EP83: Want To Raise Smart, Resilient Kids? Don't Do This

Interview with Jennifer Wallace / Author and Advocate for Adolescents

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

It's all or nothing. Harvard or bust. A's may not be enough. This is achievement culture and it's hurting kids. Jennifer Wallace, author of “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic--and What We Can Do About It”, has a plan to help adolescents and their well-meaning but intense parents change the dynamic. Listen to her tips.

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Transcript

00;00;05;16 - 00;00;29;03
Paul Sullivan
Welcome to the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, silly, strange and sublime aspects of being a lead dad in a world where men are the go to parent, aren't always accepted at work, among their friends or in the community for what they're doing. I'm your host, Paul Sullivan. Our podcast is just one of the many things we produce each week at the company that we have various features, including the lead dad of the week.

00;00;29;10 - 00;00;56;08
Paul Sullivan
We have our community both online with, in-person event as well. And we have a new resource library for all fathers. The one stop shop for all of this is our newsletter, The Dad. So sign up today at the company dads.com backslash. The dad today. My guest is Jennifer Wallace, author of Never Enough when Achievement Culture becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It.

00;00;56;11 - 00;01;26;09
Paul Sullivan
It's set to be published, right around the start of school this year, and it's one of those books that will elicit a reaction one way or the other. To some, the book will describe what they hate about affluent parents in America. To others. In areas like New York City where Jennifer lives, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, where I am, what she describes will ring true in the all or nothing race to get students into top schools.

00;01;26;11 - 00;01;56;24
Paul Sullivan
We're also talking shortly after the Supreme Court has invalidated affirmative action as a criteria for college admissions decisions. And during a time when people are questioning how colleges and universities use their legacy admissions. Those are kids whose parents had gone to the college as a criteria for admission. Jennifer has three kids, 17, 16 and 13, so she's not only, an expert and an author, but she's living this experience of kids and college.

00;01;56;26 - 00;02;00;19
Paul Sullivan
Jennifer, welcome to the company Dad's podcast.

00;02;00;21 - 00;02;03;21
Jennifer Wallace
Thank you so much for having me on.

00;02;03;23 - 00;02;29;03
Paul Sullivan
When we've talked in the past, I know you went to Harvard. Your husband went to Harvard. You have kids who will be going off to college soon. You're really coming at this from both the, lived experience, but also the expertise that comes from a journalist who who really delves into the subject. What was the reason that that set you on this path to research and write this book?

00;02;29;06 - 00;03;03;20
Jennifer Wallace
Yeah. So it was, 2019 and the varsity scandal hit. And that was when, you know, a bunch of Hollywood and financiers and, you know, rich people got caught in a, like, huge dragnet, and charged with conspiracy and fraud and with sentences that had prison time. And I thought to myself, how did we get to the point where parents are now going to jail to get their kids into USC?

00;03;03;26 - 00;03;09;03
Jennifer Wallace
How what where did we go here? Like how did we get to this point? And I wasn't.

00;03;09;11 - 00;03;26;20
Paul Sullivan
And then let me pause it. Everything I did for a little nuance for, for for the listeners. This was, you know, the star of Desperate Housewives, one of the sort of Desperate Housewives. You had somebody, help one of her kids fake the SAT scores. But the USC reference is to this woman who'd been an actress who'd been on, like, hallmark, channel movies.

00;03;26;20 - 00;03;49;04
Paul Sullivan
Like, the most saccharine sweet things out there. And she had somebody, if I remember correctly, like, create videos that that portrayed her kids as, like, elite rowers, to get them into USC. And the whole thing went through, like the rowing coaches on the take. There's a guy arranging all of this, and it was one of those things where you would think it was like a bad movie, like, this wasn't really happening in reality.

00;03;49;07 - 00;03;56;29
Paul Sullivan
So that's the background. So. So you see all this and a light goes off being like, this is not just weird, but this is what emblematic of something deeper.

