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Informationen zum Autor Jennifer Breheny Wallace Klappentext "In Never Enough, reporter Jennifer Breheny Wallace investigates the deep roots of toxic achievement culture. Drawing on interviews with families, educators, and psychologists, she offers a humane view of the crisis plaguing today's teens and a practical framework for how to help"-- Leseprobe 1 Why Are Our Kids "At Risk"? Life Inside the Pressure Cooker Amanda should have felt elated: She was a varsity athlete, the president of the debate club, and about to graduate from her competitive high school with top grades. She had just received an early acceptance letter to her college of choice, an elite university with an admissions rate of a mere 10 percent. It had taken six full years of sacrifice and singular focus to finally reach this moment. Now she could do anything. She'd made it. But instead of overwhelming pride, what she remembers is shock and anxiety. The Saturday after receiving her college acceptance, she brought a bottle of Smirnoff vodka to a friend's house and partied all night-not to celebrate, but to numb a quiet desperation she couldn't quite name. Amanda grew up on the West Coast in a small, relatively affluent town reminiscent of so many of the communities around the country I visited while researching this book: a beautiful downtown kept up by high taxes, parents who work long hours in white-collar professions, kids who work just as hard on their homework and devote their weekends to traveling club sports. As a child, Amanda loved school. She was "great at being a student," she told me, and she enjoyed learning-until seventh grade arrived. "Then people started telling me that I had to do this activity or take that class for my college application, and life became about setting yourself up early to get into the best college you could," she said. For four long years of high school, Amanda maintained an intense schedule filled with year-round sports, after-school clubs that focused on serving the underprivileged in her community, and a maxed-out course load of honors and AP classes. Her parents had instilled a strong work ethic in her and her siblings. Her dad worked twelve-hour days as a lawyer at a tech company, while her mother volunteered in various leadership positions for the PTA. Their house was always impeccably maintained. Amanda remembers the frenzy that would take place whenever guests were coming over, even just to drop something off-everything had to be exactly right. Holidays were particularly serious affairs, prompting her mother to spend weeks decorating, striving to create storybook memories for her kids. Even family vacations were planned with the same methodical precision-nothing left to chance. "Achievement in all areas of our lives was what mattered most to my parents," she said. When it came to Amanda's school performance, her parents were careful not to make the conversation directly about grades. Instead, Amanda said, "it was more subtle, under the guise of 'You're not fulfilling your potential.'" Bringing home a C or even a B on an assignment would be met with a quiet, buttoned-up coldness. Their message was clear, she said, even without being explicit: We know you can do better. Many of her friends felt the same way. "We live in a community where your grades, how you look, your weight, where you travel, what your house looks like-everything has to be the best, to be perfect, and to look effortless," said Amanda. Classes at the high school were competitive and demanding, she recalled. Teachers expected a high level of performance from their students, as did coaches during after-school practice. Most days, it looked like Amanda could juggle it all-until suddenly she couldn't. By the end of junior year of high school, with college applications looming and the pressure mounting, Amanda would stay up late working, then lie awake, gnawe...
