Conversation with Jennifer B. Wallace — What to Do About Toxic Achievement Culture

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, an award-winning journalist and author of, “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It,” joins Scott to discuss solutions to toxic achievement culture, economic pressures on families, instilling a sense of ‘mattering’ in children, and how gender influences children’s sense of interdependence. Follow Jennifer on Twitter (X), @wallacejennieb. P. S. Scott is on holiday, so we’ll be back with our business analysis and Algebra of Happiness in September! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 264. 264 is the area code belonging to Anguila. 1964, the first computer mouse was invented, and the miniskirt was introduced and popularized by a designer. I was born in November of 1964, so that means I'm somewhere between a boomer and Gen X. Then we have Gen Z, then we have millennials. So what are the next generation? Fucked. It's not that funny. Go, go, go!

• 1:51Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 264th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jennifer Brandy Wallace, an award-winning journalist and social commentator covering parenting and lifestyle trends. We discuss with Jennifer her new parenting book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic, and what we can do about it. Our conversation covers solutions to toxic achievement culture, economic pressures on families, instilling a sense of mattering in children, and how gender influences children's sense of interdependence. I love this stuff. I think it's fascinating, our approach to raising kids. It's definitely been the most, I don't know, is it the most meaningful thing or most influential thing? I think it's the most fascinating thing is raising kids. It's also vastly overrated.

• 2:35Scott Galloway?

  It's, I don't know, it just kind of takes over your life. I don't, anyways, if you're out there and you have kids, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't have kids, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. Anyways, enjoy this conversation with Jennifer Brandy Wallace. Jennifer, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Uh, Hamptons.

• 2:52Scott Galloway?

  In the Hamptons, oh my gosh. Where in the Hamptons?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Bridgehampton.

• 2:57Scott Galloway?

  It's beautiful out there. So let's bust right into it. Your new parenting book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It, investigates the roots of toxic achievement culture and its negative effects on children. So let's start there. Give us sort of an overview of the book and sort of set the table, if you will, for what you think the dynamics are around what inspired you to write this book.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm a journalist by trade, also the mother of three teenagers. And in 2019, I wrote an article for the Washington Post about how students who attend what researchers call high-achieving schools, those are public and private schools around the country that have high standardized test scores, most of the kids go off to four-year colleges. Those kids, according to two national policy reports, are now an at-risk group, at risk for two to six times national averages when it comes to clinical The levels of depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorder.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  That was pretty shocking to me. So these two policy reports, this was the National Academies, and it was also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. So two really solid reports finding after kids in poverty, kids with incarcerated parents, recent immigrants, and children living in foster care. It's these students who are under an excessive pressure to achieve that is now making them an official at-risk group.

• 4:31Scott Galloway?

  So, and it's a little bit, it reminds me of whenever I talk about or advocate for young men or talk about the challenges they face, it doesn't inspire a lot of sympathy. And the group you just, you just, the cohort you just described, quite frankly, sounds like privileged white kids. And so there's not what I'd call a ton of immediate sympathy. I'm putting words in your mouth. Is that true? And how does that impact the conversation and the dialogue?

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So when I first came across this, I asked the leading resilience, one of the leading resilience researchers whose research, you know, found these, this cohort to be an at-risk group. And I said to her, you know, should we care about these kids? They have access to healthcare. They, they generally fall within the top 25%, the favored fifth of household incomes. And she snapped right back at me and she said, "A child in pain is a child in pain. Neither choose the circumstances." And essentially what she was saying to me was, "We don't need to put pain on a scale.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Pain is pain and these kids deserve our empathy. And as the adults in the room, it's our job to do something about it."

• 5:47Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, the statement I love and that I constantly parrot is that compassion is not a zero-sum game. And Jennifer, you're going to figure out quickly, the guests on Prop G are mostly a vehicle for me to talk about myself. So this is the first opportunity I'll take.

• 6:02Scott Galloway?