00;03;57;00 - 00;04;22;08
Jennifer Wallace
I knew it was bigger. It wasn't just about a bumper sticker like, that's the popular narrative, but oh, all these crazy helicopter parents, they just want the bumper sticker on the back of their cars. As something deeper was going on here, and my gut was telling me, because I live in these communities. I know the stress and anxiety in my own house and in my friends houses to set our kids up, you know, to, to thrive and adulthood.

00;04;22;08 - 00;04;51;19
Jennifer Wallace
And, and I just wasn't buying it that it was about a bumper sticker. And so, you know, I went on this four year, journey where I really looked at the deep roots of achievement culture and really wanted to get to the bottom of why my children's childhood was looking so different than my own. I grew up in the 70s, so it was just, you know, in the 70s.

00;04;51;21 - 00;05;14;14
Jennifer Wallace
Well, what I found, I'll give you one of the things that I found. One of the deep roots of this achievement culture are the macro economic forces in our environment. You know, in the 1970s, life was generally more affordable. You could, you know, most likely buy a house. Health care was more affordable. Higher education was more affordable.

00;05;14;17 - 00;05;38;13
Jennifer Wallace
There was slack in the system. So a parent could, you know, be pretty assured that their child, even with a few wrong turns, would, would be able to replicate their childhoods. In the last several decades, you know, there has been the crush of the middle class globalization, steep inequity like we have never seen before. And parents are worried.

00;05;38;19 - 00;06;14;10
Jennifer Wallace
We see dwindling opportunities for our kids. We see we have no idea, even with these jobs are going to be in the future. What are we preparing our kids for now? And so parents are absorbing these macroeconomic forces, and as researchers call it, they're becoming social conduits in how they parent. So our parenting behaviors have changed, not because we want the bumper sticker, but because we have in our heads that that the the an elite college or brand name college could act.

00;06;14;10 - 00;06;34;01
Jennifer Wallace
We believe, we hope, as a kind of life vest that could keep a child a afloat in a sea of economic uncertainty in the future. But unfortunately, the very life vest that we're trying to put on our kid is drowning too many of the kids that it's meant to protect.

00;06;34;03 - 00;06;56;07
Paul Sullivan
I mean, but devil's advocate here, there's a great book came out of a decade ago called privilege is written by a sociologist named Seamus Kahn, who is an at Columbia now is a Princeton. And it tracked he went back to his boarding school, the Saint Paul School, which for those in the system, is probably one of the tippity top, boarding schools in America.

00;06;56;12 - 00;07;23;05
Paul Sullivan
And one of his conclusions was these parents who were really pushing to get their kids into Saint Paul's because Saint Paul's is a feeder to Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Williams. They weren't doing it out of, a feeling that they wanted to take something away from other kids out there. They're doing it for exactly the reason you just said they want it to, you know, insulate them, help them preserve, give them the best opportunity, for success.

00;07;23;05 - 00;07;39;14
Paul Sullivan
So it's a sort of a rational choice in the sort of the you Chicago. If there's a rational choice, it had, you know, unintended consequences. Ramifications. But devil's advocate here. I mean, are they wrong? I mean, an Ivy League degree is going to get you a lot further in life than a community college degree.

00;07;39;17 - 00;08;03;10
Jennifer Wallace
I don't think we have. I think that's a false I don't think we have to talk about a community college degree versus an Ivy League degree, but, you know, you it. Of course, it's rational to think that brand name college will open doors. And for some people, you know, it will open that first door. But the research and I wrote about it in the book, the research does not bear it out.

00;08;03;13 - 00;08;28;24
Jennifer Wallace
A it is not the degree that leads to success. It's the child that leads to success. So, you know, there have been lots of studies done. One that I wrote about was a Gallup and Purdue study that looked at it was the largest, the largest study that looked at where people went to college and, and later life outcomes.

00;08;28;26 - 00;08;54;06
Jennifer Wallace
And they looked at private schools, they looked at big public universities, they looked at elite schools. They looked at, you know, lower ranked schools. And the research didn't it had almost no effect where a person went to school, with the exception. And you mentioned this in your intro, with the exception of, minority students, black students in particular.

