Never Enough

Never Enough Plot Summary

Introduction

Molly tightened her high ponytail and answered me without any irony: "Those days, I run the laps in practice with my eyes closed." This sixteen-year-old varsity athlete was explaining how she coped with getting only five hours of sleep while maintaining her perfect GPA. That image—a generation running in circles with their eyes shut—haunted me. In communities across America, childhood has become professionalized, with every minute managed to maximize potential. Academics, athletics, and extracurriculars have transformed into high-stakes competitions where anything less than excellence feels like failure. What should be a time of growth, exploration, and joy has become a relentless race toward external markers of success, leaving many young people feeling empty despite their impressive résumés. The pressure to excel has created a generation statistically more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than their middle-class peers. Throughout this exploration, we'll discover how parents, educators, and communities can help young people develop a sense of inherent worth beyond their achievements—what researchers call "mattering"—and how this foundation of self-worth enables them to pursue meaningful goals without sacrificing their well-being.

Chapter 1: The Pressure Cooker: When Excellence Becomes Too Much

Amanda should have felt elated: She was a varsity athlete, the president of the debate club, and about to graduate from her competitive high school with top grades. She had just received an early acceptance letter to her college of choice, an elite university with an admissions rate of a mere 10 percent. It had taken six full years of sacrifice and singular focus to finally reach this moment. Now she could do anything. She'd made it. But instead of overwhelming pride, what she remembers is shock and anxiety. The Saturday after receiving her college acceptance, she brought a bottle of Smirnoff vodka to a friend's house and partied all night—not to celebrate, but to numb a quiet desperation she couldn't quite name. In communities like Amanda's, the past several decades have given rise to a professionalized childhood, in which seemingly every minute of a child's life is managed to maximize their potential. Academics, athletics, and extracurricular activities have become increasingly competitive, adult-led, and high-stakes. These kids are running a course marked out for them, without enough rest or a chance to decide if it's even a race they want to run. This trend has not come without a cost. For decades now, researchers have been studying how adverse childhood experiences increase risks to a child's health and well-being. In 2019, a national report published by some of the country's top developmental scientists added a surprising new group to our country's most "at-risk" youth: students attending what researchers call "high-achieving schools." These students experience "relatively high levels of adjustment problems, likely linked with long-standing ubiquitous pressures to excel at academics and extracurriculars," the report noted. One expert estimated that one in three American students may be impacted by this excessive pressure to achieve. It's not only that there are more areas in which a child needs to be "exceptional"; it's also that the bar for what is "exceptional" keeps rising, offering our kids more and more ways to feel like they are not enough. Children absorb constant messages from our achievement culture that they need to be thin, rich, smart, beautiful, athletic, and talented to be worthy of likes, love, and attention. Like dutiful soldiers, our kids comply with these crazy demands. Over time, they internalize them. One student dismissed his nearly straight-A report card at a competitive high school as "just average excellence." In our achievement-obsessed culture, even success can feel hollow when it comes at the cost of genuine well-being. The pressure to excel has created a generation of young people who are statistically more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than their middle-class peers. What should be a time of growth, exploration, and joy has become a relentless race toward external markers of success, leaving many feeling empty despite their impressive résumés.

