Podcast Episode 316: Mattering Matters: Boosting Your Kid’s Self-Worth in a High Pressure World Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

JoAnn

Welcome to the No Guilt Mom podcast. I’m your host JoAnn Crohn joined here by the lovely Brie Tucker. 

Brie Tucker 

Why hello, hello everybody. Magic! 

JoAnn 

Magic. my gosh, that’s a great entrance. I didn’t even know you were there. I didn’t. didn’t. Not here. my gosh. It’s like we’re playing peekaboo. We are. 

Brie Tucker

It’s a magical day. I know, right? Like here, not here. Here, not here. I was gonna say it works 

on a six month old. Why is it not entertaining to you? 

JoAnn 

It does. my gosh. Babies. I love it. There’s like, you can just make them happy by going, They’re like, It’s amazing. My niece is like at the cutest stage right now. At five months old. my gosh. First, she has all the drool coming out, which you don’t remember because they’re not in much pictures. All that drool of teething and everything. Yeah. Well, with. yeah. 

Brie Tucker 

Right? I remember the drool. no. I had lots and lots of wet onesies. So maybe, maybe my kids 

drooled more than yours. 

JoAnn 

Mine drooled a lot. just, I get blocked it out of my memory and I didn’t remember it until my niece this weekend. I’m like, yeah, all the drool and like how I actually wore a black t-shirt and I’m like walking into restaurants. Of course there’s like spots right here on my shoulder, spots right here on my shoulder. I’m like, it’s fine. It’s worth it. It’s totally worth it with babies. 

Brie Tucker 

Yeah. Because you’re not in competition with anybody else. You do not need to be holding yourself up to anybody else. You are enjoying your life as is. 

JoAnn 

Exactly, which is what we’re talking about today with achievement pressure. Ha ha. Yes. Achievement pressure, especially how it relates to our kids because Bree and I see it a lot at our daughter’s high schools and all the pressure to get into college and get the good grades. And sometimes that pressure is perpetuated by friends’ parents. And my gosh, it’s insane. 

Brie Tucker 

Yeah. and society and the school and like so many places. And we’re not saying that there isn’t that competitiveness doesn’t have a good purpose. There are good purposes for it. But when it starts to break down your kid’s no bueno. 

JoAnn 

yeah. I have some theories for why it’s happening too, but I’ll share those for the outro. After the interview, stick around. Joanne has some theories, but our guest today is someone that actually we put out there into podcast world that we wanted her on the podcast. Probably about a year ago, we started mentioning her and her book. 

Brie Tucker 

okay then. 

JoAnn 

it is Jennifer Wallace. writes the book, Never Enough. I listened to this on Audible during my walks and like I use so much out of this book in my coaching and also in our balance community. But Jennifer Wallace is an award winning journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Never Enough When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. She’s the mom to three teenagers living in New York City, which you’ll hear her describe in this interview. And we hope you enjoy our interview. 

INTRO MUSIC

JoAnn 

Where are you at Jenny? Where what state are you in? 

Jennifer Wallace 

New York City.

Brie Tucker 

We were just there a couple weeks ago.

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, we’re raising our three teens here.I have a 19, he’ll be 19 in a week, and then a 17 year old and a 14 year old.

Brie Tucker 

Okay.

JoAnn 

So how is that raising kids in the city? Because a lot of our friends who we talk to, they’re like, yeah, we lived in the city, but then we moved out to the suburbs because it was too hard. Like, what do you feel about it?

Jennifer Wallace 

So I grew up in the suburbs and I love this city. I knew when I was four, visiting my dad in the office here in New York City, that these were my people. And I have to say my kids love it. It’s really, it exposes them to a lot of good and not so great in the world. They have the Met, they have Central Park at their footsteps.

They have any kind of ethnic food that they might want. There is never a dull moment in New York. And I think my kids, know, particularly when they’re thinking about going away to college, they worry that they will be bored in a lot of towns because they are so used to growing up in this huge city that everything is always calm.

