DEEP DIVE: Jennifer Wallace on Achievement Pressure

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0:32Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. And today we're talking to my friend Jennifer Wallace. Jennifer is the author of the new book, Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. Jennifer is an award-winning journalist and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Jenny lives in New York City with her husband and their three teenagers. Welcome, Jennifer. Thank you guys so much for having me. So you first got the idea for this book because you're a reporter on sort of parenting issues for the Washington Post.

1:05I remember reading this article. You reported on two studies that had some seriously surprising findings about what kind of youth are at risk in today's society. Tell us about that. Yes. So in 2019, two national policy reports added a new at-risk group to the children that we traditionally think of as at risk, children in poverty, children with incarcerated parents, recent immigrants, children living in foster care. And then they added students in what they call high achieving schools. Those are competitive public and private schools all around the country where most of the children at the school go on to four-year colleges where these are schools that have AP offerings and rich extracurricular activities.

1:54So what researchers were finding is that those kids, those children in those competitive schools were now at risk for two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorder than the average American teen. And that, you know, as you mentioned, I have three teenagers and they go to one of these competitive schools. And I wanted to find out one, how did we get here? And two, what could I do in my home to buffer against this and be a better buffer? And I think that as I listened to this, we're, we get it, right? Like this is the fact that kids in maybe underserved communities or who have an unstable environment that they're trying to function in suffer because of lack of resources.

2:46They're having emotional trouble as a result of a tremendous amount of instability, fear, anxiety on one end. And then I'm filling in the gaps that at the other end, this is coming from parental, societal, and everyone has to go to Harvard and take 96 different extracurricular activities to get there. Is that what the picture looks like. That's exactly right. When researchers look at the top, they call them top environmental factors that can make a kid at risk. You mentioned poverty, there's discrimination, and then there's an excessive pressure to achieve. And that is, you know, the Surgeon General issued a health advisory a few years ago on our youth mental health, naming this excessive pressure, these messages in our environment that tell our students, our children, that they are not good enough, that they're not smart enough, that they're not beautiful enough, not popular enough.

3:50And that never enough feeling is causing an excessive pressure that's unrelenting. That's interesting. So it's not just you have to go to Harvard and get a 4.75 to get there. It's also you're on Instagram and seeing everybody looking flawless in their bikinis. And also, so it's not just this issue of high functioning for your college education. It's the pressure is wider than that. Correct. I mean, the population that I studied for this book are kids in the top 25 % of household incomes. So that's roughly$130 ,000 a year, depending on where you live, combined income. And the pressures, like you mentioned, some of them are academic, some of them are sports related, some of them are Instagram, likes related, popularity, and just that these messages are eroding their sense of worth.

4:50When a child is building an identity in adolescence, they're absorbing these messages that who they are is not enough. And so it's creating this very unstable sense of self, and it makes them vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and substance abuse disorder. You make this excellent point in the book that not only there are more arenas in which kids feel pressured to achieve, but then the bar in each of those areas is also going up, right? So the bar is higher, and there's also more bars. And it isn't just about getting to Harvard, right? Because I think it's very easy, and I've seen it done, and it always rubs me the wrong way, but I've seen it done often.

5:27That's like, oh, if parents would just stop pressuring these kids, everybody would be fine. But as Margaret just pointed out, it starts, it's wider and it also starts a lot younger than senior year of high school. Oh, 1000%. And a big reason why I chose to write this book is because I was so tired of the narrative that this is all about parents wanting status and bumper stickers and, you know, their contingent self-esteem on their kids. What I found in my research is that these pressures are bigger than any one family, any one school, and any one community. That what parents are up against today is so different than the environment that the three of us grew up in, in the 70s and early 80s.