00;08;54;08 - 00;09;18;28
Jennifer Wallace
And the researchers were not quite sure what led to better outcomes, how the prestige of a school led and a private, prestigious school led to better outcomes for the blacks. For the black students, they weren't sure if it was because those schools, generally those kids could go tuition free, if they needed to. And so they would, you know, go into the workforce with no debt.

00;09;19;00 - 00;09;48;05
Jennifer Wallace
The other idea was that, perhaps there were networking opportunities open to them that they wouldn't have had had they gone to a less credentialed, prestigious school. So, you know, I have, as you mentioned, I have a, a junior who's applying to college, and I have lived with this research, and I have a husband who we spent an entire weekend going through the research, the two of us, because he wasn't buying it.

00;09;48;05 - 00;10;06;26
Jennifer Wallace
He was like, there was no way. And he. And he totally walked out one weekend and we went through all of it. And I will give him credit, he helped me with that section because I knew it, because I'd been, you know, writing about parenting for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for all these years. But he came to it blind.

00;10;06;28 - 00;10;33;07
Jennifer Wallace
And what's what I found most fascinating, and what I'm focusing on with my own kids, is that this study that I mentioned earlier, there were six things that the researchers found led to later life, career success and financial well-being. And I could quickly rattle them off because one of the six right thinking about college, it's about fit over rank.

00;10;33;13 - 00;11;05;14
Jennifer Wallace
So it's taking a course with a professor who made learning exciting. It's having a professor who cared about the student personally, by having a mentor who encouraged the student to pursue personal goals, working on a meaningful project across semesters, participating in an internship, and being active in extracurricular activities. These six things were found to have, you know, the students who engaged in those six things were found to have better outcomes in midlife.

00;11;05;16 - 00;11;35;03
Jennifer Wallace
And I, I know what I know why that is why. And it's sort of the it's the core of my book. It is because these students felt like they mattered on campus. They felt valued. The professors knew their name. They were encouraged to pursue personal goals, and they were depended on to add meaningful value back through extracurricular activities, through internships, to working on a meaningful project long term.

00;11;35;05 - 00;11;55;15
Jennifer Wallace
So what I am doing with my own child is looking for the right fit for my kid. What is the school that is that is going to bring out this sense of feeling valued and have the opportunity to add value back? So that's what we're focusing on.

00;11;55;18 - 00;11;59;00
Paul Sullivan
Jennifer, you and your husband, both at the Harvard, send your kid to Harvard. Come on. Last he.

00;11;59;01 - 00;12;03;24
Jennifer Wallace
Admissions, he's not even applying. He's not even applying.

00;12;03;27 - 00;12;23;18
Paul Sullivan
You know, years ago, for my first book, I talked to this guy who was a pretty successful trader. And he said the biggest thing they struggle with was, you know, everyone else's. Harvard is like, when you get to graduate from Harvard, who's done really well? Is he going to be a successful trader? What was determined it was not whether he went to Harvard or not.

00;12;23;18 - 00;12;45;21
Paul Sullivan
It was whether he had had one of those charmed academic lives where he'd never he just was a smart kid. Never did. Never struggled. Nothing ever happened and just went right through it. Those guys would almost always fail because trading is about failure. I mean, dating is about failure. Life is about failure. They would almost always fail. But it was the guy who went to Harvard or wherever, and it had this up and down career.

00;12;45;25 - 00;13;03;27
Paul Sullivan
What he you know, where that so popular now wasn't back then. Resilience. He knew how to, you know, rebound from it. You know, all of this makes total sense to me. But I don't know how you're going to I want to know how you're going to convince parents, because there's one part of the book in which you talk about the challenge that I want to get to mattering, you know, later on this, one of my questions.

00;13;03;27 - 00;13;24;09
Paul Sullivan
But you talked about the twins, how you talk about, you know, even these these well-meaning parents who who, you know, say they're not living through their children. But, you know, the chill month is it's kind of like that classic, you know, prisoner's dilemma. Like, how do you opt out of this rat race and the prisoner's dilemma? If you snitch, the other guy goes to jail, he snitches.