Chapter 2: The Mattering Framework: Building Inherent Self-Worth

Rebecca tightened her grip on the steering wheel and blinked away the tears clouding her vision. She pulled over to the shoulder to compose herself before going home. It wasn't a terrible day at work or a personal loss that had her crying in the car, but a heated meeting at her daughter's school. The gathering had been quickly organized by school administrators to calm an eruption of parent frenzy. But as Rebecca leaned her head against the wheel and sobbed, she felt anything but calm. At the time, Rebecca and her family were living in Denver. That week, she and the other parents in her daughter's kindergarten class had each received an email from the school announcing their child's scores on an IQ test. The results would be used to determine which kids entered the elementary school's gifted program. But some parents weren't happy. There was confusion about the reliability of the tests and a pervasive sense that the consequences of admission to the gifted track extended far beyond elementary school. The chosen few would be set on the right track for a successful, happy life—while everyone else fell behind. Rebecca's daughter had scored in the average range on the test, Rebecca told me. "Which is fine, of course," she quickly added. But the less-than-perfect score had triggered an unexpected, overwhelming reaction in her. It was the first time she'd encountered such a blunt evaluation of her child's capacities, and it caught her off guard. It felt as if a dam had broken inside her, and all the pressure she experienced growing up—getting straight As, skipping a grade, needing to excel at all times—came flooding back. And then she felt guilty and embarrassed about her reaction. This was when Rebecca realized that if she didn't get a grip on her parenting anxieties, they would get a grip on her children—something she knew firsthand. It was the legendary social psychologist Morris Rosenberg who first conceptualized the idea of mattering, in the 1980s, while studying self-esteem among adolescents. Critical to the well-being of these high school students, Rosenberg found, was feeling valued: those who felt they mattered to their parents enjoyed higher self-esteem and lower rates of depression than peers who felt they mattered less. When you feel like you matter, you are secure in the knowledge that you have strong, meaningful connections and that you are not going through this life alone. Mattering expresses the deep need we all have to feel seen, cared for, and understood by those around us. No one is born knowing their inherent value. We form this perception over time, based on how we are seen and treated by the people in our lives, most critically by our primary caregivers. When we are made to feel that we matter for who we are at our core, we build a sturdy sense of self-worth. We learn that we matter simply because we are. Mattering is a pathway back to our inherent worth. It tells us we are enough. High levels of mattering act as a protective shield buffering against stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. What is so appealing about mattering is how actionable it is. As parents, teachers, coaches, and trusted adults, we can dial up and nurture a child's sense of mattering so they can meet the challenges they have ahead.

Chapter 3: Parental Anxiety: Breaking the Cycle of Pressure

The texts from friends started pouring in before I even saw the headlines: "Just wow, can you believe this?!?!?!" "Really?!? You can buy sports recruiting spots now???" "What a horror show." The breaking news story had all the makings of a Netflix true-crime documentary—which it eventually inspired. As the high school class of 2019 anxiously awaited college decisions, the U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges against dozens of people involved in a nationwide conspiracy to influence college admissions. The investigation, code-named Operation Varsity Blues, led to charges against parents on both coasts, among them celebrities and wealthy business executives. Parents and accomplices to the illegal scheme were indicted for racketeering in an all-out effort to secure acceptances to elite universities like Yale, Stanford, and the University of Southern California for their kids. The public reaction was united in its contempt for the accused parents. These were famous actors, financiers, and power players with abundant money and clout already. Yet they wanted the credential of a name-brand college for their kids so much that they were willing to break the law. The Full House actress Lori Loughlin and her husband paid the college consultant William "Rick" Singer half a million dollars to nab recruiting spots on the USC rowing team for their daughters, even though neither girl rowed. The former Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman paid to have an SAT proctor fix the answers on her daughter's SAT to gain additional points. In a statement accompanying her guilty plea, Huffman described how her worries had pushed her over the edge: "In my desperation to be a good mother, I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot." It was tempting to dismiss the Varsity Blues cases as extreme outliers, but in truth, the parents' desperation was uncomfortably familiar. Many of the parents I met confided that they were consumed with anxiety over college admissions (albeit anxiety that never turned into illegal payoffs or federal indictments). One Midwestern parent told me about hiring a middle-school math tutor, not because their child was struggling but to make sure they would test into the advanced math track in seventh grade—and eventually place into AP Calculus BC in their senior year, to increase the chances of landing in a good engineering program. Another parent talked about enrolling their child in a summer course on AP Chemistry so their daughter would do well the following year at school. Here is an uncomfortable truth: to our brains, status matters. It's a truth that dates back to our earliest ancestors. The higher an individual's status in their community, the greater their access to important advantages—first choice of food, first choice of shelter, first choice of mate—that ensured their long-term success and that of their children. That deep-rooted drive for accomplishment can still act like a puppeteer pulling our strings, even today. When we perceive that there are not enough resources to go around, our brains default to a "scarcity mindset"—a one-track fixation on what we lack that can cause us to miss the bigger picture. In today's increasingly competitive landscape, parents are responding to genuine economic anxiety. Two-thirds of Americans no longer believe that a steady improvement over generations is a given. White middle-class children who were born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents. For children born in the 1980s, however, the chances of earning more than their parents fell to 50 percent. This uncertainty drives parents to weave "individualized safety nets" for their children, making day-to-day decisions in an attempt to maximize their children's personal achievement and happiness. The challenge we face is recognizing when these protective instincts cross the line from helpful guidance to harmful pressure.

