Never Enough

May 15, 2023
Journalist Wallace debuts with a smart take on how parents can help their children thrive without putting undue pressure on them. Drawing on interviews with more than 200 parents and children from across the country, Wallace explores why parents push their kids to excel in the classroom and on the field, how this pressure affects children, and how parents can provide less stressful forms of support. She suggests that parents’ fixation on their children’s success stems from an evolutionary drive to secure scarce resources for one’s offspring, but that modern parents struggle to distinguish real threats from such “perceived” ones as “getting cut from the A team... or rejected from their first-choice college.” The consequences can be disastrous, as case studies make clear; a particularly harrowing one tells the story of a Connecticut high schooler whose full plate of advanced-level classes left her so stressed she had to be hospitalized for suicidal ideation. Wallace contends that countering achievement culture requires demonstrating to one’s child that love is not contingent on a test score, and she encourages parents to ensure kids don’t overextend themselves. Wallace’s sharp analysis illuminates the social and evolutionary pressures that drive achievement culture, and her advice is well observed. This more than makes the grade.

A journalistic study of America's overcommitted, overworked youth. Today, writes journalist Wallace, "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." In a series of anecdotal accounts, the author portrays teenagers working relentlessly on their studies and college-placement exams during the week but then knocking themselves out with booze and drugs on the weekend, and younger children suffering torments of anguish at not being stars on the field or in class. These are, Wallace adds, the children of parents who "have the privilege to choose where they live and where their children go to school." Perhaps surprisingly, she notes, the statistics indicate that such children are far more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than are youth in positions of poverty, and far more susceptible to clinical depression. Wallace decries the "achievement culture" that produces such results, arguing that it comes from parents' expectations that, because children are seen as investments, they should receive a high rate of return, commodifying their flesh and blood. Wallace strays into pop psych here and there, as when she attributes some parental anxiety to the same sort of scarcity thinking that led our hunter-gatherer ancestors to gorge on food whenever it was available, knowing that famine would follow. Given the small number of admissions at top schools--which, ranked by the number of applications declined, thereby become still more elite--those parents are strongly motivated to demand perfection and more from their offspring. Instead, Wallace counsels in a meandering argument that probably won't do much to dismantle the achievement machine, parents need to focus on building self-esteem, service to others, and "the power of mattering." A middling but still provocative rebuttal of the concept of the tiger mother.

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