Brie Tucker 

tell them. Yeah, like I went to the town I went to college in in Missouri was so small. It was a huge deal when they got an Applebee’s. People were like, what is this monstrosity here?

JoAnn 

That’s like the party. So I was a camp counselor in the Poconos in Pennsylvania in college. And like the big thing to do on day offs was to drive to East Stroudsburg and go to the Walmart. I mean, that was it. So coming from New York City to a small town like that, I imagine your kids might have some board of issues.

Brie Tucker 

Something to say. They might have something to say about it.

Jennifer Wallace 

I think they’re not looking at small towns to be honest. I think they’ve set me straight. they are, yeah, anyway, it’s great. love raising kids in the city. I love not driving much. I drive just a teeny bit. They’re old enough now to take Ubers and taxis. So a lot of my time is my own.

JoAnn 

Yes.There.

Brie Tucker 

Isn’t that so nice when you get around to that again? Like having two kids that just started driving in the last year, I love it. It’s so nice to not be a taxi service anymore.

JoAnn 

Yeah.

Jennifer Wallace 

It is, and boy do they love, I have never had more errands run for me than last summer when I had two drivers just looking for things to do. And it was great.

JoAnn 

I am really looking forward to that. My daughter is 15, gonna turn 16 in December. And so we’re just about there, but my son’s 11. So we have some time still. We live in like the Chandler area, which is a very, very high achieving area, which is why I initially picked up your book because the pressure here on kids is ridiculous. And I imagine it’s the same for your kids too in New York City. how do you see the pressure really?

pushing against your kids there? Like what kind of things are they saying that they’re hearing from school, their friends?

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, so a big reason why I was drawn to write this book about achievement pressure was because I was noticing just how different my kid’s childhood was from my own growing up. Achievement mattered to my parents, but it did not define my childhood the way it seems to for so many young people today. Yes, there is a pressure to achieve here in New York City, but I will tell you that I traveled around the country and spoke with parents as far as Alaska.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

Jennifer Wallace 

And this pressure is not unique to New York City or to the coasts or to a few affluent communities. This is a pressure being felt everywhere. When I first started doing the research for the book, it was estimated that one in three children were contending with this excessive pressure to achieve. And now experts are saying it’s really one in two. One in two kids feel this excessive pressure.

Brie Tucker 

Same.I believe it.

Yeah, even though we try, right? Like I think so many of us set out to not put that kind of pressure on our kids to try to offset it. But I imagine as we’re going to find out in this episode, there’s only we, there are things we can do, but at the same time it can creep in even when you think you’re doing a great job.

JoAnn 

I believe it too.

Well, something that’s so, I agree that the pressure seems more intense for our kids than it ever did for us. I I went to a college prep high school where I felt the pressure was intense. But what my daughter is telling me, like her friends are saying, like there’s a friend who at lunch, she was freaking out over getting a 92 % on a test and then saying like her parents are gonna kill her and that now’s the time to go quote unquote, drink bleach.

which my daughter’s like, yeah, no, it’s crazy intense here. And I know that as parents, we really can have a big influence on how our kids react to that stress and that pressure. One of the ways you said in your book is about this concept of mattering. Can you describe this concept of mattering?

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, sure. So for the book, I went in search of who were the kids who were doing well, despite the pressure. What did they have in common? What did their parents focus on? What did their teachers focus on? How did they experience friendships and their sort of role in the larger community? And I found about a dozen or so things that these healthy strivers, as I call them in the book, had in common. And I detail it in the book, but it boiled down to mattering the kids who were doing well felt like they mattered for who they were deep at their core, away from their achievements and successes. The kids I met actually who were doing the worst fell into two camps. They were kids who felt like their mattering, their worth was tied to their achievements as if they only mattered when they made the 18, when they had the high GPA. And the other group, and this surprised me, but it makes sense, is kids who felt like they mattered to their parents.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

Jennifer Wallace 

but they were never relied on or depended on to give meaningful value back to anyone other than themselves and their own resumes. And so what these kids lacked is what I call in the book social proof that they mattered. They heard it in words, but they didn’t see in action how their little lives could contribute to anyone other than themselves. So what mattering is just to kind of pull back a little bit.

