In her book Never Enough, Jennifer Breheny Wallace examines what she calls the “toxic achievement culture” of upper-middle-class American parents, where children are pushed hard from a tender age not just to get good grades, but to get stellar grades, acquire impressive extracurricular skills, and distinguish themselves in every way in preparation for their college applications. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in her review:
Twenty pages before the end of Never Enough, Wallace describes a visit to Saint Ignatius, an all-boys Jesuit school in Cleveland. “What these priests undoubtedly knew, and what research shows us,” she writes, “is that living a life according to a value system that balances others’ needs with our own boosts our well-being.” Wallace, who has made no mention of faith or religious communities before this point, says that “part of the reason religion has been found to enhance mental health is because it reduces self-centeredness and creates a sense of belonging to a larger whole.”
In fact, what makes Saint Ignatius and other religious communities different is not merely an emphasis on community service—one that has been replicated by schools across the country—but a fundamental idea about the human person. That is, that human beings have inherent worth, no matter how they perform in school or what college they get into. Wallace writes: “We are in a crisis of the self. The formative years are when a child builds a stable foundation for a secure, sustainable adult identity. What we are doing instead is sending a devastating message: in order to be valued you must audition for it, work for it, and keep earning it. Only then will you matter in this house, at this school, in this world.”
Teaching kids that they matter is hard to do in a vacuum. You can tell them that they are loved, of course. But as children get older, they will inevitably wonder what makes them worthy of love. That they are nice? That they are smart? That they are attractive? Only by offering them an overarching theory about human dignity will they be able to understand their own value. But that is not the subject of this book. And most of the prestigious colleges to which they might be admitted will never tell them.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/naomi-schaefer-riley/achievement-culture-toxic-for-kids/