6:09I mean, I could get into that a little bit. Remember in the 70s and early 80s, you know, life was generally more affordable back then. Housing was more affordable, Healthcare was more affordable. Higher education was more affordable. Groceries were more affordable. So parents could be a little bit more relaxed in their parenting because they had a sense that even if a child had setbacks and failures, they would most likely end up okay. You know, previous generations had at least done as well as their parents, if not better. That was sort of the promise of the American dream. And what we've seen in the last few decades is that an ushering in of extreme inequality, a crush of the middle class, hyper competition, globalization, and the future feels so unknown.

6:57We don't know what the majority of jobs will be like when our kids leave school. And parents are, in the words of researchers, absorbing these macroeconomic forces and becoming social conduits, preparing our kids for this unknown, somewhat scary future. And it comes out in our parenting behaviors. So while I'm not saying we parents should be let off the hook, what I'm saying is we need to put into context, which we rarely do, that the reason parents are parenting so intensely is because they view fewer safety nets for their kids, that life feels harder. And we are nervous that it's going to be harder for our kids.

7:41This is a natural response to these messages in our environment. But what I have found, and why I'm here, I'm sure, and why I wrote the book, is that we're trying to put this sort of safety vest on our kids so that they can float in a sea of uncertainty and be protected. But really that safety vest that we're doing with our intensive parenting is drowning too many of the kids we're trying to protect. This is such an anecdotal version of this, but I think that I look at it as in my own family, my grandfather ran a diner and his son went to a community school and became a lawyer and then had four kids and three of them went to elite, you know, Ivy schools.

8:26And then they, between us now, there's nine kids. Like it feels like a reverse pyramid scheme in a way that like the idea of defining success, like the American dream maybe needs to shift somehow because we can't all race to the same mountaintop. There's not enough room, but that the peak has been kind of defined as this very specific thing and there's no more room anymore. It's like, does that make sense? I think that makes perfect sense. And I would go even a step further that we know from the research life at that peak is not necessarily a great life. Yeah, that's really interesting. I do say that all the time.

9:01Like I've been to the mountaintop and it's not all that. But at the same time, then I hear sometimes privileged parents being like, well, they need to bring back trade schools. It's like, but wait, your kid's not going to trade school. So like, who are we bringing back the trade schools for? Like, maybe I have a kid who should be thinking about trade school and not running up the mountain. It gets soupy pretty quickly. Well, I think what we struggle with in the US is that we have come to believe that wealth equals well-being. And so if we're hoping to set our kids up for midlife and later life happiness and success, parents get fixated on this idea that wealth will deliver on well-being.

9:39But none of the research actually bears that out. So it's time, like you said, to rewrite our definition or broaden our definition of success. This book is not anti-success. I love achievement. I love succeeding. But I love achievement in more than just my work. I'm like ambitious as a wife. I want to have a good marriage. I'm ambitious as a mother. I want to have a good connection with my kids. I'm ambitious as a friend. I want to have deep, close friendships. I'm ambitious with my hobbies. So I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not that parents have to not have any ambition for our kids, but actually to be ambitious for more.

10:17We're talking to Jennifer Wallace. Her brand new book is Never Enough. And we'll be right back. Your favorite friend group is back. FX's Adults follows five roommates living in New York, leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship and family. While tackling pressing questions of your 20s like, what if the person who inherited your fake ID is cooler than you ever were? Why does being around your family make you regress into your worst self? And how do you tell your roommates that you have other friends? FX is adults. All episodes now streaming on Hulu.

10:54This one goes out to all my ladies. All my multitasking mamas who need energy to show up at work and at home. All my empty nest explorers who need a little gut health support for the journey ahead. AG1 is the daily health drink designed to support whole body health with over 75 essential nutrients and pre and probiotics. So you can make the most of every day and every decade. Learn more at drinkAG1.com. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects.

11:35And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Jenny, I wanted to talk to you about something called conditional regard because the other sort of like knee-jerk reaction is like, well, my kids know this. My kids know that it doesn't matter what grades they get or where they go to school. I don't tell them that. But there's this thing called conditional regard that our kids are great at perceiving way better than we realize.

