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Why does it feel like no matter how much we do, it’s never enough—Including—and especially—in our mothering?
It’s no wonder we feel this way! Societal changes have created a culture that ties worth to performance, often at the expense of our health and happiness, while macroeconomic trends that have shifted the way we think about work, education, and success, making it entirely focussed on external standards of achievement.
In this thought-provoking episode, I sit down with Jennifer Wallace, journalist and author of Never Enough, to dive into the toxic achievement culture that’s shaping our lives—and the lives of our kids.
Together, we explore how this relentless pursuit of external success is leaving us exhausted, disconnected, and questioning our self-worth. We also dig into what really matters—connection, purpose, and a sense of belonging—and how we can reclaim these values for ourselves and our families.
In this Episode
Join us as we go deep into our own personal journeys as women and moms, and along the way talk about:
- The Cost of Toxic Achievement: Macroeconomic trends—like rising inequality, job instability, and the increasing cost of living—are amplifying the push to achieve at any cost. But the evidence is clear: more external success doesn’t lead to happier or healthier lives.
- What We’ve Lost: The modern obsession with productivity has left less time for the things that truly nourish us—community, hobbies, connection, and learning for its own sake.
- The Power of Mattering: Kids thrive when they feel valued for who they are, not what they accomplish. And it’s up to us as parents to model that sense of worth by healing our own relationship with achievement—including feeling that the our kids’ success is a measure of our own worth, from where they were born to how long they breastfed to what schools they go to and who they are as adults.
- Healing Generational Wounds: Unexamined beliefs and “ghosts” from our own upbringing often push us toward extrinsic measures of success. By addressing these wounds, we can break the cycle and redefine what matters for ourselves and our kids.
- Reclaiming What Matters: Research shows that relationships—not status or money—are the strongest predictors of happiness, fulfillment, and resilience. We explore practical ways to prioritize relationships, joy, and intrinsic fulfillment over endless striving and external rewards.
If you’re ready to let go of the pressure to achieve and embrace a more meaningful, connected life, this episode is for you. Share it with a friend who might need the reminder that they’re already enough, and let’s start a movement toward true fulfillment—together.
This episode is a compassionate call to reevaluate what really matters. The relentless push for more isn’t the path to happiness, for ourselves, or for our kiddos. Instead, it’s connection, purpose, and a sense of belonging that truly nourish us.
Resources & Links
- Never Enough by Jennifer Wallace offers even more insights and is a must-read for parents and caregivers.
- Let’s continue this conversation on Instagram: @DrAvivaRomm.
The Interview Transcript: Navigating Toxic Achievement Culture | Aviva Romm + Jennifer Wallace
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Aviva: I've been thinking about the word enough lately, for months actually, as in what is enough money, success, doing achievement. It started in a session with a wonderful therapist named Diane, who I worked with for some months around the issues of my highly unrealistic expectations for myself and my hard driving perfectionism that seems to come and go in waves throughout my life. The lens of the word enough has become so important to me that though I'm working on a menopause book, I'm also realizing I have a lot of thoughts on enoughness that I want to start sharing more and more. I also found myself during this time recalling the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest running studies on human happiness, which has provided some really valuable insights into what contributes to a truly fulfilling life. While this study doesn't specifically focus on B students versus A students, it's kind of how I sometimes think of it in my mind.
The study basically found that academic performance is not the sole or primary determinant of long-term happiness in our lives. Instead, the quality of relationships plays a more significant role in our overall wellbeing. Researchers have discovered that close relationships more than money or fame are what keep people happy throughout our lives. And these ties protect us from all kinds of life's discontents and may even help to delay physical and mental decline, and they’re better predictors of long-term happiness than even social class IQ or genetics. In essence, the study underscored that while academic achievements can open doors, they're not the primary drivers of our wellbeing, and fostering meaningful relationships, a sense of community and other crucial components are really important for the fulfillment of our lives. But as a mom of four, I have personally felt the pull, the deep desire, of course, to see my kids thrive in a world that seems to demand so much from us and I want them to succeed.
While we homeschooled our kids and there were no A's and B's, I wanted them to have the opportunities in some ways also that I didn't have. And there's no doubt that I instilled pressures in them based on my own story, but I didn't want this to be at the expense of their mental health and their joy and their sense of who they are. And I personally know that the challenge of balancing ambition and wellbeing, particularly as someone who grew up in a family with immigrant origins and material scarcity, is challenging. I know it all too well, and it's something I suspect many of too. Whether for yourself personally due to scarcity origins, early pressures around achievement or the very real pressures we all feel to perform and achieve as adults. And certainly if you're a mom, you know the pressures that are put on us to be perfect as moms, to do it all and give it all. And also to make sure our kids turn out to be “perfect”, whatever that means.
In the midst of my months of contemplating a book arrived in the mail for me to review – Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. Naturally the synchronicity caught my attention and the themes absolutely did not disappoint. And it's why I'm so excited to bring you today's conversation, which I'm calling Are We Chasing the Wrong Kind of Success? The High Cost of Toxic Achievement Culture, with my wonderful guest, Jennifer Wallace, an award-winning journalist, the author of Never Enough who has spent years researching the pressures of achievement culture and its effect on kids, teens and their families, Jennifer's work centers on something we all need more of in our lives: the idea of mattering, feeling valued not just for what we do but for who we are. As a mom herself, Jennifer understands the struggles we face raising kids in a high pressure world. Her insights are rooted in research, but feel like advice from a friend. And today we'll talk about how we can help our kids succeed without them losing themselves and how we can find more peace for ourselves in the process. I feel this is a conversation every woman, everyone who struggles with achievement issues, pressures, perfectionism, not enough-ness, and every mom absolutely needs to hear. Jennifer, welcome.
