Journalist Jennifer Wallace wanted to understand why studies were showing elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and related issues among kids in “high-achieving” schools—a topic she wrote on for The Washington Post in 2019. To learn more, she teamed up with researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to create a survey, which she distributed online to parents through her social networks in February 2020. When she sent it out, she asked recipients to share it with their networks. The goal was to collect 1,000 responses. Within days, there were 6,500.
The pressure to succeed, the parents’ answers suggested, was contributing to a mental health crisis among young people in the United States, and parents were suffering, too. Among the survey’s findings, Wallace said, 73% of respondents agreed that parents in their community believed getting into a selective college is one of the most important ingredients to later life success. Eighty-three percent agreed that their children’s academic success is a reflection of their parenting. Yet 87% wished that childhood was less stressful for their kids.
Wallace included the data in her book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It, which quickly became a bestseller when it was published in 2023. “It struck a chord,” Wallace said. “What parents were saying was, ‘Thank you for raising these issues that I’ve been thinking about, but nobody really wants to talk about.’”
Although the desire to succeed is often a positive motivator, too much pressure to get into a good college, get ahead at work, or fit into an unrealistic mold of perfection can be detrimental to mental health, psychological studies indicate. And, according to a growing body of psychological research, those pressures are growing.
But not everybody succumbs to this kind of “toxic achievement culture,” and a new wave of studies is zeroing in on a concept known as mattering that can be protective by providing people with a sense of self-worth independent of their accomplishments. Drawing attention to the issues is an important first step, researchers say.
“This is something of a zeitgeist at the moment. You look at the data, and it just screams at you like, something’s happening here,” said Thomas Curran, PhD, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics and author of The Perfection Trap. “Those concerns, those doubts, those worries, those socially prescribed pressures—they’re rising really, really quickly.”
