The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Jennifer B. Wallace — What to Do About Toxic Achievement Culture

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, an award-winning journalist and author of, “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It,” joins Scott to discuss solutions to toxic achievement culture, economic pressures on families, instilling a sense of ‘mattering’ in children, and how gender influences children’s sense of interdependence. Follow Jennifer on Twitter (X), @wallacejennieb.  P.S. Scott is on holiday, so we’ll be back with our business analysis and Algebra of Happiness in September!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 264. 264 is the area code belonging to anguilla in 1964 the first computer mouse was invented and the miniskirt was introduced and popularized by a designer i was born in november of 1964 so that means i'm somewhere between a boomer and gen x then we have gen z then we have millennials so what are the next generation fucked ited. It's not that funny. Go, go, go. Welcome to the 264th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jennifer Branny Wallace, an award-winning journalist and social commentator covering parenting and

lifestyle trends. We discuss with Jennifer her new parenting book, Never Enough, when achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it. Our conversation covers solutions to toxic achievement culture, economic pressures on families, instilling a sense of mattering in children, and how gender influences children's sense of interdependence. I love this stuff. I think it's fascinating, our approach to raising kids. It's definitely been the most, I don't know, is it the most meaningful thing or most influential thing? I don't know. I think it's the most fascinating thing is raising kids.

It's also vastly overrated. It's, I don't know, it just kind of takes over your life. I don't know. Anyways, if you're out there and you have kids, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't have kids, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. Anyways, enjoy this conversation with Jennifer Brownie Wallace. Jennifer, where does this podcast find you? Hamptons.

In the Hamptons. Oh, my gosh. Where in the Hamptons? Bridge Hampton. It's beautiful out there. So let's bust right into it. Your new parenting book, Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It, investigates the roots of

toxic achievement culture and its negative effects on children. So let's start there. Give us sort of an overview of the book and sort of set the table, if you will, for what you think the dynamics are around what inspired you to write this book. Yeah. So I'm a journalist by trade, also the mother of three teenagers. And in 2019, I wrote an article for The Washington Post about how students who attend what researchers call high-achieving schools, Those are public and private schools around the country that have high standardized test scores. Most of the kids go off to four-year colleges. Those kids, according to two national policy reports, are now an at-risk group,

at risk for two to six times national averages when it comes to clinical levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorder. That was pretty shocking to me. So these two policy reports, this was the National Academies, and it was also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. So two really solid reports finding after kids in poverty, kids with incarcerated parents, recent immigrants, and children living in foster care, it's these students who are under an excessive pressure to achieve that is now making them an official at-risk group. So, and it's a little bit, it reminds me of whenever I talk about or advocate for young men or talk about the challenges they face, it doesn't inspire a lot of sympathy.

And the group you just, the cohort you just described, quite frankly, sounds like privileged white kids. And so there's not what I'd call a ton of immediate sympathy. I'm putting words in your mouth. Is that true? And how does that impact the conversation and the dialogue? Yeah. So when I first came across this, I asked the leading resilience, one of the leading resilience researchers whose research, you know, found this cohort to be an at-risk group. And I said to her, you know, should we care about these kids? They have access to health care. They generally fall within the top 25 percent, the favored fifth of household

incomes. And she snapped right back at me and she said, a child in pain is a child in pain. Neither choose the circumstances. And essentially what she was saying to me was, we don't need to put pain on a scale. Pain is pain. And these kids deserve our empathy. And as the adults in the room, it's our job to do something about it. Yeah, the statement I love, and then I constantly parrot, is that compassion is not a zero-sum game.

