Never Enough By Jennifer Breheny Wallace

Never Enough By Jennifer Breheny Wallace

INTRODUCTION Running with Their Eyes Closed

In one of my early interviews for this book, I met Molly, a high school junior living in Washington State. She began by telling me that many of her classmates on the Advanced Placement track either went to bed or woke up at 3:00 a.m. to cram in all their studying. Molly confessed sheepishly that she wasn’t a night person, and told me that she went to bed around midnight most nights and sometimes woke up early, around 5:00 a.m., to study before tests or to put the finishing touches on a paper. When I asked her how, as a varsity athlete, she maintained her stamina on only five hours of sleep, Molly tightened her high ponytail and answered me without any irony: Those days, I run the laps in practice with my eyes closed.

Three years later, that conversation has stuck with me. That image—a generation running in circles with their eyes shut—is an apt, if devastating, metaphor for the new normal in the classrooms, on the playing fields, and in the late-night bedrooms of many of today’s teens. In communities like Molly’s, the past several decades have given rise to a professionalized childhood, in which seemingly every minute of a child’s life is managed to maximize and extracurricular activities hav become increasingly competitive, adultez, an high-stakes. These kids are running a course marked out for them without enough rest or a chance to decide if it’s even a race they want to run.

One expert estimated that one in three American students may be impacted by this excessive pressure to achieve

For the past ten years I’ve been reporting on modern family life. When I wrote about the growing research around achievement pressure and this newly identified at-risk group for The Washington Post, the article quickly made its way around

Worrying about the well-being of high-performing students can feel awkward, even absurd. After all, most of them come from families who don’t have to worry about housing or healthcare and can afford to spend money to alleviate their problems. Do these families really need our attention? With so much suffering in the world, do the hardships of the children of the top 20 percent of Americans matter? Without a doubt, youth who live in poverty and face hunger, violence, and discrimination are significantly more likely to experience adversity than their peers in high-achieving schools

The takeaway is clear: living with toxic stress is harming a large portion of our youth, and as the adults in the room, it is our job to do something about it.

Achievement pressure wasn’t just an issue of a few isolated communities—it was affecting families from coast to coast. Parents were eager to share their experiences and thanked me for the opportunity to talk openly about what everybody was feeling but nobody was saying. The survey asked parents how much they agreed with statements like

Parents in my community generally agree that getting into a selective college is one of the most important ingredients to later-life happiness. (73 percent of parents agreed.)

Others think that my children’s academic success is a reflection of my parenting. (83 percent of parents agreed.)

I wish today’s childhood was less stressful for my kids. (87 percent of parents agreed.)

My survey and the resulting connections gave me so much material, both personal stories and patterns that could be traced between them. 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.

This book begins by looking at how we got here and what society’s increasing achievement pressure is doing to our kids. From there, it discusses practical solutions and outlines an attainable, empathetic path toward raising healthy and, yes, successful children. Finally, I’ve gathered insights and advice from leading experts about changes we can make beyond the walls of our homes, including what schools and communities can do to help buffer against the toxic pressures of our achievement culture.

What I have found in my reporting is that there are actions we can take now, in our homes, classrooms, and teams, to counter the increasing anxiety, depression, and isolation young people are experiencing. These actions require shifts in thinking, past the harmful messages that society sends day in and day out, messages that often seem inescapable and inevitable

1 Why Are Our Kids At Risk? Life Inside the Pressure Cooker

High levels of stress—whatever the source—also put young people at greater risk for poor long-term physical health. When we perceive danger, our bodies secrete hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol to temporarily sharpen our focus. Once the imminent risk passes, our body is designed to return to its baseline to recover. Our bodies aren’t designed to handle chronic psychological stress, the kind that never lets up. Living in a state of constant vigilance, with a steady flow of the associated neurochemicals and hormones, can cause both short-term and long-term damage, including heart disease, cancer, chronic lung and liver diseases, diabetes, and stroke. An increased risk of substance abuse also appears to last well into adulthood. One study found that by age twenty-six, former students of high-achieving schools were two to three times more likely to struggle with addiction than their middle-class peers

Despite best intentions, we adults can magnify the pressure. Over the past thirty years, as the world has grown both more competitive and more uncertain, parents have bet big on the belief that childhood success—the grades, the trophies, the résumés—is the surest, safest pathway to a secure, happy adult life. This wager has redefined childhood, family priorities, and the rhythm of daily life. While it’s easy to dismiss the parents who spend every waking hour optimizing their children’s lives as over-the-top outliers, countless parents in communities around the country find themselves struggling to figure out how far to go to keep up with rising expectations

In generations past, having two employed parents with college degrees, as my kids do, generally meant that your family was upwardly mobile, if not already financially secure. But my parental anxiety to make sure my kids were not falling behind wasn’t a personal quirk, as I have come to learn. This anxiety was a symptom of a new, broader cultural trend that has mainly taken root in communities like mine, filled primarily with college-educated professionals. Growing up, our parents might have encouraged us or bought us a pair of running shoes, but they mostly watched our success from the sidelines. Today, many modern parents feel tasked with making their kids a success, pushing them, if they must, to the front of the pack. And this trend has not come without a cost, to both parents and kids

The psychologist Erik Erikson pointed out that an adolescent’s most crucial task is attaining a sense of personal identity. But that process is undermined when adolescents feel they must be high performing or perfect to be loved. Adolescents become overly reliant on others for a sense of who they should be and how much they’re worth. And when personal worth seems to depend solely on getting ahead of their peers, kids may fail to develop a sense of internal meaning and purpose. This can make achievement unfulfilling and lead to burnout and cynicism.

None of the parents I surveyed said that what they ultimately wanted for their kids was to be captain of the football team, a straight-A student, or a Rhodes Scholar. They simply wanted happy, productive, and fulfilling lives for their kids. Even Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has said, If I could push a magic button and choose either happiness or success for my children, I’d pick happiness in a second.

But there is no magic button, and the path to happiness is increasingly understood as a high-stakes drag race to success. For parents, the logistics alone can strain even the most solid of marriages. And there are times we simply can’t juggle it all, when Saturdays and Sundays are triple booked with soccer games, school projects, and chess tournaments. Standing on the sidelines of a soccer game in the freezing rain, I have looked around and wondered: How is everyone else pulling this off week after week, year after year, with multiple children? Why are we even doing this?

The Pressure Is Everywhere

When parents ask me where all of the pressure on these kids is coming from, Luthar likes to say, I ask them: Where is it not? Relationships that once protected students and kept them grounded—with parents, coaches, teachers, peers—can be added sources of pressure nowadays, she said.

Coaches, for example, are now part of a nearly twenty-billion-dollar competitive youth sports complex, one that pushes kids to specialize in one sport year-round at a very young age, even at the risk of overuse injuries, in order to sustain enrollment

Meanwhile, with housing prices linked to public school performance rankings, school administrators can feel pressured to maintain their school’s state ranking, a worry that can trickle down to pressure on students

Private school administrators, too, can feel pressure from their boards and alumni to protect their school’s brand and market share, which increases the pressure on current students to maintain high standards, even as competition for honors and prestigious college seats ratchets up everywhere

Our wider consumer culture reinforces the idea that your child is an investment, and that the expected return should be measured early

Busy schedules inhale all downtime, sucking up the idle after-school hours or weekend days once spent with friends and family

Growing up in a culture that teaches our children that certain types of people matter more—those on the varsity team, those with the most As, those with the most likes, or those who fit into the idealized norm—can set students up to chronically question their own importance and worth

Parents Feel It, Too

A mutual friend introduced me to Catherine, a mother of two boys in a suburb of New York City. Catherine had taken my parenting survey and wanted to talk more about the issues it had raised. I drove out of the city to meet her after dropping my kids off at school.

Catherine, like many of the mothers I subsequently met, put her career on hold to raise her two children. She was active in the community, always the first to volunteer to serve as class mom or field-trip chaperone. In the early years of raising her older son, Catherine told me, she took a hands-off attitude to parenting. It was only as he finished elementary school that she began to feel a duty to make sure he was living up to his potential. Her husband had attended Yale, and with the promise her son showed, Yale felt within reach for him, too. But getting into Yale today—with an acceptance rate of 4 percent—is different than getting into Yale forty years ago, when acceptance rates were around 25 percent. Meeting these increased expectations would require a shift in her parenting

2 Name It to Tame It. Unpacking the Deep Roots of Parental Anxiety

Apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior. —john harsanyi, nobel prize laureate and economist

The breaking news story had all the makings of a Netflix true-crime documentary—which it eventually inspired. As the high school class of 2019 anxiously awaited college decisions, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against dozens of people involved in a nationwide conspiracy to influence college admissions

The Deep Roots of Status Anxiety

Here is an uncomfortable truth: to our brains, status matters. It’s a truth that dates back to our earliest ancestors. The higher an individual’s status in their community, the greater their access to important advantages—first choice of food, first choice of shelter, first choice of mate—that ensured their long-term success and that of their children. That deep-rooted drive for accomplishment can still act like a puppeteer pulling our strings, even today

Instagram exploits this love of status, with some users obsessively curating the perfect image in the hope of securing more likes and more followers.