  I really relate to this book and what you're talking about because I have very privileged kids. And for the first, what I'll call 12, 14 years of their life, tiger household, all over their grades, studying with them every night. Did you do your derivatives homework? Or let me see it. You don't know, this is wrong. Go back, do it. A very nervous, sometimes celebratory, sometimes very anxious, depressed household, the day grades came out. And also, what I found is it works. When we're all over our kids, it works. And now, I have a lot of insight, or I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of social media

• 6:44Scott Galloway?

  technology on society. And you immediately zero in on the cohort that's kind of taken it arguably, who has been the recipient of the most negative of the externalities of the big tech world, and that is teenagers. And it has totally pivoted, literally 180, my approach to parenting as it relates to school. And that is, it's essentially gone from what are your grades? Did you do your homework? How's biology going? My really, my only question is, are you happy? Do you feel loved? Are you doing, are you doing okay at school? Do you enjoy it? And if the answer is yes, that's literally all A's for me. And unfortunately, and I got to master the downside here, that it should, it would

• 7:27Scott Galloway?

  be more fun if it was a Hallmark Channel movie and it'd be like, well, then they thrived even more at school. They're not doing as well academically. When I'm not all over them, they're not doing as well. And you know what? It's worth it. Because I just, it just, it just struck me when I see how many kids and that this is, my guess is we're sort of, I don't call them the same weight class, but probably have a lot of the same friends going to the same schools with their kids. It's the number one issue in households. You hear about some kid who had everything, who's cutting or worse. And it is just entirely shifted, I think, among a lot of us. What does it mean to have a successful child? And it was, I'll stop there, but I can't. Let's talk about that toxic ambition, Will. How does it start?

• 8:12Scott Galloway?

  And how does it manifest itself, both in terms of the types of behavior and the impact it has on the child?

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Well, I think what you were describing with your own children is what I call dirty fuel or clean fuel. And so the dirty fuel, the criticism comparing one child against a friend, or, you know, things that that parents do, either because they're tired, but but always because they want what's best for their kids. It can maybe, like you pointed out, get that short term, good, great on a quiz because they're afraid and and they don't want to be ashamed and they want their parents' love and affection. Or you could use what I have found to be the most effective in my research, which is this healthy fuel.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  So, you know, I went, I traveled around the country and I met with parents who had lost loved ones to suicide. I'd met anxious students, depressed students, college-age students, spoke with, you know, people now in their twenties and thirties. And then I went in search of who were the healthy thrivers? Who was doing well despite the pressures in the environment? I wanted to know what their parents focused on at home? What was school like for them? What were their relationships like with their peers? And I found about 15 things that these healthy achievers had in common. And by the way, one of them is that their parents did what you're now doing with your kids.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  You might not see short-term results, but they saw them in the long term. What I found were were these common threads. And as I was looking for a framework to present my findings to parents, I came across this psychological construct called mattering. Mattering is basically what you're now focused on at home. Mattering is making children feel valued for who they are at their core, by their family, by their friends, by their communities, and depending on them to add meaningful value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  The kids who were doing the worst, and in my surveys, and I I did two extensive surveys and I interviewed hundreds of families. The kids who were doing worse, and it's not just my research, actually, there have been journal, there have been published studies on this, are kids who felt like their mattering, their worth was contingent on their performance. The other kids I found who were not doing as well were kids who got those messages that they mattered a lot, but no one ever depended on them to add value to anyone other than themselves and their own resume. And so what these kids lacked was social proof that they mattered, right? They had the words, but they

• 11:08Speaker 03

  didn't see it. They didn't see in how they were contributing to their parents, or their siblings, or their peers in a way that was significant. So this healthy fuel that I'm talking about is leading with mattering. And I think that's what you are doing with your children. And it doesn't, just to be clear, mattering and achievement are not mutually exclusive. What I have found is that kids who have this high level of mattering have a kind of protective shield that buffers against stress and anxiety. They weren't afraid to reach higher. They weren't afraid to fail. They weren't afraid to take risks because

• 11:50Speaker 03

  those were not an indictment of their worth. Their worth was not contingent on whether they succeeded or failed. And their parents made this clear at home daily.

• 12:03Scott Galloway?

  So there's something else I've been thinking about. So if you look at a lot of the evidence or a lot of the research around teen depression, the two things I see the most, the two drivers or the two signals is one, social media at a young age causes or can inspire a lot of not only anxiety and depression, but the really terrible thing about it is you don't even know it's going on as a parent. They go into their room with their phone, they go down a rabbit hole, they get bullied, especially girls. But the second thing is kind of on us, and that is the bulldozer concierge parenting that clears out all of the obstacles for these kids such that they never develop their own skills. You know, we use so many sanitary wipes on their lives that they don't develop their own immunities.

