The Self-Driven Child
Helping parents raise kids with healthy motivation and resilience in facing life's challenges. Oh, and having more fun while doing it!
The Self-Driven Child
When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic (with Jennifer Wallace)
Today I talk with Jennifer Wallace, an award-winning journalist and author of "Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It." With an illustrious career that began at “60 Minutes” and her current role as a Journalism Fellow at the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Jennifer brings a wealth of knowledge and a keen eye to the discussion.
Together, we discuss the intricacies of parental pressures, the weight of societal expectations, and the emotional toll it takes on children. As we navigate the turbulent waters of achievement and the idea of "never enough," Jennifer sheds light on the transforming landscape of parenthood and the silent battles our children face. Are parents unknowingly acting as conduits of social pressure? Can the prestige of a top-ranked college serve as a life vest in uncertain times, or is it turning into a lead vest drowning our children? Tune in for an episode filled with profound insights, backed by Jennifer's impeccable journalism and real-life anecdotes.
Timeline Summary:
[02:11] Shocking stats from nationwide parenting survey
[05:45] Overworked teen runs laps on 5 hours of sleep
[07:08] Relentless achievement culture like dystopian novel
[08:04] Vital importance of sleep for anxious teens
[11:04] Ned's "sleep stipend" motivates better rest
[12:25] Sleep fuels anxiety's fire
[15:21] Control and stress relation
[18:31] Giving teens autonomy improves grades
[19:41] 5:1 positive to negative interaction ratio
[20:24] Abandoning play and downtime
[22:39] Instilling balanced lives early on
[23:23] "Don't talk that way about my kid!"
[25:08] Not anti-achievement, just pro-balance
[25:40] PDFT - playtime, downtime, family time
[26:04] Parents as "social conduits"
[27:41] Zero-sum thinking and safety nets
[28:20] Teen already worried about affording food
[29:02] Regressing down Maslow's hierarchy
[30:34] The vital concept of mattering
[33:55] Actionable mattering framework
[35:02] Crumpled money "mattering hack"
[36:07] Teaching internal vs. external pride
[38:29] Nostalgia informing future direction
Connect with Jennier Wallace:
https://www.jenniferbwallace.com/
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It
Links & Resources:
· The Long Walk by Steven King
· Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
· The Sleep-Deprived Teen by Lisa Lewis
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If you have a high school aged student and would like to talk about putting a tutoring or college plan together, reach out to Ned's company, PrepMatters at www.prepmatters.com
Parents are becoming what researchers called Social conduits in the way that they pass these pressures, this idea of scarcity and the importance of maintaining the family status on to their kids. And this is not to blame parents. It is that parents today believe the status and the highly ranked college can act like a kind of life test in a sea of uncertainty. If we don't know what the economic future is going to be. We don't know what the jobs are going to be parents are kind of thinking big, that the status of the school will protect their child. Unfortunately, the pressure that's coming with it, that life vest is becoming more like a lead vest and drowning to many of the kids it's trying to protect.
Ned Johnson:Welcome to the self driven Job Podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson, and co author with Dr. Williams structured of the books, the self driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives. And what do you say, how to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance, and a happy home? I don't know about you. But sometimes it feels like things just keep getting harder. It's harder to be a parent, it's harder to be a kid or a teen. And we do our best, we keep trying harder and harder. But sometimes it feels like it's just never enough. Which is why I'm delighted to have today as my guest, Jennifer Wallace, an award winning journalist, a mother of three and the author of never enough when achievement pressure becomes toxic. And what we can do about it a longtime journalist, she started her career on 60 minutes, among other things, she is the journalism Fellow at the Center for parent and teen communication at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. So a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience, and a keen eye that she brings to us. So welcome, Jennifer, I'd love to start Jenny. Yes, Jenny, I love to start with the origin story of this. I reckon that as a journalist, you are looking at both the big picture and the personal stories that bring things alive. We're all sort of wowed by stats, I guess, but really moved by stories. Can you share a little bit of both what brought you to this book and what helps you bring it alive?