We live our modern lives with old wiring we can’t easily change, Breuning explained to me. Our instincts are a system designed to ensure survival and reproduction. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our sensitivity to status shapes how we parent. We pay a lot of attention to even the smallest status markers, anything that serves to rank our kids the littlest bit above or below their peers

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

In our calmest and most logical moments, we like to think we would resist the worst impulses of status-seeking parenting. Our kids are bright and talented, we tell ourselves. They will be fine, even if they don’t make the team or ace the test. But when we feel a threat to our survival—or to the survival of our children—our brains trigger an alarm. This biological tripwire can generate false positives, especially in fast-paced, competitive environments

How Scarcity Affects Us

America’s self-understanding as the land of opportunity rests on the premise of an ever-expanding pie, so to speak. Everyone can get a slice, and as long as the pie keeps growing, each successive generation can wind up better off financially than the last. But our collective self-image is due for a revision. Today two-thirds of Americans no longer believe that a steady improvement over generations is a given. American parents worry that resources for their kids are becoming increasingly scarce, and the data supports their belief. White middle-class children who were born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents. For children born in the 1980s, however, the chances of earning more than their parents fell to 50 percent. In the past several decades, it’s only gotten worse. Millennials on average have lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth compared to what other generations had at their age

So, as neurotic as contemporary parenting extremes may seem, such behaviors are in fact instinctual responses to insecurity, whether real or perceived. The effects of money on feelings of scarcity are in some ways obvious: money determines where we live, the schools we send our kids to, the enrichment we can provide them. But as researchers have discovered, it isn’t just an individual’s income that affects their parenting decisions; it’s also the macroeconomic climate in which they live, such as the degree of inequality that exists in their country. This is why outwardly comfortable people in the upper middle class can toss and turn all night feeling anything but.

Weaving Individual Safety Nets

Doepke and Zilibotti’s research crystallized how much the world has changed for parents over just a few decades. White middle-class parents in the 1960s and early 1970s could afford to focus more on their children’s happiness and less on skills-based achievement because life itself was generally more affordable back then. It was easier to buy a house, afford medical insurance, and get a decent public education. After World War II, many families achieved security through broad economic expansion, government policies such as federally subsidized mortgages and free college tuition for veterans, and strong labor unions that could guarantee benefits such as a comfortable pension. Parents could expect that even if they made some wrong turns, their children would enjoy a safe, middle-class life. There was slack in the system. But starting in the 1980s, the combined influence of technology, globalization, the decline of unions, and government policy—lower taxes, privatization, and deregulation—ushered in a sharp increase in inequality. What’s left now, as one woman put it, is the feeling that there’s an express elevator headed up—if your kid doesn’t get on it early, they’ll be left on the ground floor forever.

These intense anxieties likely aren’t costing parents sleep in countries with more robust social services and less pronounced income inequality, where the kind of life Doepke enjoyed growing up is still plausible

Here in the United States, without those guaranteed safety nets, parents strive to ensure their children’s future social and economic status by weaving an individualized safety net for each of them, as the researchers Milkie and Warner have put it. Parents make day-to-day decisions in an attempt to maximize their children’s personal achievement and happiness, while constantly anticipating any potential obstacles to success and well-being

Building an individual safety net involves a lot of grunt work, money, and mental labor, whether it’s shepherding kids from activity to activity or making constant calculations in our heads about which hobby, class, or sport holds the most promise

While parents have always been responsible for launching the next generation, this responsibility has never felt so fraught or so lonely. We sense fewer and fewer guarantees for our children. We have, as the researcher Thomas Curran at the London School of Economics pointed out, absorbed social and macroeconomic conditions into our parenting

Some minority families report experiencing this pressure even more due to substantial racial wealth disparities in the United States

When Status and Scarcity Collide

There may be no better illustration of status and scarcity than competitive college admissions. In a civics classroom, we might talk about education as a public good, intended to mold informed citizens and strengthen democracy. In reality, higher education has become what economists call a positional good. This means its value lies less in the actual education provided and more in the fact that not everyone has access to it. An acceptance letter to Amherst or Pomona is a more powerful status symbol than, say, a Gucci handbag

Part of the reason we get so wrapped up in our kids’ achievements is that we’re worried that our children won’t be able to get into the kind of college we attended, Harvard’s Rick Weissbourd told me. In a parent’s mind, either consciously or unconsciously, this registers as a drop in status and triggers that smoke-detector alarm

3 The Power of Mattering. Untangling Self-Worth from Achievement

Today, an avalanche of metrics, measurements, tracking, and sorting can gradually overtake a young person’s existence inside and outside school

As if being measured at school and in extracurriculars weren’t enough, kids today also clock into a third shift: managing their social media metrics. While teens have always wondered how they measure up against their peers, social media now offers a public and objective tally of popularity: the number of photos you’re tagged in, your follow ratio (how many people you follow versus how many follow you), how many likes and comments your posts receive, even how quickly these metrics pour in

Of course, tracking and sorting aren’t new. Growing up, I knew who the fastest runner, the strongest arm-wrestler, and the best mathematician and tennis player in my class were. But today, rankings feel more urgent and ever present. There is now a pressing need for children to score in the 99th percentile on a standardized test at age five, to make the A travel team in the fifth grade, and to tend social media profiles like a thirteen-year-old brand manager. Our generation took the SATs and ACTs and watched our GPAs, but our children are living under a tyranny of metrics

Average excellence

It’s not only that there are more areas in which a child needs to be exceptional; it’s also that the bar for what is exceptional keeps rising, offering our kids more and more ways to feel like they are not enough

For today’s kids, it’s less about measuring up than measuring over. Everyone needs to stand out from the crowd

A parent’s pressure might manifest as hypervigilance about a child’s grades, intrusive involvement in a child’s schedule, or excessive criticism of their failures. The parent-child bond is the most important relationship for a child’s mental health. When a child cannot meet a parent’s high expectations, that bond becomes jeopardized. Criticism feels like rejection, a loss of love. The relationship transforms from a safe place into a danger zone. The fear of not being lovable as they are can push a child to pursue or present an idealized, perfect version of themselves in order to win the security and affection they crave

Over time, young people internalize too-high expectations and come to depend on them as indicators of self-value and parental love. In kids’ eyes, these metrics are marks they must hit in order to earn their worthiness. Not hitting those marks—whether it’s because of inevitable setbacks or an impossibly high bar—can become an indictment of who they are

When we talk about pressure, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, and loneliness in kids, what we are really talking about is an unmet need to feel valued unconditionally, away from the trophies, the acceptance letters, the likes, and the accolades. When we say that pressure is detrimental to children’s (and parents’) well-being, what we mean by pressure is a set of circumstances that cause our children to wrongfully perceive their value as contingent on achievement. When an adolescent believes they must sustain a certain level of success in order to earn their parents’ love and affection, they feel inadequate, and this interferes with a healthy, stable identity

Feeling Valued

It was the legendary social psychologist Morris Rosenberg who first conceptualized the idea of mattering, in the 1980s, while studying self-esteem among adolescents. Critical to the well-being of these high school students, Rosenberg found, was feeling valued: those who felt they mattered to their parents enjoyed higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression than peers who felt they mattered less

You’ve likely never heard about the specific framework of mattering, but you’ve surely felt it. Mattering occurs in life’s big moments, like being celebrated with heartfelt toasts by friends. It’s found in everyday moments, too, like when you’re sick and a friend brings over a pot of homemade soup. The feeling that hits you when you open the door is mattering, that you are deeply valued by your friend and worthy of love and support. When a teacher assigns a child a classroom chore like watering plants, that child feels like they matter, that they are counted on and capable of adding important value to their little world

Mattering has many layers. It begins with mattering to our parents and then extends outward to our community and the wider world. The more we feel valued, the more likely we are to add value, and the other way around—a virtuous cycle of interdependence that can continuously feed our sense of mattering, notes the community psychologist Isaac Prilleltensky. Mattering is what he describes as a meta need, or an umbrella term that captures feelings of being valued, such as belonging, community, and attachment, as well as feelings around adding value, such as self-determination, mastery, and competence. Put them all together, he says, and you experience mattering

No one is born knowing their inherent value. We form this perception over time, based on how we are seen and treated by the people in our lives, most critically by our primary caregivers. In other words, self-worth isn’t developed in a vacuum. It functions as a social barometer, a way of tracking how we’re doing in the eyes of others and becomes the story we tell ourselves about how much we are valued by those around us. When we are made to feel that we matter for who we are at our core, we build a sturdy sense of self-worth

On the other hand, when we are chronically made to feel like we don’t matter, when we are abused, ignored, or made to feel marginalized, we can behave in ways that force others to take notice of us—whether that’s obsessing over a perfect image, overworking, developing an eating disorder, or acting out in extreme ways (a school shooter being among the most visible and tragic examples). A lack of mattering is a strong predictor of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. When we don’t feel like we matter, we can turn inward: we give up, drink to escape, and even self-harm. People low on mattering tend to overgeneralize and catastrophize their thoughts, said Flett, convincing themselves that they don’t matter now and will never matter in the future.