Jennifer: Oh, thank you so much for that. Couldn't agree more with your intro.
Aviva: Yeah, you had to put up with my long intro there, but thank you for your patience with that. It really did. The book just came at this kismet time, and I'm so curious for you…I mean, clearly this kind of big picture meta around enough-ness is something that you've been thinking about a lot as well because it's no small feat to write a book. And I just wonder for me, I wrote a book called The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution, not my favorite title, but essentially it's about achievement culture and the pressures in our world and how those jack up our cortisol and cause us to in a constant state of being in fight, flight, freeze, fawn. But how that affects our physical wellbeing, our actual, the pathophysiologic changes. I'm so curious. I mean clearly you've written a book, it's a New York Times bestseller, you're a high achieving person. What brought your attention personally to achievement culture and why was it a strong enough pull for you to devote the time and energy to writing and promoting a book? Is there a personal story there?
Jennifer: So there certainly is a personal story. Researchers who investigate things that are personally meaningful to them, they call it me-search. So it was really good. I mean, I had been noticing over the years as a parent of three now teenagers. I have a 19-year-old, I have a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old. (Oh, you're in it.) I'm in it. And I've been noticing with confusion about just how different my kids' childhood was from my own growing up and how, yes achievement mattered to my parents, but so many other things mattered just as much – what I was like as a friend, my involvement with my extended family, the time that I could devote to hobbies that were meaningful to me. Religion played a big role in my house as well. I was raised Catholic and all of those things seemed to be getting crowded out with my children. And so that's really where it began.
But certainly part of my story is like you sort of a battle against perfectionism. And what I have learned about perfectionism is that it's something that I absorbed in the world around me and lots of other young people. I mean, I'm no longer a young person, but the young people. Researchers have been tracking the expectations around perfectionism over time and there is a steep increase as our world – and they sort of tracked it with macroeconomic forces – and they were looking at how as social inequality increased, these feelings around needing to be more, that you're never enough, also started to increase. So yes, I found myself living in this never enough world parenting in a world that felt like no matter what I was doing was never enough, and then raising kids and wanting to protect them and buffer against some of these very toxic messages that are in our wider culture.
Aviva: Can we talk about these macroeconomics? I personally have really dug deep into this in my own origin story and really can very kind of chronologically track the things that I was rewarded for that created a sense of security, safety and almost a sense of future safety. So achievement was one of those big things. And at the same time, I grew up in an economically challenged environment, and so having achievement be rewarded created a sense of financial security for me as I was growing up. And what I have found though is even achieving more security, like having enough, there's still this inner sense of not being enough. So for me on a personal level, I can track that. What are the bigger macroeconomic factors that you uncovered or that researchers have uncovered that kind of parallel that or maybe created that sense for me that felt personal but were really bigger and that are creating that for yourself and for other moms as well.
Jennifer: So when I was growing up in the seventies and the early eighties, life was generally more affordable. Housing was more affordable, healthcare was more affordable, higher education was more affordable. There was slack in the system. So parents like mine could be relatively assured that even with some setbacks, even with a B minus in AP calculus like I got my senior year, that most likely I'd be able to replicate my childhood as an adult, if not do even better than my own parents did. That's always been the American Dream to not only do as well as your parents, but to exceed them. And we modern parents are facing a different economic reality. We are seeing the first generation, the millennials, who on average are not doing as well as their parents. We are feeling the crush of the middle class. We are absorbing the hyper competition that's been ushered in with globalization. It's always been the job of a parent to raise a kid to thrive when we're no longer around, but never has that future felt so uncertain.
We don't know what something like half the jobs are going to be when our kids are out in the job market. AI is now on the scene disrupting everything. So what I heard over and over again from the parents was not necessarily this explicitly, but what they were saying to me was that they were betting big. That early childhood success, getting their kids into a “good college,” they hoped would act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty. But unfortunately what I was finding and what national policy reports and other research was finding was that this pressure that's being put on our kids – in order to protect them, right, in order to put on that safety vest – is drowning too many of the kids we're trying to protect.
Now I want to just underscore that this is not a book that blames parents. Part of why I wrote this book was because I was tired of the narrative that modern parents today just want a bumper sticker. We just want to live through our kids. We're all fixated on status. I'm sure that's true of some parents, but what I've heard, I surveyed 6,500 parents, I interviewed hundreds of families for this book. There was something much deeper at play. So what I was hearing in the parents was that, again, they weren't saying this explicitly, but that they felt, whereas my parents felt like they wanted to set me up for success, modern parents today feel like we need to make our kids a success. And that is because we are sensing fewer and fewer guarantees for our kids, fewer and fewer social safety nets. So what this intensive parenting is that we're all being accused of and fingers pointing at us, what that really is according to sociologists is that we individual parents are weaving safety nets for each one of our kids. That is what intensive parenting is.
Aviva: I couldn't agree more. We're being blamed for the actual perceived necessary response for the world our kids live in.
