Grim expectations: An expert explains how toxic achievement took over American childhood

It's not just getting into that prestige preschool. It's not just SAT scores. It's not just the tutoring and the violin lessons and right resume gilding internship. "The bar of what it is to achieve has risen for all kids," says journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace, "and it is in all areas of their lives."

And that stress-inducing drive to turn American childhood and adolescence into a competition cuts across class and income lines — and is burning out kids and their guardians alike. Last year, research from the Health Resources and Services Administration revealed that rates anxiety and depression among children ages 3-17 have increased dramatically since 2017 — and that "Parents and caregivers also experienced greater mental health needs."

The roots of the problem, Wallace says, are a cultural and economic shift that has narrowed our options while removing many of our social supports. But we don't have to treat childhood like "a zero-sum game," as Wallace puts it. In her new book, "Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do about It," the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post contributor explores how the best thing we can do for our children is cultivate their sense of community, and of mattering to others and themselves.

"Parents can either choose healthy fuel or dirty fuel to motivate their kids," Wallace explained during a recent video chat. "Dirty fuel, the overemphasis on external markers of achievement," she says, "over time is going to clog up your kid's engine." But by drawing on the lessons of "healthy high achievers," Wallace says we can reclaim our time, our sanity and our children's own childhoods. "It's only been in the last several decades that we have focused so in such an unhealthy way on individual achievement," she says, adding, "There's never been a time where it's been more obvious that this achievement culture is toxic." 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The narrative is that with this kind of pressure, this success and achievement oriented toxicity, we're really talking about the kids whose parents are trying to push them to go to Ivy League schools. We're really talking about Operation Varsity Blues families. The idea is that this isn't about public school kids in America who are struggling. 

When I started researching this book, I thought, "Is this just like a few pockets of the East Coast, the West Coast?" The first thing I did was conduct a parenting survey with a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to see if this was just a problem of a few elite communities. Within a few days, my survey had reached 6,500 parents around the country.

This is happening in Maine, Texas, Alaska, in Cleveland, Ohio — this pressure to achieve. This is not about getting kids into an Ivy League anymore. Maybe that's where it began. But I would point out the Varsity Blues people were trying to get their kids into a school like USC. The bar of what it is to achieve has risen for all kids, and it is in all areas of their lives. It is not just about getting into an elite university. This is about, "How do I look on social media? How many followers do I have?" Sports used to be a way to reduce stress. Now, kids as early as five years old are being put on travel teams. Everything is about excellence. 

What I found in my survey was that this was affecting parents. This is not a book about the 1% or even the 10%. We are talking about the top 20 to 25% of household incomes. We're talking about public schools and private schools. We are talking about kids who may be growing up in an affluent community but also kids who aren't, who are trying to get into the same types of schools or have the same types of outcomes. 

How did we get to this to this place? A generation ago, going to school, having a future, getting a job was all at a somewhat less high stakes level. What happened?

I wanted to know this, too. I interviewed historians, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists to find out. Why was my childhood in the '70s so different than my own kids' childhoods?

I remember standing in sleet in the pouring rain with my son in fifth grade at his travel soccer team, an hour and a half away from New York City. I looked around all these freezing parents. I actually asked out loud, "Why are we doing this? Why?" Bizarrely, I thought people would be like, "I totally agree." No one answered. They thought I was just the crazy person thinking out loud. 

In the '70s, when I was growing up, life was generally more affordable. There was slack in the system. Housing was more affordable; health care was more affordable. Higher education was more affordable. At the same time, over the last several decades, there are macro economic forces to play. What I really focus on is the crush of the middle class, and this steep inequity that we have seen. Parents have had that big message that childhood success is about getting a child into a good school that can act as a life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty.

We might not even be understanding what we're doing and why we're feeling this intensity and why we're so stressed out. But we are absorbing these macro economic forces and we're becoming social conduits and changing how we parent at home. 