• 12:46Scott Galloway?

  And we're now at a point where we'll take a vacation if we feel there's a lot of opportunity for what, and I think this is really important, and I try and push the limits of my comfort zone around it for unsupervised play. And that is, they're on their own, they're doing their own thing. You don't have to check in every 15 minutes. I literally used to leave my mom's place, I was raised just by my mom, and she worked with a Schwinn bike, 35 cents and an Abba Zaba bar, and like come home 12 hours later. I mean, that was it. And now, we are so all over them in every sense of the word. Does that impair their own ability to develop skills and find their own confidence?

• 13:28Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm sure it does. I was also sort of under the misimpression that it was my job to keep my children perfectly safe and to avoid any harm. And those were the messages I was sent of what a good parent is. But I'd like to step back for a second and say, you know, I think there's so much blame on parents. And I'm not saying that we should let ourselves off the hook. But there is this popular narrative that we are overprotective, that we, you know, want bumper stickers for the backs of our cars with the name of a good college on it. Why do we want these things? Why do we want them so much

• 14:08Speaker 03

  more than in the 70s, like you were talking about when I was growing up? And it's because, so I've interviewed historians and economists, and the argument that really rings true to me is that parents are absorbing these macroeconomic forces in the environment. This steep inequity, this crush of the middle class, this globalization, it is a parent's job to raise a child who will thrive when we are no longer there. But that job feels so much more fraught than it was in the 70s when I was growing up. And my parents could let me go run around and, and make mistakes. And back then, in the 70s, life was generally more affordable.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  The stakes felt lower. Today, the stakes feel so high, and parents now feel tasked with Weaving these individualized safety nets for each of our kids. Both, you know, we are, we are, as economists say, we are absorbing these stressful, fearful, macroeconomic pressures. We don't know what the jobs are going to be like in the future. You know, we have climate change. There's, there's so much uncertainty. Parents are absorbing it, and that's what's coming out in our parenting behavior. That, I think, is what is leading to, you know, the intensive parenting we are seeing today. So as, as much as parents have to be aware of our actions, and we do,

• 15:37Speaker 03

  I also think it's time to stop blaming parents. This is a societal issue. And parents are bearing the brunt of it.

• 15:46Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and I saw, I read in your bio that you went to Harvard. And the way I, I think of it is the danger of, of tracking. And that is, so 55,000 people will apply to Harvard this year. They'll let in 1,500. And we'll come back to whether that's morally corrupt or not. But we all have this image that the, the, the prize as a parent is our kid gets to Harvard and ends up at KKR or Google. Anything outside of that track, you don't like to say this, but you kind of all failed. You kind of, God forbid, they don't go to an elite college. Oh, my God, it's unthinkable they don't go to college. And then, okay, not only do they have to go to an elite college, but they have to start tracking at an early age

• 16:28Scott Galloway?

  in this incredibly competitive economy. Where if they want to live in a city, it's incredibly expensive. A house is incredibly expensive. If they're a male, they need to demonstrate economic viability right away to be attractive to a mate. And it's getting harder and harder in an education system that, quite frankly, I think is biased towards, towards females. And so you start tracking and, and, and it used to be kind of the 11th grade. You started thinking about college. And if you were in the top third or half of your class in California, you could go to UCLA, which I did, which had a 76% admissions rate. Now, if you aspire to have your kid go to UCLA or Berkeley, as I did, I start putting them on a track when they're 11.

• 17:09Scott Galloway?

  You know, I'm like, all right, we got to start tracking because one false move, one bad year. One hiccup or slowdown from the achievement wheel. And I failed as a parent because they're not going to get into UCLA or MIT and end up at Google. It's I the the economy, I think what you're saying is so powerful, the context, the pressure, it's just gone up for everywhere. And I want to move to a little bit around societal solutions. If if parents are just reacting to the context and the environment they're in, what are some of the societal fixes such that we can we can take down the temperature in these households?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Well, when I first sold this book, the book proposal in 2019, I thought that shifting parents' focus from the short term achievement goals like the Friday Spanish quiz to larger goals like instilling this sense of mattering, putting the buffers back in place to absorb some of the stress in the environment, I thought this was going to be a hard sell. I thought parents were going to say, you know, I don't buy it. I want parents are desperate. And I could say this as the mother of three teenagers. We are living through a very difficult time to parent. And I think what you are talking about with the, you know, getting the kid into the elite