Jennifer: So, I conducted a survey with the help of a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and this was about getting parents' reactions and deep feelings about achievement. And he said to me, in order for us to really see patterns, we're going to need at least a thousand respondents. But within a few days, over 6,500 parents had filled out the survey, it went viral. And so I asked parents how much they agreed or disagreed with statements like “Others think that my children's academic success is a reflection of my parenting.” 83%
Aviva: 100%. Yeah, I would be like a hundred on… the moms I know in my community who are attachment parenting moms. It's like 100%, right.
Jennifer: And I don't think that my parents felt like it was their responsibility to make me a success. I think they wanted me to do well, they wanted me to achieve, but it was an assumption that we no longer feel like we can make because of the macroeconomic forces in our environment.
Aviva: And isn't it true that we do judge each other. We judge ourselves, we're being judged, we judge each other and the very markers of success that our parents might've had for us having our own apartment living on our own. I mean, I've got four kids, my oldest two are kind of launched on their own, but my younger two are 30 and 32. They're now in graduate school. They literally cannot afford to work, be in school and pay their rents. It's so expensive.
Jennifer: It's so expensive. It's a very different world today. And so it's understandable that parents feel the pressure. It doesn't mean to let us off the hook. I wrote an article as I was researching this book for the Washington Post in 2019 and I was covering two national policy reports. One was the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the other by the National Academies of Sciences. So these are reports that our government uses to set policy and what they were looking at, these child development experts who were creating these reports were looking at who are the kids who are most at risk for negative health outcomes in our society today. So they named people you would imagine: children growing up in poverty, children with incarcerated parents, the children of recent immigrants with few resources, children living in foster care, and then they named a new at-risk group – children attending what the researchers were calling high achieving schools.
Those are public and private schools all around the country where the kids go off to good four-year colleges. These kids were now two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety and depression and two to three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse disorder than the average American teen because of this excessive pressure to achieve. And what the researchers actually were looking at was that, over time,,, they found that what gets in early gets in deep. So these ways of thinking, this belief that your sense of self is tangled up in your achievements that lasts, that without examining that it can last into your adulthood and with it bring substance abuse issues.
Aviva: I see a lot of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and especially the females in that population in middle school, high school and college as well. And interestingly, these are, whether it's eating disorders, sort of thinness, high achievement in school, high performance athleticism, they're sort of these insidious, almost psychological disorders that are actually rewarded in our culture. So they're often really missed and the problems behind them I feel like are very missed in our young people.
Jennifer: I think you're absolutely right. Something that I found fascinating in the research on this was that what you're talking about are what researchers call extrinsic values. Things like popularity, appearance, material success, achievement. Researchers say that that is extrinsic values. So roughly all of us have about a dozen core values inside all of us no matter where we live in the world – and we have extrinsic values in us and we have intrinsic values in us. Intrinsic values are things like wanting to be a good person, wanting to be a good neighbor, wanting to be good to the environment. And here's why we need to understand our values is because extrinsic values are linked with negative mental health issues and substance abuse disorder, whereas the intrinsic values are linked with the wellbeing we want for our kids. And it's not that parents in these high achieving communities don't have good values; it's that their extrinsic values are constantly being activated in their environment.
And so what you are talking about, I think a way for parents to think about this is what are the values in your neighborhood, in your children's school, in your workplace? How are those values impacting your mental health? Because values operate like a seesaw. The more time and energy you spend pursuing extrinsic values, the less room you have in your life for pursuing the intrinsic ones. So, I found that fascinating. I found the idea around values just to be such a clean way of looking at the problems that both parents and young people face in today's materialistic culture.
Aviva: You mentioned something else that I think really harken me back to my own childhood. Even though I grew up in a housing project in New York City where there were a lot of vulnerabilities, there were a lot of buffers even in that environment. We always had people on the stoop or looking out a window, keeping an eye on the kids. We walked to school in groups. We came home from school together. Not for safety, but because we were like a neighborhood. We played together outside after school until it got dark in the summer, spring and summer, in the fall. We really had this social network and a lot of other things that really did drive a sense of these intrinsic values, connectedness, and extended families that we were part of.
I had extended family. It just felt like there were other, I had many hobbies. We did more things together. There were fewer distractions and fewer things that created kind of a bubble. We weren't all looking down at our phone. We were watching a Friday night Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, just to date myself, together. That was the kind of show that would've been on Friday night at 8, 8:30 right. It feels like there were a lot of different buffers to these pressures and a lot of things that made it so that achievement was just one small part of actually who we were and what we did. And that feels like it's changed a lot. I don't know what you think about… that was a lot that I just said, but
Jennifer: No, I think you hit it on the head. I think what used to protect us growing up, those protective factors that you're talking about are relationship with your parents that didn't really revolve around achievement relationships with your peers that might have a bit of envy or competition or a comparison, but it wasn't excessive the way it is today. There wasn't that sense of scarcity. Hobbies, things like playing tennis or dance were seen as stress reducers. not yet another place where we had to prove our worth, right? Today every win sets the stage for an even higher goal. So, an extended family – time with extended family is a protective factor that's been crowded out by this busy achievement culture with our kids, with the amount of homework that they have, or travel leagues on the weekends. I mean, I spoke with a mom in Alaska who said that her children don't know what a traditional Thanksgiving meal is because they are always on the road at tournaments, so they don't know what it is to sit around a table on Thanksgiving. The priorities, our values have shifted and there are reasons for this that you draw out. We, for decades now, sociologists have been looking at how we are bowling alone in the words of Robert Putnam. We are no longer joining leagues. We're no longer going to religious institutions where we could feel that sense of belonging for our inherent worth. Those things have really been crowded out and those protective factors have been removed. And so as the stress has gone up in our environment, the buffers are supposed to go up too and they're not.
