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

by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

In communities like Molly’s, the past several decades have given rise to a professionalized childhood, in which seemingly every minute of a child’s life is managed to maximize their potential. Academics, athletics, and extracurricular activities have become increasingly competitive, adult-led, and high-stakes.

Processional Childhood

My survey and the resulting connections gave me so much material, both personal stories and patterns that could be traced between them. What emerged from my research hit me like an ice bath: our kids are absorbing the idea that their worth is contingent on their performance—their GPA, the number of social media followers they have, their college brands—not for who they are deep at their core. They feel they only matter to the adults in their lives, their peers, the larger community, if they are successful.

I see this every day...

Bringing home a C or even a B on an assignment would be met with a quiet, buttoned-up coldness. Their message was clear, she said, even without being explicit: We know you can do better.

I hate grades

“All of my life, I have felt like I had to be perfect, or people wouldn’t love me,” Amanda said.

Wow

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. A 2018 report by the influential public health and policy experts at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) named the top environmental conditions negatively impacting adolescent wellness. Among them were poverty, trauma, discrimination, and “excessive pressure to excel.” According to the RWJF report, a “family and/or school environment characterized by extreme pressure to succeed or to outdo everyone else—often, but not exclusively, occurring in especially affluent communities—can affect youth in significantly deleterious ways, including causing high levels of stress and anxiety or alcohol and drug use and dependence.” Students who are marginalized—whether due to race, class, ethnicity, or identity—can feel an additional, formidable layer of stress, making it even harder for them to thrive.

WOw

When you live in a community of high achievers with strict definitions of success, when friends are competing for the same leadership positions, for the same teams, for the same acceptances to increasingly exclusive colleges, you grow up in an environment of outsized expectations.

“Critics of this generation say they are being coddled and overprotected, but I actually think it’s quite the opposite,” Luthar said. “They’re being crushed by expectations to accomplish more and more.” These students are playing out their young lives in a kind of gilded pressure cooker—shiny on the outside, punishing on the inside. Every win sets even higher expectations: harder classes, tougher tournaments. Even activities that are supposed to be fun and stress reducing, like playing a sport or a musical instrument, become a means to an end: padding for life’s résumé. Speaking to young people crystallized for me just how poisonous these pressures are. One New York student recalled bursting into tears in her third-grade classroom because she thought getting a C on a math test had ruined her chances of getting into Harvard and “living a good life.”

Wow

“Mom, I love architecture,” he said. “Please don’t ruin it for me.”

“Many of us have to resort to fake personalities with fake passions in order to not fall behind in ‘social status’ and the college process.” Pressure to stand out, he said, has had a paradoxical effect on his generation, forcing students to be someone they’re not and feign passions to appear attractive to top colleges. Students become disaffected learners, consumed by getting good grades and accolades instead of taking a genuine interest in the subject matter. “In the hopes of seeing us for who we are, they’ve made us become who we aren’t,” he concluded.

W

In a letter to parents, the principal at Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, got right to the point: the kindergarten talent show was canceled, and the reason why was “simple.” She wrote, “We are responsible for preparing children for college and career readiness with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers.” Accordingly, the talent show was nixed so that teachers could spend more time on career readiness—for five-year-olds.

“You can say that we shouldn’t care about status, but if you fill a room with people who say they’re ‘anti-status,’ they would soon create a social hierarchy based on how anti-status they are,” wrote Loretta Graziano Breuning in I, Mammal.

Thats funny. Reminds me of if you put two privates in a room- someone has to be in charge.

The parents that really concern Weissbourd are the ones who organize their entire relationships with their children around their kid’s achievements, a hidden curriculum that becomes the main, if unspoken, focus of their parenting.

True

What Weissbourd said next prompted a light-bulb moment for me: the real problem, he said, is that high achievement is now seen by many parents as a life raft in an unpredictable future.

Nice

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).

Note

But the second and more significant reason was that the “slope of potential social decline is steepest at the top.” Doepke explained that well-off parents can feel especially compelled to safeguard against a drop in their child’s socioeconomic status.