• 18:32Speaker 03

  college, just to underscore it, parents are betting big that that brand name will act as a kind of life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty. But unfortunately, like you said, putting on that life vest, tracking them so early is unfortunately drowning too many of the kids that we are trying to protect. So when you think about the bigger questions, the bigger societal questions, I mean, some people, and I don't know that I agree with this, have proposed, you know, a lot of the issues that these kids in the top 25% of household incomes are facing is because we live in these super zip codes, right?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Areas of the country, hundreds of of towns and cities and areas where it's predominantly, you know, upper middle class Americans, college educated, all have

• 19:29Scott Galloway?

  High achievers.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  High achievers, all with the same sort of external definition of success. And so to sort of stick out in those environments, you really have to break your neck. And so I would say societally, I think it's time to start. Pointing to widening the definition of success. Because I'm sure you have found this, I have found this. Just because you go to Harvard doesn't mean your life is going to work out. Just because you go to a small liberal arts college that nobody's heard of, doesn't mean your life isn't going to work out in the most magnificent way. And so I think if we can, as parents, zoom out and think about, yes, we want the safety net. I'm saying do not have ambitions for your kids. I am saying be ambitious for more.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I think we, I think our ambition has been too narrow. It's not about the brand name college, particularly going into the world as uncertain as it is today. If we really want safety nets, the safety nets come in our relationships. One of the biggest findings in my book that really was surprising to me was that according to decades worth of resilience research, a child's resilience rests fundamentally on their primary caregiver's resilience. And a, and the primary caregiver's resilience rests fundamentally on their relationships, the depth of their relationships.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  So if we really want resilience and, and safeguarding our kids' future, we should be focusing on how they can build these deep, deep relationships that will carry them through when they need it.

• 21:13Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 21:18Scott Galloway?

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• 22:02Scott Galloway?

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• 22:35Scott Galloway?

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• 23:47Scott Galloway?

  This is a topic I'm passionate about. And what I, what I have, or a lot of the research I've reviewed says is that while boys are physically stronger, girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. That when, if you look at single parent households, girls have similar outcomes as dual parent households. Boys have dramatically worse outcomes. The moment they're in a single parent household, it's usually, it's usually the mom that has custody and they lose the male role model, which is sort of the singular point of failure. If you were to reverse engineer to, to when young boys come off the tracks. It looks as if you segmented by economic class. Did you segment by gender in these households in terms of outcomes for girls and boys and the pressures they face?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  I did look at the genders and, and one of the things that I found enlightening, I have two teenage boys and a teenage daughter. And what I have found to be critical in teaching our boys, which our girls seem to get because they are socialized for this, is this idea of healthy interdependence. And so as parents, we think our role is, and it is, to raise strong, independent kids. Absolutely. I want my kids to be able to, you know, survive without me. But there is a deeper goal if we really want to protect the mental health and wellbeing of our kids, particularly our boys. And that is healthy interdependence.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  That is teaching them that they are worthy of leaning on others for support. And also that they should, they have an obligation to be that source of support for others. And the kids that-

• 25:31Scott Galloway?

  I just want to push, I just want to push pause there because I like that in theory. I have a 15 year old boy, you know, my boy is, as I'm sure your kids are, you know, everything became about them when they were born. And it just turned on a, God reached into my soul, flipped on a switch and then they're kind of it for me. And I would love it if my 15 year old, I try and tell my 15 year old, you're the big brother, you need to be the bigger man, you know, you know, try and teach him empathy. Talk about his role in the world and how he can make others feel better and that others should be able to depend on him. And he gets that and he's picking up on it. I would kill- Kill for my 15 year old to come and ask me for advice, to lean on me. And he doesn't.

• 26:15Scott Galloway?

  And I don't, I don't see him leaning on anybody. I don't see him, as far as I can tell, he doesn't go to anyone for advice or talk to anyone in very open, open and transparent ways about the challenges a 15 year old boy faces. So how do you, I, I get it in theory. I would posit that most 15 year old boys aren't sharing their emotions, aren't depending on other people. They see that as a, I don't know, they see it as a sign of weakness or they're just, you know, they don't go there. How do you, how do you train or how do you parent a boy into being more reliant on others? And teaching them or encouraging them to be, to, to seek out help from their relationships?

