Never Enough

Key Highlights

What emerged from my research hit me like an ice bath: 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. I use the word “matter” deliberately here. 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. (p. xvii)

“Critics of this generation say they are being coddled and overprotected, but I actually think it’s quite the opposite,” Luthar said. “They’re being crushed by expectations to accomplish more and more.” (p. 8)

At a bustling New York City restaurant, I met psychologist Richard Weissbourd of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a frequent source for my reporting. When I asked him what pushes parents to extremes in the name of college acceptance, Weissbourd smiled. “Sure, it’s easy to point to outlier parents, the ones who are hiring SAT tutors for middle schoolers or starting nonprofits for their kids so it looks good on the college application,” he said, “but they are not really the problem.” The parents that really concern Weissbourd are the ones who organize their entire relationships with their children around their kid’s achievements, a hidden curriculum that becomes the main, if unspoken, focus of their parenting. According to Weissbourd, this might look like telling your child that all you care about is effort, then asking how everyone else scored on the test. Or it could mean saying that going to an elite college doesn’t matter, then extolling the virtues of a cousin who got into Brown. What Weissbourd said next prompted a light-bulb moment for me: the real problem, he said, is that high achievement is now seen by many parents as a life raft in an unpredictable future. (p. 29)

When you think of status, you probably don’t picture a mom sacrificing her sleep to help finish a science project on time or scouring the Internet for private classes that might draw out her kid’s spike. But such behavior exemplifies what the researchers Melissa Milkie and Catharine Warner call “status safeguarding,” a term that describes the decades-long project of ensuring that our offspring don’t suffer a generational decline in standing. As Milkie described it to me, safeguarding involves the everyday parenting work of mapping out optimal school activities, hobbies, and social and emotional skills that we hope will improve our children’s life chances and eventual happiness. (p. 30)

In his book The Psychology of Mattering, Flett notes 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 (p. 53)

When you criticize a child, they don’t necessarily stop loving you, psychologists say; they stop loving themselves. (p. 56)

Amy, a junior at Yale, said her parents helped her become aware of her best traits by writing her “strength letters” annually, beginning on her tenth birthday. More recently, they’ve begun sending the letters before milestones: college drop-off, her first summer away from home, the beginning of her gap year. Now the stack of letters is so fat, she told me, that the drawer gets stuck when she tries to open it. Over the years, she has gone back to reread the notes “as a reminder of who I was at that stage of my life, what my passions, habits, and personality quirks were then.” Notably, the letters rarely focus on individual achievements but on ways in which she has demonstrated curiosity, grit, or compassion. She added, “They took note of who I was, even when there wasn’t an accompanying medal to bring home or an A to show for my hard work, and those letters proved to me that my parents saw me, the full me. That level of attention was proof of their love.” (p. 69)

What I have discovered is that parents must keep up a steady beat of unconditional mattering to drown out the harmful messages of our culture. (p. 74)

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. (p. 96)

When I asked psychologists and researchers what was making young people today more vulnerable than past generations, they all pointed to one thing: the increasingly narrow definition of “success.” The problem isn’t wanting to be successful, but how we have come to define success as a society and the strict path we’ve laid out to achieve it. “In affluent communities, you can literally go through a checklist of what’s ‘the best,’ and it creates an intense pressure and competition among peers and families to keep up,” said Rachel Henes, a consultant and parenting coach who specializes in working with high-achieving schools and families in the New York City area. “I work with parents of kids as young as preschool who are already worried about getting their kids on this path.” (p. 113)

When Tim Kasser and I spoke, I asked him about how affluence and achievement shape our children and their mental health. Short of moving out of these SuperZip communities, I wondered, what can parents do to make sure we’re focusing on values that won’t harm our kids? (p. 131)

Kasser threw my question back at me. “Well, I don’t buy the premise of your question,” he replied. “Why not move?” (p. 131)

I paused. (p. 131)

“If you were sending your child to a school where there was lead in the pipes, you would recognize that the child’s health was at risk,” Kasser continued. “So, if you could, you would probably leave and put your kid in a different school, right?” If you believe, and the research shows, he continued, that sending your child to a very achievement-focused school is bad for their values, bad for their well-being, bad for their ultimate behavior, and you have the opportunity to leave, why not leave? (p. 131)

Like these world-class musicians, teens should be getting eight to ten hours of sleep a night, but fewer than 25 percent of teens today are getting the minimum. (p. 136)

In my national student survey, I asked students if they’d ever felt discriminated against. Many of their responses emphasized that these competitive environments can be especially toxic for students who fall outside whatever is considered the institution’s “norm”—whether in terms of class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. (p. 162)

What Black students need is what Carey calls “comprehensive mattering”: they need to be valued and recognized for the full people they are. Vaughan described feeling this comprehensive mattering with her Archer teachers. She detailed one moment in particular when her English teacher at the time surprised her by saying in front of the class, “Vaughan, I didn’t know you played volleyball. That’s amazing.” It was an experience she would never forget, she told me, as a wide smile came over her face. I asked why that moment made such an impression on her. Vaughan explained that often, especially for athletes of color, you’re seen only as your sport, as if you don’t have any other talents. To be known as a good student who also happened to be a volleyball player made her feel seen and that all of her belonged. (p. 165)

William Damon, a Stanford University professor and expert in human development, told me that young people today are stressed and anxious not necessarily because we’re overworking them but because they don’t know what all their efforts are for. They are given this road map to follow, a series of hoops and tests, but without a larger sense of why they’re doing it. (p. 181)

One mother in the Palo Alto area talked about how she created a “council of moms” during the turbulent teen years. Each teen had a list of five mothers who gave the kids in the group their cell phone numbers and promised confidentiality about any topic: academic pressure, drinking, relationships. They made this group formal. If one of the kids was worried about grades, any one of these mothers would meet them for coffee to discuss. If the kids found themselves at a party without a safe ride home, they could call any of these moms at any hour, no questions asked. It wasn’t just giving kids explicit information about who to call. What these women were doing was making their family seen and vulnerable, giving their network of friends a peek under the hood by allowing their teens to open up and share their troubles with trusted people outside the family. (p. 216)

This kind of arrangement helps the adults in their lives matter, too, because they feel trusted and like they have something to offer. “Honestly, I don’t always get the appreciation I want from my own kids,” said one dad who was coaching his son’s little league team. “So it’s motivating for me to help the kids on my team because they are open about expressing their appreciation and that makes me feel like what I do actually matters.” (p. 217)