Conversation with Jennifer B. Wallace — What to Do About Toxic Achievement Culture

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1:01Tell Washington to end middleman markups and put American patients first. Visit phrma.org slash middleman. Episode 264. 264 is the area code belonging to Anguilla. In 1964, the first computer mouse was invented and the miniskirt was introduced and popularized by a designer. I was born in November of 1964, so that means I'm somewhere between a boomer and Gen X. Then we have Gen Z. Then we have millennials. So what are the next generation? Fucked. It's not that funny. Go, go, go!

1:43Welcome to the 264th episode of the Prop G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jennifer Brandy Wallace, an award-winning journalist and social commentator covering parenting and lifestyle trends. We discuss with Jennifer her new parenting book, Never Enough, when achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it. Our conversation covers solutions to toxic achievement culture, economic pressures on families, instilling a sense of mattering in children, and how gender influences children's sense of interdependence. I love this stuff. I think it's fascinating, our approach to raising kids.

2:17It's definitely been the most meaningful thing or most influential thing. I don't know. I think it's the most fascinating thing is raising kids. It's also vastly overrated. But it's, I don't know, it just kind of takes over your life. I don't know. Anyways, if you're out there and you have kids, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't have kids, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. Anyways, enjoy this conversation with Jennifer Brownie Wallace. Jennifer, where does this podcast find you? Hamptons. In the Hamptons. Oh, my gosh. Where in the Hamptons? Bridge Hampton. It's beautiful out there.

2:51So let's bust right into it. Your new parenting book, Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic. and what we can do about it, investigates the roots of toxic achievement culture and its negative effects on children. So let's start there. Give us sort of an overview of the book and sort of set the table, if you will, for what you think the dynamics are around what inspired you to write this book. Yeah, so I'm a journalist by trade, also the mother of three teenagers. And in 2019, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about how students who attend what researchers call high-achieving schools, those are public and private schools around the country that have high standardized test scores.

3:39Most of the kids go off to four-year colleges. Those kids, according to two national policy reports, are now an at-risk group. at risk for two to six times national averages when it comes to clinical levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorder. That was pretty shocking to me. So these two policy reports, this was the National Academies, and it was also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. So two really solid reports finding after kids in poverty, kids with incarcerated parents, recent immigrants, and children living in foster care, it's these students who are under an excessive pressure to achieve that is now making them an official at-risk group.

4:24So, and it's a little bit, it reminds me of whenever I talk about or advocate for young men or talk about the challenges they face, it doesn't inspire a lot of sympathy. And the group you just, the cohort you just described, quite frankly, sounds like privileged white kids. And so there's not what I'd call a ton of immediate sympathy. I'm putting words in your mouth. Is that true? And how does that impact the conversation and the dialogue? Yeah. So when I first came across this, I asked the leading resilience, one of the leading resilience researchers whose research, you know, found this cohort to be an at-risk group.

5:03And I said to her, you know, should we care about these kids? They have access to health care. They generally fall within the top 25 percent, the favored fifth of household incomes. And she snapped right back at me and she said, a child in pain is a child in pain. Neither choose the circumstances. And essentially what she was saying to me was, we don't need to put pain on a scale. Pain is pain. And these kids deserve our empathy. And as the adults in the room, it's our job to do something about it. Yeah, the statement I love and that I constantly parrot is that compassion is not a zero-sum game.

5:45And Jennifer, you're going to figure out quickly. The guests on Prop G are mostly a vehicle for me to talk about myself. So this is the first opportunity I'll take. I really relate to this book and what you're talking about because I have very privileged kids. And for the first what I'll call 12, 14 years of their life, tiger household, all over their grades, studying with them every night. Did you do your derivatives homework or let me see it? You don't know. No, this is wrong. Go back, do it. a very nervous, sometimes celebratory, sometimes very anxious, depressed household the day grades came out.

6:23And also what I found is it works. When we're all over our kids, it works. And now I have a lot of insight or I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of social media technology on society. And you immediately zero in on the cohort that's kind of taken it arguably who has been the recipient of the most negative of the externalities of the big tech world. And that is teenagers. And it is totally pivoted, literally 180, my approach to parenting as it relates to school. And that is, it's essentially gone from what are your grades? Did you do your homework? How's biology going? My really, my only question is, are you happy?

