Thu, November 7, 2024

Student Achievement: Is It Ever Enough?

By: Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Author

When William, my oldest child, started sixth grade, I somehow became convinced that the clock was running out to find his “passion.” It seemed like so many parents I knew had already figured out what made their kids uniquely tick: there was the violin prodigy, the soccer star, the budding chess aficionado. I’d heard about third graders who were participating in School Scrabble Championships. One boy I knew was so obsessed with ancient artifacts that his mother signed him up for a summer on an archaeological dig. What latent interests and talents was I neglecting in my own three kids?

William had always loved architecture and design. When he was younger, he’d cover the floor of his bedroom with “cities” of wooden blocks, building structures that resembled Greek temples. As he got older, he’d spend full afternoons imagining new worlds to create with his Legos. When we traveled, he would always be looking up, noticing, and pointing out unusual facades of buildings in the cities we toured. Wasn’t it my duty to help foster this passion?

In a parental frenzy, I googled architecture and design classes in New York City and started at the top, both literally and figuratively. I called the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, once the home of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, situated on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. When I earnestly asked whether they offered classes for sixth graders, they said no, they didn’t. I detected a light chuckle in their response. I made my way down the list. One school that offered an introduction to architecture class asked if my son had a basic understanding of CAD—computer-aided design software used by architects, inventors, and engineers to design bridges, skyscrapers, rockets, and more. I said no, not yet.

Undeterred, I kept digging. Eventually, one program did bite. The person who answered the phone told me that if my son wanted to sit in on an intro to architecture evening class aimed at older high school and college students, and if I stayed and sat next to him, he could enroll. When I excitedly shared the news with William, he looked me straight in the eyes.

“Mom, I love architecture,” he said. “Please don’t ruin it for me.”

In generations past, having two employed parents with college degrees, as my kids do, generally meant that your family was upwardly mobile, if not already financially secure. But my parental anxiety to make sure my kids were not “falling behind” wasn’t a personal quirk, as I have come to learn. This anxiety was a symptom of a new, broader cultural trend that has mainly taken root in communities like mine, filled primarily with college-educated professionals. Growing up, our parents might have encouraged us or bought us a pair of running shoes, but they mostly watched our success from the sidelines. Today, many modern parents feel tasked with making their kids a success, pushing them, if they must, to the front of the pack. And this trend has not come without a cost, to both parents and kids.

Being pushed like this can feel dehumanizing. A senior at a high-achieving public high school in Brooklyn, New York, sent me an editorial he wrote for his school paper. He wrote, “Many of us have to resort to fake personalities with fake passions in order to not fall behind in ‘social status’ and the college process.” Pressure to stand out, he said, has had a paradoxical effect on his generation, forcing students to be someone they’re not and feign passions to appear attractive to top colleges. Students become disaffected learners, consumed by getting good grades and accolades instead of taking a genuine interest in the subject matter. “In the hopes of seeing us for who we are, they’ve made us become who we aren’t,” he concluded.

The psychologist Erik Erikson pointed out that an adolescent’s most crucial task is attaining a sense of personal identity. But that process is undermined when adolescents feel they must be high performing or perfect to be loved. Adolescents become overly reliant on others for a sense of who they should be and how much they’re worth. And when personal worth seems to depend solely on getting ahead of their peers, kids may fail to develop a sense of internal meaning and purpose. This can make achievement unfulfilling and lead to burnout and cynicism.

It’s not just the students who feel stuck in this grueling race. Many parents I interviewed said that they, too, felt trapped by hypercompetitive societal norms. An overwhelming 80 percent of the over six thousand parents I surveyed agreed that the children in their community were “under excessive pressure to achieve.” When asked about where that pressure came from, more than 80 percent pointed to other parents as the primary source. One wrote, “Where we live, it is competitive on all levels. Many have endless resources to ‘outdo’ your child if they choose or need to. Your kid comes home stating what everyone else is doing, eating, wearing, participating in, going on vacation, etc., and you feel that you must keep up and provide those same opportunities because that is all they know. It’s the environment that they are growing up in.”

I asked these parents to rank the things they most wanted for their children: happiness, success, having a sense of purpose, and being a compassionate member of society. I also asked them what they thought were the top priorities of other parents in their community. Nearly 80 percent of parents believed that “academic and professional success” was one of the top two priorities of other parents. But only 15 percent of parents named it as their own first or second priority—a discrepancy that may reflect just how much parents feel pitted against one another. While many parents may feel stressed and concerned about the pressure that’s being put on our kids, no one wants to be the first to drop out of the race—or can even conceive of how they would.

None of the parents I surveyed said that what they ultimately wanted for their kids was to be captain of the football team, a straight-A student, or a Rhodes Scholar. They simply wanted happy, productive, and fulfilling lives for their kids. Even Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has said, “If I could push a magic button and choose either happiness or success for my children, I’d pick happiness in a second.”

But there is no magic button, and the path to happiness is increasingly understood as a high-stakes drag race to “success.” For parents, the logistics alone can strain even the most solid of marriages. And there are times we simply can’t juggle it all, when Saturdays and Sundays are triple booked with soccer games, school projects, and chess tournaments. Standing on the sidelines of a soccer game in the freezing rain, I have looked around and wondered: How is everyone else pulling this off week after week, year after year, with multiple children? Why are we even doing this?

