Never Enough Quotes

“seven critical ingredients to feeling like you matter: 1. Attention: Feeling that you are noticed by others 2. Importance: Feeling like you’re significant 3. Dependence: Feeling like you’re important because others rely on you 4. Ego extension: Recognizing that someone is emotionally invested in you and cares what happens to you 5. Noted absence: Feeling like you’re missed 6. Appreciation: Feeling like you and your actions are valued 7. Individuation: Being made to feel unique, special, and known for your true self”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“In the unrelenting chase of what is “best,” many of us can unknowingly allow our lives to become defined by materialism. 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. Ironically, the more isolated we feel, the more likely we are to pursue materialistic goals that we hope, even subconsciously, will draw people to us. Acquiring status markers, we believe, will make us worthy of the human connection we crave. It’s a vicious cycle: some people may become materialistic not because they love money more but because they have underdeveloped connections. Instead of attaching to people, they attach to material goods and status markers to fill the void and to try to get the emotional security they’re lacking. But this approach can backfire and undermine the very relationships we’re trying to foster. In fact, people who prioritize materialistic goals tend to have weaker, more transactional relationships: you do for me, I do for you.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“When you criticize a child, they don’t necessarily stop loving you, psychologists say; they stop loving themselves.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Nurture parent-teacher relationships. When students feel that parents are talking negatively about their teacher, it undermines that critical relationship, akin to the acrimonious divorce of parents, notes Suniya Luthar. Students learn best from teachers they feel close to, and teachers play an essential role in buffering against achievement stress. Show respect and appreciation when you speak about or interact with their teachers. Actively build a partnership with educators so that a child can be best supported. “Replace” yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives. Guard that time so that they can enjoy a wider safety net of support. You might even make it formal, as some parents I interviewed did, by creating a master sheet of phone numbers and meeting together as a group. Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter. You might adopt a regular gratitude practice at home, like “the one thing I love about the birthday person.” Teach kids how to think gratefully. Point out when someone goes out of their way to find a present for them, or when they do something kind that makes your child’s life better. Researchers find gratitude is the glue that binds relationships together.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Make home a “mattering haven.” Parents can provide a child’s most significant source of mattering—or be the greatest source of contingent mattering, feeling like they matter only when they’re performing. Because our kids are bombarded with messages on the importance of achievement, home needs to be a safe place to land, a place where their mattering is never in question.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Another big lesson I learned in my reporting was that people need to know they matter more than they need their privacy.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Yet what I have learned in my research is that when we let kids skip out on chores or family events so they can study or practice for their soccer games, we support an overly self-focused outlook in them. It doesn’t just make them selfish and self-involved and a little hard to live with. Too much self-focus is unhealthy for them. It’s associated with clinical depression, personality disorders, and anxiety.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Choosing intrinsic values—like investing in friendships, neighbors, or volunteer groups—has been found to sustain our happiness and well-being in a way that pursuing extrinsic goals, like higher income or higher status in a career, doesn’t.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Conditional regard” is the psychological term for parental affection that depends on a child meeting certain expectations, whether academic, athletic, or behavioral. Researchers distinguish between two types of conditional regard: positive, like when children feel their parents provide more warmth and affection than usual when expectations are met, and negative, when affection is withheld after expectations aren’t met. Psychologists have shown that conditional regard undermines a child’s self-esteem. Instead of figuring out who they really are, adolescents fixate on pleasing others.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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” offers a rich, almost intuitive framework for understanding the pressure assailing our kids—and how to protect them from it. It is as profound as it is practical. It doesn’t involve spending more money on tutors or coaches or adding another activity to an already overpacked schedule. Instead, it offers a radical new lens for how we as adults—parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors—see our kids and communicate to them about their worth, potential, and value to society.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“3. Dependence: Feeling like you’re important because others rely on you 4. Ego extension: Recognizing that someone is emotionally invested in you and cares what happens to you 5. Noted absence: Feeling like you’re missed 6. Appreciation: Feeling like you and your actions are valued 7. Individuation: Being made to feel unique, special, and known for your true self”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Focus on wise striving and being energy efficient. How do you define being a “good student” in your house? For Lisa Damour, “good” doesn’t mean giving everything 100 percent—that’s what leads to burnout and feeds perfectionistic tendencies. Instead, it’s learning to be strategic about where you spend your energy. As Damour’s colleague put it: the difference between getting a 91 and a 99 is a life.