00;13;24;09 - 00;13;50;10
Paul Sullivan
You go to jail. If you both stay quiet, you go to jail for a low amount of time. That's kind of what this is. If if somebody you know is opting out of this system that values not just the degree, but all of those connections, you know, later on, you know, the University of Massachusetts does not have, a beautiful building, in Midtown Manhattan, the way Harvard does Harvard as the Harvard Club.

00;13;50;10 - 00;14;06;14
Paul Sullivan
You go, there you go. How do you how are you going to convince parents that those, you know, networking connections later on in life, are worth something, but not, as, you know, not the tremendous amount of stress that these kids are putting themselves under, often to the detriment of their health.

00;14;06;16 - 00;14;35;24
Jennifer Wallace
So I really when I sold the book proposal in 2019, I really thought I was going to have to convince parents. I really thought, this is going to be a tough sell. And then Covid happened and, and this, this unbelievable rise we are seeing among our youth. I am no longer having to convince one parent that the the pressures of our achievement culture are doing a number on our kids and, and they are seeing it firsthand in their, in their families.

00;14;35;24 - 00;15;04;08
Jennifer Wallace
So I will tell you that I have not had, surprisingly, the pushback that I anticipated. I will also say that I it's not an either or. This book is not. You either have a healthy child or you have a high achieving child. What I found in my research, I when and I was looking for who were the healthy strivers, who were the kids doing well despite the pressure?

00;15;04;10 - 00;15;15;29
Jennifer Wallace
What did they have in common? What was home life like? What was school like? What did their parents focus on at home? And I found about 14 things that these healthy, high achievers had in common.

00;15;16;02 - 00;15;24;28
Paul Sullivan
What were the top ones? This is key. Like what are the healthy? High achievers have? The equally high achieving but less healthy kids lacked?

00;15;25;00 - 00;15;52;01
Jennifer Wallace
Well, that's a really good question. So what these healthy achievers had was that they felt like they were valued by their parents for who they were at their core, separate from their achievements. The kids who were struggling the most felt like they only mattered to their families, or they were only valued when they achieved that. Their value, they felt, was contingent on their performance.

00;15;52;03 - 00;16;16;07
Jennifer Wallace
Those kids struggled. Those kids struggled not only with mental health issues. Those kids and other research backs this up. They are. If you believe that your value is contingent on your performance, you are less likely to take those risks to to set yourself up for the necessary failures in order to be a success. So it it to me, it sounds counterintuitive, right?

00;16;16;07 - 00;16;39;18
Jennifer Wallace
When you first hear it, you're like, how could it be that that the kids who were the healthy achievers had parents who focused on their value outside the system? But that's exactly what worked for these kids. And they were getting messages. These healthy achievers were getting messages in their environment from their peers, you know, from social media about getting into a top school.

00;16;39;18 - 00;17;08;26
Jennifer Wallace
You need to look a certain way, you need to perform a certain way. And then they would go home, and home would be a place to recover from that, and home would be a place where parents said, you have so much more value deep at your core. It's not your achievements that matter to us, it's who you are at your core that you're caring, that you're kind, that you have the values that are going to actually lead you to long term success.

00;17;08;28 - 00;17;41;05
Jennifer Wallace
So so that was the other set of of healthy achievers. Their parents didn't let them only focus on their own resumes. They again, this sounds counterintuitive, but they depended on them to add value back at home and into the larger community. They knew these parents knew that if their children were to be so self focused on their own resumes, and the research backs this up, this extreme self focus, right?

00;17;41;05 - 00;18;00;28
Jennifer Wallace
Your your self esteem rising and falling depending on your wins and losses. That is a hard way to go through life. But if you can see your value in, you know the value you give to others that acts as a protect of shield against mental health distress. So you know just by that.

