What happens when achievement turns toxic – and how to fix it

College prep increases the pressure on teens to succeed. Author Jennifer Breheny Wallace offers tips for turning down the heat.

College preparation in the United States used to begin in the junior year of high school. But competition to get into elite colleges has led many parents to push children to distinguish themselves academically at earlier grades. These students are now considered at risk for depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders, according to a report from the National Academy of Sciences.

Author Jennifer Breheny Wallace interviewed dozens of students and parents in high-achieving communities around the country. In “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It,” Ms. Wallace examines the roots of “toxic achievement culture” and what families can do to push back. 

How do you define “achievement creep”?

When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, junior year, senior year, these were sort of important if you wanted to go off to college. But now it’s crept into middle school, into kindergarten, and in some areas, even nursery school. The idea that you have to get into the right nursery school, the right kindergarten, you have to be on the right track in grade school, you have to get into the gifted and talented program. ... Every win sets the bar for an even higher thing. 

A lot of people ask me what is “toxic achievement” versus just “achievement.” And I will say, this book is not anti achievement. I get a lot of joy from my achievements, and I want my kids to feel that joy. When it becomes toxic, though, is when our sense of self, our identity, becomes so tangled up in our achievements that we only feel valuable when we’re achieving. And when we fail or have setbacks, we crash. 

Your book focuses on privileged high school students trying to get into elite colleges. What compelled you to write about this group and its struggles?

In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation identified a new at-risk group, and these were what the researchers called “students attending high-achieving schools.” Those are public and private schools around the country where the kids generally go off to competitive four-year colleges. According to the reports, these students are two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety and depression and two to three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse disorder than the average American teen. 

I’m talking about the families that generally fall in the top 20% to 25% of household incomes. This population, these upper-middle-class families, sets the bar for what achievement looks like. And it trickles down to families in the middle and lower-middle class, where parents told me the pressure to achieve was because college was so expensive and they wanted their kids to get scholarships. So families in the top 25% of household incomes are setting the bar of what success looks like, because they have the resources to do it, and it is impacting all families. 

You talk about the concept of “mattering”: Children should know that they have value for who they are, rather than for what they achieve. How can parents reinforce that?

I have yet to meet a parent who does not love their kids unconditionally. But what I heard time and time again in my interviews was that that love didn’t always feel unconditional. And so parents have to be careful about the messages, even unintended messages, they’re sending their kids. 

One of the things parents can do is ask themselves a series of questions that were given to me by the psychoanalyst Tina Bryson. These four questions can really help you understand what your kids may think is most important to you. The first question she suggests for reflection is: Take a look at your child’s calendar and see how they spend their time outside of the classroom. How much of it is toward achievement-oriented goals?

Second, take a look at how you spend your money as it relates to your kid. How much does it revolve around these materialistic, competitive goals? Third, take notice of what you ask your children about when you pick them up from school, or when you come home from work. Is that “How’d you do on the Spanish quiz?” If so, they could be thinking that’s the most important thing to you. And then the last question is, what do you fight with your kids about? So those four questions can tell you a lot about the messages you’re sending to your kid.

The best professional advice I got to the question, “What could I do tonight at home to buffer against this excessive pressure to achieve?” was “minimize criticism; prioritize affection.” That phrase has become my North Star as a parent. 

What further advice would you give?

We are so busy, with so much on our to-do list, that often our kids don’t get to see the joy and the delight that we get from being their parents. So make a point at least once a day to really show your kids how much you delight in being their parent.

Make home a haven of mattering; make home a place where your kids can recover from the messages they are hearing at school, from their peers, from social media, from the wider culture about how their value is contingent on their performance. Make home a place where they never have to worry about their worth.