Aviva: You said so many things that are so important. And one thing just really landed with me, which is that everything we do sort of sets the stage for the next thing. I remember when my kids were little, there was someone, a popular psychologist or something on the radio or NPR interview who somebody said something about how we're becoming human doings instead of human beings. And I can remember just being a kid and doing a craft for the sake of doing a craft, as you say going to dance class or being in a play. It wasn't for the sake of everything having an outcome that had a value applied to it. It was just for the pure joy of doing it. And also it created a sense of flow, right? I was able to have many times in my life where I was just doing something that created joy or pleasure or curiosity. And now it seems like so much both for our kids but also for us as adults, feels like it has some kind of a value attached to it, whether it's likes on social media or something more a financial price tag attached to it with a promotion or a raise, it's really hard to just be and do for the sake of joy and pleasure now, I think.
Jennifer: It is. You mentioned technology. Where I'm coming out on technology these days is if you or your child are having a hard time with excessive social comparison, with excessive levels of envy, and you don't feel like you necessarily have enough coping skills to deal with that or your child doesn't, I think as a parent you could be pretty nervous with your child using social media because they may be using it in ways that are not helpful to them. But when it comes to a parent or a child who has lots of social connections, who spends time outside, who gets the right amount of sleep, who's doing well academically and has these coping skills, I think you could be pretty assured that most likely they are not using social media in ways that are negatively impacting them. While I certainly think social media is a magnifier and an accelerant of issues happening in real life, social media is an accelerant and a magnifier of the problems that we've been seeing – this need, this huge well of a need that was going unmet and technology dipped right into that need, made us think that we were connected with friends, got our dopamine going, all of these relationships that are not quality
And they were seeing that we needed, we desperately were craving that connection. We were thirsty for it. And so technology fed the thirst. But I think for us to blame technology that everything was great until 2008 is to miss the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that our kids and so many adults are walking around with this unmet need to feel like they matter for who they are at their core.
Aviva: Jennifer, you interviewed 6,500 individuals. What were a few of the other findings that maybe surprised you?
Jennifer: One of the ones that surprised me the most was, and this is according to decades worth of resilience research, that our children's resilience rests fundamentally on the caregiver's resilience. And our resilience rests fundamentally on the depth and support of our relationships. So we are sold this kind of bill of goods by the multi-billion dollar wellness industry. Just light this candle, take a bubble bath, download a meditation app and you'll be resilient. Those are great stress reducers, but they do not give us the resilience we need to act as the first responders day in and day out to our kids' struggles. The only thing that does that are deep nourishing relationships. And again, it's not that these parents in these high achieving communities didn't have friends, it's that they often didn't have the time or the bandwidth to invest in these friendships so that they could be sources of support when they need them. We're often told, put your oxygen mask on first. But what I'm saying goes deeper. I'm saying find one or two or three people in your life who know you intimately, who can see when you are, who can hear when you are gasping for air, and who will reach over and put that oxygen mask on for you. And that is a very different level of support than we normalize today.
Aviva: That's really beautiful. And when we think about that whole putting the oxygen mask on, right, it's like, who are we putting it on? We're putting it on our child. And to have this visual for me of another adult being someone who's going to be willing to reach over and put an oxygen mask on us, that's really beautiful. And it really implies us also having a level of vulnerability and receptivity to getting help, which a lot of moms were also led to believe we shouldn't need or get or admit.
Jennifer: I have come to see asking for help as an act of generosity. That if we are struggling and we don't reach out for help, not only are we suffering more than we need to, but we are not giving the friend the opportunity to step up and feel like they matter in our lives. We add value to our friendships, to our relationships, when we do reach out for help. We tell them that we need them. That is a very deep way of telling somebody, you are worthy in my life. I trust you. I depend on you. And those are critical ingredients to feeling like we matter in this world. So think of reaching out, not about you. Think about what you're giving as a gift to the person you reach out to.
Aviva: And I would just add one piece to that is if you're in any doubt about how you're reaching out to someone else is a gift, there's been some research around this concept of tend and befriend, which is kind of a parallel response to fight or flight. It's in a sense a more productive response to fight or flight that may be more how women intrinsically on an evolutionary biological basis would respond in danger. When we think back historically, if there were a danger to women, women were often the ones pregnant and tending the children, they couldn't necessarily flee and they couldn't necessarily just freeze either. They might've hid, but what did they do? They reached out and circled the wagons with each other. And some of this research has actually shown that when we reach out to someone else, not only do our stress hormones go down and our oxytocin goes up, but so does the recipients – their oxytocin goes up. You're literally giving them hormonal gift. And one of the things we think of oxytocin as the cuddle or love hormone, but there's a lot that we are now understanding about it as being part of our resilience response.
Jennifer: Yes, they call that a helper's high, the high that we get, the pleasant neurochemical cocktail that we get in our brains when we're helping somebody. You're reminding me of a really interesting study that I wrote about in the book. When two people friends are staring up at a hill, it looks less steep than it does when you are standing there alone. So when researchers measure individuals looking at the hill and then with looking at the hill with a friend, it is less steep with a friend.