00;18;00;28 - 00;18;13;08
Paul Sullivan
Like that's sounds all theoretical, practically speaking. Is that like, you know, getting a normal summer job, like working at a coffee shop or a pool, is that like actually volunteering and not volunteering just for the sake of putting it on your college application? What do you mean by that in terms of that? Yeah.

00;18;13;09 - 00;18;36;15
Jennifer Wallace
So it meant a variety of things depending on the family. So several families I met had a volunteer mandate. You know how some families say, you know, you have to exercise, you have to play a sport? I don't care what it is. You have to write that kind of mandate. These families had a volunteer mandate. They said every week you need to contribute 1 to 2 hours or more in some families to something.

00;18;36;20 - 00;18;55;11
Jennifer Wallace
And so like one family I met with, as a family, they it was actually a single mother with her children. She would go to a soup kitchen on Saturday mornings. That was the only time that kind of fit for all their schedules, and they would stock the pantry. And she said to me, you know, and her kids were very high achieving.

00;18;55;11 - 00;19;20;02
Jennifer Wallace
And she said, you know, parents look at me and they're like, I can't believe, you know that you're doing that. Your kids are are, you know, doing everything right. They're getting the good grades. Whenever she would let their volunteer mandate slip because they were too busy or something that she noticed that they were not themselves, that they were overly consumed by themselves, and she just noticed the anxiety ratcheted up.

00;19;20;05 - 00;19;42;29
Jennifer Wallace
Other families that I met, one one family that I feature, in Wisconsin, the daughter went to Yale and the family, lived on a farm, and she had to do daily chores before school every single morning, no matter what. And these were not like, make your bed. These weren't things to to benefit yourself.

00;19;42;29 - 00;19;44;15
Paul Sullivan
Slaughter the chicken. Yeah.

00;19;44;16 - 00;20;08;02
Jennifer Wallace
It was feed the chickens or they're going to die like milk the cow or the cow is going to be really uncomfortable. So these were things that this this child had to get their self focused lens and realize that they are part of the bigger whole. And it put any struggles that this girl was having into perspective. She didn't skip and dance and like want to do these chores.

00;20;08;04 - 00;20;24;15
Jennifer Wallace
But looking back on it, she realized what it did for her. She was a perfectionist who was really struggling with these tendencies and her time outside doing things that didn't focus on her help to reset her and lessen those tendencies.

00;20;24;18 - 00;20;48;28
Paul Sullivan
And then she turned it into a compelling essay. And that's how she got into Yale, right? Probably, you know, like, if I you if the parent is balanced, if the parent are happy, the parents are content, you know, with with their lot in life, it would make sense that they would have a more expansive view of a parenting.

00;20;48;29 - 00;21;06;18
Paul Sullivan
You know, that it's not all or nothing like the the the Wisconsin farm kid. You know, her parents had their farm. Would it be great if she went to Yale? Maybe. You know, there are lots of other places you could go. But, you know, in some ways, I wonder if that's an outlier because, you know, you live in the belly of the beast.

00;21;06;18 - 00;21;27;24
Paul Sullivan
You know, the upper East Side of Manhattan. It's, it's a tough, you know, environment. How do you, you know, look to, you know, advise parents to take the longer view. I, you know, I'm also a child of the 70s. Applying to college was a yeah. I don't know what it's like. My kids are younger than than your kids.

00;21;27;24 - 00;21;48;23
Paul Sullivan
But it was a fairly straightforward process in which we bought the parents, got college, and we built a bunch of schools, and it was expensive, but it wasn't like so crazy expensive as it is now. So how do you talk to those, you know, parent? Because at another point in the book you talked about, you know, you just talk now about how know parents who are grounded are better, who don't emphasize achievement over all else.

00;21;48;23 - 00;22;07;27
Paul Sullivan
But the mistake to some parents is, you know what, the only that matters is that you're happy, that you work hard. But you know what? You know, your cousin went to Brown and she's a dumb ass, so. But whatever man did you have at it? So how do you coach them to, to to resist, to sort of not pull back and to really to be authentic because kids are, you know, their hypocrisy meters.