12:11Tell us about that. So I have yet to meet a parent, either for my book or in my real life, that did not unconditionally love their child. I just have yet to meet that. Unfortunately, as I unpack in the book, our messages, our kids in adolescence are hyper aware to our mixed signals. And so while we definitely feel unconditional love for our kids, the way we sometimes express it with a look of disappointment or whatever, when they don't sort of perform to our expectations, they get this idea that our love, it's read by them as our love is conditional. And I actually, I did this survey with a researcher at Baylor of 518 to 30 year olds.

13:00I got to give a whoop whoop because I'm from a Baylor family. So whoop whoop to Baylor. Sick of bears. So he and I wanted to find out from these students, most of them were college students who filled out the survey, what they wish their parents had known when they were in high school. And if they felt that love as unconditional with their parents, I'd love to read you if it's okay, like two things that they said, which to me was very eye-opening as a parent. Absolutely. Love it. Okay. So more than 70 % of the young adults I surveyed reported that they thought their parents valued and appreciated them more when they were successful in school.

13:40And more than 50 % thought their parents loved them more when they were successful, with 25 % of students saying they believed this a lot. the highest degree the survey allowed. So in other words, one in four of the students in my survey thought that achievement, not who they were as people, was what was most important to their parents. So as parents, you know, we say we love our kids unconditionally. We just want them to be happy. We want them to be caring members of the community. My survey and several other national surveys have found that our kids are not getting that message. The message they are getting is my parents care more about achievement than my character as a person.

14:24I want to double click on this because I think it's very interesting. I think that we unconditionally love our children, but there is no world in which we unconditionally value our children. I mean, value or we don't unconditionally like our children. We don't unconditionally respond positively to our children. And so I think it's very interesting to acknowledge that, that like, yeah, when my kid is being a pest and rude and like a stinky, annoying teenager, I unconditionally love him, but certainly I'm not having a great time with it. And I think the missing piece here, which is very illuminating to me, is that that also plays in, I had a kid who came hysterically crying because he failed a test.

15:09And I think of myself as pretty laid back about academics, but he was very worried about it. Like there's something that I'm feeding back because I don't unconditionally accept a 72 and a 100. And I don't unconditionally accept him being sent home for pulling the fire alarm and him being sent home with a note that says he's the greatest kid in class. And I think that the taking unconditional love out of it, what are the things you're conditional about? And are you clear about those things? and, you know, growing up, my mother loved me unconditionally, but when I came home looking thinner, it was better than when I came home looking heavier.

15:49And like, I don't think that she understood those values. So I think this is a very interesting place to really drill down. Like, it's not whether or not you love them. It's what you personally value because that's coming up in the groundwater and whether or not you acknowledge it or not. So I agree, except I will put, you know, know, a highlighter on what I'm about to say, which is our children's value, who they are as people does not change whether they come in with an A, lose 10 pounds. So in other words, but what they are hearing is their value is contingent on that performance. So it doesn't mean a parent shouldn't have standards.

16:28Absolutely. That's our job to have standards about how work gets done. Are you putting in your effort? Are you eating in healthy ways? Are you taking care of yourself? So just to like give you kind of making the thinking visible, one mother I interviewed, whenever her kid would fail a test or get cut from a team or a friend would reject them, she'd go into her wallet and grab a bill. Let's say she found a$20 bill in her wallet. She would hold it up and she would say, do you want this bill? And the child would say yes. And she'd say, okay, hang on. She would crumple the bill, put it on the floor, dirty it up, dunk it in a glass of water and then pick up the bill again and say, do you still want this?

17:10And the child would say yes. And she said, like this wet, dirty, soggy bill, your worth doesn't change if you get cut from the team. If you fail a quiz, your worth is your worth. And that does not change. Our kids are not getting that message. Our kids are getting their worth is contingent on fill in the blank. That makes a lot of sense. And you make this point about psychologically that we're actually born as humans not knowing what our worth is. That's not an inherent thing. Like I have value. That's not something you're born knowing. It's something that you learn from your environment and that we're doing.

