Catherine, a mother living in the New York City suburbs, has a son who flunked out of college. Her story is one of the cautionary tales offered up in Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It. Catherine left the workforce to raise her two children. The elementary-school years went just fine, but then “she began to feel a duty to make sure her older son was living up to his potential.” Catherine and her husband are both Yale graduates and wanted the same for their kid.
She and the other parents around her “ensured that their kids were enriched outside of the classroom: that weekends were spent learning and that summers were maximized with skill-building camps.” She said, “I began to really second-guess what I knew to be true about being a parent” and spared her son from doing chores as part of an effort to ensure he would devote his time to studying instead of taking time to hang around with friends. Most of her interactions with him were about school and college admissions. By senior year, her son stopped going to school entirely and his relationship with his mother was “in shambles.” He managed to enter college “with the help of medication and intensive therapy” but couldn’t make it through freshman year.
Read Full Article »