Our world of metrics and impossibly high standards directly undermines our children’s sense of mattering. To be clear, every single parent I spoke with for this book loved and valued their kids deeply. The problem, I found, was that too many kids perceived their value and worth to be contingent on their achievements—their GPA, their number of social media likes, or their college’s brand—not for who they are deep at their core. If children matter only to the extent that they follow their parents’ directives or live up to their parents’ standards, they will not experience true mattering, writes Gregory Elliott in his book Family Matters.

We are in a crisis of the self. The formative years are when a child builds a stable foundation for a secure, sustainable adult identity

In his book The Psychology of Mattering, Flett notes seven critical ingredients to feeling like you matter:

• Attention: Feeling that you are noticed by others
• Importance: Feeling like you’re significant
• Dependence: Feeling like you’re important because others rely on you
• Ego extension: Recognizing that someone is emotionally invested in you and cares what happens to you
• Noted absence: Feeling like you’re missed
• Appreciation: Feeling like you and your actions are valued
• Individuation: Being made to feel unique, special, and known for your true self

Not What You Say, but What They Hear

Despite our loving efforts, we are unintentionally denying our kids a key release valve to their gilded pressure cooker: close, nurturing, caring relationships that deliver mattering. In my research, I have found that it’s not enough to love our kids unconditionally, as we do. To matter, our kids must also feel that the love is unconditional. That feeling is formed not by what we say but by what our kids hear—and they are natural prodigies at translating our doublespeak, like when we say that grades aren’t everything but then ask how the test went the minute they walk in the door

Astoundingly, more than 70 percent of the young adults I surveyed reported that they thought their parents valued and appreciated them more when they were successful in work and school

In other words, one in four of the students in my survey believed that achievement, not who they are as people, is what is most important to their parents

We all know the stereotypes: the critical or withholding mom, the overinvolved sports dad. Most of us know that such behavior is destructive, and we consciously try to avoid it. Still, it’s natural to get swept up in feelings of pride when our kids shine and to button our lips when bad news hits to avoid piling on

The difference between what we say and what our children hear is magnified in the teen years. Like all of us, teens come wired with a negativity bias. Simply put, adverse events elicit a stronger neurological response than positive ones. Criticism, research suggests, has a much greater impact on us than positive feedback does. Moreover, psychologists have shown that teenage negativity overperforms that of other age groups, making teens hypersensitive to threats in their environment, even imagined ones. This bias also means that the subtle messages our kids receive regarding achievement—a raised eyebrow, a question about how a test went—can come across as excessive pressure. Perceived parental criticism, which a parent may subtly wield in an effort to mold and control a child’s behavior, is linked to poor mental health outcomes

Feeling controlled and routinely criticized can make an adolescent feel less accepted by a parent, which weakens their relationship. When that relationship feels weak, a child can in turn feel like they matter less. The consequences of associating love with achievement can last far beyond childhood

The False Self

As Gregory Elliott says to his students: What gets in early gets in deep. When a parent is critical (Why can’t you be more like your brother?) or when love feels conditional (I expect all As this semester), a child begins to feel defective. To cope with those painful feelings, they learn to hide who they really are, their true self, in order to become the person they believe their parents want or need them to be. In other words, the child makes a subconscious trade: they abandon their real self to stay connected to their parent through the long, vulnerable years of adolescence

Conditional regard is the psychological term for parental affection that depends on a child meeting certain expectations, whether academic, athletic, or behavioral. Researchers distinguish between two types of conditional regard: positive, like when children feel their parents provide more warmth and affection than usual when expectations are met, and negative, when affection is withheld after expectations aren’t met. Psychologists have shown that conditional regard undermines a child’s self-esteem. Instead of figuring out who they really are, adolescents fixate on pleasing others

Of course, having unconditional positive regard doesn’t mean that parents can’t have expectations about a child’s behavior. Psychologists say we must be mindful about how we express those expectations. When a child acts in ways that are inconsistent with our values or hopes, we need to signal warmth even while expressing disappointment. In other words, we need to separate the deed from the doer. You still love the person, but you don’t love the action. When we’re able to clearly separate the two, a child doesn’t link their worth to their behavior, whether good or bad. This creates room to make mistakes and grow up without fear of failure

A parent’s tendency to invest their self-worth in a child’s performance is influenced by both their personality and perception of the social environment. In my survey, I asked parents what it means in their community to succeed in raising kids. Their answers reflected some commonalities, succinctly stated by one parent: You are judged by the success of your child’s academics and athletics. Another wrote that success in their social setting meant that their child is the best at everything.

Good Warmth, Bad Warmth

Children thrive in warm, loving environments. Decades of research show this. But there is a difference between what the psychologist Madeline Levine calls good warmth and a more controlling bad warmth. Good warmth is the love, understanding, and acceptance a parent communicates to a child as they change and grow, writes Levine in The Price of Privilege, and good warmth is cultivated by taking time to get to know our kids in intimate and specific ways. Bad warmth, on the other hand, can look like overinvolvement in a child’s life, like doing for your child what they can do for themselves. To a child, bad warmth feels conditional. For instance, it might involve showering a child with effusive praise about a grade or performance as a way to keep kids invested in what the parent deems important. Bad warmth can be tempting in its convenience and quickness, a short-term strategy that a tired parent might use to get a child to conform to expectations

Okay, you may be thinking, but what if my child does need a bit of a push when they aren’t living up to their potential? Most kids want to do well in school, Levine says, so get curious, not furious, about what’s going on under the surface. Rather than getting upset, spend your energy getting to the root of the problem. Listen to them, ask probing, open-ended questions, and take time to figure out why they’re underperforming

In other words, the way we express our concerns and expectations makes a difference in our relationship with our kids

Our children feel freer to express their true selves when we focus less on molding them into what our communities regard as exceptional people and more on seeing and loving them for who they are right now, their wonderful, ordinary, authentic selves. Our job as parents isn’t to push or drag our kids to excellence. It’s to correct the lies that our society tells them: that they matter only if they’re performing, if they’re achieving. Our job is to let them know they are enough, right now, in this moment.

Get a PhD in Them

While the problems with being critical and withholding are obvious, researchers have also found that praise can function as bad warmth. Like criticism, praise is a form of judgment and can make a child vulnerable to shame when they don’t measure up. As one student in my survey explained, Being told that I was especially good at something felt like I had to then work really hard to maintain if not exceed the levels at which I was already doing it?.?.?. [or] I would be worth somewhat less.

Parents might feel like they can’t win: we want to set high standards for our kids, but both criticism and praise have the potential to cause harm. Thankfully, the sweet spot for showing unconditional love and positive regard is a lot bigger than you might think. As Harvard’s Richard Weissbourd notes, The self becomes stronger and more mature less by being praised and more by being known. Our children feel they matter to us when we know them deeply and uniquely.

So much parenting energy is often spent on identifying and fixing our kids’ weaknesses: who needs help with social skills, or with math or writing. But a mother I met in Maine used a different strategy. She told me about how she really got to see her kids for who they were by becoming a strengths spotter, by noticing when her kids were at their best. Instead of looking at her kids’ deficiencies, she told me, she shined a light on their best aspects and found ways to use those strengths to drive their growth

Interestingly, researchers estimate that two-thirds of us don’t know what our own strengths are. We tend to lack awareness of the gifts we have to offer the world

The Puppy Dog Principle

To show our kids how much we value them, we must attune ourselves to the emotional and physical nuances of our communication. Mattering can be communicated through what Gordon Flett calls micro-practices: Do you light up when your children walk in the room or do you pepper them with questions (How’d you do on that test?) to relieve your own anxiety? For the mother and psychologist Susan Bauerfeld, mattering means greeting your children at least once a day like the family puppy: with total, unabashed joy. This includes being physically affectionate with them and playing with them

Gordon Flett offers tips to convey mattering to kids in his book The Psychology of Mattering

• Respond in a warm and sensitive way
• Explicitly tell kids how much they matter to us
• Express unconditional acceptance, particularly after a failure
• Show warmth through affection
• Engage in mutual activities

Flett warns of ways parents can unintentionally convey a sense of their kids not mattering

• Being overly focused on themselves
• Treating some kids in the family as more or less important
• Rewarding kids with praise and expression of warmth when certain expectations are met
• Engaging in harsh criticism
• Comparing kids negatively to others
• Invalidating emotions

Physical touch and affection emphasize how much our children matter to us. Or, as NYU professor Scott Galloway poignantly writes about his own loving mother, For me, affection was the difference between hoping someone thought I was wonderful and worthy—and knowing someone did. In fact, studies have shown a link between warm parental affection in childhood and future mental and physical health. One study out of Notre Dame found that children who were raised in a physically affectionate household reported less depression and anxiety and higher levels of compassion as adults.