17:50I want to go back though, because part of this, Jenny, is that we're feeling the achievement pressure as parents. And you unpack that excellently in the book too. We are also these one-person villages that are feeling all of this pressure and all of the scarcity, which we're being fed the scarcity mindset. It's not imaginary, we're soaking in it. And then we have to sort of, we have to figure this out for ourselves, right? Our own that our own value is not only not contingent, I can be a crumpled bill, and doesn't really matter where my kid goes to college, it also doesn't really matter like what my hair looks like, and that it really starts there before we can be that for our kids.

18:24And just to drill and scarcity mindset just means just to define that for people, it means fear that there's not enough to go around. Okay. Exactly. So life becomes like a zero sum game. So if somebody gets something, that means you don't get it. So scarcity is, you know, it can be real or imagined. But yes, Amy, I mean, what the work of parenting is also to go into our psychological addicts and unpack the messages we were sent by our school, by our peers, by our parents growing up, unpack those so that we can be more intentional about what we communicate with our kids. And it takes work. And we are under a tremendous amount of pressure.

19:06And we are, you know, very siloed in our homes, running ourselves ragged, thinking we're the only one, we're the only one. I'm here to tell you, you are not the only one. I mean, I'd love to read you one other thing. So with the help of a Harvard researcher at the Graduate School of Education, I conducted a parenting survey and we reached 6 ,500 parents filled out this survey, which was extraordinary all over the country. And here is the burden that we are feeling. I asked parents on a scale from one to four how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement. I feel responsible for my children's achievement and success.

19:4675 % of parents felt responsible. Now growing up, I don't think my parents felt responsible if I played well at tennis, or where I got into college, they did not feel that pressure. And I think as we talked about earlier, it's these macro economic forces that are pressuring parents. You know, we're sensing fewer safety nets for our kids. And so it's our job to kind kind of bolster them up and get them as, you know, shiny and pointy and ready for the future. One other thing I would love to say is I asked parents again on that scale from one to four, how much they agreed or disagreed. I wish today's childhood was less stressful for my kids.

20:2687 % of parents agreed. I can't believe there were 13 % that said, no, it's not so bad. That is the more shocking statistic. there's one simple thing underlying all of this that's beyond like talk about college less and it's beyond like start this junior year it starts with ourselves it starts with our kids and it's this very large concept of mattering and can you tell us just a little bit about like how you found that and how that came to really jump out at you yeah so in my search for this book i went looking for the healthy strivers who were the kids who were doing well despite the pressures in their environments.

21:04I wanted to know what if anything they had in common, what their parents focused on at home or what their behaviors or mindsets or friendships were like. And I found about 14 things, 14 or 15 things that these healthy achievers had in common. And as I was searching for a framework, I came across mattering. And mattering is an idea that's been around since the 1980s. It was first conceptualized by Morris Rosenberg, who brought us self-esteem. And what he found was kids who enjoyed a healthy level of self-esteem had parents who made them feel like they mattered, that they were important and significant to the family.

21:46And, you know, it's been studied since the 1980s straight through today, all different age groups. But what the research finds is that, and what I found in my reporting, is that kids who enjoy this healthy level of mattering, who feel valued by their family, their friends, their community, and importantly, who are dependent on to add value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities, those kids were thriving. It didn't mean they didn't have setbacks. It didn't mean they didn't have failures and disappointments. But Mattering acted like a protective shield or a buoy that helped lift them up because those setbacks were not an indictment of their worth.