And Jennifer, you're going to figure out quickly, the guests on Prop G are mostly a vehicle for me to talk about myself. So this is the first opportunity I'll take. I really relate to this book and what you're talking about because I have very privileged kids. And for the first, what I'll call 12, 14 years of their life, tiger household, all over their grades, studying with them every night. Did you do your derivatives homework? Or let me see it. You don't know. This is wrong. Go back, do it. A very nervous, sometimes celebratory, sometimes very anxious,

depressed household the day grades came out. And also what I found is it works. When we're all over our kids, it works. And now I have a lot of insight or I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of social media technology on society and you immediately zero in on the cohort that's kind of taken it arguably who has been the recipient of the most negative of the externalities of the big tech world and that is teenagers

and it has totally pivoted literally 180 my approach to parenting as it relates to school. And that is, it's essentially gone from what are your grades? Did you do your homework? How's biology going? Really, my only question is, are you happy? Do you feel loved? Are you doing okay at school? Do you enjoy it? And if the answer is yes, that's literally all A's for me. And unfortunately, and I got to be honest, there's a downside here. It would be more fun if it was a Hallmark Channel movie and it'd be like, well, then they thrived even more at school. They're not doing as well academically.

When I'm not all over them, they're not doing as well. And you know what? It's worth it. Because I just, it just struck me when I see how many kids, and my guess is we're sort of, I don't call them the same weight class, but probably have a lot of the same friends going to the same schools with their kids. It's the number one issue in households. You hear about some kid who had everything who's cutting or worse. And it has just entirely shifted, I think, among a lot of us,

what does it mean to have a successful child? Anyways, I'll stop there, but I can't. Let's talk about that toxic ambition wheel. How does it start and how does it manifest itself, both in terms of the types of behavior and the impact it has on the child? Well, I think what you were describing with your own children is what I call dirty fuel or clean fuel. And so the dirty fuel, the criticism, comparing one child against a friend or, you know, things that parents do either because they're tired, but always because they want what's best for their kids, it can maybe, like you pointed out, get that short-term good grade on a quiz because they're

afraid and they don't want to be ashamed and they want their parents' love and affection. Or you could use what I have found to be the most effective in my research, which is this healthy fuel. So, you know, I went, I traveled around the country and I met with parents who had lost loved ones to suicide. I'd met anxious students, depressed students, college-age students, spoke with, you know, people now in their 20s and 30s. And then I went in search of who were the healthy thrivers, who was doing well despite the pressures in the environment. I wanted to know what their parents focused on at home. What was school like for them? What were their relationships like with their peers? And I found about 15 things that these healthy achievers had in common. And by the way, one of

them is that their parents did what you're now doing with your kids. You might not see short-term results, but they saw them in the long-term. What I found were these common threads. And as I was looking for a framework to present my findings to parents, I came across this psychological construct called mattering.

Mattering is basically what you're now focused on at home. Mattering is making children feel valued for who they are at their core by their family, by their friends, by their communities, and depending on them to add meaningful value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities. The kids who were doing the worst, and in my surveys, and I did two extensive surveys, and I interviewed hundreds of families, the kids who were doing the worst, and it's not just my research, actually, there have been journal, there have been published studies on this, are kids who felt like their mattering, their worth was contingent on their performance. The other kids I found who

were not doing as well were kids who got those messages that they mattered a lot, but no one ever depended on them to add value to anyone other than themselves and their own resume. And so what these kids lacked was social proof that they mattered, right? They had the words, but they didn't see it. They didn't see in how they were contributing to their parents or their siblings or their peers in a way that was significant. So this healthy fuel that I'm talking about is leading with mattering. And I think that's what you are doing with your children. And it doesn't, just to be clear, mattering and achievement are not mutually exclusive. What I have found is that kids who have this high level of mattering have a kind of protective shield that buffers against stress and anxiety. They weren't afraid to reach higher. They weren't afraid to fail. They weren't afraid

to take risks because those were not an indictment of their worth. Their worth was not contingent on whether they succeeded or failed. And their parents made this clear at home daily. So something else I've been thinking about. So if you look at a lot of the evidence or a lot of the research around teen depression, the two things I see the most, the two drivers or the two signals is one, social media at a young age causes or can inspire a lot of not only anxiety and depression, but the really terrible thing about it is you don't even know it's going on as a parent. They go into the room with their phone, they go down a rabbit hole, they get bullied,