JoAnn 

Mmm.

Jennifer Wallace 

Mattering researchers who study it say that after the drive for food and shelter, it is the instinct to matter that drives human behavior for better or for worse. So when we feel like we matter, we want to show up to the world in positive ways. We want to give back. We want to be pro-social. We want to be good to the environment. We want to achieve. When we are chronically made to feel like we don’t matter or when our mattering feels contingent on something outside of ourselves,

Brie Tucker 

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Wallace 

We can turn against ourselves, become anxious and depressed, or act out an anger. School shooters, among the most tragic examples. I don’t matter. I’ll show you I matter. So, mattering really, it wasn’t that these high achievers, these healthy strivers didn’t have setbacks. They bombed tests. They had friends leave them out at parties. They didn’t make the A team. But what mattering did is it acted like a protective shield.

These setbacks were simply setbacks. They were not an indictment of their worth. And so actually, and it sounds counterintuitive, but what I found is that mattering and achievement are not mutually exclusive. That it is through mattering that our kids have that healthy fuel and confidence to reach for high goals. So many of the, for lack of a better word, unhealthy strivers that I met were so

concerned about failing and about what people would say about them if they failed, that they wouldn’t reach for high goals, that they knew they couldn’t 100 % meet. So mattering is really this healthy fuel, as I mentioned, that causes a child to reach high achievement.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

JoAnn 

That absolutely tracks with what I’ve seen going on. I I go back to my childhood and being raised in the 90s, there was a lot of achievement pressure then. I mean, not so much as now, but something you mentioned in your book is this conditional regard is when parents offer love when expectations are met and withdraw love and affection when they’re not. And it’s something that I think that many parents do unintentionally and also in the realm of

Brie Tucker 

Hmm.

JoAnn 

chat like when kids are younger, not quite as this achievement pressure stage, but if kids are like, you’re like, you’re grumpy right now. Mommy’s mad at you and they should withdraw that love and affection until they do something. What I saw in my high school years is I always bring it back to this story about the way I mattered as I was involved in this club called Odyssey of the Mind.

And it was a problem solving club, a competition. I was so into it. Like everything outside of school, I devoted to this because we had to do a performance around this problem we were solving. And then we had this spontaneous competition and I had gotten a C in my freshman year English and all of that was stripped away from me everywhere I mattered. It was like achievement was the only purpose of my life. And if I wasn’t achieving in a certain way,

then everything else I loved would get taken away from me. I mean, what do you say to those parents who have kids in extracurriculars and they are trying to get their kids to do well and achieve, but then they take away their extracurriculars from them? And I want to hear your answer right after this. I saw the clock. Did you see it go, Jenny? Did you see it? I was like, it was ad break, ad break. Okay, here we go.

Jennifer Wallace 

was good!

JoAnn 

So talking about kids and what they love to do outside of school, a very frequent thing I see happening, like my daughter tells me her friends’ parents do it to them, is parents will take away those extracurricular activities for kids if kids are not achieving in school. I really want to hear what you think about that.

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, well, I think you could probably guess how I feel about that. What I have found over and over again among the parents of the Healthy Stribers was that they got to know their kids uniquely, what made their kids ticked, what lit up their brains, like say in the book, getting a PhD in your kid. And the reason they did this was because they wanted to know their children’s strengths. And when you know your child’s strengths,

JoAnn 

I could guess, yeah.

Brie Tucker 

Tell us please. 

Jennifer Wallace 

you can help them use those strengths to overcome weaknesses. I mean, I’ll tell you one little anecdote. Let’s pretend you have a child who loves football or soccer, but who’s struggling a bit academically. So how can you use their love of soccer and football academically? So what I have learned from the research and from speaking with dozens of psychologists is that parents need to know that kids want to do well.

All children want to do well. So if your child isn’t performing, get curious, not furious. Could there be an underlying learning difference? Could there be a social issue in the classroom with their peers that’s hijacking their cognitive resources that should be spent paying attention? Or maybe they don’t have a good relationship with the teacher, which could interfere with learning and achievement.