So much of our lives as parents consist of getting our kids to do things they don’t want to do, teaching them lessons, setting them up for future success. But something gets lost when our relationships don’t include enough time just enjoying each other, delighting in what is inherently lovable about our kids. That’s why playtime as a family is so critical. When we don’t carve out time for play, we lose out on some of the highest-quality interactions we can have with our kids—getting immersed in something together, as equals

Maintaining this closeness, especially with older kids, requires parents to push back against the negative, unfair stereotypes that surround teens: that they are prickly, sullen, and moody and don’t want us around. Yes, developmentally our kids are pulling away and forming their own identities, but that doesn’t mean parents should be pulling away, too. Parents, research finds, remain the most important source of support for our teens in these critical years. And this sometimes requires us to knock on closed bedroom doors to issue an NOFA. Keeping this relationship strong offers our kids not only support now, it also serves as a model for the kind of warm relationships they can replicate in the future

Make the Implicit Explicit

Of course we want our kids to strive to be the best they can be. But we need to be mindful about how we communicate that desire so that their inherent value—their mattering—is never in question. Parents cannot assume their kids know that they matter, Flett told me; we must engage in what he calls proactive mattering promotion—explicitly telling our kids how much they matter to us.

Here’s a mattering lesson I learned from a mother I interviewed. One night, when her hard-working teen was excessively worrying about an upcoming test, this mother pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from her wallet. She crumpled it up, put it on the floor, theatrically squashed it, then dunked it in a glass of water. Picking up the soiled, soggy money, she said to her son, Remember, like this twenty-dollar bill, our value doesn’t change, even when we’re dirty and bruised and soaking wet, like when we get a bad grade or get cut from the team or mess up in a million ways.

One night before bed, for example, Caroline talked about how she and her friends were worried about their upcoming report cards. After listening to her concerns, I took a minute to point out her strengths. I told her that I saw how much time and care she put into her schoolwork every day, how organized she was, and how engaged she was in her education. I knew she was doing her best, so I wasn’t particularly worried about what was on the report card. If the upcoming grades didn’t reflect the time and effort she put into her work, then we would figure it out together, I said. She seemed to lower her shoulders a bit in relief.

Then I grabbed a Post-it note from her desk drawer and scribbled on it: YOUR WORTH IS DIFERENTE OF YOUR GRADES

I handed it to her along with an explicit statement of what too often remains implicit: My love for you never changes. It doesn’t depend on how you behave, what you look like, or any grade you get.

Fighting the messages sent by our never enough culture takes constant and consistent reminders. It is not solved over one bedtime conversation, with one Post-it, or even with a hundred. But I am hoping that over time the message will sink in. And I think it’s starting to. That sticky note I gave Caroline so many months ago is now taped to the keyboard on her laptop, serving as her own constant, gentle reminder.

4 You First. Your Child’s Mattering Rests on Your Own

Kids learn and internalize mattering not just by absorbing our words, but by absorbing our actions, how we model mattering. A take my advice, I’m not using it approach backfires. Our kids see the dissonance between our words and our actions when we exhaust ourselves, trying to secure the best for them. Think about it: We want our kids to know that they are more than just their grades, but we ourselves prioritize good outcomes, in their lives and our own. We want our kids to lean on us for support when they are feeling overwhelmed, but we shoulder everything alone. When we put every family member’s needs above ours because that’s what good parents, particularly mothers, do, we are showing that we don’t think we matter—even if we think we’re showing our love.

To raise our kids well, I have learned from talking to experts, we have to examine what we’re doing, not just what we’re saying. Do I behave as if my worth is unconditional, do I practice being kind to myself, do I act like my interests are just as important as theirs?

Your kids need this from you, but you also need this for yourself. Because you matter, too

Intensive Parenting

It is easy to believe that sacrifice is the only way we can secure a decent life for our kids. To be a good parent today is to be an all-consumed parent, norms primarily defined by white, affluent parents who have the time, money, and privilege to engage in full-contact parenting. Some parents move houses, neighborhoods, towns for their kids, even change careers or give them up entirely, if they can afford to

While mothers in particular have been found to fall into this style of intensive parenting, fathers are increasingly adopting it as well

The good father effect, as sociologists call it, finds that more involved dads make a positive impact on their children that can last through the years

At the same time, the networks that parents have historically relied on for help—extended family, committed neighbors—have eroded. People move away from their families and neighborhoods for jobs, leaving behind critical sources of support.

The researcher Suniya Luthar calls parents first responders to our kids’ daily struggles, and paying constant attention to their roller-coaster feelings and social and academic pressures can take a toll, particularly when we don’t have time to recover before another problem hits. There are plenty of weeks like this: your daughter doesn’t make the cut on the soccer team, your son bombs his math test, and one of them gets left out of another Friday-night party. We want to be, and should be, a constant source of empathy for our kids, but the nonstop snags of everyday parenting do add up, even on a biological level: one study found that the more empathetic a mother is, the more likely she is to experience chronic, low-grade inflammation, a physiological process which is believed to raise the risk of serious health issues like cancer and heart disease.

Intensive parenting is also associated with heightened feelings of isolation and a greater sense of burden. More recently, Luthar has found that college-educated, overextended mothers can be particularly susceptible to chronic stress and burnout

Adolescence is also, incidentally, when the pressures of high achievement start to really kick in. One study, conducted by Luthar and her colleagues, analyzed surveys from over 2,200 college-educated moms across the country

Bowling Alone

Working mothers talked about how it stung to appear as if they couldn’t give their kids as much time as stay-at-home mothers

And yet what all these relatively affluent mothers had in common was this: there was an unspoken assumption that being materially successful should somehow protect against distress, that high levels of education should provide the skills to eliminate worry and loneliness.

Our viciously meritocratic mentality—that old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps thinking—has pushed us toward an overworking, overproductive lifestyle that dominates the energy and attention we used to give to other things, like our friendships. For decades now, sociologists have charted the decline of social structures, from churches and civic groups to bowling leagues. They have documented how we are bowling alone, disengaging from the larger community. Instead of spending time together building trust and cooperation in leagues, at religious institutions, in local clubs, we are bowling alone in our own siloed lanes.

Just Perfect

Performing the perfect mother act can be exhausting. A good mother, we’ve come to believe, isn’t just committed to being the best she can be. She must hide any cracks in her mask. Showing need, we fear, will reveal weakness—and weakness makes us vulnerable. It puts our status—our family’s status—on the line. A good and status-safeguarding mother, then, must maintain an I’ve-got-it-together veneer for the sake of her family. You can’t just have friends over on a random Thursday to have a glass of wine and catch up, because your house is a mess and you’d have to serve some beautiful hors d’oeuvres, get flowers, and put on a nice outfit, said Genevieve. You don’t just invite people over in your sweatpants.

It’s not that we parents aren’t doing our best, Luthar said empathically; we are not being neglectful or unloving. But all the ways that we are overstretched—work deadlines, financial anxieties, emotional turmoil, satisfying our child’s every need—can deaden our ability to be sensitive, responsive parents, she explained. We are more likely to be moody and critical and controlling, and less attuned to our children’s emotional cues. Anxiety, depression, and exhaustion impair our perspective and patience, as well as our ability to be consistent; to set healthy boundaries, limits, and schedules; and to find the energy to start fresh the next day when we fall short

Most alarmingly, our kids can misinterpret our stress and impatience: they may internalize the belief that something must be wrong with them. A feeling of not mattering is often rooted in the smaller actions or lack of responses that accumulate on a daily basis, notes researcher Gordon Flett. Feeling like you don’t matter or that you matter less than, say, a parent’s career or social life can contribute to a child’s negative view of themselves as not worthy enough to be valued. Kids can feel the difference between a parent who works two jobs because they need to financially and a parent who chooses to work rather than spending time with them

A feeling that you matter to your parents is an adolescent’s first and often greatest source of well-being, Flett told me. Among boys, it has been found to have an even stronger impact than mattering to one’s friends. One of the most influential factors of parental mattering is the extent to which the parent is psychologically present,

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.

Being a mom is a tough job, made even harder when we must swim against the powerful tide of community norms. To love a child well—to walk the fine line between supporting a child and respecting their autonomy—a parent must, of course, have the emotional and physical resources to do so. You need a mental calmness, a composure, which is impossible to maintain unless you yourself feel supported. To be good parents, we need to take care of ourselves. But to take care of ourselves first and foremost? The idea can be hard to wrap our heads around. After all, it directly contradicts how society tells us—especially women—to parent

The Friendship Solution

What we need, Luthar explained, is not the kind of me time marketed to tired women by the multi-billion-dollar self-care industry. The trick is not running a bubble bath twice a week, or getting your nails done, or taking up yoga, or finally trying out that meditation app that’s been sitting on your phone, unused, for a year. Instead, the trick is prioritizing the rich relationships that allow us to feel deeply loved and cared for, just as we strive to make our children feel with our own caregiving

Friendship buffers against the wear and tear of daily stress, lowering anxiety and regulating emotions. Social support, research finds, short-circuits our body’s natural threat response; experiments have shown that when a companion is in the room, our stress is reduced

Friendship is a gift we give ourselves. Friendship has a deep, healing power that I didn’t fully appreciate in my twenties, when my friends and I were more focused on just having fun together

Don’t Worry Alone

To build these kinds of life-sustaining relationships, a second critical practice is the willingness to be vulnerable—and the willingness to accept support. We’re comfortable telling people we’re looking for a new job or trying to lose a few pounds, but in our hyperindividualistic society, we’re often reluctant to admit we need support

If there’s a silver lining of the pandemic, it’s that it has made us realize how much we need relationships in our lives, how much we need to lean on each other for solidarity.