Interesting

“that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.”

...further back than that.

Among the top ten universities, admissions have dropped even more dramatically, from roughly 16 percent to as low as 3 percent.

Is this bad? "Once everyone is special ...no one will be." -Sid; The Incredibles

At the critical stage of adolescent development, as they are grappling with questions of identity—who am I?—they begin to question their place in society. They begin to feel valued not for their intrinsic worth, but for their external appeal, for their résumés. Surrounded by our achievement culture, they begin to wonder: Do only certain people matter in this world?

Our fault

The problem resides in the potential gap between what a child can actually do and what a parent or society expects of them.

Over time, young people internalize too-high expectations and come to depend on them as indicators of self-value and parental love. In kids’ eyes, these metrics are marks they must hit in order to earn their worthiness. Not hitting those marks—whether it’s because of inevitable setbacks or an impossibly high bar—can become an indictment of who they are.

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

In the most extreme cases, the heavy burden of a false self can cause a young person to feel suicidal. As one student who had been hospitalized for an attempted suicide told me, “It wasn’t even like I was killing myself. I was killing this fake person I’d created, someone I didn’t even know.”

When a child acts in ways that are inconsistent with our values or hopes, we need to signal warmth even while expressing disappointment. In other words, we need to separate the deed from the doer. You still love the person, but you don’t love the action.

Hate the sin. Love the sinner.

In reflecting on her childhood, Beth realized that both of her parents tied their own self-esteem to her successes. Researchers call this phenomenon “child-contingent self-esteem.”

One of the most influential factors of parental mattering “is the extent to which the parent is psychologically present,”

Kids do not need parents who take self-sacrifice to the extreme. They need parents who have some perspective on the fraught high-achievement culture they find themselves in. Our kids need parents who have the wisdom and energy to call out the unhealthy values of achievement culture for the threats they are. And kids need to hear consistent countercultural messaging: about their inherent worth, about the delight they give their parents, about their meaning and purpose as a part of a larger world.

Truth!

Friendship buffers against the wear and tear of daily stress, lowering anxiety and regulating emotions. Social support, research finds, short-circuits our body’s natural threat response; experiments have shown that when a companion is in the room, our stress is reduced. It sounds hokey, but our relationships act like a shock absorber, reducing the brain’s response to pain. One study found that if two people are standing together, looking up at a hill, the incline doesn’t look as steep as it would if they were each alone.

Comminity

Kids can wrongly assume that if they aren’t being successful, it’s because they aren’t trying hard enough.

Materialism isn’t simply about loving certain logos or buying nice stuff; rather, it’s a value system that defines our goals and attention and how we spend our days. And it can leave us not just exhausted but unmoored. Pursuing materialistic goals, like high-status careers and money, causes us to invest our time and energy into things that take time away from investing in our social connections, a habit that can make us feel isolated over time.

We must offer them regular reprieves from a world that cares about advancement and stuff—whether it’s offering connection through family dinners or friends’ birthday parties, a mental reset through unplugging from devices, or a reminder of our smallness and humanity through excursions into nature.

I’d try to encourage him by telling him, Just try your best. One day, in frustration, he responded, “Mom, I’m eleven. I don’t know what my best is.”

In one study of teens, those who got more than eight hours of sleep a night were found to be the most mentally healthy, reporting the lowest levels of moodiness, feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and depression.

Truth

In one study, researchers asked hundreds of middle school students to rank the values their parents prioritized. Half of the values centered on achievement, such as attending a good college, excelling academically, and having a successful career. The other half focused on character traits, such as being respectful, helpful, and kind. Adolescents who reported that their parents valued character traits as much as or more than their performance exhibited greater mental health, enjoyed higher levels of achievement, and engaged in less rule-breaking behavior than peers who believed their parents were primarily focused on how they were performing.