Jennifer Wallace:You know, researchers who study topics that are very important to them, call it me search. So this book, you know, I wrote it for, of course, my audience, but I also wrote it for myself, I'm a mother of three teenagers. And when I first started digging into the material, what sort of prompted this was in 2019, my oldest son who's now 17, going into senior year of high school was in eighth grade. And it struck me that I have four more years with him to instill, you know, all the life lessons, the values, everything I want to give him. So I was thinking, where should I be putting my parental energies. At the same time, the varsity blues scandal hit 2019, where, you know, parents on the East Coast and the West Coast got caught up in a bribery scheme. And I thought to myself, how did we get to the point where parents are now going to jail to get their kids into a highly selective school and I wasn't buying the narrative that it was all about bumper stickers and status, I had a feeling there was something deeper going on. And so as a reporter, I sort of dug into it. And sort of the the last thing that happened that grew into this book was in 2019, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about two national policy reports. One was the National Academies of Sciences. One was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that named students in competitive public and private high schools around the country, and at risk group at risk for two to six times more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, substance abuse disorder, and I'm not talking about occasional blues, I'm talking about clinical levels of anxiety and depression, compared to the average American teen. So that got me going. And that's sort of the origin story of the book.
Ned Johnson:It's funny, I'm smiling, when I think about going to jail Bill and I were out in Palo Alto lecturing. And there's a story in the self defense, I will build talks about talking to a group of AP English students at the end of which this English teacher comes up and they'll say, the kids are great, and blah, blah, blah, good questions. And the teacher says, well, here, the kids, they all think it's the ale or McDonald's. So Bill's telling the story. We're meeting with all these principals and superintendents, and this woman raised her hand Superintendent of whatever. And she says, well, here the kids say it's a Yale or jail, and I think it was so much more clever with that rhyming on the West Coast. We finished the talk. I turned my phone on, it blows up. We are in Palo Alto, you know, minutes from your brain count is sort of the epicenter of this the day that varsity blues drops. So you can imagine I have a field day with this because we're lecturing that night and I said, your kids talked about Yale and they said they were so close to Prince out at Yale and jail that hey, China yoga, yell, I'll go to jail. We'll both get out in four years. It's to your point, you know, something could be going better there. I remember when that that article of yours dropped about the causes of stress and adolescents are a poverty, trauma discrimination and all of its glorious forms. And then this excessive pressure to sell. And Bill and I talk about this everywhere that we lecture because when we think about families of wealth and privilege and opportunity, they do everything they can to protect and shield their kids from poverty, you know, trauma and discrimination and yet, and yet, here we are, and perhaps in our own accent for the reasons we'll get into, we kind of inflict this persistent and excessive pressure on kids to excel. You start the book talking about Molly and sort of professionalized childhoods and you put in words when I have thought for long while Can you talk about what what that means to you this idea of a professionalized childhood?
Jennifer Wallace:Yes. And Molly, I start the book with Molly. She was one of my early interviews, and I followed her actually through into college. And that hope she's doing right now. She is doing well. Good and well, but she was someone that I interviewed. And I, I remember talking to her about bedtimes. And I said, So what what time do you go to bed and she said, Well, I really liked my sleep, as opposed to my other friends who either go to bed at 3am, or wake up at 3am to finish all of their schoolwork. And she said, I generally go to bed before midnight. And then I get up at five to work on my papers study for a test. And she actually thought like, that was slacking. And I said, so on five hours asleep. How do you perform as a competitive varsity athlete, and without any irony, she tightened her ponytail and said to me, those days, I run laps with my eyes closed. And I thought that image of our young people running laps on trails and tracks that we have laid out for them on this very narrow definition of success. And it is crushing them. And they don't even realize because everyone is doing it. This is sort of an normed in her high school. You know, she felt like a slacker for getting five hours asleep versus less than her peers, peers, we're getting.
Ned Johnson:I just this summer read Richard Bachman and Stephen King of the long walk, I don't know if you know this book. And it's this competition through Maine, and they walk and so it's 100 boys, and they start, and the person who wins gets basically everything that he wants. But only one person, the person who wins is the one person who finishes the race, and everyone else doesn't make it. And I keep thinking about that as a metaphor. And, boy, then but so big part of that is is they don't get to take rest. They don't get to sleep and literally describe just that of walking and having to keep up the pace, you know, while falling asleep with micro. Oh, golly. Particularly when we know the sleep Dr. Teen the book just came out. And I'll put that in the show notes. My apologies to my friend who wrote that who's not coming to mind right. Now, right now, when we think about how important sleep is to developing brains. That's pretty terrible.