especially girls. But the second thing is kind of on us, and that is the bulldozer concierge parenting that clears out all of the obstacles for these kids such that they never develop their own skills. We use so many sanitary wipes on their lives that they don't develop their own immunities. And we're now at a point where we'll take a vacation if we feel there's a lot of opportunity for it. And I think this is really important. I try and push the limits of my comfort zone around it for unsupervised play. And that is they're on their own. They're doing their own thing. You don't have to check in every 15 minutes. I literally used to leave my mom's place. I was raised just by my mom. She worked with a Schwinn bike, 35 cents and an Abba Zabba bar and like come home 12 hours later. I mean, that was it. And now we are so all over them in every sense of the word. Does that impair their own ability to develop skills and find their own confidence? keep my children perfectly safe and to avoid any harm. And those were the messages I was sent of

what a good parent is. But I'd like to step back for a second and say, you know, I think there's so much blame on parents. And I'm not saying that we should let ourselves off the hook, but there is this popular narrative that we are overprotective, that we want bumper stickers for the backs of our cars with the name of a good college on it. Why do we want these things? Why do we want them so much more than in the 70s, like you were talking about when I was growing up? And it's because, so I've interviewed historians and economists, and the argument that really rings true to me is that parents are absorbing these

macroeconomic forces in the environment, this steep inequity, this crush of the middle class, this globalization. It is a parent's job to raise a child who will thrive when we are no longer there. But that job feels so much more fraught than it was in the 70s when I was growing up. And my parents could let me go run around and make mistakes. And back then in the 70s, life was generally more affordable. The stakes felt lower. Today, the stakes feel so high and parents now feel tasked with weaving these individualized safety nets for each of our kids. Both, you know, we are, as economists say, we are absorbing these stressful, fearful

macroeconomic pressures. We don't know what the jobs are going to be like in the future. You know, we have climate change. There's so much uncertainty. Parents are absorbing it, and that's what's coming out in our parenting behavior. That, I think, is what is leading to the intensive parenting we are seeing today. So as much as parents have to be aware of our actions, and we do, I also think it's time to stop blaming parents. This is a societal issue, and parents are bearing the brunt of it. Yeah, and I saw, I read in your bio that you went to

Harvard, and the way I think of it is the danger of tracking, and that is, so 55,000 people will apply to Harvard this year. They'll let in 1,500. And we'll come back to whether that's morally corrupt or not. But we all have this image that the prize as a parent is our kid gets to Harvard and ends up at KKR or Google. Anything outside of that track, you don't like to say this, but you kind of all failed. You kind of, God forbid they don't go to an elite college. Oh my God, it's unthinkable they don't go to college. And then, okay, not only do they have to go to an elite college, but they have to start tracking at an early age in this incredibly competitive economy where if they want to live in a city, it's incredibly expensive.

A house is incredibly expensive. If they're a male, they need to demonstrate economic viability right away to be attractive to a mate. And it's getting harder and harder in an education system that, quite frankly, which I did, which had a 76% admissions rate. Now, if you aspire to have your kid go to UCLA or Berkeley, as I did, I start putting them on a track when they're 11. I'm like, all right, we got to start tracking because one false move, one bad year, one hiccup or slowdown from the achievement wheel. And I failed as a parent because they're not going to get into UCLA or MIT and end up at Google. The economy, I think what you're saying is so powerful. The context, the pressure, it's just gone up for everywhere. And I want to move to a little bit around societal solutions. If parents are just reacting to the context and the environment they're in, what are some of the societal fixes such that we can take down the temperature in these households?