So let’s say you got curious, not furious, and let’s say you haven’t discovered anything. Some kids just need more scaffolding. So here’s where you could bring in their love of sports into it. You could say to your child, you know what? I know you want to do well. I’m on your team. So let’s come together. Let’s draw up a game plan each week, each day, to help you reach the goals you want for your class. So come home, take a short break.

you know, check in with friends, have a snack. Then we’re going to sit at a desk. We’re going to put a bright light on it, clean desk, and we’re going to write a game plan of what you want to accomplish that day. What are your goals? Just like you would when you were setting yourself up for practicing for soccer or practicing for football. Let’s practice it here. Let’s make up that game plan together. So letting your kids know you are on their team, getting curious, not furious. What I call it in the book is,

You know, we can motivate our kids with dirty fuel. And I would use that example is dirty fuel, taking away things they love because they are not measuring that.

Brie Tucker

Mm-hmm.

JoAnn 

Dirty, I like that term dirty fuel.

Brie Tucker 

Interesting.

Jennifer Wallace 

So you can motivate a child in the short term with dirty fuel, right? I’m going to take, not going to play soccer. You’re not playing the game if you don’t get an A in the math test. Well, guess what? Children could get an A by cheating. Obviously that’s not what we want. So what I have found that parents of the healthy strivers use is what I call clean fuel. So again, it is letting your child know you are on their team, helping them.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

JoAnn

Yeah.

Jennifer Wallace 

to helping to scaffold them. Some children need more support than others. So long way of saying get curious, not furious in supporting your child.

JoAnn 

I am all about the curiosity when it comes to parenting. I think that we find so much about our kids when we really dig in, we ask the questions, and most of it surprises us. I want to go back and hit on getting curious about those reasons that your kids aren’t performing well in a subject because when I got a C in my English class, it was because of the relationship with the teacher. I did not get along with him. I was pushing back against him.

I see the same tendencies right now in my daughter with one of her teachers. And I wanted to hear like, what’s your advice when you find that problem is a relationship between your child and one of the adults at school, especially in high school where we’re not supposed to get involved so much as parents. Like they tell us not to.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah. You can’t, right? Like, yeah. Like we have our curriculum night and we get told, I will not be answering you. I will only be answering your child. And like, and you’ve got that kid that, well, I mean, it works on so many levels, but I’m also thinking Joanne and I both have the kid that’s like, I don’t want to stir the pot. I don’t want to piss them off even more. And sometimes it’s hard to see them stand up for themselves when we’re like, I know you can, you stand up to me every day.

JoAnn 

What can you do as a parent in that situation?

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, so first I would say to parents, I have yet to meet a teacher who has gone into the profession for the money and for the glory. I would assume best intentions. If there is a problem though, and I would include this in a high school student, I would…

JoAnn 

Yeah, I know. I was a former teacher. I’m like,

Brie Tucker

Mic drop! Mic drop on that one!

Ha!

Jennifer Wallace 

take issues with the teacher away from my kids ear. Because what I wouldn’t want to do by complaining about a teacher is you can validate their feelings. You can ask them, if they’re complaining, that sounds hard. How do you want to handle it? What are you going to do? And then if you feel like your young teen or older teen isn’t able to really get the ball rolling to repair the relationship, I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing to reach out to the dean.

and say you’d like to connect with the teacher. Again, outside of the ear of your child, because what researchers have found in these high achieving communities when they’ve surveyed thousands of kids, tens of thousands of kids around the country, they have found the kids who are struggling the most often have sense and acrimonious relationship between their parents and their teachers. And they compare it to an ugly divorce.

JoAnn 

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Wallace 

So if you are bad mouthing their coach or bad mouthing their teacher, you are making your child pick sides and allegiance and they are going to pick you. So don’t undermine that relationship. See what you can do out away from your child or coaching your child to repair the relationship if they’ve done something wrong or going around and working on this away from the ear of your child. That relationship, our kids need more adults in their lives.