Asking for help is powerful precisely because high-achievement culture discourages it—reaching out can disarm those around us, causing them to drop their defenses, too. It’s also critical to our mattering: when you ask for help, you recognize that you are important enough to have your needs met. At the same time, you communicate to your friends that they matter to you, which bolsters their own mattering

5 Taking the Kettle off the Heat. Confronting Grind Culture

Surrounded by the Grind

For decades now, sociologists have been documenting how our country is splitting along lines of social class, with those at the top end of the socioeconomic spectrum creating communities of SuperZips—towns like Mercer Island, where there is a heavy concentration of high-income and highly educated families. When the term was first introduced in 2013, The Washington Post located 650 SuperZip communities in the United States, where two-thirds of adults had college degrees and the average household income was $120,000

You don’t have to be a forensic accountant to figure out how much a parent’s lifestyle costs

No one wants to live at a lower standard of living than the one they grew up in, said Lisa Damour, a child psychologist who lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She sees this pressure heightened in her clients from more affluent families because of the narrowing of the kind of lifestyle they feel they must maintain, the jobs they feel they must do (mostly in finance or tech), and the neighborhoods they feel they can live in.

On a surface level, this means kids can come to believe their value rests on achieving the external markers set by their community: where they go to college, what job they land, where they live, what they buy. At a deeper level, they can come to believe something even more damaging: that they are expendable. Their health, their interests, their needs—these are not marked as important. Instead, a work hard, play hard lifestyle is the ideal, the expected cost for getting ahead

Worthy of Protection

As parents, we sometimes think our role is to help fuel and support our kids’ ambition. But in a hypercompetitive culture, kids sometimes need the opposite. They need the adults in their lives to occasionally hold them back—to prevent them from sacrificing their minds and bodies on the altar of achievement and to teach them how to build the kind of life they won’t need substances to escape.

Mattering, from a child’s perspective, means your physical and psychological limits are worth honoring. What the experts in this field have told me, time and again, is that our kids need wise balance-keepers, parents who actively help protect their time, their energy, their health, and their integrity. It is not our role to support every endeavor, in other words, but to wisely challenge, to create guardrails that tell our kids they are not cogs in a machine but people worthy of rest and preservation, to help them reimagine their ambition in an environment that tells them constantly to secure and acquire more. We demonstrate to children that they matter when we send a distinctively countercultural message: that they are worthy of protecting

Children need to be taught, explicitly, that true success comes from finding healthy ways—both physically and psychologically—to excel. As a conscientious student growing up, it took me a while to get to this place where I was essentially asking my children to do less and teaching them to be strategic, said Damour

When kids are encouraged to do it all, they come to believe that their fates rest entirely in their own hands. Having the privilege of choices, as many students in affluent communities do, can give them a false sense of control over their lives

The teacher’s presumed intent aligns with the idea of the growth mindset—a groundbreaking concept pioneered by Carol Dweck that holds that a person’s talent and ability can grow with effort. The growth-mindset ideology has become popular in our self-improvement culture. Encouraging such an outlook, this well-intentioned teacher would ask for multiple drafts of the same paper before deeming it worthy. This pattern set the daughter, who was already displaying perfectionistic tendencies, on a path where nothing was acceptable unless it was absolutely perfect, the mother told me. In communities where the norm is to push and push and push, experts say a growth mindset, if not employed correctly, can backfire.

Some teachers, coaches, and parents have oversimplified Dweck’s insights, the UK researcher Andrew Hill explained to me. Kids can wrongly assume that if they aren’t being successful, it’s because they aren’t trying hard enough. These students have a high ability to try really, really hard, he explained. What they lack are the self-regulatory skills that signal when to give up, when to disengage.

In some students, this drive can turn into a compulsive and excessive need to overprepare and overfunction. Scholars find that study addiction during the school years can be a precursor to workaholism in later life. When a student puts an excessive amount of time and effort into studying, it can impair their relationships and health and can lead to other addictions, like drinking and drug use, in an effort to calm the compulsion. It can also harm performance

An Emergency Exit

For the past thirty years, the psychologist Tim Kasser, an emeritus professor at Knox College in Illinois and the author of The High Price of Materialism, has focused his career on studying how the pursuit of goals like career success, money, and image relate to our well-being. In one study, Kasser and his colleagues surveyed a group of eighteen-year-olds, asking them to rank various goals in terms of their importance: job, money and status, self-acceptance, community goals, and belonging. They also surveyed them for any mental health issues. Twelve years later, when these teenagers turned thirty, researchers revisited the group. At both points in time, Kasser found that participants who were more materialistic were also more likely to be suffering from a mental health disorder. Moreover, he found that those people who became less materialistic over time—whose values had shifted between the ages of eighteen and thirty—went on to experience an increase in well-being.

While some of us may care more about certain goals than others, we all basically share core values that can be divided into extrinsic and intrinsic goals. Extrinsic values center around personal achievement and enhancing our self-esteem: financial success, image, popularity, conformity. They are focused on other people’s opinions, outside attention, and approval and rewards. Intrinsic values, meanwhile, center around personal growth and improving the community and our relationships. The difference lies in the motivation of our behavior. If you’re, say, pursuing a career in medicine mostly for status and the high salary, you’re pursing it for extrinsic reasons. But if you’re pursuing it because you want to help others, that’s an intrinsic pursuit

Kasser also offered an analogy of a pie, where your values are different slices: one might be material goods, one might be family, another might be career goals, another might be community. If the materialistic slice gets too big, the others get short shrift. Values operate like a zero-sum game: as one set increases in importance, the others must decrease. A great desire for personal success and achievement, then, can crowd out the desire to help others without expecting anything in return. Logistically, a person has only so much time, energy, and attention to spend

Choosing intrinsic values—like investing in friendships, neighbors, or volunteer groups—has been found to sustain our happiness and well-being in a way that pursuing extrinsic goals, like higher income or higher status in a career, doesn’t. Intrinsic values offer nourishing payoffs, like more social support and a sense of belonging, while extrinsic goals can be a little like junk food: they feel good in the moment, but that feeling doesn’t last long and too much of it can make you sick. It’s not that we don’t know and appreciate good values, of course. The problem is that we are bombarded with messages that activate those extrinsic values that are inside all of us, pulling us away constantly from intrinsic ones. Material goods also feed our status-safeguarding instinct, giving us a feel-good neurological release that’s hard to override

The more parents model that having material possessions, making lots of money, and going to a name-brand school are important, Kasser said, the more children tend to follow along in adopting those same values. If we want our children to shore up on intrinsic values—relational, community-minded ones—the first thing we must point them toward is regular ways of experiencing their value outside their zip codes. We must offer them regular reprieves from a world that cares about advancement and stuff—whether it’s offering connection through family dinners or friends’ birthday parties, a mental reset through unplugging from devices, or a reminder of our smallness and humanity through excursions into nature

Reject the Premise

At the root of grind culture is a foundational belief: a good life is secured by admission to a good college. Many of the students I interviewed believed that High school is a means to an end. They have been inculcated with the idea that attending a prestigious college is the key to financial success, social status, and happiness

This belief also presupposes that a select few colleges are good—and the rest are not

But experts who have analyzed the rankings will be quick to tell you that college rankings are, at best, misleading. Rankings may seem like they are objective measures of quality because they use complex formulae and present their findings definitively,

Parents and students might be surprised to learn—as I was—what criteria U.S. News uses to produce their rankings. In 2022, for example, 20 percent of a school’s ranking was based on its reputation among peer institutions

Graduation and retention rates make up another 22 percent of the ranking criteria. Pope notes that a highly ranked private university typically has a 95 percent graduation rate, while flagship public universities have rates between 65 percent and 85 percent, depending on the school

Some colleges even manipulate the data to improve their standing, throwing more uncertainty into the rankings. Columbia University made headlines for submitting statistics to U.S. News that were deemed inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading by one of its own math professors

Rankings are compelling because, in an uncertain world, we would like to believe that getting a degree from a higher-ranked college, even if it costs more, will lead directly into a high-paying career and greater life satisfaction. But does a more expensive college lead to better career outcomes? Pew Research conducted a study to explore this very issue. Researchers compared life outcomes between graduates who had attended large public universities and those who had attended more expensive private schools. Surprisingly, they found no statistical difference in the outcomes. The majority of each group reported about the same levels of personal satisfaction with their family life, their economic well-being, and their job.

Materialism and Mental Health

It’s only when we get clear on our intrinsic values that we can develop the wisdom to be effective balance-keepers for our kids. Kasser suggests asking yourself: Have I set up my life in a way that reflects what I think is most important? For example, if my family is most important to me, does my day-to-day schedule reflect that belief? Am I encouraging my children to live the kind of lifestyle I think is important? Are my kids so involved in so many different activities that they never have any free time to sit and relax? If I really want my child to be a kind person who cares about others, what opportunities do I give my child to practice this?

Kasser says that parents should talk about values openly, just as you would about substance use or sex. Instead of one hundred-minute conversation, aim for one hundred one-minute conversations peppered into daily interactions. When you’re at the mall and your son is begging for the latest sneakers, Kasser suggests asking: Do you really need another pair? Will it actually get you what you want? Similarly, I have found, you can have these same conversations around achievement. What would getting a higher score on your SATs really mean? Will going to a name-brand college lead you to a fulfilling life?