Well, when I first sold this book, the book proposal in 2019, I thought that shifting parents' focus from the short-term achievement goals like the Friday Spanish quiz to larger goals like instilling this sense of mattering, putting the buffers back in place to absorb some of the stress in the environment. I thought this was going to be a hard sell. I thought parents were going to say, you know, I don't buy it. Parents are desperate. And I could say this as the mother of three teenagers. We are living through a very difficult time to parent. And I think what you are talking about with getting the kid into the elite college, just to underscore it, parents are betting big that that brand name will act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty. But unfortunately, like you said, putting on that life vest, tracking them so early

is unfortunately drowning too many of the kids that we are trying to protect. So when you think about the bigger questions, the bigger societal questions, I mean, some people, and I don't know that I agree with this, have proposed, you know, a lot of the issues that these kids in the top 25% of household incomes are facing is because we live in these super zip codes, right? Areas of the country, hundreds of towns and cities and areas where it's predominantly, you know, upper middle class Americans, college educated, all have this... High achievers. High achievers, all with the same sort of external definition of success. And so to sort of stick out

in those environments, you really have to break your neck. And so I would say societally, I think it's time to start pointing to widening the definition of success, because I'm sure you have found this. I have found this. Just because you go to Harvard doesn't mean your life is going to work out. Just because you go to a small liberal arts college that nobody's heard of doesn't mean your life isn't going to work out in the most magnificent way. And so I think if we can, as parents, zoom out and think about, yes, we want the safety net. I'm saying do not have ambitions for your kids. I am saying be ambitious for more. I think our ambition has been too narrow. It's not about the brand name college particularly going into the world as uncertain as it is today. If we really want safety nets, the safety nets come

in our relationships. One of the biggest findings in my book that really was surprising to me was that according to decades worth of resilience research, a child's resilience rests fundamentally on their primary caregiver's resilience. And the primary caregiver's resilience rests fundamentally on their relationships, the depth of their relationships. So if we really want resilience and safeguarding our kids' future, we should be focusing on how they can build these deep, deep relationships that will carry them through when they need it. We'll be right back. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories,

and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for?

What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a topic I'm passionate about. And what I've, or a lot of the research I've reviewed says is that what boys, while boys are physically stronger, girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. That when, if you look at single parent households, girls have similar outcomes as dual-parent households. Boys have dramatically worse outcomes. The moment they're in a single-parent household,

it's usually the mom that has custody, and they lose the male role model, which is sort of the singular point of failure if you were to reverse engineer to when young boys come off the tracks. It looks as if you segmented by economic class. Did you segment by gender in these households in terms of outcomes for girls and boys and the pressures they face? I did look at the genders. And one of the things that I found enlightening, I have two teenage boys and a teenage daughter. And what I have found to be critical in teaching our boys, which our girls seem to get because they are socialized for this, is this idea of healthy interdependence.

And so as parents, we think our role is, and it is, to raise strong, independent kids. Absolutely. I want my kids to be able to survive without me. But there is a deeper goal if we really wanna protect the mental health and wellbeing of our kids, particularly our boys, and that is healthy interdependence. That is teaching them that they are worthy

of leaning on others for support and also that they have an obligation to be that source of support for others. And the kids that... I just want to push pause there because I like that in theory. I have a 15-year-old boy. My boys, as I'm sure your kids are, everything became about them when they were born. And it just turned on a...

God reached into my soul, flipped on a switch, and then they're kind of it for me. And I would love it if my 15-year-old, I try and tell my 15-year-old, you're the big brother, you need to be the bigger man, you know, try and teach him empathy, talk about his role in the world and how he can make others feel better and that others should be able to depend on him. And he gets that, and he's picking up on it. I would kill, kill for my 15-year-old to come and ask me for advice, to lean on me. And he doesn't. And I don't see him leaning on anybody. I don't see him, as far as I can tell, he doesn't go to anyone for advice or talk to anyone in very open and transparent ways about the challenges a 15-year-old boy faces. So how do you, I get it in theory. I would posit that most 15-year-old boys aren't sharing their emotions, aren't depending on other people. They see that as, I don't know if they see it as a sign of weakness or they're just, you know, they don't go there. How do you train or how do you parent a boy into being more rel it's a father or an uncle or an boys build out emotional lives, if we're going to teach them healthy interdependence, the men in their lives have to lead the way so that it's not considered a female thing. And I'll tell you what we've done in our house. My husband is open about he has very deep male relationships that date back to elementary school. And he models out loud in front

