Book Review: Never Enough
Jennifer Wallace's exploration of competitive parenting and its tragic outcomes
While it did not get as much press when it came out as Jonathan Haidt’s wildly hyped book recently did, Jennifer Wallace’s 2023 book - Never Enough - is probably a more critical resource for today’s very well-educated parents. Many of these parents also read Substack pubs, hence my interest in getting more notice here for her work.
The essential provocation of Wallace’s research is that elite zip codes and their high-achieving professional parents have unwittingly created a culture of hyper-individualistic teenage/young adult over-achievement driven by their own status anxieties.
Parents, not smartphones, are the biggest problem in these homes.
Wallace eloquently unpacks what has become an upper-middle-class tragedy and deftly includes her own story of catching herself about to fall into the same pattern with her own children. This pattern of chasing every possible achievement advantage is one my wife and I have dodged multiple times raising our own kids in or near America’s high-strung Super Zips (the term invented by Charles Murray and deployed for DIY public understanding by the Washington Post back in 2013).1
Super Zips are the 3-4 million households with elite education and income that represent a tiny 2.4% of U.S. households.2 Parents in these privileged zip codes are raising their kids very differently than the rest of America’s parents. While it is not a mass market problem, for sure, it is a profoundly ironic one for kids who have so much privilege. Curiously, Wallace’s book is a deep dive into this new American aristocracy, the one supposedly built on merit (or so their parents desperately want to believe).
Our fully realized consumer society entices today’s ‘meritocratic’ and cash-rich elite to push their kids excessively in a quest for increasingly rare status markers - like an Ivy League degree. It goads ordinary upper-middle-class parents like me to join in this elitist race to nowhere. A PhD in social science is an expensive but very useful inoculation against any rat race.
And here is what it feels like for the teenage student in these communities, using Wallace’s research -
‘My friends and I worked so hard all week that we felt like we deserved to let go,’ she said. They’d binge drink, sometimes to the point of blacking out. Amanda said there was a tacit agreement in town between some parents and their teens that you could do whatever you wanted on the weekends as long as you were performing during the week. Some parents, she told me, would supply the booze and even join them in the drinking.3
In the vastly less hyper-competitive 1980s, I sensed that the kids who were partying like this back then were usually underachieving, not overachieving, in school. I never encountered 4.0 GPA nerds partying like this, at least. We had no real dissatisfaction at school (other than intellectual boredom at times). We were not that stressed about school at all. It was super easy. I was much more stressed about my romantic incompetence.
The teen self-destruction in elite households goes even further than binge drinking and light drug use. Kids in these Super Zips are occasionally killing themselves if they feel no hope of fulfilling perfectionist and statistically unrealistic ideals and goals (pushed on them by their parents).
“I had this desperate feeling like I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she recalled. “I was completely exhausted and just wanted to end it. I have felt like I had to be perfect, or people wouldn’t love me.”4
Wallace describes a quiet, invisible hell for these kids, living in gated neighborhoods with pushy, status-seeking parents. It reminds me a lot of Evelyn Waugh’s descriptions of the invisible hell of growing up in a royal family after World War I, as the British aristocracy was declining in wealth and public status. The general public would probably not sympathize at all with the kids Wallace depicts, but their emotional torture chamber of elite expectations and ‘corrections’ is still real.
Wallace sums up the feeling kids have in these elite homes later on very succinctly,
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.5
When I first read this, my brain immediately leaped to the utter conditionality of one’s position in the modern, private-sector workplace (including media companies). Ironically, the horrendously lonely and individualistic pressure that educated parents put on their kids in these Super Zips prepares them for a pressure-cooker, time-urgent, chaotic world of professional work - a world the parents themselves are experiencing as they are parenting.
Wallace describes the social origins of elite parental anxiety well:
Parents are reacting anxiously to a hypercompetitive world, with intense academic pressures, extreme inequality, and innovations like social media that feed unrealistic ideals of how we should look and perform..6
Yet, the most insightful cause she unpacks is the perceived threat of social decline at the top of America’s class pyramid. Interestingly, though, Wallace does not point to parents’ own less-than-secure workplace experiences as a significant cause of their anxiety over their children’s futures. This income anxiety may be the root cause of much of their status anxiety on behalf of their children’s future. I have lived with this upper-middle-class anxiety over status decline from my mid-30s until very recently when my business book enabled the success of my current consultancy. My father’s peak income in the mid-1990s (when he was my current age) was 40% higher than my current income, adjusted for inflation. This is academic to me now, but it was not ten years ago! I also initially experienced a client-facing status decline as a consumer researcher compared to my corporate attorney father. Unclear client impact (the bullshit jobs problem). More disrespectful clients at the bottom of corporate status hierarchies. Market research (where I started) is also an unregulated shitshow of ego insecurity, poor training, and corporate politics. It screams anything but a high social status. The law is a regulated space. You have to follow the law. Sort of.
My own experience with status insecurity and the threat of status loss (and that of other recovered academics) leads me to suspect there may be a quietly unconscious projection going on with some of the elite parents Wallace interviewed - ‘my career has been so unstable and fraught that my kid needs to work even harder than I did in school.’ Parent-as-doomsayer.