I wasn't believing this narrative that is in the popular culture that parents just want bumper stickers on the backs of their cars. I knew there was something deeper going on. What I found is that parents are betting big that getting their kid into a quote unquote good college, or really college at all, is the only way to protect them in a country that offers very few and increasingly fewer social safety nets. Parents, particularly mothers, have been tasked with weaving these individualized safety nets to catch their kids because they can't rely on the government to do that. The pressures that parents are feeling, and the way childhood has changed, are so much bigger than any one family, any one school, any one community.

On the other side of this, what is the price of resisting that hyper competitiveness and that hyper anxiety? I hope that my kids have good values and strong support and friends and happy lives, but is that enough to be okay, in this world, right now?

Parents can either choose healthy fuel or dirty fuel to motivate their kids. I would argue that the fuel that you have used to shepherd your children into their own future, not focusing excessively on external markers of achievement, is a healthy fuel that over their lifetime will serve them. This isn't just my my idea. This is what I have found in interviewing families all over the country, that focusing on healthy fuel is what is going to help a child over the long run. That dirty fuel, the overemphasis on external markers of achievement, will get you a short term win. But over time — and the literature and the research bears this out — it's going to clog up your kid's engine and they are going to burn out. 

I begin the book by talking about the struggles, but really the book is focused on the healthy achievers. I wanted to raise healthy achievers. I'm super high achieving, but I'm ambitious for more than just my career. I want my kids to be ambitious for more. I want a deep community. I want a great marriage. I'm ambitious for a fuller life. 

I was looking for whether these healthy high achievers have anything in common. What was home life like for them? What was school? What were their relationships like? What did they see as their goal in the larger community? I found lots of threads they had in common. When I was looking for a framework, I found this idea of mattering. Kids who who enjoyed healthy achievement had this high level of mattering. They felt valued by their family, their friends and their community. It didn't mean that these healthy achievers weren't depressed sometimes. They certainly experienced failure, but mattering acted like a buoy that lifted them up and helped them carry on.

The kids who were suffering the most felt like their mattering was contingent on how well they were performing. The other group of kids who seem to be suffering the most were those who were overly focused on themselves and their own resumes, and were never depended on to add meaningful value back to anyone other than themselves. What those kids lacked was social proof that they mattered. They might have gotten the messages at home, "We love you so much unconditionally," but they never got the social proof that they mattered for more than their resumes. 

That gets to this idea of interdependence. 

Interdependence was a huge lightbulb moment in my research. I always focused on things like, "I want to raise independent kids who can flourish on their own." I still do. I still want my kids to enjoy hitting goals and knowing that they can always rely on themselves. But what I have learned in researching this book is that there is a higher goal that I want for my kids, and it is interdependence. It is knowing that they are worthy of support. They are worthy of other people helping them, and they have a responsibility to help others.

They have a responsibility to be dependable, and life is not a zero-sum game. We are tricked into believing that it is, and it just isn't. Ask anyone who has lived a happy, fulfilling life, and they will tell you, they did not get there on their own. In our hyper-individualistic culture, we are made to think that it's our own rugged independence. But nothing I have achieved, have I done on my own. It is only because of the kindness and generosity of people around me.

I want to ask about the specific toll this kind of achievement culture has on moms. We know a lot about the crisis in our young people. But there is less conversation around what this is doing to moms, many of whom are taking care of older parents at the same time, maybe at the most critical stages of their careers. 

Intensive parenting serves our society, this idea that that mothers need to be the safety nets for our kids, because we can't rely on any other safety nets. We saw this during COVID. This takes an enormous toll on caregivers, and in particular mothers. Understanding the importance of maternal well being and mental health and social support was perhaps the most important finding in my research. 

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Suniya Luthar emphasized this with me in every conversation we had. Every conversation would come back to the number one most important thing we can do for our kids is to make sure their primary caregiver's — most often the mother's — support system is intact, that her psychological well-being is there and solid. Children's resilience rests fundamentally on the adults in their lives, the resilience of their teachers, their coaches, their parents. We can't be first responders, as Suniya Luthar puts it, to kids' struggles if we are not shored up and our resilience is not there in ourselves.

