How parents can help their children achieve without being overbearing
How parents can help their children achieve without being overbearing
AP classes, college admissions tutors, extracurricular activities — these are some of the likely buzzwords hovering over parents of students, especially high schoolers. All these words have the same root: They show colleges what the student has achieved by traditional standards during school.
But is this achievement-centered approach the only way to go? Can students who don’t respond to this method do it another way and still be successful after college?
Jennifer Breheny Wallace is the author of “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It.” She recently spoke with Marketplace’s Nancy Marshall-Genzer. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Nancy Marshall-Genzer: I will tell you I am down in the trenches with you. I have twin teenage boys. And I have noticed there is a lot going on these days for kids. The pressure to succeed academically is higher than I’ve ever seen. Why is there so much pressure on kids right now and how might parents actually be adding to it?
Jennifer Breheny Wallace: To be clear, I have three teenagers myself, so I’m right there in the trenches with you. I’ve been noticing over the years just how different my children’s childhood was from my own. The story that really makes the most sense to me is the changing economic story from when you and I were growing up. So when I was growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s, life was generally more affordable. There was slack in the system. So a parent could be relatively assured, even with a child having some setbacks, that they’d be able to replicate their childhoods — if not do even better than their own parents did. But today’s parents are up against a very different story.
Marshall-Genzer: I think you talk to hundreds of kids, Jennifer, who said their sense of self-worth was based on academics. They only felt like they were truly loved when they got an A.
Breheny Wallace: That is the unfortunate narrative that I heard from way too many kids that, you know, they’re only as good as their next A. So, kids today are under a tremendous amount of pressure to achieve — and not just achieve, but the bar to achieve just seems to be getting higher and higher in all areas of their life. And there’s no one person to blame. I mean, these pressures come from peers, from their peers’ parents, from social media, from the wider culture that tells us only certain people are valued and matter in this world. What I hear from the parents is not so much that they want to get their kids into Harvard or Yale. This is really an issue that’s affecting all parents, particularly those in the top 25% of household incomes. The stories that I heard from parents is, you know, college is a prerequisite today. And the struggle to pay for college, even state schools, now is such a burden on families. And so that pressure that parents are feeling to, you know, get their kids over this ever-widening economic divide, parents feel really tasked with getting their kids into a “good school,” so that that could act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty.
Marshall-Genzer: There are some kids though who managed to still thrive in this pressure cooker environment. I think you call them “healthy strivers.” Tell me about them, and how are they succeeding, and what are their parents doing differently?
Breheny Wallace: Yeah, so I wanted to, as you say, look at who were the kids who were doing well, despite the pressures. What did their parents focus on at home? What was school like for them? What was their relationship like with their peers? And I found a lot of commonalities. And it boils down to this idea of mattering. These kids who were doing well felt like they were valued for who they were deep at their core away from their achievement and successes. Mattering is an idea, a psychological concept that’s been around since the 1980s. But it’s an idea that’s been locked away in the ivory tower. And so, what I found and what I’ve implemented in my own parenting at home is the importance of teaching our kids their value inherently for who they are away from their achievements. But also importantly to depend on them and rely on them to add value back to their family, to their friends, to their communities. Kids who felt like they were valued and were depended on to add value had a kind of protective shield. It didn’t mean they weren’t anxious and depressed, but mattering acted like a kind of buoy that lifted them up.
Marshall-Genzer: I noticed your book focused on upper-income families, which I have to say seems ironic. Why did you decide to zero in on them, and couldn’t parents at all income levels benefit from these tools we’ve been talking about?
Breheny Wallace: Absolutely. The pressure to achieve is really relevant for all parents and the buffers on how to buffer against it are, as well. The reason I focused on the top 25% of household incomes — so roughly parents who make a combined income of $130,000 a year — is because these are a newly named at-risk group. Meaning, kids attending competitive schools, mostly found in affluent communities, 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. So that is why I focused on them. But this book is relevant really for all parents.
Marshall-Genzer: Yeah, absolutely. And you talk in the book about the importance of students having commitments outside of school that don’t have anything to do with academics, things like chores and part-time jobs. Why are those commitments valuable?
Breheny Wallace: So what I found among the healthy strivers was that their parents focused on developing an other-oriented mindset, meaning that they were forced to take their self-focused lens — which is pretty, you know, indicative of the teenage years, this self-focus — and the parents forced them to look outwards, to see where they can add value at home and in the wider community. The reason this helped to these achievers was that it gave them social proof that they mattered. So they heard in the words of their parents that they were valued. But they also got the proof of that by seeing how they were able to uniquely add value to those around them.
Marshall-Genzer: And lastly Jennifer, this is a question for all parents: When you do push, when do you push and when do you hold back, considering everything we’ve just been talking about?
Breheny Wallace: Yeah, so the best advice I think on this is to — instead of focusing on shiny outcomes, like a specific grade, like “I want to see an A in your math” — instead focus on how the work gets done. Scaffold our kids. Give them a kind of healthy fuel that motivates. So the way we do that is helping them identify their strengths and teaching them how to use those strengths to overcome, you know, stumbling blocks. Parents need to make the assumption that kids want to do well. So, if their child isn’t doing well, get curious not furious about what is getting in the way.
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