00;22;07;27 - 00;22;10;04
Paul Sullivan
They know when we're not being authentic.

00;22;10;07 - 00;22;53;26
Jennifer Wallace
They know exactly when we're not being authentic. Well, I mean, the first step we have to do, and I had to do this myself, is to rummage through our psychological attics and think about how achievement was talked about when we were growing up. You know, what our values are like, really. You know, I, I interview in the book, this researcher, Tim Kasser, who is so fabulous and he has devoted his whole life to studying how values and well-being, how values impact our well-being and mental health, and what his research and other research around the world has found is that having materialistic values, those aren't just logos, those are wanting to go to the

00;22;53;26 - 00;23;26;16
Jennifer Wallace
right college, wanting to have, you know, a career that is a high status career, anything that has to do with sort of external status, those values crowd out other values, intrinsic values, being a caring person, being generous with neighbors, investing in our relationships, those materialistic values when when we are overly focused on them actually lead to mental health issues and negative well-being.

00;23;26;19 - 00;23;56;02
Jennifer Wallace
And so what I would say to the parents is to read about how values impact well-being and what Tim said. They actually it was a funny exchange on the thought like, luckily we weren't on zoom because I blushed in the middle of our conversation. But I said to him, you know, I'm reading your research and you know about my kids in these high achieving schools, and I'm raising them in Manhattan and like, you know, what can I do to protect them other than moving out or changing schools?

00;23;56;04 - 00;24;14;21
Jennifer Wallace
And he said, well, I don't buy the premise of your question. If you knew that there was lead in the pipes and your kids were drinking the lead water, you'd move them, right? You'd get them out. So I don't understand why you're not moving. If you know that these values are negatively going to impact your kid. So I got all red in the face and I'm not leaving Manhattan.

00;24;14;28 - 00;24;40;00
Jennifer Wallace
And he said, but if you're going to stay, then you have to be very focused on the values that you, you know, focus at home on. So, so in other words, if you are going to stay in these communities that are overly focused on materialistic values, you at home have to focus on the intrinsic ones because, as he explained it to me, values operate like a seesaw.

00;24;40;02 - 00;25;23;16
Jennifer Wallace
So the more you're exposed to materialistic values and goals, the less likely you are to spend time and attention on intrinsic ones. So what parents can do who are raising their kids in these, you know, environments that are, you know, focused on materialistic values, is at home to have open conversations about values, just like you would drugs and alcohol and sex talk about, you know, why you're making certain decisions, why maybe, you know, you've chosen not to go for a big promotion, or why you know, you you are instead of being at work, you family dinners are a priority or, you know, whatever it is to talk about your values, to talk about, and

00;25;23;17 - 00;25;37;26
Jennifer Wallace
to really get clear in your own head about those values. Because I think we are so busy, we never stop to think about how are we organizing our lives and does this work for us, and is this the life we want for our kids?

00;25;37;29 - 00;26;11;03
Paul Sullivan
You know, you talked about how, you know, some kids are high achievers in, a healthy way. And when I think about the term, you know, achievement culture, it's, you know, it's clever, but it's it's loaded. It's it's, you know, it's only a, a bad thing if kids are stressed out or if they're, you know, striving for something at the expense of, of other things that would make them, you know, a fully fledged, human being, not not, you know, keep coming out with 18, you know, AP courses to her name.

00;26;11;05 - 00;26;35;21
Paul Sullivan
But where does the stress come from when you think about is the stress is it coming from the parents? Is it coming from their peers? Is it coming from the schools they attend? Is it coming from, you know, the the colleges or are they feeding into this by publishing their, you know, minuscule, acceptance rate each year? Where does the stress come from?

00;26;35;23 - 00;26;59;12
Jennifer Wallace
When I asked, I asked this very question to, researcher Sonia Luther, whose research, I talk about in the book, and she said the stress is coming from every direction. It's coming from the schools, it's coming from teachers and administrators. I mean, think about it. You you live in a in a wealthy, affluent community that has a really good public school system.