Direct conversations about values have been some of the most important talks I’ve had with my kids. These conversations have pushed me to define what success means to me

I wanted my kids to focus on feeling intrinsic, authentic pride—and not to be overly distracted by extrinsic, shiny outcomes. And this changed the way I talked to them about measuring their success when I saw they were already working overtime. It isn’t about doing your best, I told them. It was a different metric, a different question we needed to ask: Are you proud of your work?

This shift in thinking gave me the tools to define what doing our best really means for our family—reaching for that proud feeling, rather than just reaching for the A. It helped focus William. He wasn’t just working for a good grade; he was working for the anticipation of how proud he would feel for producing good work

Deliberate Rest

To matter is to realize that we are not machines; we are humans with limits. Monitoring those limits sends a strong signal to our kids: they are worthy of rest and nurturing. Our role as balance-keepers is to insist on this

To be clear, home conversations about what we value, like taking care of our health, aren’t about abandoning achievement or hard work. Rather, they’re about offering a whole-person framework: saying in our words and modeling in our actions that achievement is just one part of what it means to live a successful life

It doesn’t mean we’re not ambitious—we are, said Elizabeth. But there are limits to how much we’re willing to sacrifice for that ambition. They explain to their sons that ambition can’t come at a cost to important relationships and it can’t come at a cost to mental health. I want my boys to know when enough is enough, she said

Everything in Moderation

So, what do you credit it to? I pressed. Well, she said, we were clear at home about what we valued as a family and held on to it, even when it was hard, even when other people warned us that we were wrong.

6 Envy. Coping with Hyper-Competition

Social comparison—sizing up the competition—is an inescapable part of human nature. And local context matters

In education, psychologists call this kind of social comparison the big-fish-little-pond effect. When you are a big fish (competitive student) in a little pond (less competitive school), you have more confidence in your abilities. You feel smarter because you’re smarter than the average student. On the other hand, when too many talented students (little fish) are in high-achieving environments (big pond), they can suffer psychological fallout from feeling like they do not measure up

So when we talk about the waters of achievement our kids swim in every day—the waters that erode their mattering—these skewed metrics of performance are perhaps the most difficult for our kids to see and name. It’s the water they swim in, invisible because it’s all they know. These undercurrents make their way into every area of their young lives: school, sports, music, theater, dance, art—causing kids to have to break their necks to distinguish themselves within a very narrow band of excellence. Treading these competitive waters, it’s almost impossible for kids to keep any perspective on their worth outside their performance. Or any perspective on how, just by being in these well-resourced schools, they’re already winning a medal, just maybe not the gold, the sociologist Natasha Warikoo, author of Race at the Top, told me. The children who are at a real disadvantage, she pointed out, are those who are living outside of these elite communities.

Social comparison within such a narrow range pits classmates in an understood but unspoken competition against one another, where your success harms my chances, as one student said. When Harvard’s rate is 3 percent, then you have to do the calculation, said one father in a Town and Country article titled This Year’s College Admissions Horror Show. What if you take away all the slots for first-gen students, all the athletes, and the legacies? Then how many are left in that 3 percent? The feeling is: What can kids possibly do? How do they distinguish themselves?

Mattering to Friends

Mattering starts at home when we feel valued by parents and family. But when it comes to feeling significant in the eyes of other people, our role in a larger community is also critical. For our kids, this larger community is primarily found at school, where they spend the majority of their waking hours and where their identities are being formed

Like parents, peers can be a uniquely protective factor in an adolescent’s mental health and well-being. As our kids grow into teenagers, notes Gordon Flett, it’s their peers who are increasingly able to satisfy the need to matter. By feeding each other’s sense of mattering, friends grow closer. Knowing that we matter to people who matter to us can protect an adolescent’s well-being, while loneliness increases the risk of a host of serious problems, such as depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.

Even just one quality friendship can shield against the harmful effects of loneliness and bolster self-esteem and academic engagement

The quality of friendships during adolescence can also have a long-term effect. Researchers have found that students’ perception of mattering to their friends is directly associated with their happiness; friendships with those who know us well and enjoy our company, quirks and all, feed our hunger to feel unconditionally valued

Make the Thinking Visible

Social comparison is a natural part of being human, but left unchecked, it can make us deeply lonely. Envy diminishes one’s sense of mattering. The pernicious thing about envy is that you don’t want to show that you’re feeling it, because doing so exposes your own deficiencies. Experiments have found that people are less willing to own up to feelings of envy than they are any other emotion. This shame also makes us less likely to open up and receive help from others—undermining the very relationships that would allay our painful feelings

Normalize Healthy Reliance

One of the most practical ways to cement our value and that of others is by asking for help, relying on someone’s support, and feeling that we are worthy of that support. But in competitive environments, some students can come to believe that admitting that they need support means they are inadequate. It’s why so many adolescents suffer in silence, unbeknownst to us, until they implode

Asking for help can feel especially difficult for our kids because they are so competent in the first place

Opening herself up to feedback improved her relationships, too. It bleeds over, because it teaches you how to bring your newspaper friends into other areas of your life: ‘I trust you to give me good advice,’ ‘I trust you to learn about this situation I’m not comfortable with myself yet,’? she said. Interestingly, she continued, the weekly experience of asking for and offering input made her feel less vulnerable. Because I’ve gotten so much input from people within this close group, I’m more confident, she told me. I kind of feel like I can now ask for, and accept, input from anybody.

Our kids benefit when we teach them the power of inviting people in. A competitive culture forces our kids to exude self-reliance, to pretend that they can handle everything on their own. But if parents talk about vulnerability and model it at home, if we make home a place where feelings and fears are nothing to be ashamed of, we can bring our kids relief

Do your kids see the nitty-gritty of your vulnerabilities? Do they see your setbacks? Do they see you accepting help?

Meditative phrases: May you be safe. May you be healthy and strong. May you be happy. May you be peaceful and at ease.

When I asked the students of my survey what they would have liked their parents to have known about their high school years, they wrote:

• The fact that I was constantly feeling compared to other students often makes me feel like my work will never be enough, that I will always be miles behind my peers in terms of academic success
• It took a toll on me having a best friend who was in the top??percent for high school.
• There was a lot of [friend] drama and I wish my parents could’ve taken the time to help me navigate it.
• I was severely depressed in high school and most of the time was barely keeping it together, partly as a result of the toxic culture around grades and achievements in my high school and within my group of friends.

Marginal Mattering

The more competitive students are encouraged to be, the more likely they are to experience scarcity and envy, which can fuel dehumanizing attitudes and stereotypes, explained school consultant Rachel Henes

Healthy Competition

Data bears this out. In a study that examined competitive motives among more than one thousand adolescents in Italy, those who expressed a zero-sum outlook—such as I compete with others even when they are not competing with me—were more likely to suffer in their relationships. In another study, of 615 Canadian adolescents, the researchers Tamara Humphrey and Tracy Vaillancourt found that kids who displayed hypercompetitiveness in the early years of high school went on to display more direct and indirect aggression in twelfth grade—a finding that suggests that they grew more aggressive, and more isolated, over time. Other research has shown that hypercompetitive people are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, stress, and self-harm. Always needing to win makes life more challenging, Vaillancourt told me, because winning isn’t always possible. By contrast, students in the same study who viewed their peers not as competitors that hinder the winner, but rather as possible helpers who can facilitate personal discovery had healthier relationships. This adaptive competitive style, as it’s known, is associated with high self-esteem; these adolescents also tend to be more concerned about the well-being of others.

So how exactly do we help our kids reframe competition as constructive rather than destructive? How do we help them see themselves as part of a larger whole, not as isolated individuals in a dog-eat-dog environment? The answer isn’t a blithe everyone else makes you better pep talk—that sort of amorphous pronouncement isn’t helpful in a cutthroat environment. Just as we can be explicit about envy, we can support a shift in our kids’ mindset around competition. Too often, we aggravate the sense of rivalry: Where is so-and-so applying to college? How did so-and-so play in the game today? Instead, we can support connection when we ask about, and teach our kids to look for, what is worthy about their competitors. What are their competitors’ strengths? What do they do well? What can we appreciate about these opponents? In what ways are they working with us—on a project, on a shared goal, on navigating the same incredible achievement pressure?

Competition can be mutually beneficial if you acknowledge that you need others and they need you to become who you are each meant to be. A worthy rival, a term coined by the author Simon Sinek in The Infinite Game, is someone who is better than you in certain areas, and who can inspire you to get better at what you value

A worthy rival also benefits from what we bring to the table—our ideas, our talents, our successes. This is just as important to help our kids articulate: What strengths do they have that their rivals can learn or grow from? This idea—that your rivals need your strengths—is especially important for girls, who tend to struggle more than boys do with competition’s impact on their social relationships. While boys are conditioned to act competitively, even among close friends, girls are socialized to be collaborative and to work together to reach their goals, which can feel at odds with competition

One study of nearly sixty girls in grades six to twelve at a competitive school found that they felt pressure not to acknowledge their aspirations openly, which only added to their stress

While boys are often taught that competition can push them to new heights, cultural stereotypes of competition among girls can be a lot more venomous—cat fights, queen bees and wannabes, as the author Rosalind Wiseman so vividly captured in her book by the same title.