of my kids, asking for advice, asking for help for things, talking about things that are an issue at work or something that he's struggling with in the family, and he models it in front of my boys. And we have said explicitly to my boys and to my daughter that these are people, so we have like a handful of families that we're extremely close to, that no matter what's going on, you have full authority to talk about anything, including things within our house with other people. We don't feel this deep sense of privacy. We want you to have others. If you don't feel this deep sense of privacy. We want you to have others. If you don't feel like you could come to dad and me, these are the people, these are the trusted adults in your life that you can lean on.

Another thing that I think we can talk about with our kids are what gets in the way of building these healthy interdependent relationships, right? It takes courage. But in these hyper-competitive environments, envy can sometimes get in the way. And I think we have to name the elephant in the room. I think we have to explain to our kids when they maybe don't lean on their peers is to talk about how universal this feeling is of envy, that everybody feels it.

We don't have to judge ourselves for how we feel it, but we have to hold ourselves accountable and that we shouldn't let these uncomfortable feelings get in the way of building deep, healthy relationships. Anyway, I can tell you what I've done as a mother with my daughter. She was in middle school and she had just gotten a paperback from her English teacher. And she's a very good writer and she was disappointed by all the marks on her paper. So I marched her over to my computer and I showed her the first article I submitted to the Washington Post science section like 10 years ago. And I showed her all the red marks. And she said, oh my God, this is horrible. I can't believe they still let you write for them. And I said, yes, I was initially embarrassed to need all that help. But really, the way I read it is that they wanted to

invest in me. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the parents that I met and what I've tried to institute in my own life is to help our kids adopt an interdependent mindset where we can go to others, where we can ask for help, and then to give them that skill set. And the skill set we can give is by, in our hyper-individualistic culture, to be countercultural, to actually be the person who's asking for advice or offer advice and kind of push through. What role do schools play in all of this? Well, they do play a role. I mean, I have yet to meet an educator who doesn't have the best interest of the students at heart. Most educators are not going in it for the money. They're going in it for their purpose, which is to, you know, help our society by helping our next generation. But I think schools, you know, there are a few things that I traveled, I was lucky to travel at a bunch of schools around the country. And I saw some of the countercultural things they were doing, which was like we talked about earlier, you know, naming what gets in the way of relationships, focusing, you know,

on relationships over rigor, making room in the schedule for teachers and students to have a connection, a deep connection so that they could sort of develop this like wonderful, warm lab of learning. I mean, another thing I think schools need to do is to focus on teacher mattering. Teachers, just like the primary caregiver, needs to be firm and sturdy to be a first responder to our kids' struggles. And I think as a society, we have not taken care of our teachers. So, you know, I think one obvious step is to prioritize teacher mattering, to prioritize their value. I think schools can do, and many schools are doing this, they're trying to limit this hyper-competition. They are no longer having kids wear their college sweatshirts

on college acceptance day. They are helping to make sure creating a culture where every kid feels valued in the community. They are working hard to match the adults in the school community with one child so that each child has an adult that they feel values them and knows them and someone they could turn to for support. Yeah. And just as I'll put forward a thesis and you tell me where I, you know, you think I have it right or wrong, but just as I agree with you, primary and high school teachers are kind of the heroes or the unsung heroes and more an additional investment. I feel as if there's villains here, and the villains are me and my colleagues.