Chapter 4: Healthy Competition: Transforming Rivalry into Growth

Perched behind a gated entrance in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles sits the Archer School for Girls, an independent middle and high school. With a kind of cinematic appeal, the iron gates open up to reveal a U-shaped driveway, a sweeping front lawn, and the school's historic 1931 main building designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. Originally built as a women's retirement home, the school fits right in with the surrounding architecture of the neighborhood. Vaughan Anoa'i, one of the students I met during my visit, transferred to Archer in sixth grade and was immediately struck by the sophistication of her classmates. Each response to a teacher's question was so well reasoned and insightful, she said. She began to feel a creeping sense that she was competing against her new classmates. Whenever she took time to slow down, Vaughan said, she'd feel guilty and restless, like she was falling behind. This unspoken competition inevitably got in the way of close friendships, a reality that sometimes left her feeling like she was "stranded on an island." The competition Vaughan described was a common refrain among the students I interviewed all around the country. It's one of the unique challenges our children face in high-performing schools. Parents move to towns with excellent schools or pay high tuitions because they want to give their kids the best education, the best opportunities, and the best shot at a successful future, but these competitive environments can have unintended side effects. As if to get it off his chest, Nate, a senior at a competitive public high school on the West Coast, told me early in our interview that he's "haunted" by three grades he's gotten over his high school career that were less than As. When I asked him why three grades across four years upset him so much, he said, "I'm such a generic person, just totally vanilla. There are twenty-five other kids just like me in my class—who play sports, who get good grades—and that's why I need to be perfect, to somehow distinguish myself." Then he added, almost as an aside to himself, "I've often wondered if I would feel and think differently about myself if I'd gone to another school that wasn't so competitive." Social comparison—sizing up the competition—is an inescapable part of human nature. And local context matters. A sixty-degree day in New York in March is warm; in Florida it's considered cool. Nate was doing the same mental math in his honors classes: getting a B+ when everyone around you is getting As can make even strong students feel "less than." In education, psychologists call this kind of social comparison the "big-fish-little-pond effect." When you are a "big fish" (competitive student) in a "little pond" (less competitive school), you have more confidence in your abilities. You feel smarter because you're smarter than the average student. Competition isn't inherently bad, but how we think about it often is. When we inevitably compare ourselves to another and feel inadequate—and envy starts to bubble up—our brains attempt to dissipate the discomfort by urging us to close the gap between ourselves and our competitor. But there are two ways to close that gap: we can use our envy as a motivator and try to raise ourselves up to the other person's level—what's called "benign envy"—or we can use our envy to undermine our perceived rival, and cut them down, a posture known as "malicious envy." Whether competition becomes helpful or destructive depends on how we wield our envy. We can help train our kids to choose benign envy over malicious envy.

Chapter 5: Finding Purpose: Service as an Antidote to Self-Focus

Adam looked at his watch. It was 1:00 p.m. He should have been heading to English class. But instead, here he was, at the top of Snoqualmie Falls, one of the largest waterfalls in Washington State, on this cold, damp, gloomy day. Adam looked up at the huge evergreens towering over him, then stepped out onto the overhang and peered down at the over-two-hundred-foot drop below. Despite the heavy mist blocking his view, one thing was very clear: he was well outside of his comfort zone. Even with the waterfall roaring in his ears, sixteen-year-old Adam couldn't quite believe he was finally on his first mission. He'd been pulled out of class earlier that day to join the search and rescue. His teacher hadn't looked pleased when his phone had gone off in the middle of class and Adam had gathered up his books. But due to a local law, Adam was allowed to leave school for emergencies like this one. He raced down the hall and out to the parking lot. His go bag, the one he'd been told to always have on hand, was waiting for him in the trunk of his car. It was filled with supplies he might need for the mission: first aid kit, flashlight, water bottle, energy bars, a tarp, sleeping bag, rain gear, and hiking boots. Within a half hour of the search and rescue unit's arrival on the scene, the boy was found, but not the way everyone had hoped. His body lay shattered on the rocks below. The search turned into a recovery. It became the team's mission to bring up the boy's body so that his mother could say a final goodbye. For three hours, Adam and the crew carefully raised the body with a pulley system, inch by inch, over two hundred feet from the rocks to the top of the cliff. When Adam and the other volunteers placed the boy on a gurney for his mother to identify, she let out a piercing scream and broke down crying. Driving his mother's minivan home that night, with the day's dirt caked all over his shoes, all Adam could think was What am I doing with my life? That night, he filled out an application to become a volunteer with a teen crisis hotline. In affluent communities, kids often come to feel anything but helpful. The unintended consequence of intensive parenting is that it promotes in our kids a narrow self-focus. When we groom our children from birth to focus on developing their exceptional selves by, say, taking extra Mandarin classes, we crowd out other activities that were once marked important by society, such as being a contributing member of their community. According to data collected from nationally representative samples of high school and college students, young people today are shifting away from more social values, like caring about community, and moving toward more self-enhancing ones, like pursuing money, fame, and image. Children need adults to help them zoom out and see the bigger world and their role in it. In other words, it's not about landing that leadership position in the school club to improve their résumé. It's about helping them see the broader implications of their involvement: Where can they be of greater help to their classmates and communities? Where can they step up, take the lead, and do more? We all want our kids to grow in healthy ways, to become high-functioning, happy adults. But growth isn't necessarily found in building the perfect college applicant, raising ACT scores or batting averages, or perfecting their unique, special selves. It is in helping our children take interest in the world outside their bedrooms and classrooms, to widen their reach and their circles of concern and caring.