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Be a balance keeper. Kids need to learn self-care skills. The nonprofit Challenge Success suggests the mnemonic “PDF” to remember that our kids need playtime (in older kids, “recharging” time), downtime, and family time every day.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“in one national phone poll of 1,001 US adults, while 82 percent of adults reported having done chores growing up, only 28 percent had their kids doing chores. As one mother bluntly put it to me, “I’d rather my daughter know Mandarin than how to make her bed.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About 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? one student asked me rhetorically.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“It’s not only that there are more areas in which a child needs to be “exceptional”; it’s also that the bar for what is “exceptional” keeps rising, offering our kids more and more ways to feel like they are not enough. Children absorb constant messages from our achievement culture that they need to be thin, rich, smart, beautiful, athletic, and talented to be worthy of likes, love, and attention. Like dutiful soldiers, our kids comply with these crazy demands. Over time, they internalize them.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Some teachers, coaches, and parents have oversimplified Dweck’s insights, the UK researcher Andrew Hill explained to me. Kids can wrongly assume that if they aren’t being successful, it’s because they aren’t trying hard enough.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“When we talk about pressure, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, and loneliness in kids, what we are really talking about is an unmet need to feel valued unconditionally, away from the trophies, the acceptance letters, the likes, and the accolades. When we say that “pressure” is detrimental to children’s (and parents’) well-being, what we mean by “pressure” is a set of circumstances that cause our children to wrongfully perceive their value as contingent on achievement. When an adolescent believes they must sustain a certain level of success in order to earn their parents’ love and affection, they feel inadequate, and this interferes with a healthy, stable identity.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About 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?”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“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.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Instead of worrying about a wobbly ranking, research points us toward a better use of parental energy: emphasizing not where you go to college but what you do when you get there.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Friendship is a gift we give ourselves. Friendship has a deep, healing power that I didn’t fully appreciate in my twenties, when my friends and I were more focused on just having fun together. Research has found that time with our friends may make us the happiest, happier than time with anyone else, including our children, relatives, parents, and even spouses. And yet friends are the first ones to take a back seat when life gets hectic. We take them for granted, thinking they’ll always be there, until one day, maybe they’re not. Without intentional focus and attention, even close friendships can fade away over the years.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“Asking for help is powerful precisely because high-achievement culture discourages it—reaching out can disarm those around us, causing them to drop their defenses, too. It’s also critical to our mattering: when you ask for help, you recognize that you are important enough to have your needs met. At the same time, you communicate to your friends that they matter to you, which bolsters their own mattering. “We have a culture that sees asking for help as a weakness,” noted Vanessa. “But anyone who has ever asked for help knows how much humility and strength it takes.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“When we teach our kids how to live a life of purpose, how to contribute meaningfully to others, their drive becomes self-sustaining. Purpose energizes, motivates, and keeps them on track, even when challenges or setbacks inevitably occur. It curbs perfectionistic tendencies and reminds them that they’re much more than any one failure. Setbacks don’t become all-encompassing reflections on a person’s inherent worth. When we have a sense of outward mission, we gain a long-term perspective: We see that we’re not just rising and falling on our achievements and that our failures aren’t as consequential as they may initially seem. This larger purpose shifts our mindset from one of scarcity and fear to one of abundance, where we see our place in the world as part of a bigger whole.”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

“We form this perception over time, based on how we are seen and treated by the people in our lives, most critically by our primary caregivers. In other words, self-worth isn’t developed in a vacuum. It functions as a social barometer, a way of tracking how we’re doing in the eyes of others and becomes the story we tell ourselves about how much we are valued by those around us. When we are made to feel that we matter for who we are at our core, we build a sturdy sense of self-worth. We learn that we matter simply because we are. Mattering is a pathway back to our inherent worth. It tells us we are enough. Mattering won’t solve everything, but it goes a long way toward addressing many of the emotional and behavioral problems facing our youth today, says Flett. High levels of mattering act as a protective shield buffering against stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. What is so appealing about mattering is how actionable it is. As parents, teachers, coaches, and trusted adults, we can dial up and nurture”
― Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It