00;26;59;15 - 00;27;21;23
Jennifer Wallace
Well, you know, those those school rankings affect real estate prices. And, you know, so it's, you know, our kids, unfortunately and coaches, you know, just take take you live in a town where we're soccer and cross and all of these things are super important. And kids specialize really early to get a leg up. And so they're getting all of these, you know, over two centuries.

00;27;21;23 - 00;27;55;10
Jennifer Wallace
Well guess what. Guess why they're doing that. They're doing it because in the 70s and 80s these the government our government started leasing these, their public parks to private people because we were budget there were budget cuts. And those private individuals, those coaches needed to have a staff and they needed the staff to be year round. So unfortunately, many of the adults, adults in our kids lives are perversely incentivized to keep this achievement culture going.

00;27;55;12 - 00;28;13;13
Jennifer Wallace
Coaches need to have 12 months out of the year salaries, so specializing kids early and keeping them in that sport year round, even if it's not to their benefit, is likely not going to change unless the parents really push back on it. And I'm not. I'm not taking parents off the hook. Parents are looking for parents where I'm paying.

00;28;13;13 - 00;28;35;23
Jennifer Wallace
This wouldn't happen. You know, schools. I, I quote, a, psychologist who was talking with the head of a school and the head of the school. It was a an independent private school. And he said, yeah, if we did what was developmentally appropriate for our kids, we would become a vanilla school. And who wants to send their kids to a vanilla school?

00;28;36;00 - 00;28;40;17
Paul Sullivan
Yeah. For for 60 or $70,000 a year, parents are going to say, you know what? Yeah.

00;28;40;21 - 00;29;13;02
Jennifer Wallace
So this achievement culture, you know, the billion dollar, multibillion dollar tutoring industry and college admissions coaches, and I mean, there is such there is this huge, what's the word I'm looking for? There's this huge business. Yeah. Around, you know, childhood Inc that is, you know, incentivized to professionalize our kids. So when you ask where the pressure's coming from, it's coming from everywhere, from the adults who should be protecting kids from this excessive pressure.

00;29;13;02 - 00;29;16;18
Jennifer Wallace
Unfortunately, we are adding to it.

00;29;16;20 - 00;29;34;15
Paul Sullivan
You know, you you mentioned the town where I live, and there's a guy who's become a friend of mine, he has, two Superbowl rings, for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He went to Notre Dame where he, was a finalist for the Heisman Trophy. And when I've talked to him, he played 4 or 5 sports, as a kid.

00;29;34;15 - 00;30;00;07
Paul Sullivan
There are other sports that he was, equally good at. And then it just so happened that he got drafted to play football as two super rings. And, you know, fast forward, when his kids were playing sports, he volunteered to coach football in our town. And his idea was that, you know, if you could teach these kids the fundamentals, they would enjoy the game more and they wouldn't get hurt.

00;30;00;09 - 00;30;29;16
Paul Sullivan
And this would be a vanilla story if not for what I'm about to say. Like, as he's out to get to Super Bowl rings, he has parents, who couldn't play in a Division three sports of any sort, yelling at him on the sidelines about what he was doing and to put their kids in and all this and this is, you know, the sort of Pop Warner, you know, football and and I just sort of started listening to you because it's the same thing with, you know, it's, you know, what economists call confirmation bias.

00;30;29;16 - 00;30;57;05
Paul Sullivan
Like, you know, I would Harvard, my life turned out great. My kids, you go to Harvard, their life will will turn out great. So it's almost like. And I read the book. It's a great book. It's a wonderful book, but it's not almost at this point. It's not an individual problem. It's a systemic problem. And do you see any organization large enough to help change this, this systemic problem to to begin changing this systemic problem?

00;30;57;08 - 00;31;22;06
Jennifer Wallace
It is a systemic problem. And I think every I think the university level, I think the community level, I think the school level, the neighborhood level, and then, you know, parenting within our own homes so parents can do a lot more, than maybe we think we can. You know, again, I saw these healthy achievers in these unhealthy environments.

