing promise—especially for those in white, affluent communities where the climb starts a few rungs up. Of course, as in any hierarchy, there is room for only a few at the top—and that’s when a parent’s status anxiety can get triggered.

Safeguarding generally falls to the mother, who is tasked with forging a unique path to success for each individual child. To be sure, many fathers contribute to status safeguarding, but it’s mothers, the researchers note, who continue to perform the bulk of the cognitive and emotional labor for children.

Ironically, Milkie points out, all the sacrifices a mother makes to launch a child successfully into the competitive labor market often have a high cost in her own career and compensation—and thus her own status.

White middle-class children who were born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents. For children born in the 1980s, however, the chances of earning more than their parents fell to 50 percent. In the past several decades, it’s only gotten worse. Millennials on average have lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth compared to what other generations had at their age.

The two looked at broad economic and social trends across countries and across decades and sketched out a theory: Do the prevailing economic incentives in any given time and place directly influence parents’ behavior, from the number of children they have to the style of their parenting?

Across national borders and generations, Doepke and Zilibotti found that a country’s level of income inequality, social mobility, and return on educational investment informed parents’ behavior. To help categorize this behavior, the economists turned to the psychologist Diana Baumrind’s groundbreaking framework of parenting styles, which outlines three main approaches: permissive (which allows room for kids’ freedom and self-discovery), authoritarian (which restricts kids’ autonomy, demanding obedience and a respect for work), and authoritative (which attempts to encourage good behavior through communication and clear limit setting). A country’s underlying economic conditions, they found, had a direct correlation with its parenting approaches. In Scandinavia,

There are roughly 27,000 high schools in this country. So, alone, the 54,000 valedictorians and salutatorians of those schools could fill the incoming classes of the twenty top-ranked colleges and universities twice over. The sobering math elicited a few gasps from parents who hadn’t thought about scarcity in such stark terms.

Part of the reason we get so wrapped up in our kids’ achievements is that we’re worried that our children won’t be able to get into the kind of college we attended, Harvard’s Rick Weissbourd told me. In a parent’s mind, either consciously or unconsciously, this registers as a drop in status and triggers that smoke-detector alarm.

This was when Rebecca realized that if she didn’t get a grip on her parenting anxieties, they would get a grip on her children—something she knew firsthand.

Both Curran and Hill are quick to clarify that they’re not blaming parents, who place excessive expectations on kids because they think that is what society demands. The problem resides in the potential gap between what a child can actually do and what a parent or society expects of them. Parents are reacting anxiously to a hypercompetitive world, with intense academic pressures, extreme inequality, and innovations like social media that feed unrealistic ideals of how we should look and perform, Curran explained.

Mattering expresses the deep need we all have to feel seen, cared for, and understood by those around us, notes social psychologist Gregory Elliott of Brown University. Elliott describes the feeling of mattering this way: Do people take an interest in you and what you have to say? Do you have people who can share your triumphs and support you after setbacks? Do people depend on you and rely on you for guidance and help? As long as we live, this instinctual need to matter never changes.

When we are made to feel that we matter for who we are at our core, we build a sturdy sense of self-worth.

As parents, teachers, coaches, and trusted adults, we can dial up and nurture a child’s sense of mattering so they can meet the challenges they have ahead.

When you criticize a child, they don’t necessarily stop loving you, psychologists say; they stop loving themselves.

Psychologists have developed an assessment to measure child-contingent self-esteem that involves asking participants to rate how much they agree with statements like “My child’s failures can make me feel ashamed.” A parent’s tendency to invest their self-worth in a child’s performance is influenced by both their personality and perception of the social environment.

That’s why playtime as a family is so critical. When we don’t carve out time for play, we lose out on some of the highest-quality interactions we can have with our kids—getting immersed in something together, as equals. Play has no agenda and offers a judgment-free place for our kids to be, to learn, and to become their ordinary selves. It can be hard to protect that time, of course. My husband, Peter, instituted a family rule: at least once a week, all of us must participate in something he branded NOFAs, or “nonoptional family activities.” It’s a signal to the kids that play and family time is a priority in our house: yes, we value hard work, but we also value having fun together. Our kids need to learn and cultivate the skill of using downtime as a way of replenishing themselves and their relationships. Past NOFAs have included game nights, picnics at the beach, bike rides, and working through one-thousand-piece puzzles. Peter is a strategic thinker, so he paired NOFAs with OFAs (optional family activities) to offer the kids some agency. The branding helped to get buy-in, as did allowing the kids to participate in choosing activities. Sometimes we even play video games as a family, if that’s what one of the

It’s less about what the activity is and more about the closeness you feel as a family doing it.