Chapter 6: Creating Balance: Redefining Success on Your Terms

Andrew was planning his schedule for the fall of his junior year in high school, one that he knew would be critically important for his college applications. As a sixteen-year-old growing up in an affluent community outside Seattle, Andrew played travel soccer, mentored kids in his community, and thought he might want to be an engineer one day. Looking through the course listing, he scanned for the math and science classes. If he could add another class to his schedule, doubling up on AP science classes, he believed it would improve his odds of getting admitted into a top engineering program. Which classes you were taking, and the rigor of your schedule, was a big topic of conversation at school. "You ask your friends how many APs they're taking, and some people are taking a full load, and then you feel compelled to not slack off, so you add even more to your plate," Andrew said. In his high school, he explained, the expectation among the students was to take advantage of every opportunity available to you. Like his ambitious peers, Andrew knew exactly how he wanted next year's course schedule to look. Now he just needed his parents to sign off on it. His parents, Jane and Mike, said they'd consider it. But Andrew's schedule for next year was already "ridiculous," Jane said, with more than a full plate of honors and AP classes on top of travel soccer and volunteer commitments. By adding even more to his busy day, he would have absolutely no downtime—or even time for a full night of sleep. After thinking about it for a few days, Jane broke the news to Andrew that they wouldn't be letting him double up on AP sciences. "Andrew was furious," she said. He argued that if he wanted to be a competitive candidate for top colleges, he would need all of these sciences courses on his transcript. Also, Andrew believed he could manage the work, and his best friend was doubling up too. "This was an area where I had a good track record," Andrew told me as he recalled the incident years later. "I felt that this was best for me. I felt like my parents were limiting me." As parents, we sometimes think our role is to help fuel and support our kids' ambition. But in a hypercompetitive culture, kids sometimes need the opposite. They need the adults in their lives to occasionally hold them back—to prevent them from sacrificing their minds and bodies on the altar of achievement and to teach them how to build the kind of life they won't need substances to escape. Mattering, from a child's perspective, means your physical and psychological limits are worth honoring. What the experts in this field have told me, time and again, is that our kids need wise balance-keepers, parents who actively help protect their time, their energy, their health, and their integrity.

Summary

Throughout this journey, we've discovered that mattering isn't just a psychological concept—it's a transformative force that ripples outward from our homes into our communities. When we help our children feel that they matter unconditionally, not for what they achieve but for who they are, we set in motion a powerful chain reaction that extends far beyond our immediate families. The stories shared—from Amanda's struggle with perfectionism to Adam's discovery of purpose through service—reveal a common thread: our children are desperately seeking proof that they have inherent worth in a culture that constantly measures their value by external metrics. This shift in perspective doesn't mean abandoning ambition or excellence. Rather, it means redefining success in more holistic terms. It means creating homes where rest is valued as much as productivity, where connection matters more than competition, and where contributing to others is seen as essential to a well-lived life. The path forward isn't about lowering standards but about expanding them to include well-being, purpose, and connection. By helping our children develop a secure sense of mattering, we equip them with the resilience to weather life's inevitable storms and the confidence to pursue meaningful goals. And perhaps most importantly, we give them the foundation to extend that same sense of mattering to others—creating communities where everyone feels valued not for what they do, but for who they are.

About Author

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Jennifer Breheny Wallace

Jennifer Wallace is an award-winning journalist and author of the book Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It. She is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post and appears on national television to discuss her articles and relevant topics in the news. After graduating from Harvard College, Wallace began her journalism career at CBS “60 Minutes,” where she was part of a team that won The Robert F. Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism. She is a Journalism Fellow at the The Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.Jennifer serves on the board of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York City, where she lives with her husband and their three children.

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