7:07Do you feel loved? Are you doing, are you doing okay at school? Do you enjoy it? And if the answer is yes, that's literally all A's for me. And unfortunately, and I got to be honest, there's a downside here that it would be more fun if it was a Hallmark Channel movie and it'd be like, well, then they thrived even more at school. They're not doing as well academically. When I'm not all over them, they're not doing as well. And you know what? It's worth it. Because I just, it just struck me when I see how many kids, and this is, my guesses were sort of, I don't call them the same weight class, but probably have a lot of the same friends going to the same schools with their kids.

7:43It's the number one issue in households. You hear about some kid who had everything who's cutting or worse. And it is just entirely shifted, I think, among a lot of us. What does it mean to have a successful child? Anyways, I'll stop there, but I can't. Let's talk about that toxic ambition, Will. How does it start and how does it manifest itself, both in terms of the types of behavior and the impact it has on the child? Well, I think what you were describing with your own children is what I call dirty fuel or clean fuel. And so the dirty fuel, the criticism, comparing one child against a friend or, you know, things that parents do either because they're tired, but always because they want what's best for their kids.

8:34it can maybe, like you pointed out, get that short-term good grade on a quiz because they're afraid and they don't want to be ashamed and they want their parents' love and affection. Or you could use what I have found to be the most effective in my research, which is this healthy fuel. So, you know, I went, I traveled around the country and I met with parents who had lost loved ones to suicide. I'd met anxious students, depressed students, college-age students, spoke with people now in their 20s and 30s. And then I went in search of who were the healthy thrivers? Who was doing well despite the pressures in the environment?

9:18I wanted to know what their parents focused on at home. What was school like for them? What were their relationships like with their peers? And I found about 15 things that these healthy achievers had in common. And by the way, one of them is that their parents did what you're now doing with your kids. You might not see short-term results, but they saw them in the long term. What I found were these common threads. And as I was looking for a framework to present my findings to parents, I came across this psychological construct called mattering. Mattering is basically what you're now focused on at home.

9:57Mattering is making children feel valued for who they are at their core by their family, by their friends, by their communities, and depending on them to add meaningful value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities. The kids who were doing the worst, and in my surveys, and I did two extensive surveys, and I interviewed hundreds of families, the kids who were doing the worst, and it's not just my research, actually. There have been published studies on this, are kids who felt like their mattering, their worth was contingent on their performance. The other kids I found who were not doing as well were kids who got those messages that they mattered a lot.

10:48But no one ever depended on them to add value to anyone other than themselves and their own resume. And so what these kids lacked was social proof that they mattered, right? They had the words, but they didn't see it. They didn't see in how they were contributing to their parents or their siblings or their peers in a way that was significant. So this healthy fuel that I'm talking about is leading with mattering. And I think that's what you are doing with your children. And it doesn't, just to be clear, mattering and achievement are not mutually exclusive. What I have found is that kids who have this high level of mattering have a kind of protective shield that buffers against stress and anxiety.

11:36They weren't afraid to reach higher. They weren't afraid to fail. They weren't afraid to take risks because those were not an indictment of their worth. Their worth was not contingent on whether they succeeded or failed. And their parents made this clear at home daily. So something else I've been thinking about, so if you look at a lot of the evidence or a lot of the research around teen depression, The two things I see the most, the two drivers or the two signals is one, social media at a young age causes or can inspire a lot of not only anxiety and depression, but the really terrible thing about it is you don't even know it's going on as a parent.

12:19They go into the room with their phone. They go down a rabbit hole. They get bullied, especially girls. But the second thing is kind of on us, and that is the bulldozer concierge parenting that clears out all of the obstacles for these kids such that they never develop their own skills. You know, we use so many sanitary wipes on their lives that they don't develop their own immunities. And we're now at a point where we'll take a vacation if we feel there's a lot of opportunity for it. And I think this is really important. And I try and push the limits of my comfort zone around it for unsupervised play.

12:51And that is they're on their own. They're doing their own thing. You don't have to check in every 15 minutes. It's I literally used to leave my mom's place. I was raised just by my mom. She worked with a Schwinn bike, 35 cents and an Abazaba bar and like come home 12 hours later. I mean, that was it. And now we are so all over them in every sense of the word. Does that impair their own ability to develop skills and find their own confidence? I mean, I'm sure it does. I was also sort of under the misimpression that it was my job to keep my children perfectly safe and to avoid any harm. And those were the messages I was sent of what a good parent is.