I was writing this book during COVID, and I was reading all of this research on how important "mothering the mother" was for caregivers. It was a really fraught time for parents, particularly working mothers. What I found in this research was, in order for me to be there for my kids during a crisis like COVID, or during a crisis of friendship, or any number of things, was to make sure that I put myself first. This is not a message that parents and mothers are given.

The self-care that is most meaningful for parents and mothers is their own support system. A parent's resilience, a mother's resilience, rests on her relationships. In visiting dozens of communities around the country, for busy working parents, it's not that we don't have friends. It's that we don't have the time, too often, to invest in our relationships, so that when we need them, they can be the source of support we need. 

You talk about this idea of self-care as sometimes feeling like just one more thing to do. Talk a little bit more about we how we flip that switch, because it's so fraught with guilt. It's so fraught with, "Am I also not taking care of myself the right way?"

Throw out what the multibillion dollar self-care industry is selling you. Focus, above and beyond all, on your relationships. You don't need a ton of them. You need one or two really good friends who you are willing to be vulnerable with, and who are willing to be vulnerable with you. Find those deep reciprocal, not transactional, relationships that you can be seen and loved for who you are, no matter what, warts and all.

You don't need a lot of time — you need deliberate time. You need to say to your partner, to your kids, "I need this time for me." What you are doing is not only building up your own resilience and resources, you are modeling for your spouse, for your kids, here's what you do to build up your own resilience.

There is something different about having relationships that give you a social proof that you matter. I think we have lost the skills of friendship in our busy lives, and as a society, we have not prioritized it. What the research shows and what I have found in four years researching and writing this, the most resilient kids, the most resilient families, rely on others. 

I have been raised in this culture that tells me I am most worthy when I achieve. I have worked really hard to flip that switch. You literally have to practice the importance of not being productive. It's a really radical new way of thinking that is not always rewarded socially, but I'll tell you where it where it's rewarded. It's rewarded in your friendships.

Is it possible that this crisis that we have been looking at over the past few years, has crested? We see this anti-work, anti-capitalism pushback. We see kids saying, "Wait a minute, I don't want to go into the workforce and live like my millennial elders did and get the same bill of lies." Has this ideology changed? 

During COVID, when everything slowed down and schools were focusing on relationships over rigor and everybody was having family dinners again, I honestly said to my husband, "Maybe I don't have to write this book." Unfortunately, it quickly went back to normal and actually supersized. Parents felt, "Now my kids are really behind."

There are some signs that we are having these critical, important conversations and that the needle may be moving in the right direction. Here's what I fear, and where I think mattering can help us. What I don't want to happen is for the quiet quitters and the Gen Z resistance to become about focusing on their own happiness. I think that's a dead end and is going to ultimately lead to their unhappiness. What I hope we can do is shift the conversation beyond this extreme focused on individual achievement, to how we make our society healthier. How can we go back to focusing on the greater good and not the individual?

I hope we can shift the conversation from unhealthy individual achievement burnout to the solution. The solution to burnout is not logging off. The solution to burnout is reengaging, and seeing where you fit in the larger picture, and how you can contribute meaningfully to the world around you. What scares me is I'm hearing people saying they want to log off, they want to travel and relax on the beach and get their time back. That's great and that's important. But that shouldn't be our ultimate goals as humans.

We are meant to be interdependent; we are meant to want to contribute to the greater good. This is not some radical new way of parenting, to focus on these greater goals. This is the way we have focused as the human race forever. It's only been in the last several decades that we have focused so in such an unhealthy way on individual achievement. There's never been a time where it's been more obvious that this achievement culture is toxic. I am not saying, do not be ambitious. I want my kids to enjoy success and achievement. But it is one part of the of a bigger picture. Personal achievement should just be one slice of life, it should not be life itself.