• 26:58Speaker 03

  So I would start with modeling. And I think it's important for the male figures in a boy's life, whether it's a father or an uncle or an adult friend in the neighborhood, a neighbor. You know, I, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that you very generously tweeted out about the role of fathers and the role of male figures and how important it is if we are going to help our boys build out emotional lives, if they are going to, if we're going to teach them healthy interdependence. The men in their lives have to lead the way so that it's not considered a female thing. And I'll tell you what we've done in our house.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  My husband is open about, he has very deep male relationships that have, that date back to elementary school. And he models out loud in front of my kids, asking for advice, asking for help for things, talking about things that are, you know, an issue at work or, you know, something that he's struggling within the family, and he models it in front of my boys. And we have said explicitly to my boys and to my daughter, that these are people. So we have like a handful of families that we're extremely close to, that no matter what's going on,

• 28:16Speaker 03

  you have full authority to talk about anything, including things within our house with other people. We don't feel this deep sense of privacy. We want you to have others. If you don't feel like you could come to dad and me, these are the people, these are the trusted adults in your life that you can lean on. Another thing that I think we can talk about with our kids are what gets in the way of building these healthy, interdependent relationships, right? It takes courage. But in these hyper-competitive environments, envy can sometimes get in the way. And I think we have to name the elephant in the room. I think we have to explain to our kids when they maybe don't lean on their peers is to

• 28:59Speaker 03

  talk about how universal this feeling is of envy, that you don't, you know, that everybody feels it. We don't have to judge ourselves for how we fear, feel it, but we have to hold ourselves accountable. And that we shouldn't let these uncomfortable feelings get in the way of building deep, healthy relationships. Anyway, I can tell you what I've done as a mother with my daughter. She was in middle school and she had just gotten a paper back from her English teacher, and she's a very good writer, and she was disappointed by all the marks on her, on her paper. So I marched her over to my computer and I showed her the first article I submitted to the Washington Post Science section, like 10 years ago.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  And I showed her all the red marks. And she said, "Oh, my God, this is horrible. I can't believe they still let you write for them." And I said, "Yes, I was initially embarrassed to need all that help, but really, the way I read it is that they wanted to invest in me." So I guess what I'm trying to say is, the parents that I met and, and what I've tried to institute in my own life is to help our kids adopt an interdependent mindset where we can go to others, where we can ask for help, and then to give them that skill set. And the skill set we can give is, is by, as, you know, in our hyper-individualistic culture,

• 30:22Speaker 03

  to be counter-cultural, to actually be the person who's asking for advice or offer advice and kind of push through.

• 30:31Scott Galloway?

  What role do schools play in all of this?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Well, they do play a role. I mean, I have yet to meet an educator who doesn't have the best interest of the students at heart. You know, most educators are not going in it for the money. They're going in it for their purpose, which is to, you know, help our society by helping our next generation.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  But I think schools, you know, there are a few things that I I traveled, I was lucky to travel at a bunch of schools around the country. And I saw some of the countercultural things they were doing, which was like we talked about earlier, you know, naming what gets in the way of relationships, focusing, you know, on relationships over rigor, making room in the schedule for teachers and students to have a connection, a deep connection, so that they could sort of develop this like wonderful, warm lab of learning. I mean, another thing I think schools need to do is to focus on teacher mattering.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Teachers, just like the the primary caregiver, needs to be firm and sturdy for to be a first responder to our kids' struggles. And I think as a society, we have not taken care of our teachers. So, you know, I think one obvious step is to prioritize teacher mattering, to prioritize their value. I think schools can can do, and and many schools are doing this, they're they're trying to limit this hyper competition. They are no longer having kids wear their college sweatshirts on, you know, College Acceptance Day. They are helping to make sure, creating a culture where every kid feels valued in the community.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  They are working hard to match the adults in the school community with one child, so that each child has an adult that they feel values them and knows them, and someone they could turn to for support.

• 32:31Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and just as I'll put forward a thesis and you tell me where I, you know, you think I have it right or wrong, but just as I agree with you, primary and high school teachers are kind of the heroes, or the unsung heroes, and more an additional investment.

• 32:47Scott Galloway?