Jennifer Wallace:It's pretty terrible. Lisa demore has a good saying she's a child psychologist, she says and I think about this all the time, also, in my own life, that sleep is the glue that holds humans together. And I don't believe sleep is the root cause of the anxiety and depression. And the research doesn't bear that out. But it is certainly an accelerant. And a magnifier, when you do not get sleep, you do not have the coping skills to deal with the success of pressure on you. Well,
Ned Johnson:it's such a good point. And by the way, Lisa Lewis is the author of that terrific book, when we know that sleep insufficiency elevates cortisol, the dominant stress hormone, you know, and so, so the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain look pretty darn similar. And my writing partner, Bill's pictured as a clinical neuropsychologist says, If you decided you really want to develop an anxiety disorder, a pretty clear path to get there is simply to be too tired and too stressed for too long. And if you keep going, you'll eventually get depressed. And I agree 100% At least and by the way, all three books are amazing. There's also a wonderful book if people don't know called Why We sleep by Matthew Walker, and he talks at the very end of this about, you know, the four stages of sleep and REM sleep in the last one, the beginning of the night, we have more deep sleep, sort of washing away these toxic metabolic substances and a little bit of REM sleep. But as we go through that cycle, towards the end, we get more and more REM sleep. And he said REM sleep is really the thing that's psychologically the bomb to our brains in that it's the one time of the day when we process things in ways that are chemically neutral. And so when you look at people who are clinically sleep deprived, so many of them have wildly dysregulated sleep, and when they can fix the sleep for like 50% of them, no more depression because they're getting that thing. So you see you're right that sleep deprivation isn't the cause of anxiety, but it's but curiously, anxiety messes with sleep and sleep, you know, adds to anxiety and so it's both a cause and a symptom and you Yeah, in my world, if I could, if I could snap my finger and fix one thing for the whole world, starting with kids, it would be that they were all well rested. Because as you know, their ability to handle things, those those executive functions, including putting things into perspective, are just so completely sidebar by being tired.
Jennifer Wallace:I did asleep experiment in my family. I don't write about it in the book. But yeah, when I was thinking about how important sleep was, I did an experiment. And I said, because I go to bed very early. And I like to wake up very early. So I paid I told my then 11 or 12 year old that I would pay him to go to bed at 830, which was an hour earlier than he normally would go for a week and see what that would do. And he noticed how good it was. And I paid him. And then I stopped paying him. But it got to feel what that feels like to be so well rested. And he now is a I wouldn't say he's always in bed at 830. But he he recognizes how important sleep is.
Ned Johnson:Oh, I love it. Yeah. When I when I talk with kids, I say among other things in your Sunday have noticed that that do you ever notice how when you're tired, your parents are even more annoying than normal. And this was like, I must be tired all the time. I do this with students I a kid years ago, very academic, anxious, blah, blah, blah, trying to get this score for her college he's trying to go to and I was trying to get her the week before the test to be well rested. Because we know that you know, doesn't, it doesn't matter how much you put in your brain under too much pressure. You lose your mind. And so I made the case for being more rested. And she had and she had the most because it was her friends and she wanted to be up. And so what if your parents paid you to go to bed? And so my parents went pay me on really the pay me a fortune for tests, but seriously, and I said, What if I pay you? And she said you won't pay me? I said I will. She said you won't. I said I will. She said you won't. I said Try me. But I don't trust you. So if you hand your phone into your mob at 945 in your bed by 10 o'clock, I'll pay 20 bucks. She said for the week. I said I paid 20 bucks a night. She said no you and I said yes, we should know it. I said Try me. So repeat the whole thing. Your mom, she shows up on Friday, her mom swears scouts honor, she could go to bed, peel off $20 bills, five $20 bills, here we go walks and gets the score. You know she'd taken three times and this was the time that she got it. And obviously when I wish we as a society could not only talk in respectful ways to kids about that, but frankly structure school in ways that was just easier. Just use your free kids.
Jennifer Wallace:Don't tell my son you paid 20 A night?