00;31;22;06 - 00;31;55;08
Jennifer Wallace
I mean, unhealthy by the standards of the researchers who were studying them. And there were specific things that the parents did within those walls. It wasn't easy. It wasn't always the popular choice to enforce bedtime at the expense of studying or to enforce rest. When the child wanted to take on so many activities. But what these parents were thinking about was, I want to teach my children how to live the life that they don't have to escape from with drugs and alcohol.

00;31;55;10 - 00;32;22;24
Jennifer Wallace
So, okay, so in terms of, you know, it actually, Daniel Markowitz, who's a Yale Law School professor, wrote an excellent book, flaking on the name of it. Now, the meritocracy, the myth, the meritocracy. I think it's called. But he talked about how and I thought this was pretty brilliant, that colleges and universities with large endowments should lose their charitable nonprofit status.

00;32;22;26 - 00;32;52;03
Jennifer Wallace
And those tax benefits, unless they start operating like charities, unless they start expanding, they can afford to expand. They can afford to take kids from the bottom. In his words, the bottom third of the economic, socioeconomic spectrum and enlist more of those kids to actually operate as, you know, change makers for these kids. So that's that's one idea.

00;32;52;05 - 00;33;17;00
Jennifer Wallace
You know, another idea is for communities to start rebuilding. You know, a lot of the issues in our kids lives is because they don't have adults in their lives looking after them other than their parents. You know, we are very much siloed in our own homes, thinking that we need to be 24 over seven the therapist, the driver, the nutrition, the mentor, everything to our individual kids.

00;33;17;00 - 00;33;36;21
Jennifer Wallace
But that's not how we're meant to be. We're meant to be living in a society of healthy interdependence where we can rely on other people, and other people can rely on us. So for communities to read village, and for parents to really do everything they can to buffer against the pressure in their own homes.

00;33;36;23 - 00;33;55;29
Paul Sullivan
Jennifer Wallace, author of Never Enough When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and what can we do about it? This has been great. I want to just and hopefully on a positive note with one, last question and talk about the concept of mattering that you ask us in the book.

00;33;56;01 - 00;34;46;01
Jennifer Wallace
Mattering is mattering has changed my parenting and it has changed my life. Really, it is mattering. Is the idea, of feeling valued by family, friends and community and adding meaningful value back to family, friends, and community. Mattering is a psychological construct that's been studied since the 1980s. It is. Feeling like you matter is a great predictor of academic success of, deep, strong relationships of, well, you know, well-being, strong mental health and feeling like we don't matter or feeling like our mattering is contingent is linked with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, excessive drinking.

00;34;46;03 - 00;35;13;13
Jennifer Wallace
So in my own home, I now have put mattering front and center. Again, it is not, I believe it's a false choice to tell parents you can either have a healthy kid or you can have a high achiever. Healthy kids who matter will want to contribute to society. They will have this clean fuel of motivation that they can carry through life.

00;35;13;15 - 00;35;17;09
Jennifer Wallace
So that's that's the short of it. On mattering.

00;35;17;11 - 00;35;22;23
Paul Sullivan
Jennifer Wallace, thank you again for being my guest on the Company Dads podcast.

00;35;22;26 - 00;35;26;11
Jennifer Wallace
Thank you so much for a great conversation.

00;35;26;14 - 00;35;55;04
Paul Sullivan
Thank you for listening to the Company Dads podcast. I also want to thank the people who make this podcast and everything else that we do. The company dads possible, Helder, Mira, who is our audio producer Lindsay Decker and is all of our social media, Terry Brennan, who's helping us with the newsletter and audience acquisition, Emily Servin, who is our web maestro, and of course, Evan Roosevelt, who is working side by side with me on many of the things that we do here at The Company of Dads.

00;35;55;04 - 00;36;09;15
Paul Sullivan
It's a great team. And we're we're just trying to bring you the best in fatherhood. Remember, the one stop shop for everything is our newsletter, the dad. Sign up at the Company of dads.com backslash. The dad. Thank you again for listening.