  I feel as if there's villains here and the villains are me and my colleagues. And that is a lot of this pressure that has been injected into middle class and upper middle class and and upper income households, much less lower income households. Is that me and my colleagues are drunk on exclusivity and we've taken UCLA's acceptance rate from 76% when I applied to 9%. And the alumni and the faculty and the leadership and the donors love it because once I have my degree, it goes up in value, the harder it gets. And that is, we have engaged in a business strategy of artificial supply. There's no excuse for Harvard and Princeton with their endowments to limit their freshman class sizes as small as they are.

• 33:30Scott Galloway?

  And the fact that we have turned this into literally the Hunger Games for households has transitioned kind of spring of your or fall of your senior year from a time of nervousness and joy when all my friends were applying to college to literally anxiety and and despair. And it's because me and my colleagues have decided we're Chanel bags, not public servants. What are your thoughts?

• 33:55Speaker 03

  I totally agree with you. Danielle Markovitz wrote in his book, The Meritocracy Trap, that as that we should demand schools with huge endowments like Harvard, like Yale, to actually act like charitable organizations. We give them tax breaks like the nonprofits that they get the status of. And so they should, they should accept more students in the top, you know, the, sorry, they should accept more students in the lower 30%. They should act as what, you know, the way they're intended, which is to ensure social mobility. And they're not acting this way and yet they're still getting the tax benefits. They are still getting all the benefits of a charitable organization without acting

• 34:40Speaker 03

  like one. I couldn't agree more.

• 34:43Scott Galloway?

  There is some nuance there and that is, if you look at Harvard, I actually think that the Ivy League has done a good job of reaching into lower income homes, of reaching into, in 1960, there were 15 blacks at Harvard, Princeton and Yale total, not 15%, but 15 people. This year, the freshman class at Harvard will be 51% non-white.

• 35:04Scott Galloway?

  But here's my thing. This is Vaseline that we rub over the lens of our corruption because reshuffling the elites by income and race is still elitism. It's not about who at this point. It's about more. We let in rich kids and freakishly remarkable kids from middle and low income households. And I can prove to every one of us that, you know, 99% of our kids are not in the top 1%. So I feel as if the diversity and the income equalization that's taken place is basically just a head fake, that it's still elitism. It's just we feel better about ourselves because the elites that we give, you know, entrance to look more like America, which is great.

• 35:45Scott Galloway?

  If you still have, you know, the GDP of Costa Rica as an endowment and you're not expanding your freshman class, I mean, it strikes me, you should lose your nonprofit status. That the diversity is a great thing, but it's still elitism, that it just needs to be dramatically, dramatically, and I think you said this, more.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  So let me ask you, let me run an idea by you that I've been talking about with some colleagues. You know, we, one of the things that I found, the kids who were struggling the most were the kids who felt like their worth was contingent. The other group were the kids who never felt like anyone depended on them, right? They were just focused on their own resume. What if top, I don't know, the top 25 colleges or something like that? What if we as a society decide for a year, every young person has a mandate to go out into the world and make an impact? You could go with your cohort that gets into Duke or Harvard.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  They could, you know, take over a hotel in the area or, you know, have this sort of satellite campus, this cohort of students that are off campus, doing some good, seeing the world, making an impact and also taking classes and then bringing them back onto the campus at some point. But that there are, I think there are ways we can be creative. We have seen that online school works. It's not ideal, but it works. And we could find better ways of expanding these classes.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Faster than waiting to build huge, you know, expanding campuses and waiting five to 10 years to build buildings. Finding creative solutions, giving these high achieving kids a chance to really make an impact on the world a year of their life in a cohort. So they would be making friends with the classmates they'd be with for four years in some other area of the United States and also learning.

• 37:47Scott Galloway?

  I love that. There's a big notion or a big movement towards a gap year. I'm actually working with Chris Whittle, who is sort of this iconic entrepreneur in education and he's thinking about, you know, trying to redefine a gap year, especially, I find that especially young men who just mature later really would benefit from a year in the agency of something bigger than them for a year between high school and college. I'm also a big advocate, and it's easy for me to say that I've aged out, I'm a big advocate of national compulsory service where people can serve in the agency of their country, not necessarily the military, but senior care, disaster relief, whatever it might be, and meet kids from different economic classes, different sexual orientation, and just start

• 38:31Scott Galloway?

