Our oldest child started 8th grade this year. For our school district, this is also the last year of middle school; next year, they'll make the leap to high school proper. It's about the age when the academics ease into the forefront, putting grades front-and-center in the four-year quest towards a worthy college.
When the kids were babies, my spouse and I had discussed—and firmly decided against—cutthroat academic competition. The Bay Area is certainly still a competitive place, but there are degrees of intensity, and we chose to avoid the renowned hotspots like Palo Alto, Cupertino, and Fremont. Still, the conversations around rigorous academic extracurriculars are unavoidable: summer prep classes, select sports with high "college ROI," weekend tutoring, volunteering, etc.
All of us parents will readily concede that we didn't stuff our own teenage schedules with neverending activities, but we all feel trapped in this educational tragedy of the commons. The premium placed on a college degree, though, raises the stakes. It's a stressful ordeal—for both the parents and the children.
I picked up Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It to read about how others deal with this exhausting race of achievement.
Immediately, the book identifies and empathizes with toxic achievement culture. It shares even more extreme examples, focusing on affluent neighborhoods where household wealth—rather than providing a safety net—instead amplifies academics as status. The author's solution is to focus on intrinsic motivation, to find "mattering" and purpose over comparisons and collegiate brand names. The strongest example in the book follows the arc of a disaffected student who, after volunteering for a local wilderness rescue team, internalized his goal of helping others. He used that motivation to reorient his attitude towards schoolwork, and it set a north star for his eventual field of study.
But the tell is that the substantive examples in the book… all end happily. Despite the admonishment against achievement culture, the book could not help itself in reassuring parents that these noble motivators do not distract. Rather, they can serve to keep kids on track to get kids into prestigious universities. That volunteer who found purpose by helping others? He improved his grades and landed at UCLA, already eyeing a pre-med track. How about a trio of high-achieving girls, all best friends, competing for a single editor-in-chief role in the school newspaper? The faculty sponsor defused their competition by assigning meaningful editor roles to each student, ensuring they garner the proper experience to burnish their college admission essays.
After all, it's the parents who opt their kids into intensity. We are the ones who, years before our kids even understand what college is, enroll them in Montessori programs and afterschool music lessons and mind-numbing Kumon classes[1]. We ask each other for tips and dutifully follow the advice to try to give our kids a leg up on the competition. With so much of our own efforts absorbed into the process, college admissions are unabashedly a status symbol for parents as much as they are for the children.
I am reminded of how this dynamic is magnified within the intense educational systems found in many parts of Asia. For some countries like China and Korea, college placements are concentrated down to a singular examination: the gaokao for Chinese students, the CSAT for Korean high schoolers. Since the best companies recruit disproportionately from elite universities—to the point of ranking new grad candidates based on school brands—the university and its entrance exam really do have major career implications.
Contrast these massively consequential exams with the wide nets that major corporations cast for talent in our American system, in addition to the robust set of smaller companies and nascent startups that also recruit from all backgrounds. When we talked with friends and family in Asia this past summer, many of them held intense curiosity about the American school ecosystem. A couple even idly mused on the possibility of sending their kids overseas for high school.
It's not quite accurate to say that we're living through our children—many of the parents we know are themselves are alumni of top universities, when they were less competitive than they are today—but rather that their acceptance into an elite college in some way validates our parental oversight.
In group chats and casual Slack channels, my spouse and I often catch ourselves sucked into academic discussions more than we want. Parents are of course friendly and helpful, but there's that pervasive vibe of competition, hints of tiger parenting that we all feel. We thought we had opted out of the intensity, but the reality of raising kids has us searching for proof that our kids will be fine, that both parent and child feel like it's… enough.
Another book explicitly makes this argument: Restoring Childhood examines the data behind why kids are stressed. It concludes that while it's easy to blame smartphones and social media, a more damning culprit is overbearing adults, micromanaging their children. ↩︎
