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

by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

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,