13:37But I'd like to step back for a second and say, you know, I think there's so much blame on parents. And I'm not saying that we should let ourselves off the hook. But there is this popular narrative that we are overprotective, that we want bumper stickers for the backs of our cars with the name of a good college on it. Why do we want these things? Why do we want them so much more than in the 70s, like you were talking about when I was growing up? And it's because, so I've interviewed historians and economists, and the argument that really rings true to me is that parents are absorbing these macroeconomic forces in the environment, this steep inequity, this crush of the middle class, this globalization.

14:25It is a parent's job to raise a child who will thrive when we are no longer there. But that job feels so much more fraught than it was in the 70s when I was growing up. And my parents could let me go run around and make mistakes. And back then in the 70s, life was generally more affordable. The stakes felt lower. Today, the stakes feel so high and parents now feel tasked with weaving these individualized safety nets for each of our kids. We are, as economists say, we are absorbing these stressful, fearful macroeconomic pressures. We don't know what the jobs are going to be like in the future. You know, we have climate change.

15:11There's so much uncertainty. Parents are absorbing it, and that's what's coming out in our parenting behavior. That, I think, is what is leading to, you know, the intensive parenting we are seeing today. So as much as parents have to be aware of our actions, and we do, I also think it's time to stop blaming parents. This is a societal issue, and parents are bearing the brunt of it. Yeah, and I saw, I read in your bio that you went to Harvard and the way I think of it is the danger of tracking. And that is, so 55 ,000 people will apply to Harvard this year. They'll let in 1 ,500. And we'll come back to whether that's morally corrupt or not.

15:54But we all have this image that the prize as a parent is our kid gets to Harvard and ends up at KKR or Google. Anything outside of that track? You don't like to say this, but you kind of all failed. You kind of, God forbid they don't go to an elite college. Oh my God, it's unthinkable they don't go to college. And then, okay, not only do they have to go to an elite college, but they have to start tracking at an early age in this incredibly competitive economy. Where if they want to live in a city, it's incredibly expensive. A house is incredibly expensive. If they're a male, they need to demonstrate economic viability right away to be attractive to a mate.

16:35And it's getting harder and harder in an education system that, quite frankly, I think is biased towards females. And so you start tracking. And it used to be kind of the 11th grade, you start thinking about college. And if you were in the top third or half of your class in California, you could go to UCLA, which I did, which had a 76 % admissions rate. Now, if you aspire to have your kid go to UCLA or Berkeley, as I did, I start putting them on a track when they're 11. You know, I'm like, all right, we got to start tracking because one false move, one bad year, one hiccup or slowdown from the achievement wheel.

17:12And I failed as a parent because they're not going to get into UCLA or MIT and end up at Google. The economy, I think what you're saying is so powerful. The context, the pressure, it's just gone up for everywhere. And I want to move to a little bit around societal solutions. If parents are just reacting to the context and the environment they're in, what are some of the societal fixes such that we can take down the temperature in these households? Well, when I first sold this book, the book proposal in 2019, I thought that shifting parents' focus from the short-term achievement goals like the Friday Spanish quiz to larger goals like instilling the sense of mattering, putting the buffers back in place to absorb some of the stress in the environment.

18:04I thought this was going to be a hard sell. I thought parents were going to say, you know, I don't buy it. I want parents are desperate. And I could say this as the mother of three teenagers, we are living through a very difficult time to parent. And I think what you are talking about with the, you know, getting the kid into the elite college, just to underscore it, parents are betting big that that brand name will act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty. But unfortunately, like you said, putting on that life vest, tracking them so early is unfortunately drowning too many of the kids that we are trying to protect.

18:50So when you think about the bigger questions, the bigger societal questions, I mean, some people, and I don't know that I agree with this, have proposed, you know, a lot of the issues that these kids in the top 25 % of household incomes are facing is because we live in these super zip codes, right? Areas of the country, hundreds of towns and cities and areas where it's predominantly, you know, upper middle class Americans, college educated, all have this high achievers, all with the same sort of external definition of success. And so to sort of stick out in those environments, you really have to break your neck.