The Pressure Is Everywhere

“When parents ask me where all of the pressure on these kids is coming from,” Luthar likes to say, “I ask them: Where is it not?” Relationships that once protected students and kept them grounded— with parents, coaches, teachers, peers—can be added sources of pressure nowadays, she said. None of these individual people are at fault. Adults, from teachers to school administrators to coaches, also feel pressure to succeed, to achieve top spots in their field, and to prove their mettle once they’re in those prominent jobs, Luthar said. Coaches, for example, are now part of a nearly twenty-billion-dollar competitive youth sports complex, one that pushes kids to specialize in one sport year-round at a very young age, even at the risk of overuse injuries, in order to sustain enrollment. In an editorial written on behalf of over 200,000 New Jersey youth sports participants, student athletes implored high school coaches in their state to rethink the stressful demands being placed on them. Their requests were heartbreaking in their simplicity: one mandatory day off per week during the sports season to recharge and “sleep,” “catch up on homework,” and “spend time with our families.”

Meanwhile, with housing prices linked to public school performance rankings, school administrators can feel pressured to maintain their school’s state ranking, a worry that can trickle down to pressure on students. In a letter to parents, the principal at Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, got right to the point: the kindergarten talent show was canceled, and the reason why was “simple.” She wrote, “We are responsible for preparing children for college and career readiness with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers.” Accordingly, the talent show was nixed so that teachers could spend more time on career readiness—for five-year-olds.

Private school administrators, too, can feel pressure from their boards and alumni to protect their school’s brand and market share, which increases the pressure on current students to maintain high standards, even as competition for honors and prestigious college seats ratchets up everywhere. In his book At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools, the psychologist David Gleason recounts what one head of school told him privately: “If we actually gave in, and a developmentally reasonable schedule emerged, we might achieve a healthy balance for our students at the cost of our school’s distinctiveness; we might lose our edge of excellence and become a vanilla school, and who would want to come to a vanilla school?”

Our wider consumer culture reinforces the idea that your child is an investment, and that the expected return should be measured early. Colleges have long acknowledged top scholars via diplomas with distinction, dean’s lists, and honor societies like Phi Beta Kappa. High schools have the National Honor Society. In 2008, the National Elementary Honor Society made its debut to honor the best and the brightest elementary school scholars. Sports, while always inherently competitive, are not immune to achievement creep. All-star rankings in basketball, for example, now include the top fourth graders in the nation, and semi professional, specialized training starts as early as six years old. Music competitions, dance competitions, arts competitions, and even high school bands have become more demanding, if not all-consuming. It’s hard to find a hobby— Minecraft, mountain biking, macramé—that can’t be turned into an exhausting pursuit of excellence. As a joke, my son and I once googled “Rubik’s Cube competitions”—yep, they exist, too.

Busy schedules inhale all downtime, sucking up the idle after-school hours or weekend days once spent with friends and family. Birthday parties are missed for all-day chess tournaments or out- of-state lacrosse games. I remember my son’s travel soccer coach sending me a stern warning after my son missed a game to attend his great-grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. Katie, a mother in Alaska, wrote to me that for the past eight years, her kids have missed holiday celebrations with their extended family because of soccer tournaments. “My kids don’t know the joy of a traditional Thanksgiving meal with family gathered around a table,” she wrote. Growing up in a culture that teaches our children that certain types of people matter more—those on the varsity team, those with the most As, those with the most likes, or those who fit into the “idealized norm”—can set students up to chronically question their own importance and worth. For Amanda and her parents, the effect of all those years of mounting pressure, of not meeting unrealistic expectations, of never feeling like she was enough, was devastating. Her parents have sought therapy, too, and taken ownership of the pressures they put on Amanda and her siblings. “My parents are working hard on rebuilding our relationships,” she said. But it will take time. “They think they have failed me as parents.”

Parents Feel It, Too

A mutual friend introduced me to Catherine, a mother of two boys in a suburb of New York City. Catherine had taken my parenting survey and wanted to talk more about the issues it had raised. I drove out of the city to meet her after dropping my kids off at school.

Catherine greeted me at the door and warmly welcomed me into the living room. As I sat on the couch, I saw, on the coffee table, a tray of cookies and tea she’d prepared. She took a seat toward the other arm of the couch and took a deep breath. After a sip of tea, she began to tell me her story.

“My husband and I knew our son was smart,” Catherine said, as her brown eyes softened and a faint smile of reminiscence came over her face. “I didn’t buy into the pressure in the community to be on my kids at all times, worrying about which activities were the best and making sure I was constantly enriching all of his talents.” Instead, their afternoons were spent playing Monopoly or riding bikes around the neighborhood.

Excerpted from Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It by Jennifer Breheny Wallace, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Jennifer Breheny Wallace, 2023.

Jennifer B. Wallace is an author and journalist writing about students, parents, and educators with special attention to acknowledging achievement and success with good sense and good health.

This article appeared in the 2024 issue of the Parents League Review. Get the current issue of the Review free with a family membership. Or purchase it separately.