Them win, which sends the signal that beating them is unkind, teach the benefits of being a worthy rival, playing to win while also encouraging and celebrating their efforts whenever they make a smart move.

Consider how countercultural and profound it is for kids to learn that envy doesn’t have to be shameful, and that competition can be healthy with the right mindset. There’s nothing wrong with being competitive; I’m extremely competitive, Vaughan said. But, she continued, you must draw the line somewhere. I came to realize that everyone has a different journey. I think the only thing that I want to try to compete with is myself, how I’m progressing and continuing to improve each day to be better than I was yesterday. My friends help me do that. Vaughan told me, I came to recognize that supporting someone else’s success will never hinder or diminish my own.

7 Greater Expectations. Adding Value to the World Protects Them

Zooming Out

In affluent communities, kids often come to feel anything but helpful. The unintended consequence of intensive parenting is that it promotes in our kids a narrow self-focus. When we groom our children from birth to focus on developing their exceptional selves by, say, taking extra Mandarin classes, we crowd out other activities that were once marked important by society, such as being a contributing member of their community. And we are already seeing the consequences of this extreme self-focus

What’s causing this decline? Researchers have a hypothesis: In a hypercompetitive, individualistic society, you must be narrowly focused on your own goals just to make it. If you’re worried about your own economic future, you have less bandwidth to be concerned about others. This toxic culture promotes radical individualism and self-reliance not just in adults but in our kids, too, and can encourage a kind of mandate to think about yourself first.

This highly curated, self-serving life can breed a cynicism in teens. Even if they are contributing outwardly, they often shrug it off as padding for their résumé. One student talked about his summer service trip to help build houses in South America. But the trip did little to improve the conditions of the communities, he admitted with a bit of shame: It was just a bunch of rich white kids who had no idea how to use a hammer and nail. Another student taught me a word I’d never heard before: slacktivism. Slacktivists promote causes on social media to show their followers that they are caring, empathetic people—but they rarely follow through with real action. It’s easy to put up a message to highlight a cause, but how many of us are taking time away from sports and studying to do something that makes a difference? one student asked me rhetorically.

Despite our best efforts, and our best intentions, the obsessive curation of our kids’ lives is not helping them fly. Many of our kids—our good, obedient, wanting-to-please-us kids—are doing what they’re told. They’re doing their hours of homework, taking those cello lessons, waking up early to swim laps before school, checking the boxes of community service. They’re following the ultra-directed path they’ve been placed on, but it’s not giving them the meaning they seek. Ironically, our extreme focus on their growth and fulfillment and happiness is stunting them

Yes, you may be thinking, it’s developmentally appropriate for teenagers to be self-centered. But when we let them overindulge in self-focus, when we don’t challenge them to appreciate and empathize with others, when we don’t point out the ways they can help and hammer home their responsibility to do so, we actually hurt them, experts say. We undermine the very growth we are trying to foster. 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.

Children need adults to help them zoom out and see the bigger world and their role in it. In other words, it’s not about landing that leadership position in the school club to improve their résumé. It’s about helping them see the broader implications of their involvement: Where can they be of greater help to their classmates and communities? Where can they step up, take the lead, and do more?

We all want our kids to grow in healthy ways, to become high-functioning, happy adults. But growth isn’t necessarily found in building the perfect college applicant, raising ACT scores or batting averages, or perfecting their unique, special selves. It is in helping our children take interest in the world outside their bedrooms and classrooms, to widen their reach and their circles of concern and caring—to discover, like Adam did, that they’re a part of something bigger, a larger community. In other words, that their actions do matter, and that they have a responsibility to others

When we invest too much energy in our children’s self-fulfillment and self-betterment, we can fail to connect a kid to a purpose that’s greater than landing a spot at Colgate or Colby—a why for their role in the world, a knowledge of how they bring value to others. The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress, notes Damon, it’s meaninglessness.

Value to Add

In the world’s longest scientific study of happiness, researchers at Harvard University have followed hundreds of teenage boys over the course of their lives to see how early-life experiences affected health and aging. One interesting finding was that a strong work ethic in the teen years, such as one developed by chores, was an important predictor of midlife happiness

Chores aren’t just a way to teach responsibility and work ethic. Nor are they simply a way for parents to avoid taking out the trash. Chores cement our place in our immediate community, our family—and equip us to add value to those around us. They can be used as a tool to communicate to our children that they have a place in a world that needs them, and that their contribution can have an impact. Chores make children feel depended on. In other words, chores bolster a child’s sense of mattering. While caring for others benefits us, it’s just as important to care for others because it’s simply the right thing to do.

Age-Appropriate Chores

You Have Impact

Not every child comes to this role of adding value

but all of us are born predisposed to want to add value to the world. These impulses will grow if they’re encouraged, but too much self-focus can cause these impulses to atrophy. Like our bodies, our empathy muscle needs to be exercised on a regular basis, too. And just like parents who have rules about their kids being active in a sport every season, several parents told me they take a similar approach to volunteering

Often the assumption is that the adults, the people who are in charge, are going to fix the problems of the world because we’re the ones setting up carpools and soccer practices and enrichment courses, said Kinsey. But that’s not going to help the next generation figure out what they care about or how to organize and put their ideas into action. It reminded Kinsey of a famous Lily Tomlin quote: I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody. How do we encourage that kind of thinking in our own kids? Yes, that’s a problem, so what are you going to do about it? And how can I help you? The agency must be theirs, Kinsey says, or else it’ll just be us swooping in all the time

Living purposeful lives doesn’t just involve big societal causes; it can also take place in small, everyday actions, like being a good neighbor—especially when it might be easier to turn the other way

Not Better than Others, but Better for Others

Coach Mike said people are drawn to the school’s values and mission: to form leaders, scholars, and men for others. Over the course of four years, students are taught how to balance their own personal needs and goals with a responsibility to help others meet their needs and reach their goals, too. In other words, the school is deliberate about instilling an other-oriented mindset. It’s a daily practice

Coach Mike engaged the boys in a simple exercise. First he asked them to write down everything they’d done, totally independently, without any help, to contribute to their own success. Then he asked them to make a second list of all the things others had done to support them over the past twenty-four hours. He asked the kids to put a percentage comparing the two. It’s always fun, because a kid will say, ‘Uh, it’s about fifty-fifty,’? he told me. And I press them: ‘Tell me really, what have you done?’ And then they’re like, ‘Huh, I guess I’ve been driven and clothed and sheltered and fed and loved and financially supported. Maybe it’s more like five to ninety-five percent

In his book The Path to Purpose, William Damon offers this guidance for helping adolescents find their purpose:

• Listen for sparks, then fan the flames
• Ask guiding questions
• Be open to interests
• Encourage a feeling of agency, linked to responsibility
• Ask your children to contribute some minor service to the family on a regular basis and acknowledge those efforts with appreciation
• Talk about your relationships, your work, your purpose
• Introduce your children to potential mentors

Encourage Deep Connection

Helping others is about building connection, but we can also make these deep connections with people we are volunteering with

Building Capacity for Setbacks and Failure

Part of the motivation, Adam explained, was that his parents didn’t take over the process. They let him lead the way, which made a huge difference in helping him define his purpose. They gave him the freedom to explore the activities and volunteer opportunities that interested him and supported him by driving him places and paying for things like Boy Scout fees. Being able to try new things and get hands-on experience, he said, helped move him beyond the fixed mindset that there’s one straight path to a good life: getting into a good college so you can land a high-paying job. Instead, he realized, success is finding meaning in your life. When you make this shift in thinking, Adam said, you realize that you can go to community college or Harvard and still live a life that has impact

Knowing your why does more than energize; it also improves your resilience and your capacity for failure. We may not always feel understood or appreciated by others, but when we add value to something beyond ourselves, we can see firsthand that we are valuable. In this way, purpose can serve as a healthy fuel that not only protects against mental health struggles but also provides a pathway out of them. A sense of something greater than yourself can alleviate the stress, anxiety, depression, and burnout that so many of our young people today are feeling

When we teach our kids how to live a life of purpose, how to contribute meaningfully to others, their drive becomes self-sustaining. Purpose energizes, motivates, and keeps them on track, even when challenges or setbacks inevitably occur. It curbs perfectionistic tendencies and reminds them that they’re much more than any one failure. Setbacks don’t become all-encompassing reflections on a person’s inherent worth. When we have a sense of outward mission, we gain a long-term perspective: We see that we’re not just rising and falling on our achievements and that our failures aren’t as consequential as they may initially seem. This larger purpose shifts our mindset from one of scarcity and fear to one of abundance, where we see our place in the world as part of a bigger whole. In fact, practicing generosity both requires and reinforces the perception of living in a world of abundance, which then increases happiness and health

8 The Ripple Effect. Unlocking Mattering All Around You

Not Scarcity but Abundance

Throughout this book, we have examined up close the messages society throws at us: scarcity, envy, hyper-competition. Beneath the illusion of scarcity, beneath the fear and anxiety and envy and status seeking, we are all striving for the same basic human needs: to feel valued, to belong, to be known and loved for who we are at our core