Aviva: That's amazing. That is such a powerful sense of perception changing our load.
Jennifer: Yes, and that is, I think if we want to really make a dent, a productive dent in the youth mental health crisis, we need to go upstream and we need to be taking care of the caregivers. We need to be shining a light and supporting them. I mean, the Surgeon General recently issued an advisory about the stress that modern parents are facing. And I also heard this in my interviews that parents who are working go to work – too many of them – for 8, 10, 12 hours a day feeling like they are not valued, feeling like cogs in a machine, feeling like they could be let go or replaced at any time. When you are in an environment where you don't feel like you matter, how can you show up to your kids and be the responsive parent that you want to be and that they need of you? Actually, I'm writing a book now on Never Enough for adults and how to build up our own sense of mattering, our own sense of feeling valued and adding value to the world.
Aviva: So let's talk about mattering, how you define mattering and how we can develop that inner sense of mattering, especially when there is so much externally that's sort of telling us whether we matter or not. So let's define mattering first. Tell us what you mean when you say that.
Jennifer: So mattering is a concept that was originally developed in the 1980s by the legendary social psychologist Mars Rosenberg, who brought us the self-esteem scale that everybody uses still today. And what he was finding was that the adolescents that he was researching, what he found was that those young people who enjoyed a healthy level of self-esteem felt like they mattered to their parents. And that is they felt valued. They felt significant and important for who they were deep at their core. Researchers have now been studying mattering around the world and the definition that resonates most with me is the idea of both feeling valued by family, by friends, by our larger community, but also being dependent on to add value back – to family, to friends, to the larger community. I went in search of the kids who were doing well despite the pressures in our modern environment, and I found about a dozen or so things that these healthy strivers, as I call them in the book, had in common, but it really boiled down to mattering.
They felt like they mattered no matter what. Setbacks? So, it wasn't like they didn't bomb tests or get rejected by friends or get cut from the team, but that these setbacks were temporary. They were not seen or internalized as an indictment of their worth. They knew they mattered no matter what. So mattering is really a protective shield. It matters throughout the lifespan. It matters a lot during adolescence when our children are trying to develop a sturdy sense of self, but it really matters throughout our lifespan. It matters when we change jobs and maybe we don't feel like we matter anymore. We get laid off or we get divorced or a loved one dies and it disrupts this sense of a feeling valued. So just to dork out for one more minute, mattering is a meta need. It's an umbrella term. So, researchers who study it say after the drive, the human instinct for food and shelter, it is the instinct to matter that drives our behavior for better or for worse.
When we feel like we matter, we want to show up to the world in positive ways. We want to give back, to be good to the environment. All of these sort of intrinsic values that we were talking about earlier. When we are chronically made to feel like we don't matter or if our mattering is contingent on how we perform or how we look, then we can turn against ourselves, become anxious and depressed when we are not feeling valued or we could lash out in anger. School shooters among the most tragic examples, oh, I don't matter, I'll show you, I matter. So mattering is something that as a parent, I can't make my child feel connected. I can't make them feel like they belong, but I can certainly help them unlock their mattering and unlock the mattering in the people around them.
Aviva: And often to communicate something to our children, we have to also feel it toward ourselves first. I really believe that often it's not so much even what we teach our children that they learn from, but it's really they're studying who and how we are. They're modeling. So how can we as adults deepen our own sense of mattering, particularly for those of us who have been raised in a culture where external achievement and self-worth are so bound together? How do we untangle that to be those examples of self-worth and mattering to our kids to start with?
Jennifer: So in the book, I call it rummaging through your psychological attics, which is really going back to your childhood. And I think therapy is great for this, really thinking through the messages that you internalized and really untangling, but it's work and it's a practice and it's countercultural really. I mean, in our society people make a lot of money off of making us feel like we're not enough. So we are battling against a huge machine, but the way we do that is by having people who love us be close to us and remind us of our mattering when we lean on them and we know we are worthy of support. When they reach out to us, to rely on us, it sends us the signal that we matter. So that's one way of doing it – surrounding yourself with people who you feel comfortable with, who you feel value you.
But I was doing a talk at Rezy (sp?) and a young man in his twenties said to me, there are some weeks when I really don't feel like I matter. Is there a mantra I could say to myself? And I said, I have something better than a mantra. I said, at lunchtime, go down to the cafeteria and thank the man or woman who always hands you your lunch with a smile and say, it has been such a hard week. But every time I walk in here and I get your smile and feel your joy, boy you really turned my day around. Thank you so much. So unlocking the mattering, the magic in other people is a way of feeding very quickly our own sense of mattering. I mean, you can do it in little small things like driving through stuck in traffic and letting people come into your lane and you get the wave. That is a teeny tiny micro step towards mattering.
It is looking for, here's another thing to do, is to look for genuine needs in your community. So really not necessarily what you want to do to contribute, but really what is the need in your community right now and how can you meet that need with your talents, with your strengths, with what you're good at, with your organization, with your empathy? How can you go out? So really it is, I mean there is kind of a mantra that I keep in my head on this topic and it's actually the Jesuit motto, which is ‘not better than others but better for others.' So whenever I feel that sort of never enough-ness or perfectionism creeping in, I turn myself focused lens out and I look at how can I make a positive impact here? What can I do? And that resets my mattering.