Ned Johnson:Well, if we're completely fair, this is wealth redistribution, right? I'm like looking, I'm like you're paying all this money for test prep, and you won't invest? You know, in the in the I mean, oh, it's endless. I think about that with kids going off to college to say, you know, I'm happy to give you a stipend, you know, or spending money. And obviously, I can't enforce that. But if you're well rested, you know, I'll give you 500 bucks for whatever. And if you're if you pledge to get X amount of sleep, I'll give you I'll give you 600 bucks or whatever. Because the anyway live literature on sleep deprivation is so consistent, so compelling, and so grim. And I couldn't agree more with Lisa. It's the glue that holds humans together. Hmm. So let me pivot back to your wonderful research. Talk a little bit about a few of the stats, because you did specifically after doing this research with the National Academy and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that I gather you went on? Is it a listening tour? What do we call it? I know that's what politicians do. But in your world do you interview? What hundreds of people about this and in some stunning statistics about what people shared about the pressure that they perceive?
Jennifer Wallace:Yes. So I wanted to make sure before I wrote a book about this, that it wasn't just a few pockets of the country. And then it wasn't just a West, you know, a coastal problem. So with the help of the researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I conducted a parenting survey. And you know, we were hoping for a sample size of 1000 students that went out it snowballed, and we got 6500 parents around the country to fill it out. So I heard from parents from Alaska, to Tennessee, to Maine, Washington State, California, Ohio, Wyoming, almost every state filled out some you know, and I would love to read you a few of the findings. So I wanted to get to the root of why parents were feeling the pressure that they were feeling. So I asked them on a scale from one to four how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement. I feel responsible for my children's achievement and success. 75% of parents agreed with that statement. And then I asked them I wish today's childhood was less stressful for my kids. 87% of parents agreed with that statement. And when I got to, you know, what are some of the worries that they were feeling what what was causing this anxiety and fear? I asked parents how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement. I worry that as an adult, my children will not be able to maintain the lifestyle they grew up with 50% of parents agreed that that was one of their big fears. So there's a lot of fear and anxiety and it's not about logos. And you know, I'm sure there is some, but there are forces bigger than any one family, any one school in any one community, instilling this anxiety and fear in parents today.
Ned Johnson:Yeah, before we dig into that, for a moment, I'm I'm struck in that 75% of parents felt that it was their responsibility to execute this outcome for their kids, but 87% wishing their kids were less stressed. And from the work that Phil and I do, knowing how incredibly stressful a low sense of control is that I'm gathering that those are perhaps in different compartments of parents brains that they didn't make that connection that when they feel like their kids life is their responsibility rather than their child's you know, whose life is it, I guess, would be the question that they're unwittingly adding to the kids stress. Did that ever come up in talking with folks or were they more focused outward,
Jennifer Wallace:I had one story that I include in the book about a mother and a son and her son was underperforming. So she was frustrated by it. And then every night it became this push and pull, she was yelling at him to put the phone away and to do the work. And some days, he'd come home with an A other days, he'd come home, see. And so their relationship really started to take a turn for the worse. So she reached out to a psychologist to get advice. And the psychologist said to her, too many of the interactions she was having with her teen were about performance and trying to convince him to do something, there wasn't enough warm connection between the two. So she suggested to the mother to keep a ledger of positive interactions and negative interactions. One of the leading researchers on resilience finds that the number one stressor for a child is when parents are overly critical, and under affectionate, but it's really that overly critical component. And so what she did was she tracked herself and she made sure that the ratio was you know, in her mind, she was very mathematically minded. And she wanted to have a ratio every night of three to one, three positive interactions that had no agenda to any one sort of negative or nagging interaction and what she found she had a conversation with her son. And she said, I'm going to step back, I'm not going to haunt you. But here's my expectation. Let's try this for two weeks, where I do not haunt you. And instead, we come to terms with how homework gets done in our house, and it gets done with do me a favor, put your phone while you're sitting at your desk. That was one requirement she had in order for her to stop nagging, sit at your desk, charge your phone, in my bedroom, you can get up every 20 minutes to check it. But I don't want it buzzing and constantly interrupting you. And let's try this for two weeks. And let's see what happened. And to your point, when the son started feeling some agency like he was in charge of his work, the grades actually went up. So when she was over functioning, he was under functioning. This experiment worked really well she did it over the course of two weeks. And it really transformed her relationships at you know, as she said, to me, it's not like everything's perfect. Now, there are still some days where it's more negative than positive, but she keeps that ratio of negative to positive in her mind every day.
