How Achievement Culture Harms Kids

And what to do instead.

OMG, everyone, how is it September? Today is my kids’ first day of school. We spent the weekend frenetically preparing for it because we only just returned from our vacation late Saturday night. Somehow, we got everything ready, but barely. (I’ll share more deets about our trip in Friday’s paid newsletter.)

Before I jump into today’s topic, a couple of fun announcements: I’m running a 25% off Back-to-School Sale through Friday, September 15!! Get your discount here:

If you subscribe now, you can join my one-hour live Ask-Me-Anything thread for paid subscribers from 8pm to 9pm ET TOMORROW, September 6th. (You don’t need to do anything to join other than be a paid subscriber; you’ll get an email launching the thread right at 8pm ET tomorrow.)

As a paid subscriber you’ll also get to join my weekly discussion threads, read my Friday essays and Q&As, and get discounts on upcoming workshops (more on those soon). You’ll also get to enter my book giveaways — and I’m excited today to announce my amazing September giveaway! Paid subscribers can enter here to get copies of THREE new and fantastic books: Autonomy-Supporting Parenting by Emily Edlynn, Growing Up in Public by Devorah Heitner, and Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace. I’ve read each of them and they are all phenomenal.

You’ll be hearing more about the first two books very soon — and today, you get to hear about Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — And What We Can Do About It, which came out on August 22 and became an instant New York Times bestseller.

You may recognize author Jennifer Wallace’s name from the series of posts I ran earlier this year on extracurriculars and how they impact kids, because I interviewed her for one of them. In Never Enough, Jennifer has written an essential parenting book on how the pressure parents put on kids to excel harms them and what parents should do instead to help their kids thrive. (Those of you who have read chapter 6 of my book may recognize some of the crucial research she cites on this topic.) I’m thrilled to have had the chance to talk to Jennifer — this is an interview all parents need to read, and I highly, highly recommend buying her book and reading the entire thing.

Here’s our illuminating Q&A, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jennifer, what inspired you to write your book? Tell me the backstory.

Three things happened in 2019 — that's when I sold the book. The first thing was that my oldest was going into high school. And I was thinking, I have four years left — where do I want to be putting my energy as a parent? The message I was getting, in my culture, in my community, was that you’ve got to set them up for college, you’ve got to build up the resumé. His achievement, obviously, mattered to a certain degree, but it was not where I felt like my parental energy should be spent. That prompted me to figure out: What is it that I need to instill in my kid in these last four years to really give him the skills he needs to thrive when I'm not around anymore?

At the same time, the Varsity Blues scandal hit. If you remember, it was parents on both coasts going to jail over bribing and trying to secure a spot for their kid at a select college. And I thought, wow — how did we get to the point now where parents were willing to go to jail to get their kids into a selective college? I wasn't buying the narrative that parents just wanted a bumper sticker on their car. I thought there was something deeper at play.

The third thing was, in 2019, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about how students in what researchers call “high achieving schools” — competitive public and private schools around the country — were now officially an at-risk group. They were two to six times more likely to experience clinical levels of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse disorder than the average American teen. And my kids were attending these competitive schools. I wanted to find out: One, how we got here, and two, what I could do in my own home to buffer against the excessive pressure that they might feel.

Why do we as parents feel this deep angst and fear on behalf of our kids? We're so worried that they're not going to do okay, that they're not going to be okay, and that we need to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. Where does this come from?

I wanted to figure out why my childhood in the 70s and early 80s was so different than my own children's childhood, which seemed so much busier, with so many more stressors and pressures. So I spoke with historians, sociologists, and economists. And the argument that really rang true for me was something I'd heard from economists — that in the 70s, when I was growing up, life was generally more affordable. Housing was more affordable, higher education was more affordable, health care was more affordable, food was more affordable. So parents could be relatively assured that their kids could make some mistakes, have some setbacks, and still replicate their upbringing.

That is no longer the case. We are now facing the first generation that is not as well off as their parents. We have seen, in the last few decades, the crush of the middle class. Steep inequity, hyper-competition with globalization. We don't know what jobs we're preparing our kids for. AI is now on the scene. Climate change. There's so many stressors, and a lot of them are economic stressors. So in the words of Tom Curran, who is a researcher at the London School of Economics, parents have become “social conduits” — we have absorbed those macro-economic forces. And it comes out in our parenting.

This is not to blame parents — this is to offer parents some context into why they might be worried at night when their student drops down to a B student, or when they hear about all the other activities their friends’ children are doing but their kids are not. What I hope to do with this book is to show parents: You’re not alone. It's not personal. There is a larger economic story that's playing in the background as we are trying to raise our kids. There are extra pressures that our parents didn't feel.

One thing that [Harvard psychologist] Rick Weissbourd said to me, which was a real a-ha moment, was that parents have bet big that getting their kid into a selective college is like equipping them with a life vest in a sea of uncertainty. But what I found in my research, and what I've seen in my own community, is that that life vest can become a lead vest and drown too many of the kids that we are trying to protect. There's a better way.

Yes — let's dig into the costs of this kind of parenting. As you say, we're doing it because we think it's helping our kids, we think it's for the best. But we're actually putting kids at risk. That’s counterintuitive. How and why does this behavior harm our kids rather than help help them?

This is not an anti-ambition, anti-achievement book. I believe in healthy striving and joyful achievement. I have enjoyed achievements in my life, and I want my kids to enjoy them. But I believe the harm in our achievement culture is when our kids absorb the message that they only matter, that they're only valued, when they achieve — when they make the A-team, when they get the grades, when they get the followers, when they look a certain way.