Aviva: I do the same when I'm working on a book for example or a project and I start to get these doubts. Am I enough? Is this imposter syndrome? All the things. Is this book going to matter? Is it going to be successful? Whatever. I re-shift and say, who am I writing this for? What do they need to hear from me? What can I do to serve? It sounds like what you're talking about interestingly, is when you're stuck in the extrinsic value system expecting the reward or the approval or the achievement, reconnecting to those intrinsic values.
Jennifer: That's exactly right. And I'm not saying don't like shiny things. I'm not saying don't want to achieve. I'm saying we need to get back in balance and we need to balance the self with others. And that is not something that is prioritized or even rewarded in our culture, but it is certainly rewarded in our biology. We feel better, as we talked about earlier, we get that helper's high, we feel better about ourselves. We get that social proof that we all crave, that we matter, that what we do and who we are matters on this earth.
Aviva: I love that little nugget that just came in there. We're rewarded in our biology, and that is so powerful. We become so disconnected from how we want to feel. I know that when I'm on the extrinsic reward roller coaster, I actually don't feel good inside. I feel pulled out of myself. I feel agitated. I feel anxious. When I reconnect to how am I feeling and how do I want to feel, that's what usually reconnects me to the feeling enough.
Jennifer: Yes.
Aviva: And that's for me, that has become this touchstone literal question for me. Is this enough? What is enough? When is it enough? Because that's the other thing, I think in this combination of a capitalist society, this new scarcity and new economic instability that our young adults are facing, there is actually a feeling of one, there's not enough, but there's actually never enough. And we know this from research, the dopamine bar keeps going up. You achieve one thing, then you need to achieve the next thing. So you can literally stay on a hamster wheel your entire life of never enough. So I love this just sort of dropping into your body. How are you being rewarded in your biology? How do you feel when you're thinking or feeling this way or doing this or that? And this helper's high. It's a great good thing to be, well not addicted to because we can become overly identified with giving too. And I see that a lot in healthcare providers' identity. Our achievement actually becomes wrapped into how much are we giving? And that can be a problem too.
Jennifer: We need to really matter. We need to balance the self with others. So we need to keep that as a caregiver at home. But also, like you said, in the caregiving professions, it is very easy to lose yourself. And in those moments, I am writing about them in my second book, in those moments, what I have found to be helpful is connecting to your impact. So it is again, talking about your impact as yourself, who you uniquely are and how you can make an impact. But also you have to feed yourself. You can't just pour out. You have to also pour in.
Aviva: Yeah, someone once told me, you can't feed others from an empty cup. You can't give others sustenance from an empty cup.
So you have three children, they're teens. So you know, ,not just from your research and your own experience as a woman and mom, but the real pressures that our kids do face potentially, especially in certain socioeconomic groups, to go to college, have a career – still in many places, if not most places, that's dependent on how many extracurriculars you did, what sports teams you were on, what music achievements you have, what volunteer work you've done, your SAT scores, which one in and of themselves suggest a certain amount of privilege. A lot of kids can't do afterschool sports. They have to have an afterschool job or they have to watch their siblings after school. Or in their neighborhood, like where I grew up, there were no afterschool sports, right? We went to the community center if we wanted to do a craft or something. So as a mom raising kids in this very specific age group that yours are in now, what have you learned and changed that you're actually having to work on or do to implement some of these different values than the culture expects? And at the same time, how are you helping your kids to meet the realities of the world that we do live in, which do expect and demand those things in a certain track at least?
Jennifer: So I mean, I wrote a whole book on all my changes. I definitely am taking this research seriously. I would say that the first change that I made in my house was after interviewing a leading researcher on resilience who was studying this achievement pressure. And I said to her, okay, what do I do if I know I'm raising my kids in this environment? The successive pressure in the environment. She said, home needs to be a haven from the pressure. It needs to be a place where your kids can recover from the messages in the wider media, on social media, the stress with their peers, their peers' parents. You as a parent have already, not every parent, but, and probably about the top 25% of household incomes, which is roughly like $150,000 a year combined income. You're putting your kids, if you're going to these high achieving communities in an environment that is activating those extrinsic values, day in and day out, just by having them in these good, good public or private schools they already know you want them to achieve, they don't need to hear it more from you.
What they need instead is for you to allow home to be a place to recover, to minimize criticism, to prioritize affection, to greet your kids once a day the way the family dog greets you – with total joy. So much of our lives as adults, as parents, is getting through our to-do list. Let our kids see the delight that we have in them. Now, if you do have a kid who appears not to be motivated or isn't living up to their expectations, how we communicate our disappointment matters here. So if you have a child who's not performing, get curious, not furious, dig deeper. What is it all kids want to do well, all humans want to do well? We are wired to want to do well, to want to contribute. So if your child isn't, try to figure out what is holding them back. Is it a learning difference? Is it a peer issue that they don't feel close to their classmates or a relationship with a teacher that's not strong that could be impacting their learning? And if you've done all of that and you've gotten curious, not furious, some kids just need more scaffolding. And so teach them how work gets done. Focus on how work gets done instead of the shiny outcomes. That is how we separate achievement from worth.
Aviva: What are some of the ideas for scaffolding that we can give our kids across the board, whether it's around relationship or work ethic, scaffolding to help them, as you say, be a healthy striver. And I differentiate internally having drive versus being driven. That's how I think about healthy striving.