Ned Johnson:I love that story. And one thing for I suppose for all this to keep in mind is that, despite all appearances, kids want their lives to work out. Right. And kids don't want to go to school being like, you know what, I'm this luckiest person in my class, but because their need for autonomy is particularly for teenagers, so paramount. When we do that we undermine and you talk about self determination theory later in the book about the importance of connection, the importance of feeling competent importance of autonomy. And I think for most of all, for teenagers that need for autonomy grows and grows, because they're supposed to be individuating from mom and dad and ready to go off on their own. So um, oh, I love that and the three to one for anyone who's going to pick this up as a threat, I'll gently nudge you in the direction of five to one which may feel impossible. But this is based on the work of John and Julie Gottman, who are these longtime relationship experts who've done some of the most significant work. And this applies not just to kids, but to spouses and friends and everything else. And so that if it's five to one, you can get away with being snarky or having a bad day or saying something that was wrong. And Jeremiah Yeah, and it's just having today He's usually not like that. But if I'm missing that wrong, but it feels like I'm always on this person's case. And it's
Jennifer Wallace:also because of the research on the idea that bad is stronger than good. So we will like Velcro take that bad comment. And so we need a lot of nurturing and reassurance to let go of that bad comment.
Ned Johnson:I'm really glad you included that story because it is such I mean the idea that you can help Your kids do better just by working on your relationship with him and leave and leave the score to two other things. One of the things you talk about is that with kids with this constant achievement, culture, not only feel pressure to achieve, to achieve to achieve, but also to abandon things and things that would really be beneficial to balance in their lives and their happiness and their mental health. Tell us a little bit more about what you saw.
Jennifer Wallace:I saw how our kids are just completely wrapped up in this grind culture. I spoke with students who talked about how taking a few minutes break felt like such a luxury. So what I wanted to do and I searched for this, and I write about it in the book is, how do we help our kids build a life that they don't have to use drugs and alcohol to escape from? How can we teach them to be successful in healthy joyful ways? Success and Schools shouldn't hurt. And it right.
Ned Johnson:One more time, that is such I love the
Jennifer Wallace:success and school should not hurt. It should be not joyful all the time. I'm not kidding myself writing this book, you know, there were times when it was really stressful and, and I felt discouraged. But actually challenge success has this really clever phrase that they call PDF, playtime, downtime, and family time. And they say that, to help a child create a balanced calendar, a balanced day, to really make sure that there's room baked into their calendar for playtime. And you know, depending on the child's age, play can look like different things. It could be a pickup game with peers, or it could be building blocks and Legos. Downtime is just time where they just don't even have to be productive. And family time, which you know, we know, obviously is critical for children's well being. But I found too many kids, like you pointed out felt like that would come later. Yeah, let me keep pushing the pedal down to the floor. And you know, when I get into college, then I'll have the time. But unfortunately, what the research shows is that this mindset, this grind, culture mindset, it's actually this phrase that I love is by a social psychologist at Brown, Gregory Elliot, and he says what gets in early gets in deep. Oh, right. Isn't that just so profound? And so as we are helping our kids develop this healthy work ethic, we also have to be teaching them how to balance it with this play time, downtime and family time so that they don't have to party hard to escape.
Ned Johnson:Right? Right. Right. If you don't know yet, Jessica Leahy's book, the addiction inoculation talks really eloquently about that looking at the reason why kids first start using alcohol or some other substance to basically blunt the feelings that they have. Because they don't have a better way to handle that. I love that what gets in early gets in deep when my kids were little in our what my wife and I would need to have them out to Lake and went over to a friend's house, what have you when I tuck them into bed and give them a kiss. And I said this do me a favor tomorrow, to be a little bit more patient with yourself and with other people. Because when you're tired, things are just gonna bug you a little bit. And that's the only thing the only thing that has been a drumbeat in my household since the earliest part there. And part of this is for me, I mean, when I'm sleep deprived, I'm sort of borderline homicidal. So I, I'm quite aware of that.
Jennifer Wallace:What I said, when I, when my oldest was too hard on himself, I would say to him, Please don't talk to my son like that,
Ned Johnson:Oh, I love that. I love that I love he
Jennifer Wallace:would he would stop and he chuckle. And so that's a refrain in our house. Please don't talk to my son, or Please don't talk to my daughter like that.