And that is a lot of this pressure that has been injected into middle class and upper middle class and upper income households, much less lower income households, is that me and my colleagues are drunk on exclusivity. And we've taken UCLA's acceptance rate from 76% when I applied to 9%. And the alumni and the faculty and the leadership and the donors love it. Because once I have my degree, it goes up in value, the harder it gets. And that is, we have engaged in a business strategy of artificial supply. There's no excuse for Harvard and Princeton with their endowments to limit their freshman class sizes as small as they are. And the fact that we have turned this into literally the Hunger Games for households has transitioned kind of spring of your fall of your senior year from a time of nervousness and joy when all my friends

were playing to college to literally anxiety and despair. And it's because me and my colleagues have decided we're Chanel bags, not public servants. What are your thoughts? I totally agree with you. Daniel Markovits wrote in his book, The Meritocracy Trap, that we should demand schools with huge endowments like Harvard, like Yale, to actually act like charitable organizations. We give them tax breaks, like the nonprofits that they get the status of. And so they should accept more students in the top, you know, sorry, they should accept more students in the lower 30%. They should act as what, you know, the way they're intended, which is to ensure social mobility. And they're not acting this way. And yet they're still getting the tax benefits. They are still

getting all the benefits of a charitable organization without acting like one. I couldn't agree more. There is some nuance there. And that is, if you look at Harvard, I actually think that the Ivy League has done a good job of reaching into lower-income homes, of reaching into—in 1960, there were 15 Blacks at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale total. Not 15%, but 15 people. This year, the freshman class at Harvard will be 51% non-white. But here's my thing. This is Vaseline that we rub over the lens of our corruption because reshuffling the elites by income and race is still elitism. It's not about who at this point, it's about more. We let in rich kids and freakishly remarkable kids from middle and low-income households. And I can prove to every one of us that 99% of our kids are not in the top 1%. So I feel as if the diversity and the income equalization that's taken place is basically just a head fake, that it's still elitism. It's just we feel better about ourselves because the elites that we give entrance to look more like America, which is great. If you still have the GDP of Costa Rica as an endowment and you're not expanding your freshman class, I mean, it strikes me you

should lose your nonprofit status. The diversity is a great thing, but it's still elitism, that it just needs to be dramatically, dramatically, and I think you said this, more. So let me ask you, let me run an idea by you that I've been talking about with some colleagues. You know, one of the things that I found, the kids who were struggling the most were the kids who felt like their worth was contingent. The other group were the kids who never felt like anyone depended on them, right? They were just focused on their own resume. What if top, I don't know, the top 25 colleges or something like that, what if we as a society decide for a year, every young person has a mandate to go out into the world and make an impact? You could go with

your cohort that gets into Duke or Harvard. They could, you know, take over a hotel in the area or, you know, have this sort of satellite campus, this cohort of students that are off campus doing some good, seeing the world, making an impact, and also taking classes and then bringing them back onto the campus at some point. But I think there are ways we can be creative. We have seen that online school works. It's not ideal, but it works. And we could find better ways of expanding these classes faster than waiting to build

huge, you know, expanding campuses and waiting five to 10 years to build buildings. Finding creative solutions, giving these high-achieving kids a chance to really make an impact on the world a year of their life in a cohort. So they would be making friends with the classmates they'd be with for four years in some other area of the United States and also learning. I love that. There's a big notion or a big movement towards a gap year. I'm actually working with Chris Whittle, who is sort of this iconic entrepreneur in education, and he's thinking about trying to redefine a gap year. Especially, I find that especially young men who just mature later really would benefit from a year in the agency of something bigger than them for a year between high school and college. I'm also a big advocate, and it's easy for me to say

that I've aged out. I'm a big advocate of national compulsory service where people can serve in the agency of the country, not necessarily the military, but senior care, disaster relief, whatever it might be, and meet kids from different economic classes, different sexual orientation, and just start developing empathy because I find that we're just sequestering from each other by economic weight class, and it's not good for America. The exposure to something bigger and better than yourself, a lot of schools do a good job of that. They do send people, they give them opportunities for volunteer work. But again, it's just more reshuffling the elites. I find that, you know, you brought up some really interesting things, remote work or remote