Jennifer: I like that. I would say the first piece of advice I would have is to adopt a mantra that we've adopted in our family, which I heard from Ned Hallowell who's a psychiatrist. And that is to never worry alone. So whether it is struggling in friendship, whether it is struggling academically, whether it is struggling with self-esteem, we suffer more than we have to if we don't reach out. So I think the first step is to tell our young people that they are worthy of support and to never worry alone and to model it. And I model it in front of my kids. When I'm going through something hard, I call my best friends and I say, talk this through with me. How should I be thinking about this? I messed up. How would you handle it? And also modeling when you mess up on something. I've started now living my life out loud with my kids and I'll say to myself, oh, I know better than this. Why did I do this? Oh man. And I'll think about it while I didn't sleep well and whatever it was. And then I'll say, okay, I've beaten myself up enough now time to move on. And when they beat themselves up in front of me when they say, oh, I bombed this test. Why didn't I study in a better way or this or that? And I'll say to them, please don't talk to my child like that. Don't talk to my child like that. And it sort of catches them in their tracks.
Aviva: I love that. I say that to myself. Am I talking to myself the way my best friend would talk to me? Yeah, that is beautiful. Don't talk to my child like that.
Jennifer: And I want them, I hope they will remember that. I hope that sort of self-criticism I guess is inevitable because of our negativity bias and sort of being focused on the negative from an evolutionary perspective, cause that's what helped us survive. But it's one thing to know the negative and then to show ourselves compassion for it, like you said, the way your best friend would. So noting it and then getting curious about it. Why did I do that? What was triggered in me? What was I thinking? Did I not rest, did I not have a good meal? Did someone say something that reminded me of something in my childhood or whatever It was? What was triggering me in that moment? And I think if we could take a lens of curiosity with ourselves and with our kids and also with the people in our lives, that is how we stop reacting. We stop personalizing things that really we would do better to put them into context.
Aviva: You're taking the narrative to the next level with, okay, what's going on here? Let me really unpack this. Let's get curious. Let's come up with some compassionate understanding and solutions. That's a really powerful way to next level and not, I think so much of wellness culture is if you just have enough mantras, you're not going to have those thoughts. For some of us, those negative thoughts are baked in from our childhoods, from actual things that people have said to us or to themselves that we picked up as kids. They're cultural messages and to accept, okay, that message is happening and now here's a new message. That's wonderful. I can just imagine your kids saying to themselves, don't talk to my child.
So as moms, and we talked about this in the beginning, it is so culturally baked in, thank you Dr. Freud, to blame the mother. And we have deeply internalized that our self-worth is tied to our children's success, and that is not healthy for us. It's not healthy for our kids. How as moms can we deeply start to release that belief in a culture that subtly continues to reinforce it?
Jennifer: Well, I think first is the awareness. Psychologists who study it call it child contingent self-esteem. When your child is successful or not, if you feel yourself on sort of the rollercoaster with them, then I think you need to step back a minute. Therapy could help. Talking with your friends about it could help, but really understanding that yes, the culture, and I truly believe that a lot of this came in as capitalism replaced spirituality. So in a capitalist culture, we get our moral worth by how productive we are, and I'm not saying religion solved everything but at least it shifted perspectives at least one day a week, our perspectives were shifted at least that we could see that who we are, like you said earlier, we're human beings, not always human doings. So if you feel yourself in that child contingent self-esteem trap, the first thing is awareness.
The next thing is really feeding yourself and your own interests and your own sense of mattering. I am a devoted mother and I love being a mother, but I also want to be more than that. I love working, I love being a writer, but I also want to be more than that. I want to be a good friend. I want to have a strong marriage. I want to contribute to my community. So I think what can help us is figuring out our values, what really brings us joy and what do we value so that when we're triggered with the child contingent self-esteem, we can step back a little bit and look at all the other things that we value in our life that make us who we are.
Aviva: It becomes harder if all your eggs are in the one basket of mothering. And if that's a choice that someone's making, I also honor and respect that choice. When all of our eggs are in that basket, it's really hard not to place our value on the outcomes there. And it doesn't have to be that we work outside the home to have a second thing that occupies us or brings us value in mattering. But really as you're talking about these different areas, I think of those life wheels where you can do the life audit. And often we do those life audit wheels to kind of assess how we're doing, where I'm seeing the potential here for one of those life audit wheels, which anyone can look up online, we could put some links with the show, but to say what areas of my life am I also nurturing or neglecting? And how can I nurture the friendship part of my life or the service part of my life or the actual self-care, whether that is a bubble bath or exercise or better sleep, the hobbies, the doing things just for the pleasure of doing things, areas of the play, the hobbies, those things really important to nurture.
Toward what you're saying, I really have felt a lot of concern with some of what I'm seeing around the narratives around healing trauma. I feel concerned for mothers because a lot of what I'm seeing kind of in my Instagram feed over the past couple of years around this trauma narrative is if I do these things, if I heal my own trauma, if I raise my children this certain way, if I do all the right things, even the right things around mattering and resilience, then I'm going to get this outcome. And my kids are now 39 down to 30, and I have two grandkids, and I have really learned that life and who our kids are and what our kids experience and who our kids become is so much more than just the inputs that we give. And I want to just caution that even building mattering, even building resilience is not a guaranteed recipe for healthy, happy adult success on certain terms. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on that.