Ned Johnson:I'm reading that one down. I'm thinking about what people give up as you as people may know, I do standardized test prep. And so I tend to work with successful folks in the in the DC area and across the country who are trying to help their kids, you know, get these scores to get this this college, blah, blah, blah. And I met with his family years ago, and the family had made a seven figure contribution to an Ivy League school I won't say which one and and had the plan and basically everything they lined up everything from her activities to her grades and everything was in place. They just needed to score. So they thought and so that's it but but before we get to that I just all she wants to do this kid was just finishing 10th grade, all she wants to do is play soccer and hang out with their friends. I mean, what's the point of that? It's not like she's going to be recruited. And in the back of my head. I'm thinking these are the only two things are really only healthy outlets for decreasing stress in this What did you call them? They broke the gilded pressure cooker. That's exactly what this child lived in family of endless wealth. And I thought holy smokes and to your point where it gets in early gets in deep that you then go the rest of your life thinking that it's achievement that brings happiness achievement brings happiness and I know you're a big fan of Martin Seligman the that is achievement, of course is 1/5 of happiness. It's only one piece of it right? When you sacrifice oh my goodness, not the parent of the year. In my, in my view,
Jennifer Wallace:I make the point in the book over and over again that I'm not anti achievement. I'm not anti ambitious, I am very, I love achieving, and I am ambitious. But I'm ambitious for more than just my work and riches. As a wife, I want to have great strong marriage, I'm ambitious. As a friend, I want to have these deep close relationships, I'm ambitious with, you know, my parenting, I want to have the strong connection with my kids, that's, that's going to last a lifetime. So I'm not telling people not to be ambitious. I'm saying Be ambitious for more.
Ned Johnson:I love that. And I going back to the points you said about about sort of talking out loud, you know, to say, oh, my gosh, you know, I had such a crazy week. But I'm not going to cancel the coffee with Tina, because I haven't caught up with her for a couple of weeks. And that just feel everything is still so much better. When we get to spend time together and laugh over coffee. That kind of thing is giving those consistent messages to kids that these things matter to
Jennifer Wallace:Yes. And parents are becoming what researchers called Social conduits in the way that they pass these pressures, this idea of scarcity and the importance of maintaining the family status on to their kids. And you know, parents aren't even aware of it. And this is not to blame parents. This is simply to say to parents, we are all feeling this pressure, whether or not we come to terms with it. Let's stop personalizing it and start contextualizing it. It is not necessarily about the logos, it is that parents today believe that the status and the highly ranked college can act like a kind of life vest in a sea of uncertainty, if we don't know what the economic future is going to be, we don't know what the jobs are going to be parents are kind of thinking big, that the status of the school will protect their child, unfortunately, the pressure that's coming with it, that life vest is becoming more like a lead vest and drowning to many of the kids it's trying to protect. So this is you know, what parents are absorbing, and the environment is like you said the scarcity. And they are sensing fewer and fewer guarantees for their kids. And so they are and fewer and fewer safety nets, social safety nets. So they are having to weave these individualized social safety nets for each of their children. And that's exhausting. And that burns parents out. It interferes with the important parent child relationship. So again, this is not to blame parents, this is to point out what's happening in our larger social structures.
Ned Johnson:Thank you for that was so helpful. It also of course, then leads to more of that zero sum thinking that my kids social, you know, mice, my kids social net is is at the expense of yours, and vice versa. And you reference, of course, Robert Putnam and and our kids and the great work there and that in writing this and coming to some of these realizations, I was wondering whether you found yourself sort of googling socialism in America? And how do we what we might be doing at a macro level, so that we don't have kids, we don't have kids stressed and anxious and unhappy all the time, in part because their parents aren't stressed and anxious and unhappy all the time? Well, I'll
Jennifer Wallace:tell you, they're also absorbing these messages themselves. I'll tell you just a quick anecdote. My daughter who last summer was 15 years old, working at a frozen yogurt shop saved all of her money. And at the end of the summer, I said, What are you going to spend it on? And she said, Oh, for food when I'm in my 20s? And I said, What do you mean food? Yeah. And she said, I've been reading about how expensive groceries have gotten inflation. And I want to make sure that I have food. I mean that. So our kids are hearing this. They're feeling it. They're seeing it in the environment around them in the complaints of their parents about how expensive things are like basic things like food, and they are feeling these anxieties, they are feeling adult anxieties.