While the Depression produced a large cohort of American parents pushing their kids to do better than they did economically, their children (the Baby Boomers) largely pulled off this relative SES improvement (with enormous federal assistance behind the scenes). Whether or not Baby Boomers’ social mobility made them happier than their parents is a separate issue. But they did become better off socio-economically, on average.
What is interesting to me reading Wallace’s book is that, during the period in which elite Baby Boomer and Gen X parents appeared on the parenting scene 1990-2010, the entire upper-middle-class has grown as a proportion of the U.S. population (as my own Census analytics have shown elsewhere).7 There has been a de facto surge in the sheer number of upper-middle-class kids chasing a fixed set of elite college slots (as but one status marker with too much demand and not enough supply). The scarcity perception Wallace documents is empirically genuine but is primarily the result of collectively unmanaged educational and income inequalities in which too many people have been seduced into chasing pseudo-elite social status. That includes me as a child of the nouveau riche (i.e., young money) who chases tenured academic status. I’m part of the annoying riff-raff.
A Solution for Elitist Parenting Mania
Wallace spends 2/3 of her book exploring a solution to this elite culture of over-achieving stress and anxiety - something called “mattering.” She acknowledges that the term is not hers but the invention of psychologist Morris Rosenberg in 1981. Multiple other psychologists and clinicians have helped re-awaken the term as a therapeutic and community-based intervention in the last 10-15 years (e.g., Gordon Flett, Gregory Elliott, and others).
Wallace defines mattering as “the feeling that we are valued and add value to others.”
If ‘mattering’ is too clunky, hippie-dippie, or weird for you, just replace it with “belonging” as you read her book, and you will either a) now get it or b) discover you are simply not the audience for this book. I can think of a lot of conservative, cranky, old white men who are not the audience for this book. A lot.
Both parents and their kids in America’s Super Zips have caved to a maximally status-oriented lifestyle - a modern Jay Gatbsy performance of incredible shallowness:
Instead of attaching to people, they attach to material goods and status markers to fill the void and to try to get the emotional security they’re lacking.8
Wallace shares a few case studies of schools and towns pushing back against intensive parenting in these elite zip codes. A Jesuit school in Cleveland, Ohio folds in daily ritual to humble its students:
Each day, the entire school community pauses for a five-minute daily reflection. …At 2:00pm, clases stop, the lghts go off and every student rests his head onhis desk, closes his eyes and lsitens as someone from the administration, faculty, staff or student body talks over the PA about a need in the world…These reflections widen the students’ world and instill compassion. 9
Ritualizing concern for the external world beyond the self is pretty ingenious and should be a national practice like saluting the American flag used to be. Wallace’s portrait of St. Ignatius reminded me vaguely of my nonsectarian private school in the 1980s. Ironically, the deep sense of community and mattering I felt there never re-appeared in the same way until I set up my own business in 2017, decades later. In between, I drifted around pursuing my own goals and income and did ‘work’ that largely did not ‘matter’ or lead to a deep feeling of mattering. The world beyond the walls of that high school was incredibly disappointing by comparison.
One of Wallace’s most intriguing case studies of the mattering movement is the town of Wilton, Connecticut, where two full-time, stressed-out, anxious Moms accidentally broke through their privacy-protected status anxiety and shared their family’s struggles in a mental health training session. They led a movement to get the community’s children more socially connected.
Our American obsession with privacy, especially our children’s privacy, is one of the most absurd barriers to getting children better connected. It also prevents stressed-out, ‘intensive’ parents from seeing that they are part of a social system of elite status anxiety…one they can collectively choose to abandon or at least fight against.
As Wallace herself says near the end,
Another big lesson I learned in my reporting was that people need to know they matter more than they need their privacy.10
The book’s most impactful line comes near the very end when Wallace deftly connects a lack of mattering and social belonging to its nasty, anti-social consequences in children’s lives:
They question their importance, their significance, their value, and this comes out in their actions as hyper-competition, a lack of civility, or anger.11
When humans become alienated in a prison of extreme expectation, they shut out the world and forget how to belong.
The result is a cohort of shadow adults.
Like Wallace, I know we can do far better than this.
You can find the book now on Amazon.com or click the cover image below:
Dr. Charles Murray has shared a public data file on SuperZips and discusses them at length in his book - Coming Apart. https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/superzips-and-the-rest-of-americas-zip-codes/
My population analysis of 2012 U.S. Census data and Dr. Murray’s digested Census dataset on the Super Zips.
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 4
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 5
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 53
Wallace, Never Enough, p.43
My definition does not line up perfectly with Charles Murray and AEI, but it is very similar and corroborates the barbell inequality trend he and so many others have documented
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 121
Wallace, Never Enough, p.195-197
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 223
Wallace, Never Enough, p. 229
James,
This is super interesting to me as I'm writing a post for Saturday about assortative mating. My kids are 36, 33, and 30 and never experienced that type of pressure. So i can't speak to what's going on with parents go kids pre-college today.
I'm going to get Jennifer's book and take a look. Thanks for the recommendation.