Jennifer: Yeah, I agree with you. I think we like to think that if we parent “well,” that we can protect our kids from life's hardships. It's just not the way it works, but it's to be a good parent is to be a parent who is attuned to your child and to help them through life and to help them become attuned and attached with other people. It's really what I think that the best thing we can do to guarantee, knowing that we actually can't guarantee happiness, is to teach them how to build a web of social support. Because that's really the safety net that I want for my kids. And the way that I look at building that is really through mattering because it gives me a framework, a sticky framework to think about it. Where, who in their lives do they feel valued by? How can I expand that and where can I help them find places in the world that need them and need their help? So yes, as much as I would love to say there is a formula for happiness, the closest thing we have to a formula is connection and purpose, and teaching our kids how to live a purposeful life, teaching them how to live a connected life, I think that's the best thing we could give them.
Aviva: And how would you define healthy striving?
Jennifer: It is separating your worth from your achievements. It is joyful achievement and it is knowing that it's not just for you that you achieve, but that so you can make a positive impact on the world. To me, that is healthy striving. It is having people around us when we fall to know that we are worthy of support so we can get back up and keep going. That's how we create healthy strive for life by not making…. what I have found, which is a little bit counterintuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense, is that the kids who felt like their mattering was linked to their performance, those are the kids who were least likely to actually reach for big ambitious goals because they felt like if they failed, it would be an indictment of who they were. Whereas if you have a child who's firm in their sense of self, and what I mean by that is not every minute of every day firm with their sense of self, but have a sturdy sense of self. Those are the kids who are more willing to reach for high goals because setbacks are not an indictment of who they are. So I think it was in my childhood being made to feel like I mattered no matter what gave me that energy to reach for high goals and to fail over and over again. I tell my kids this all the time, I have failed so many times. Oh my goodness. And I keep getting up.
And I keep reaching out for somebody's hand to pick me up. That, I think, is a healthy striver. And it's not perfect. It's a practice. There are still moments when I am self-critical and I have to say, don't talk to yourself like that. It's not that a healthy striver is 24-7 a healthy striver. A healthy striver knows what it looks like to strive in a joyful way that doesn't hurt us. Achievement shouldn't have to hurt.
Aviva: I love that. And resilience doesn't mean we don't fall. It means we get back up when we can, when we're ready. If you could change school and culture, what would be some of the high level things that you would do to reset how our kids are experiencing this pressure or remove this pressure more externally?
Jennifer: Well, I think the first place I would go is, well, social safety nets, that's a huge thing. Bringing back neighborhoods, bringing back this normalizing connection and reliance. School, I would look at schools and there are schools who are doing this who not necessarily are grading people with numbers or letters, but instead creating these environments where kids can learn a sense of mastery over topics. So taking real life problems, bringing them into the classroom and teaching them the skills they need in this new world that we're putting them into. I think education really needs to catch up with the needs that are going to be out there when our kids graduate college. I also would normalize not going to college. I think that we live in a society that has looked down on the trades, and boy, I think they need a rebranding because those trade jobs are critical and essential. And if we are going to protect our environment, those are the green jobs.
Aviva: And interestingly, where I live, I live rurally and we just had some work done in our house and there were a number of tradespeople coming through, electricians, HVAC painters – older tradesmen in this community. And they were telling me they're having such a hard time attracting younger people and they get paid well. I mean, their hourly is not incomparable to a family physician hourly actually. But they're really having trouble drawing people into those trades because people are so pressured to go into these sort of academic directions, which they're seeing. One of them has even an apprenticeship program where they will pay to mentor people and they're like, they can't get takers on it, which is just astonishing.
Jennifer: It's astonishing. But it's also a culture where on Instagram we're putting up where our kid is going to college and making people who don't go to college feel less than. Oh my goodness, do we need them. Talk about adding value to the world. Those jobs are jobs of mattering and they need a rebrand because boy, do we desperately need those jobs.
Aviva: Agreed. Alright, I have a question that I like to ask all my guests at the end of the show, and that is, if you could tell your younger self anything, how old would she be and what would you tell her?
Jennifer: I would tell my younger self that you have undiagnosed dyslexia and that you are going to grow up and you're going to become a writer. And all of those struggles in math, in content, was because of the way your brain was wired and just stick with it. And I still don't have a diagnosis, by the way, but two out of three of my kids are dyslexic, and I see what it shows up for me. And so that's been a really freeing realization that, oh my goodness, that the thing that was such a struggle to me in many ways is my superpower. And in our house, we celebrate neurodiversity. And so I wish that when was in the seventies and the early eighties that there was more awareness.
Aviva: Thank you for sharing that. That is just hearkening back too to the concept of some people needing more and different scaffolding than a very homogenized educational system tends to acknowledge and honor. So that's incredibly powerful, and I hope also inspiring for those of you who are listening to recognize that you can have many different ways of knowing and being. Really thank you for the work you're doing. It's so important in this time. I think for us as parents and for this next generation mattering purpose, connection, family, neighborhood, without romanticizing the past, a reconnection to some of these deeper court intrinsic values that help us remember who we are in a complex achievement driven world, I think can help a lot of us feel less anxious, less self judgmental, self-critical, less like imposters, less depressed, and more loving toward ourselves. So thank you for being here and for sharing.
Jennifer: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Aviva: A pleasure. Thank you everyone for joining me, and I'll see you next time.