Ned Johnson:I feel like we've had this evolution in our country and moving people up Maslow's hierarchy towards self actualization. And now we're going back towards down towards the base where we, we simply have to attend all the time to safety and food at the base considerations. I'm going to pivot a little bit when we go back to the research that we started talking about how even families have well well to do are at this incredible pressure, and vulnerable to anxiety, depression to substances and all the other challenge that you talk about for me, you know, again, I live in the DC world and I tend to work with sophisticated you know, successful clientele. And one of the things that struck me even 25 years ago when I was early on in my work is I was always struck by the kids from really successful affluent families, great schools, blah, blah, blah. How I say this who are doing great kind of in spite of what a big deal and you know, influence in the world that the parents kids lived in and out was trying to fit. I always tried to put my finger on this, like what were those parents doing differently that they weren't leaning on their kids all the time. And one of the things we really need to talk about in your book is the idea of mattering. And we've sort of skirted around a little bit, you note that the the parent child relationship is really the foundation of kids protection against stress, and their happiness and their health and what they internalize going forward. And at the core of that effort, if I'm reading history, reading your book, right is mattering. And how it is that we as parents help kids feel like they matter.
Jennifer Wallace:Yes, that's exactly right. I went, I went in search of the healthy strivers. I wanted to know, you know, for myself as a parent, but also for my readers. Did these kids have anything in common? What did their parents focus on at home? What were their mindsets? Like? What were their relationships like with their peers? How did they experience school, and I found about 15 or so common threads. And as I was looking for a framework to present my findings to parents, I came across the construct of mattering mattering has been around since the 1980s. It was originally conceptualized by Maurice Rosenberg who brought us the idea of self esteem. And what he found was that the kids who enjoyed a healthy level of self esteem, they felt like they were important and significant to their parents at home. And that helped to alleviate anxiety and suffering. And so mattering has been studied since the 80s. It's really picked up in the last several years. And what researchers find and what I found in my own research is that kids who feel valued for who they are at their core, by their family, by their friends, by their larger communities, and who were depended on to add value back to their families, to their schools to their communities. Those kids had a high level of mattering, it was like a protective shield. They could still experience you know, anxiety and, and failures and setbacks but mattering acted like a buoy, and it picked them up pretty quickly, they were able to bounce back, because those failures were not an indictment of who they were. They their value was never in question. They were it whether they got an A or see their value stays constant. The kids I met who seemed to be struggling the most were kids who felt like their mattering was contingent on their performance, I only matter when, and the other group of kids who also were not doing we're not thriving were kids who felt like they matter to their parents. But they were never relied on or depended on to add value back to anyone other than themselves and their own resumes. And so what these kids lacked in was social proof that they mattered. So they got the words from their parents, but they lacked the social proof that they actually had a positive impact on the world around them. It also caused them to be too self focused, too narrowly focused where, you know, they could very much be subject to a very up and down kind of life feeling good when they're doing well feeling down. versus kids who really experience the full range of mattering have a perspective on the world. They're, their setbacks and failures are put into a larger context. They have more resilience,
Ned Johnson:interesting, I love emphasizing that point of contributing, not just doing well, my parents love me unconditionally, but doing something that makes the matter to I love that idea of mattering, because it is so it's so elegant in its simplicity. And it can take so much of what we're doing and, and make subtle shifts in ways that are just so much more conducive to well, mental health into our relationships.
Jennifer Wallace:It's actionable. That's what I love about it's actionable. You know, you say, oh, I want to a child to feel a sense of belonging or connection or, and you actually can act on mattering.
Ned Johnson:What's your favorite mattering hack? Is it worth it if something you've done with your own family or for yourself?
Jennifer Wallace:So this was one I learned from a wise mother that I interviewed anytime her child would fail a test or get cut from a team or iced out at the cafeteria table. She would reach into her wallet and she'd grab any bills she found. Let's pretend it's a $20 bill, and she would hold it up to her child and she would say do you want this? And they would say yes. And then she would crumple it up, throw it on the floor, squash it with her foot theatrically dunk it into a glass of water and then hold up this soggy, dirty, wrinkled $20 Bill and say to her child, do you still want it? And they would say Yeah, sure. And she would say like this $20 Bill, your worth doesn't change, whether you've been kicked, whether you feel crumbled up inside your value is your value no matter what,
Ned Johnson:ah, that is delightful.