JoAnn

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Wallace 

to give them that sense of mattering than just our home.

JoAnn 

Absolutely.

Brie Tucker 

Mm-hmm.

JoAnn 

Absolutely. I love that advice too because sometimes I will talk to my daughter about this particular teacher. I don’t badmouth the teacher. I always assume best intentions with them, but my daughter is so adamant that this teacher does not have the best intentions and she will push against me when I’m like, well, what do you want to do about it? And she’s like, I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. And just giving her the time to think and that time to talk.

Brie Tucker 

Mm-hmm.

JoAnn 

Something else with teens is that they misconstrue situations so easily. Like they read it so wrong. And it’s really hard to get that across to our teens about what’s really going on. Like have you struggled with that at all?

Brie Tucker 

Yes!

Jennifer Wallace 

Absolutely. I talk about it in the book about a negativity bias. So we are all, we all have a negativity bias. We came by that honestly through evolution because the cost of not paying attention to the negative could mean death. And so we don’t really hold on to the positive, but we do hold onto the negative. And researchers have found that, you know, roughly you need three positive interactions to counterbalance one negative one.

JoAnn 

Mm-hmm.

Brie Tucker 

Right? 

Jennifer Wallace

So I think it starts by just, and our teens, by the way, their brains are wired to be hypersensitive to the negative. So I think just letting them know. I mean, I have found in my conversations with teens all over the country, I go to schools and I talk to teenagers and what do they like having this inside knowledge about their brains, about evolution, about why they’re wired this way and what they can do to kind of question it and give themselves some space and wonder if…

if they are just overreacting or if this truly is the right read. But I think it begins just by helping them raise their awareness and be on the lookout for the negativity bias.

JoAnn 

Mm.

Yeah, the negativity bias. think that would be a really great conversation for me to have with my daughter, actually. I don’t think I’ve named it yet for her of that. We talked about the amygdala a lot and unformed prefrontal cortex, but not quite the negativity bias. Something that I love. Go ahead.

Jennifer Wallace 

Here’s one. No, I was going to say one other thing that teens love, two other things that I say often to middle school and high school teens is when they are feeling bad about themselves, I say to them, think about who’s profiting off of making you feel bad about yourself. And they go, like they hadn’t thought about, you know, messages in the culture, messages from from corporate America.

messages on social media that get them drawn in and their attention. So again, who, when, you know, it’s sort of related to the negativity bias, who is making money and profiting off of you feeling bad about yourself, number one. And then the second thing they love that I talk about is envy. I call it in the book, Naming the Elephant in the Room, when it comes to achievement pressure. And when I say to young people is we don’t have to,you know, envy, I explained first, is an evolutionary response that we all evolved to feel envy because, you know, to our earliest ancestors, when we sensed that somebody had something that we needed for survival, we would feel those pangs of envy. And so those ancestors reproduced. And so we inherited it. So I say to them, envy is a universal feeling. We all feel it. We do not have to judge ourselves for feeling envy.

But we do have to hold ourselves accountable for how we act on that envy. So when we feel the envy bubbling up, we have two choices. We can take the malicious envy route, which is cutting down somebody so we feel better by comparison, gossiping about them, et cetera. Or we can take the benign envy route, which is looking at the source of our envy as a source of inspiration, admiring them, even saying out loud to them, I so love.

how you did that. Would you be willing to teach me? Because I’d like to try it too. That is how we preserve relationships. And in these high achieving communities where kids are competing for limited resources, these feelings of envy are constant. So we have to give our kids the tools to manage them in healthy ways that preserves their relationships.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah, they don’t focus on that.

JoAnn 

Absolutely. And you mentioned something about these competitive environments and you have some great stories in your book about how teachers turn these competitive environments to one that was really supportive. And we’re going to get into that right after this.

