Never Enough - When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It

The definitive book on the rise of a "toxic achievement culture" that dominates the lives of children and their parents, and a new framework to combat it.

As competition for the best possible future intensifies, today's students face unprecedented pressures to succeed, cramming their schedules with AP classes, filling every waking hour with resume-building activities, and even destroying relationships with friends in order to "get ahead."

There are. Tutoring fees and sports schedules stretch family incomes and schedules to the limit. Yet, in an effort to optimize grades, rates of anxiety, depression, and even self-harm have skyrocketed in America's highest-performing schools.

Parents, educators, and community leaders face the same problems. In Never Enough, award-winning Jennifer Brehenny Wallace investigates the deep roots of the toxic achievement culture and reveals what we must do to fight back.

Drawing on interviews with families and educators, as well as her own research with nearly 6,000 parents, she exposes how the pressure to achieve is not a matter of parental choice, but is embedded in society as a whole, fueling growing income inequality and diminishing opportunities.

As a result, children are increasingly absorbing the message that they are worth nothing other than what they have accomplished, a message reinforced by the media and the culture at large. Through in-depth research and interviews with today's leading child psychologists, Wallace shows that what children need from adults is not pressure, but a sense that they are important and have intrinsic self-worth that is not dependent on external achievements.

Parents and educators who adopt the language and values of being important help children perceive themselves as valuable contributors to the larger community. And ironically, children who receive consistent feedback that they matter no matter what are more likely to grow up with resilience, confidence, and psychological security.

Filled with memorable stories and offering a powerful toolkit for positive change, Never Enough offers an urgent and humane view of the crisis afflicting today's teens and a practical framework to help.