Jennifer Wallace:And our kids just need that constant messaging because what they are hearing in the world outside of our homes and sometimes feeling within our homes, is that they matter when they their value is contingent on the next test, the next goal, et cetera, et cetera.
Ned Johnson:A lot of parents fall into a trap that feels like it's the right idea. But it's actually not quite where I want to be where they say, they'll say, Well, I tell my kids, I love the minimum what they do, it doesn't matter how well they do so long as they try their best. And of course, that too, is the contingent approval that you write about that so long as I see you sweat enough continue to run around the track with your eyes closed. The suffer enough, then it's okay. Where like a $20 bill that lies there crumpled on the floor. I love you, no matter what you do, and delivery, no matter how hard you try. I wanted to ask one more thing, just because this was fun. You talked about pride, its internal versus external. Can you talk about that for a moment? And an article? If I remember correctly, you talked about?
Jennifer Wallace:Yes. So you, you sort of touched on this, just as you were talking that i i Too is one of those parents who used to say to my son, just try your best, just do your best. And my son turned to me once he was in fifth or sixth grade and writing his first paper and he's like, I'm 11. I don't know what my best is. And so, right. So yes, of course, you don't know what your best is. So, I at the time had been researching an article about pride, and about how instead of fixing our pride hubristically, to external markers, we genuinely know inside when we are putting in our best effort, like I could tell you with writing this book, I did the best I could do. If it's not well received, or it I've done everything I can. So I feel proud of
Ned Johnson:the book, you got at least one big fan here. So
Jennifer Wallace:thanks that. So anyway, so I was I was at dinner, you know, right after that incident with my son. And you know, I told him just to take pride in his work, as opposed to, you know, looking for the A on a paper. And I had just written this article for The Wall Street Journal about nostalgia. And it was, I think, one of the best articles I've ever written. And I've written a lot of articles. And I went to look at the response to see you know, if it resonated with other people, and I got, like, one or two comments. And usually my articles get more than that. And I thought, wow, this really isn't resonating with people. I feel so bad about this. And I brought it up at the, at the dinner. And my son said to me that are you proud of it? And I said, Yes, I am still proud of that article, even though it didn't resonate with readers.
Ned Johnson:I felt compelled to go and find that article. And you're right, it is a really good article. And if I may, I want to end our talk here with a quote from you have from there, because I think it gets that the the way that things have changed the way that a healthy childhood and a healthy family and you wrote, what separates nostalgia from ordinary personal memories is it's bittersweet quality. Nostalgia is happy and comforting, but also tinged with a sense of, of loss or sadness about a time that can never be captured again. It could be childhood into that, that longing does more than evoke a warm, fuzzy feeling. Psychologists say that it can inspire us to live fuller lives by bringing into focus the people and experiences that have mattered most to us in the past.
Jennifer Wallace:Yes, it's a really good, thank you. Nostalgia is not about the past. It's about the future, building the kind of future that you want,
Ned Johnson:by reflecting on the past and then informing our future. Is that the idea?
Jennifer Wallace:That's exactly right.
Ned Johnson:The book is never enough. When achievement culture becomes toxic, and what we can do about it, it has been such a delight to talk with you about this really wonderful book, I know you're going to be everywhere, talking to everyone about this. And in my view, this is the really the book for our times because we value achievement, but we want to do this in ways that kids can feel healthy and loved and like they matter because
Jennifer Wallace:they do. Thank you so much.
Ned Johnson:Thank you for being with us. I'm Nick Johnson. This is the self tripping child podcast. Thanks. Hey, folks, Ned here. Over the past 25 years, I've talked with 1000s of parents of high school students, parents who care deeply about their kids education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. But these parents need to work with a team they trust roaches pile on more pressure to achieve better grades and scores. This is why I started prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation, tutoring in college admissions planning. This podcast and my books reflect our company's philosophy and approach to helping students if you have a high school student and we'd like to talk about putting in place a plan, please get in touch with us, visit our website at prep matters.com or call us Real 19510350 That's 301-951-0350 Thanks