22:29They were just setbacks. The kids who seemed to be doing the worst were the kids that I saw. There were two camps. There were kids whose Mattering felt conditional, contingent on their performance. The other group of kids felt very important to their families, but they were never dependent on or relied on to add value to anyone other than themselves. And so they lacked social proof that they mattered. They mattered to their parents, but there was no proof that they actually were making a positive impact on the world around them. So you have to sort of have these two elements, feeling valued and being dependent on to add value to really experience mattering.

23:08We are talking to Jennifer Wallace, the author of Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic, and what we can do about it. And we will be right back. Amy, you know that in our relationship, you have historically been the one to care about skincare. But let me tell you, Osea Skincare is an award-winning bestseller for a reason. Osea has been delivering results you can see and feel for 30 years. And after several months of using Osea's Dream Bioretinol Body Serum, I myself am a true believer in. I also have the Dream Bioretinol Body Serum right there next to my sink so I can use it at night and right after getting out of the shower.

23:49Like everything Osea makes, it's deeply moisturizing, but also silky and non-greasy, absorbs fast and works fast. I'm really seeing the difference on my chest or, as we say, in the skincare world, on my décolletage. Also, the Dream Bio Retinol Body Serum smells like lavender just the right amount, which puts me in the space I need to go right before my sleepy times. Give your skin a little TLC. Go to oseamalibu.com and get 10 % off your first order with code FRESH. That's O-S-E-A Malibu dot com code FRESH. Your favorite friend group is back. FX is Adults follows five roommates living in New York, leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship, and family, while tackling pressing questions of your 20s like, what if the person who inherited your fake ID is cooler than you ever were?

24:43Why does being around your family make you regress into your worst self? And how do you tell your roommates that you have other friends? FX is Adults, all episodes now streaming on Hulu. Okay, well, we love solutions. in part three, Jenny, we always like to go to, okay, what are we going to do about this? And what I love about this book is it lays out the problem that we are all living in quite clearly, but there is this framework. There are these clear ways out that are unpredictable in some ways. So I wanted to ask you about this. You say that you've stopped telling your kids or saying, I just want you to be happy.

25:17That's all I care about is that you'd be happy. You've stopped saying that. Why is that? I used to solve for my kids' happiness when they were distressed. I would you know, get to the root of it and try to resolve it with them. And now what I've realized is I want to solve for my kids mattering. I want to know when they're not acting like themselves, when they're off, if they're anxious or down. I want to know, are they not feeling valued by a certain group or is no one depending on them to add value? Where's the social proof that they value? And so if I can solve their mattering, that is sort of the solution to so many problems.

25:49It's the solution to loneliness, to anxiety, depression, but it's also a healthy fuel for achievement. Kids, mattering and achievement are not mutually exclusive. Mattering feeds achievement. When you feel like you're making a positive impact on the world, when you have that kind of sense of purpose and meaning, you are more likely to show up in the world in ways that add value to yourselves and to others. Can you give us an example from your life or the book? Because I think people are saying, I think I get it, but I think that this, like for me, I get it. I was like, oh, okay. Values doesn't mean pressure.

26:28It's a, you know, figuring it out, mattering. Like, I'm not sure I understand what that looks like in a day-to-day with a child. So I'll give you an example. So my son was spent his freshman year of high school in COVID in his bedroom and kept in touch with his friends, but we were out of New York city where we normally live. So he was not seeing his friends for like a year. And so when he got to school the next year, he was, he felt, you know, he had friends, but he didn't feel the super connectedness with them. And a few of his peers came up to him and said in the spring, and they said, um, would you join the baseball team of our school?

27:06Because without you, it's the JV team. Without you, we won't be able to play. And baseball is not his thing. He's athletic, but that's not one of his sports. So he came home to me and he said, mom, what should I do? If I don't play, they literally can't play, but it will interfere with my schoolwork because it'll be two or three hours that I'm not doing schoolwork. And before researching this book, I think I would have said to him, you know what? Baseball's not your thing. Why don't you put that energy into your academics? And that would have been the wrong answer. So instead I said, what do you want to do?