  developing empathy because I find that we're just sequestering from each other by economic weight class and it's not, it's not good for America. The exposure to something bigger and better than yourself, a lot of schools do a good job of that. They, they do send people, they give them opportunities for volunteer work, but again, it's just more reshuffling the elites. I find that, you know, you brought up some really interesting things, remote work or remote schooling. It's not as good. But the dirty secret as someone who's taught 5,500 students over 22 years is that a third of my sessions where there's not a lot of interaction could probably be taken online with a very minimal degradation in quality. And just taking a third of sessions online, just using the campus during summer and at

• 39:16Scott Galloway?

  night, you increase the supply of freshman seats by 50%. But they're not interested in doing it because what does it mean? It means that we're no longer number four in, you know, the Forbes, you know, US News and World Report, most elite colleges, and we can't raise our prices faster than inflation with this ultimate strategy of what I call the Louis Vuitton strategy of artificially constraining supply.

• 39:44Scott Galloway?

  You know, you you get to see this through the lens of research and as a parent. If there's one or two pieces of advice you give to new parents around ensuring they don't get, what are the early signs of that toxic environment kind of evolving in a household?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so researchers have found, and I I do believe it's gotten younger than than I think the research has not caught up with the current day culture. But the research that we have shows that around seventh grade is when these, you know, the the signs that kids are feeling over pressured pressured really start to come to fruition, and that's when they feel excessive envy from their peers. They're making constant social comparisons. It's getting in the way of their friendships. You know, it's it's when they are, you know, around that time, right? Is when they're developing their sense of self and they're figuring out who they are compared to their peers.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  And so that's a way, you know, parents can be on the lookout and actually have these conversations about how social comparison is normal. We all feel it. We don't have to hold ourselves accountable and feel shame for feeling it, but we do for how we act on it. So helping to guide kids, getting in there early to prevent these feelings from overwhelming them and and ruining their relationships. Another thing I would say to parents, again, we said this earlier, is that the number one intervention for any child in distress, according to decades of resilience research, is to make sure the primary caregiver's well being, support system is intact because

• 41:26Speaker 03

  the child's resilience rests on the adult's resilience. And unfortunately, we live in a society. It's, you know, the the adults in these communities that I visited, they all had friends. What many of them didn't have was time to develop the depth of Relationship that they needed with people so that their friends could be a source of support when they needed it. So it's not about putting your oxygen mask on first. It's really about surrounding yourself with people in your life who know you intimately, who you could be vulnerable with, who know you and can put the mask on for you when they see you struggling to step in.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  That's really what healthy interdependence looks like. And we don't have that in our culture, particularly in relatively affluent communities, because there is this, you know, this need for facade to look accomplished. You know, one woman I interviewed in DC said to me, she was a consultant, and she said, I advise and problem solve for a living, and it's embarrassing to think I can't problem solve the issues in my own house. But what I would say to parents is all parents can unite on this universal feeling of, you know, wanting to be there as first responders to our kids' struggles.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  And in order to do that, we need to be there, sort of arm in arm, helping each other through these things.

• 43:01Scott Galloway?

  So you talk about this sort of toxic comparison or toxic benchmarking that starts to happen in this kind of seventh grade, if you will. For me, toxic benchmarking is just, the perfect description of that is Instagram. Can you, did you look at the correlation between social media usage in this type of toxic environment in households?

• 43:24Speaker 03

  So what I have found, and this is, you know, a debate now in the, in the research community, but where I come out on this is that I think social media is certainly a magnifier and an accelerant to these toxic pressures, but it's not the root of it.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  The root of it is in, we are in as a, as a culture, the root of this is a lack of mattering universally, a, a lack of feeling valued for who we are at our core. We feel valued now for what we achieve, how much money we make. Society tells us certain people matter more, those, you know, influencers matter more, those with the most likes matter more. And we need that. So what I see as social media crisis is a crisis of mattering. And that goes much deeper than social media.

• 44:19Scott Galloway?

  Jennifer B. Wallace is an award winning journalist and social commentator covering parenting and lifestyle trends. Her new book, Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It, investigates the deep roots of toxic achievement culture and provides a toolkit for parents and their children. Jennifer is also a regular contributor to publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She joins us from her vacation home, second home, friend's home in the Hamptons in Bridgehampton. Jennifer, when we saw this work, we knew we wanted to have you on. It's something that we're passionate about. We just appreciate your good work around this issue and, and are excited to have you on and bring some sunlight to your good work.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 45:07Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shaver. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop She Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

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