schooling. It's not as good. But the dirty secret is someone who's taught 5,500 students over 22 years is that a third of my sessions where there's not a lot of interaction, could probably be taken online with a very minimal degradation in quality. And just taking a third of sessions online, just using the campus during summer and at night, you increase the supply of freshman seats by 50%. But they're not interested in doing it. Because what does it mean? It means that we're no longer number four in the Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, most elite colleges. And we can't raise our prices faster than inflation with this ultimate strategy of what I call the Louis Vuitton strategy of artificially constraining supply. You get to see this through the lens of research and as a parent. If there's one or. You know, you get to see this through the lens

of research and as a parent. If there's one or two pieces of advice you give to new parents around ensuring they don't get, what are the early signs of that toxic environment kind of evolving in a household? Yeah, so researchers have found, and I do believe it's gotten younger than, I think the research has not caught up with the current day culture, but the research that we have shows that around seventh grade is when these, you know, the signs that kids are feeling over pressured really start to come to fruition. And that's when they feel excessive envy from their peers. They're making constant social comparisons. It's getting in the way of their friendships.

You know, it's when they are, you know, around that time, right, is when they're developing their sense of self and they're figuring out who they are compared to their peers. And so that's a way, you know, parents can be on the lookout and actually have these conversations about how social comparison is normal. We all feel it. We don't have to hold ourselves accountable and feel shame for feeling it, but we do for how we act on it. So helping to guide kids, getting in there early to prevent these feelings from overwhelming them and ruining their relationships. Another thing I would say to parents, again, we said this earlier, is that the number one intervention for any child in distress, according to decades of resilience

research, is to make sure the primary caregiver's well-being support system is intact because the child's resilience rests on the adult's resilience. And unfortunately, we live in a society, it's, you know, the adults in these communities that I visited, they all had friends. What many of them didn't have was time to develop the depth of relationship that they needed with people so that their friends could be a source of support when they needed it. So it's not about putting your oxygen mask on first. It's really about surrounding yourself with people in your life who know you intimately,

who you could be vulnerable with, who know you and can put the mask on for you when they see you struggling to step in. That's really what healthy interdependence looks like. And we don't have that in our culture, particularly in relatively affluent communities, because there is this need for facade to look accomplished. You know, one woman I interviewed in D.C. said to me, she was a consultant, and she said, I advise and problem solve for a living. And it's embarrassing to think I can't problem solve the issues in my own house. But what I would say to parents is all parents can unite on this universal feeling of wanting to be there as first responders to our kids' struggles. And in order to do that, we need to be there sort of arm comparison or toxic benchmarking that starts to happen in this kind of seventh grade, if you will. For me, toxic benchmarking is just the perfect description of that is Instagram. Did you look at the correlation between social media usage and this type of toxic environment and households? So what I have found, and this is, you know, a debate now in the research community, but where I come out on this is that I think social media is certainly a magnifier and an accelerant to these toxic pressures, but it's not the root of it. The root of it is in, we are in as a,

as a culture, the root of this is a lack of mattering universally, a lack of feeling valued for who we are at our core. We feel valued now for what we achieve, how much money we make. Society tells us certain people matter more. Those, you know, influencers matter more. Those with the most likes matter more. And we need that. So what I see as social media crisis is a crisis of mattering. And that goes much deeper than social media. Jennifer B. Wallace is an award-winning journalist and social commentator covering parenting and lifestyle trends. Her new book, Never Enough, When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It, investigates the deep roots of toxic achievement culture and provides a toolkit for parents and

their children. Jennifer is also a regular contributor to publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. She joins us from her vacation home, second home, friend's home in the Hamptons, in Bridge Hampton. Jennifer, when we saw this work, we knew we wanted to have you on. It's something that we're passionate about. We just appreciate your good work around this issue and are excited to have you on and bring some sunlight to your good work. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Caroline Shaven. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the PropGee Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be.

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