Interesting

Over the years, Vaughan has witnessed adults bring out some of the worst instincts in kids. She talked about her experiences in competitive travel volleyball, where she would sometimes see parents pit kids who played the same position against each other. In some families, there was an unspoken rule: don’t make friends with people who play the same position because it can get touchy when it comes to playing time.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which examined the reasons for well-being among more than 36,000 seventh- to twelfth-grade students, found that family connectedness was the strongest protective factor against distress, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts. But it also found that feeling connected at school—a child’s next most important community—was strongly protective against substance use, early sexual initiation, and risk of unintentional injury, such as drinking and driving.

Wow

But in competitive environments, some students can come to believe that admitting that they need support means they are inadequate. It’s why so many adolescents suffer in silence, unbeknownst to us, until they implode.

She had recently learned a loving-kindness meditation in her yoga class in which you take a small time-out to send positive thoughts both to yourself and to the difficult people in your life. Would Kate like to try? Allyson asked. Together, they sat on the floor with their backs against the wall and said the meditative phrases out loud, wishing these things both for themselves and for Melissa: May you be safe. May you be healthy and strong. May you be happy. May you be peaceful and at ease.

Praying

how affirmative action disadvantages white applicants at top colleges.

Wasn't afermitive action struck down by the supreme court as unconstitutional and racist?

While boys are often taught that competition can push them to new heights, cultural stereotypes of competition among girls can be a lot more venomous—cat fights, “queen bees and wannabes,” as the author Rosalind Wiseman so vividly captured in her book by the same title.

“I came to recognize that supporting someone else’s success will never hinder or diminish my own.”

With Ms. Taylor’s intentional lessons and the broader culture of Archer as a net of support, the girls understood that they were part of something bigger than themselves, that the sum of their community was greater than its individual parts.

One study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed data from almost fourteen thousand college students. What they found was alarming: empathy has been decreasing over the past thirty years, so much so that the college kids in their study measured 40 percent lower in empathy on tests of the trait than their counterparts just a few decades ago. The drop is so startling some researchers have even declared a “narcissism epidemic.”

How do we fix it?

Another student taught me a word I’d never heard before: “slacktivism.” Slacktivists promote causes on social media to show their followers that they are caring, empathetic people—but they rarely follow through with real action. It’s easy to put up a message to highlight a cause, but how many of us are taking time away from sports and studying to do something that makes a difference?

Slacker!

William Damon, a Stanford University professor and expert in human development, told me that young people today are stressed and anxious not necessarily because we’re overworking them but because they don’t know what all their efforts are for.

“The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress,” notes Damon, “it’s meaninglessness.”

“We didn’t really talk about it as chores,” Marjie told me. “It was more like, how am I going to choose to contribute to the family today and make our home a little happier?”

Coach Mike engaged the boys in a simple exercise. First he asked them to write down everything they’d done, totally independently, without any help, to contribute to their own success. Then he asked them to make a second list of all the things others had done to support them over the past twenty-four hours. He asked the kids to put a percentage comparing the two. “It’s always fun, because a kid will say, ‘Uh, it’s about fifty-fifty,’ ” he told me. “And I press them: ‘Tell me really, what have you done?’ And then they’re like, ‘Huh, I guess I’ve been driven and clothed and sheltered and fed and loved and financially supported. Maybe it’s more like five to ninety-five percent.’ The point is to plant this idea that they really need people—and that there are people in the world who are going to need them.”

One mother in the Palo Alto area talked about how she created a “council of moms” during the turbulent teen years. Each teen had a list of five mothers who gave the kids in the group their cell phone numbers and promised confidentiality about any topic: academic pressure, drinking, relationships. They made this group formal. If one of the kids was worried about grades, any one of these mothers would meet them for coffee to discuss. If the kids found themselves at a party without a safe ride home, they could call any of these moms at any hour, no questions asked. It wasn’t just giving kids explicit information about who to call.

In Suniya Luthar’s student surveys, she has found that one critical area that negatively affects a student’s well-being is when they feel the fracture between their parents and school. Students who perceive that collaboration is low between the adults in their lives consistently report the highest numbers of stress. If school is really a second home, Luthar notes, then the acrimonious relationship between parents and teachers is like throwing kids into the stress of an ugly divorce. It forces kids to choose sides and adds to the pressures they already feel.