Never Enough

Notes from the book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-And What We Can Do about It by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

Page 29: The parents that concern Richard Weissbourd are the ones who organize their entire relationships with their children around their kid's achievements, a hidden curriculum that becomes the main, if unspoken, focus of their enting. According to Weissbourd, this might look like telling your child that all you care about is effort, then asking how everyone scored on the test. Or it could mean saying that going to an elite college doesn't matter, then extolling the virtues of a cousin who got into Brown. What Weissbourd said next prompted a light-bulb moment for me: the real problem, he said, is that high achievement is now seen by many parents as a life raft in an unpredictable future.

Page 39: And we feel trapped. On the one hand, we want to give our children happy childhoods with more freedom to play and quit piano if they want to-childhoods like the one I had, childhoods they can look back on with nostalgia and comfort in the years to come. But we also feel a tremendous burden to prepare them for an increasingly competitive world. As one mother put it, most of her anxiety comes from trying to teach her kids everything they need to know to thrive, when all she really wants to do is enjoy them and enjoy being a parent.

Page 68: “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.

Page 75: Fighting the messages sent by our "never enough" culture takes constant and consistent reminders. It is not solved over one bed-time conversation, with one Post-it, or even with a hundred. But I am hoping that over time the message will sink in.

P83: 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.

Page 91: It's a small moment, perhaps a funny thing for Vanessa to re-member, but it represents a bigger idea, one that I heard over and over again in my interviews all over the country. ^[1]

P95: 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.

P96: 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.

P125: 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. Of course, most adults have the perspective to know this isn't true; plenty of people who go to top colleges have lives that don't turn out as they hoped, and plenty of people who go to less selective colleges have lives that turn out even better than they'd imagined.

P129: However, what did impact later-life success was a student's experience while they were at that school, particularly the quality of their relationships and their level of engagement on campus. Graduates who reported higher well-being and job satisfaction tended to have had highly engaging experiences at college. The study singled out six key types of college experiences that had an outsized positive influence on future success.

1. Taking a course with a professor who made learning exciting;
2. Having a professor who cared about the student personally;
3. Having a mentor who encouraged the student to pursue personal goals;
4. Working on a meaningful project across semesters;
5. Participating in an internship;
6. Being active in extracurricular activities.

P130: A good "fit" means that a student feels significant and important within a campus community, that they feel others are interested and concerned with their well-being and come to depend on them. Put another way: future success and well-being are correlated with how much a student feels like they matter on campus. Did they have a professor who made them feel valued? Did they have a semester-long project or an internship where they were able to use what they were learning to add value?

P132: 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?

P149: it's important to foster a child's independence, but there was an even bigger lesson to teach my children if I wanted to protect their mattering: how to be interdependent, how to rely on others and allow others to rely on them in healthy ways. In my travels, I have found that the kids who thrive in competitive waters have adults in their lives who actively push back against a zero-sum mindset. These adults-be they parents, coaches, or teachers— encourage kids to root for their classmates, to sacrifice for the greater good of the team, to help their friends and learn to ask for help in return, and to confront and manage the uncomfortable feelings that arise from competing with peers. These adults focus on fostering an interdependent mindset, rather than preparing them for some sort of Hunger Games situation that will never come to pass.

P156: Chloe felt the same way. New to Ms. Taylor's class, when she received an edit on her first piece of writing, she was mortified. "I considered myself a writer—1 enjoyed writing, it was my thing. And at a school like Archer, it felt especially important to me, like I needed to have this natural talent." But, when she got back that first assignment, it was filled with comments from the editorial staff. "I hated it," she said. With Ms. Taylor's coaching, however, she found the practice of inviting input transformative. "To put yourself out there and discover that this can actually make you better-it changed how I felt in class," she told me.

P156: 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 vul-nerable. "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." ^[2]

P168: While malicious envy sees rivalry as zero-sum—your win is my loss—benign envy sees rivalry as mutually beneficial. It acknowledges that you need others, and they need you, to fulfill your and their potential. In this way, benign envy reinforces, rather than diminishes, mattering. When you reframe competition in this way—that it's not about what you are acquiring or achieving, but about the person you are becomings—it also emphasizes the power of relationships.

P179: One study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed data from almost fourteen thousand college students. What they found was alarming: empathy has been decreasing over the past thirty years, so much so that the college kids in their study mea-sured 40 percent lower in empathy on tests of the trait than their counterparts just a few decades ago. The drop is so startling some researchers have even declared a "narcissism epidemic."

P184: how to turn her inwardly focused lens outward, and they were showing her how to be a functioning, contributing member of society…They were encouraging her to be humble—not to think less of herself, but to think about herself less. Humble people take an active interest in other people's lives instead of being overly consumed with their own. Humility helps with our psychological health, acting as an antidote to unhealthy self-involvement. It keeps things in proper perspective and buffers against the unrealistic demands we can place on ourselves.