And the bar of what achievement is has risen. It is now measured in all areas of their life. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, and even the 90s, in college, achievement was a part of my life. But it wasn't the purpose of my childhood. And I think, for too many kids today, they feel like their childhood, their high school years, are just a means to an end. What achievement culture does is it puts these adult anxieties and worries onto kids who do not have the developmental capacity to handle them and to cope with them.

You frame it so nicely in your book when you make the point that what matters isn't what we say to our kids, but what our kids hear. A parent could read what you’ve just said and think, “Well, I don't tell my kid that their value only stems from their achievements, so I’m fine.” But none of us say this explicitly — yet many of our kids are getting the message through what we're prioritizing. What are some of the subtle ways in which we might inadvertently be communicating to our kids that their achievement is more important than anything else, and that their value stems from what they do?

Tina Payne Bryson, who's a psychoanalyst, gave me four really good reflective questions to see how, as a parent, you are sending the signal about achievement to your child. These are what she said:

1) Check your child's calendar and see how they're spending time outside of school. Do they have play time, downtime, and family time? This is what Challenge Success, a nonprofit at Stanford University, says every child needs daily.

2) How do you spend your money as a relates to your child? Are you spending a lot of your disposable income on achievement-oriented activities and supports like tutoring, coaching, and expensive travel soccer games?

3) Notice what you ask your child about when they come home from school. What are the questions that you're asking them? Are they: How'd you do on your Spanish quiz? That's sending them the signal that that's something you've been worried about all day, so much so that you needed to squelch your anxiety and blurt it out when they walked in the door.

4) What do you argue with your child about?

Those four things will tell you a lot about the signals your child is receiving around achievement and how important it is to you.

I want to talk about a concept you discuss in your book as the antidote to achievement culture, called “mattering.” I think this is not a concept that a lot of parents are familiar with. Where did this concept come from and what does it entail?

For the book, I went in search of the healthy strivers. I wanted to know what, if anything, they had in common. What did their parents focus on? What was school like? What was their relationship like with their peers? And I came across this idea of
”mattering.” It's been around since the 1980s. It was first conceptualized by Morris Rosenberg, who brought us self-esteem. And what he found was that kids who enjoyed a healthy level of self-esteem felt like they mattered to their parents — that they were important and significant.

What I found in my own on-the-ground reporting is that kids who felt a high level of mattering — who felt valued for who they were, at their core, by their family, by their friends, by their community, and kids who were then depended on to add meaningful value back to their families, to their schools, to their communities — that this mattering served as a protective shield. It didn't mean that they didn't have setbacks. It didn't mean that they weren't sometimes anxious and worried. But what mattering did is it acted like a buoy that lifted them up. And research has found that mattering is important throughout the lifespan.

Mattering to me has become the North Star of my parenting. It has really changed everything about my life. I used to, in my home, try to solve for my kids’ happiness. And now I solve for their mattering. I want them to have the tools to live a life of meaning.

Can you share a couple of concrete examples of things that you do that help to ensure your kids feel they matter?

What I did was I got a PhD in each of my kids. I wanted to know what it was about them that made them uniquely tick. What were their strengths? I wanted them to feel known and appreciated by me, because part of mattering is knowing that you are uniquely seen — you are seen for the individual that you are, and that you matter because of it.

As parents, it's very easy to miss our kids natural strengths, because they’re such an inherent part of who they are. And so what my kids and I did was that we all took the VIA [character strengths] survey. That was part of getting to know them. And when my kids now get their report cards, I’ve taken to annotating the summary on the report card, of where the teachers write about their strengths, and I say, “Oh, my gosh, I see this too!”

We also, in our family, have a fun tradition where on a birthday, we go around the table and we say one thing we love about the birthday boy or girl. It can be, “I love your sense of humor,” or my daughter might say to my son, “I appreciate how you put your homework aside to help me when I'm struggling with my own. You're always so selfless that way.”

It’s seeing our kids for who they are, what makes them unique and things that have nothing to do with their performance.

That's really beautiful. But: What would you say to parents who read all this and still say, “Well, but if my kid doesn't get into an Ivy League, then they're not going to succeed!”

I would say, go and immerse yourself in the research. Denise Pope at Challenge Success wrote a wonderful white paper about how what is more important for midlife and later-life happiness, financial well-being, and just overall well-being, is how well a student fits on campus, not the rank of the school. What that means, when it comes to whether a child fits on campus, is: Did they matter?

I quote research from Purdue and Gallup — the largest study of college graduates in US history, where they surveyed over 30,000 students to measure purpose, physical well-being, financial well-being, whether they felt like they were a part of the community, how strong and supportive their relationships were — and the researchers found that the prestige of a college, whether it was highly selective or not, public or private, small or large, hardly mattered at all to their current well being and their work lives. What did impact later life success was how valued they felt on campus, and whether or not they were relied on to add value to others on that campus. Did they have a professor who knew them personally and made learning exciting and cared about them as a person, not just as a student? Did they have a mentor who encouraged them? Did they have access to internships and projects where they could use what they learned to add value either to their campus or to the knowledge of the world? Were they active in extracurricular activities? Did they add value in that way back to their school community?

The conversation that we're having in our house by with my senior is: Which college will make him feel like he matters most?

What else would you like to share with parents based on your research?

The most surprising finding for me was Suniya Luthar’s research — where, for any child in distress, the number one intervention [that helps] is to make sure their primary caregivers, the adults in that child's life, that their well-being is intact and that they have a support system. Because a child's resilience rests fundamentally on the resilience of the adults in that child's life, and adult resilience rests on the depth and support of their relationships.

Before writing this book, I knew relationships were important. But I didn't realize just how important they were not just for me, but for the mental health and well-being of the people in my home. So I have made that a real priority in my life — to have those relationships, to have friends around me who see me and know me, that I can be vulnerable with, that I can show up and I feel unconditionally loved and supported by.