Mattering, as I’ve come to see it, offers a powerful antidote to a scarcity mindset. Knowing that people are valuable for who they are—not for how they perform, not for what they produce, not for what they acquire—releases us from the competitive chokehold. It shifts our thinking away from what we’re lacking and allows us to see all that we do have. It boosts our status in healthy ways. It connects us to the best in ourselves and the best in others. Mattering, in other words, offers a perspective of abundance, freeing us from zero-sum thinking and reminding us that there is enough for everyone to go around. Mattering shows up in how we treat ourselves and how we treat one another. Choosing mattering, even when we’re feeling anxious and fearful, is a deliberate choice we can make every day

As I interviewed kids and their parents for this book, I noticed something significant: those who felt a strong sense that they mattered—to their families, to their friends, to other adults in their lives—also seemed to have an easier time expressing how others mattered to them

Mattering works as a virtuous, overflowing cycle. When we feel valued by others, when we see how we add value to them, we experience a fullness that then allows us to share it with others: we are encouraged to express how they are valuable and how they add to our own lives

In other words, mattering is additive, multiplicative. When you feel loved, nurtured, and cared-for yourself, you are much more likely to be able to revel in another’s success, to feel another’s joy. This idea that we can relish someone else’s joy is something that gets knocked out of us in our competitive, zero-sum culture. There is a Sanskrit word that captures this feeling of pleasure that comes from delighting in another’s well-being: mudita. Mudita is an unselfish joy, the belief that there is room in this world for everyone to experience happiness and success

It has been so freeing to learn about mattering, but it has also come to feel like a responsibility to me. Once you know and feel its power—and conversely the feeling of not mattering—you may, like me, come to see it as an obligation to use this knowledge for good and to spread it around. If we can start making people feel like they truly, deeply, unequivocally matter to their families, to their friends, to their communities, imagine what the world would look like, feel like, be like? Mattering motivates us to want to do something about it: How can I help someone matter, even just in this one moment?

Sources of Mattering

But a mattering mindset tells us the opposite: that we’re not meant to do this alone. Our kids do far better with input from a broader network. This isn’t just because the variety exposes them to more things about the world, though that is true. It’s also because sensing that you are valued by a network that’s larger than your immediate family reinforces your own sense of mattering. The greater the number of caring and attentive adults our children have in their lives—who know and appreciate and take an interest in who they are—the more valuable they will feel, and the more they will be exposed to how they can add value to others. I’ve thought of this in terms of How can I replace myself in my kids’ lives? How can I augment what I’m doing with the help of other trusted adults?

A larger adult network is protective. Kids who are surrounded by caring adults will exhibit less risky behavior because, in part, they don’t want to disappoint the people who care about them

Surrounding our kids with trusted adults also releases us from running ourselves into the ground by trying to be everything to them. Instead, we can actively consider—and invite—an adult network that will help preserve their mattering

Dialing it Up

Teachers are a vital source of mattering for our kids. One student I met, a senior at UPenn named Darya Bershadskaya, explained that she survived the stressful days of high school because of the good relationship she had built with her newspaper advisor and the staff. Every morning, she and the rest of the staff would get to school extra early. Instead of just talking about what had to be done in the newspaper, they talked about books, hobbies, and life beyond the classroom. It felt a lot like a family, she said

What a mattering framework does is allow us to shift from competition to cooperation, from feeling isolated to a sense of connectedness. To combat Steven’s reluctance to go to school, he and his mom came up with a plan: he was going to focus on showing his teachers how much they mattered to him. He would do this by giving them his undivided attention and engagement in class and thanking them on his way out the classroom door. This simple reframe kicked off a positive upward spiral: showing his appreciation to his teachers and their response to it has shown Steven how much he matters to them, and how much they matter to him—and he has stopped complaining about going to school.

Expressions of Mattering

Showing others how they matter to us, even in small ways, can reverberate through a community

The practice of mattering pierces our image-conscious lives—the misguided notion that we don’t need help. These small moments puncture the facade that supposedly protects our families but, in reality, breeds loneliness. New York, as much as I love it, can be very image conscious. But practicing mattering with my neighbors means we all get to let down that public mask we sometimes wear. When we get an unexpected snowfall and our kids’ snow pants don’t fit, instead of feeling like a parent who is falling down on the job, a quick text—Help, does anyone have size-ten snow pants?—both solves the practical problem and pushes back against the idea that we are meant to do this life all alone. Mattering strengthens our social safety nets. My kids also feel a sense of comfort knowing they have several people they can turn to whenever they need help, whether it’s printing out a late-night homework assignment because our printer ran out of ink or borrowing a cup of milk mid-recipe because we miscalculated just how much we’d need. Not only do I let my neighbors see my messy life, but they’re also people I count on to help me through it

Unlocking Mattering in Others

Having a mattering mindset broadens how we think about success for our kids, and what it is they truly need

Mattering now colors everything about how I parent. When things aren’t going smoothly at home, when my kids are feeling lonely or stressed, I don’t solve for their happiness. I solve for their mattering and use the framework to think about how best to help them. Are they struggling with feeling valued? Are they struggling with not seeing how they add value? I’ve even stopped telling my kids that I just want them to be happy. Happiness and well-being, I’ve come to realize, are the byproducts of living a life where we feel valued and add value to others.

It can be a challenge for young kids in high-achieving communities to find places where they truly add value, other than to themselves. One mother I interviewed spoke about the tension at home between her teens. Her younger child never wanted to help, and his older sister felt like she was the only one doing chores and helping the family. At age twelve, he was deeply consumed with himself, she said. He also lacked appreciation for others in the household who went out of their way to help him; he was entitled. I think he thinks he matters too much, she said.

So we brainstormed together. I asked her if he had any chores. Were there any concrete ways he felt useful, depended on? Her eyes lit up: No, she said. He was never asked to add value to anyone but himself. We wondered if maybe his being overly consumed with himself was a way of compensating for a lack of mattering to others. She was going to do an experiment at home, to see if giving him some real responsibility—planning the weekly meals and grocery shopping with their babysitter—would help

Two weeks later, she emailed me. Not only was her son helping the sitter with the grocery shopping, but he had also learned how to cook a signature meal himself: yogurt-marinated chicken

We cannot matter alone. We matter in relationship with others. It’s hard to insist on our own value to ourselves—it’s so easy to lose sight of it. No amount of mindfulness or emotional regulation can do it for us. We need social proof, other people to tell us, to insist on it, to remind us of how we are inherently valuable and that our presence adds something to the world. And other people need us to remind them of their mattering

After my birthday party, one friend wrote to me about how profound the mattering concept was and how she couldn’t stop seeing it in her interactions with people now: at the supermarket checkout, at the gym, in her office.

Forever I will be grateful to those who let me into their homes and into their lives, and who, in each of their own ways, added to my own sense of mattering and purpose. These conversations have stayed with me and have made me a better parent in ways I can’t begin to count

What I have learned through these thoughtful, intimate conversations is that under all the angst and anxiety, envy, fear, and hyper-competition, at the core we all really want the same thing for our kids. When we are no longer around to guide them, we want them to live a good life, to have deep, life-sustaining connections, to feel the joy of living a life of meaning, and to leave this world a little better than they found it. We want them to feel valued by those around them and to help others—in their family, in their schools, in their communities—to feel valued as well. What we want for them is to live a life that truly matters

Resources

Taking Action - At Home

The first thing parents ask me when I tell them about the book is this: How has your research changed your parenting? Here’s a list of the changes I’ve made in my own house, as much for you as it is a note to self, so I hold on to these lessons learned and continue to make them a daily practice:

Never worry alone

Be a selfist. A selfist ensures that she is well taken care of, too

Have a go-to committee. Suniya Luthar suggests asking yourself which friends make you feel unconditionally loved. Work toward having at least one or two of these people in your life

Make home a mattering haven.

Lead with lunch. When kids walk through the door, instead of peppering them with performance-related questions (How’d you do on that test?), consider leading with What did you have for lunch today?

Schedule

Talk openly about values

Take a values inventory

Normalize difficult feelings

Be a balance keeper

Focus on wise striving and being energy efficient

Help kids keep achievement in perspective

Tell failure stories

Teach skills of healthy interdependence

Make chores mandatory

Widen their circle of concern and caring

Make volunteering mandatory

Be a mattering spotter. Point out when you see a child adding value to those around them, not with excessive praise, but simply by noticing: I see how you helped our neighbor to bring in her groceries

Nurture parent-teacher relationships

Replace yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives.

Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter.

Taking Action- For Educators

Employ the mattering framework

Prioritize community mental health

Get a mental health report card for your school

Involve all stakeholders

Conduct a values inventory

Note which students are not being seen or publicly valued.

Ensure every student has at least one adult at school they feel they matter to

Engage in meaningful diversity and inclusion work

Make the thinking visible

Find a way for everyone in the school to add value

Create opportunities for authentic service

Provide students with opportunities for real-life problem solving

Rethink traditions

Be mindful about using a growth mindset

Showcase alternative routes

Hold a blind college fair

Consider a school-family college admissions contract

Taking Action- Community Efforts

Create a council of trusted adults

Be a trusted adult for other people’s children

Be intentional about re-villaging your communities

Broaden conversations around success.

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