19:31And so I would say societally, I think it's time to start pointing to widening the definition of success, because I'm sure you have found this. I have found this. Just because you go to Harvard doesn't mean your life is going to work out. Just because you go to a small liberal arts college that nobody's heard of doesn't mean your life isn't going to work out in the most magnificent way. And so I think if we can, as parents, zoom out and think about, yes, we want the safety net. I'm saying do not have ambitions for your kids. I am saying be ambitious for more. I think our ambition has been too narrow.

20:11It's not about the brand name college, particularly going into the world as uncertain as it is today. If we really want safety nets, the safety nets come in our relationships. One of the biggest findings in my book that really was surprising to me was that according to decades worth of resilience research, a child's resilience rests fundamentally on their primary caregiver's resilience. And the primary caregiver's resilience rests fundamentally on their relationships, the depth of their relationships. So if we really want resilience and safeguarding our kids' future, we should be focusing on how they can build these deep, deep relationships that will carry them through when they need it.

21:06We'll be right back.

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22:54This is a topic I'm passionate about. And what I have, or a lot of the research I've reviewed says is that while boys are physically stronger, girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. That when, if you look at single parent households, girls have similar outcomes as dual parent households. Boys have dramatically worse outcomes. The moment they're in a single parent household, it's usually the mom that has custody and they lose the male role model, which is sort of the singular point of failure if you were to reverse engineer to when young boys come off the tracks. It looks as if you segmented by economic class.

23:34Did you segment by gender in these households in terms of outcomes for girls and boys and the pressures they face? I did look at the genders. And one of the things that I found enlightening, I have two teenage boys and a teenage daughter. And what I have found to be critical in teaching our boys, which our girls seem to get because they are socialized for this, is this idea of healthy interdependence. And so as parents, we think our role is, and it is, to raise strong, independent kids. Absolutely. I want my kids to be able to survive without me. But there is a deeper goal if we really want to protect the mental health and well-being of our kids, particularly our boys, and that is healthy interdependence.

24:22That is teaching them that they are worthy of leaning on others for support. and also that they have an obligation to be that source of support for others. And the kids that— I just want to push pause there because I like that in theory. I have a 15-year-old boy. You know, my boys, as I'm sure your kids are, everything became about them when they were born. And it just turned on—God reached into my soul, flipped on a switch, and then they're kind of it for me. and I would love it if my 15 year old, I try and tell my 15 year old, you're the big brother, you need to be the bigger man, you know, you know, try and teach him empathy, talk about his role in the world and how he can make others feel better and that others should be able to depend on him.

25:12And he gets that and he's picking up on it. I would kill, kill for my 15 year old to come and ask me for advice, to lean on me. And he doesn't. And I don't, I don't see him leaning on anybody. I don't see him, as far as I can tell, he doesn't go to anyone for advice or talk to anyone in very open and transparent ways about the challenges a 15-year-old boy faces. So how do you, I get it in theory. I would posit that most 15-year-old boys aren't sharing their emotions, aren't depending on other people. They see that as, I don't know if they see it as a sign of weakness or they're just, you know, they don't go there.

25:49How do you train or how do you parent a boy into being more reliant on others and teaching them or encouraging them to seek out help from their relationships? So I would start with modeling. And I think it's important for the male figures in a boy's life, whether it's a father or an uncle or an adult friend in the neighborhood, a neighbor. you know, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that you very generously tweeted out about the role of fathers and the role of male figures and how important it is if we are going to help our boys build out emotional lives, if we're going to teach them healthy interdependence, the men in their lives have to lead the way so that it's not considered a female thing.

26:41And I'll tell you what we've done in our house. My husband is open about, He has very deep male relationships that date back to elementary school. And he models out loud in front of my kids, asking for advice, asking for help for things, talking about things that are, you know, an issue at work or, you know, something that he's struggling with in the family. And he models it in front of my boys. and we have said explicitly to my boys and to my daughter that these are people, so we have like a handful of families that we're extremely close to, that no matter what's going on, you have full authority to talk about anything, including things within our house with other people.

27:30We don't feel this deep sense of privacy. We want you to have others. If you don't feel like you could come to dad and me, these are the people, these are the trusted adults in your life that you can lean on. Another thing that I think we can talk about with our kids are what gets in the way of building these healthy interdependent relationships, right, it takes courage. But in these hyper-competitive environments, envy can sometimes get in the way. And I think we have to name the elephant in the room. I think we have to explain to our kids when they maybe don't lean on their peers is to talk about how universal this feeling is of envy, that everybody feels it.