So we were talking about envy and I don’t know if you’ve read Elise Lunar’s book on our best behavior, it is, yes. Yeah, it is. And it’s how she says like envy is really something that we want looking at it that way. And I think that really goes in line with your benign view of envy and how to handle it. Going to those communities of kids like they are extremely competitive in the classroom. And something that struck me in your book was when you’re talking about the girls who were competing to be editor in chief of the newspaper, and I could not believe what a supportive environment it was. Can you give us like just a little summary of what happened in that situation?

Jennifer Wallace 

Yeah, so was three friends who were competing to be editor in chief of their school newspaper. It’s an award winning newspaper, so it was a very prestigious position. And the teacher said to them at the end of their survey, they had to take grammar tests and, you know, go through a whole lots of hoops to apply for this job. And at the end, the teacher said, have you all discussed how you will handle it when only one of you gets the position?

And I loved that I call it, you know, that’s the chapter on naming the elephant in the room, giving our kids the language and the permission to talk about difficult feelings. In that chapter, I talk about a book by Timothy Galway called The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a bit of like a cult following book for athletes. And he gives a great analogy that I think is helpful in these situations when our kids are competing with their friends. And he talks about the surfer.

Why does a surfer wait for a big wave when the goal is to make it on shore? He says the surfer waits for the big wave because he wants to test his capacity. He wants to see his strengths. He wants to know if he can surf against the big wave. So if we think about the people we are competing with as a big wave, they are to set up obstacles so that we can be better.

That is how we can help our kids think about competition in healthy ways. One other way of doing that is watching the Olympics with your kids. So, you know, if you’re sitting down watching a track meet, you can point out to your kids how even team members of the same team, like USA, compete against each other. They go all at it while they are competing, and then afterwards they throw their arms around each other in support.

So giving our kids permission to push themselves, to lay it all out there on the field, and then when it’s over, to turn around and be the friend and the support you want to be. We are very linear thinkers in our culture, but you can actually hold those two feelings in at once, particularly if you look at your competitor as someone who is there to make you stronger, and you are there to make your competitor stronger.

JoAnn 

That like, so that like makes sense to me on a very like logical scale. And then when I was in those situations, like emotions take over and you’re like, no, like I am so horrible that I didn’t win. What does this say about me? But really what I love is that this teacher gave the girls like the forethought really to think about what might happen and to really plan through it and how they could be a support to each other. And I think like,

I want to tell people that they need to go read your book to find out what happened with those girls because it, I was blown away. I was blown away at what happens when kids are given those supports.

Jennifer Wallace

thank you.

What they call it in DBT, somebody told me, is coping ahead. So what she was giving the girls were the ideas of what they were going to do when they were inevitably two out of three of them disappointed. How will you cope with those feelings? How can you set yourself up so that you don’t make bad choices?

JoAnn 

Yes, yes, yes. There’s so much more like I wanna talk to you about. There’s a chapter in your book I didn’t even get to. So guys, you need to go and get Jenny’s book. I have it actually right here on my bookshelf. So I’ll hold it up for our Instagram audience. Never enough, right there. Go and get it. But there’s a whole chapter on how you need to also parent show kids that they matter by making sure they take care of themselves.

Brie Tucker

my gosh, yeah.

JoAnn 

which is something that we are all in on here on No Guilt Mom, making sure that moms are not the martyr of their house, but the role model, the ones who are going after the things and doing the things. So I love that one too. So go get Jenny’s book right here, Never Enough. And Jenny, what are you looking forward to now?

Jennifer Wallace 

I am looking forward to my next book, sort of Never Enough for Adults, this idea of mattering. I think that you just referenced in that article that our children’s mattering rests on our own and so many adults in the world don’t feel like they matter or they question their mattering and their significance. So that book is what I’m excited about and working on now. I would love it. I would love it.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

Well, you know you’re gonna have to come back when that book comes out, because we’ll have to talk about that one.

JoAnn 

Nats?

Yeah, mattering is such a huge concept. We see that a lot in our community too. A lot of parents, especially, have put themselves on the back burner because their kids matter more than them and they will do everything they can for their children and put themselves dead last. And it’s crazy. It does.

Jennifer Wallace 

And that makes us less resilient. It actually does a disturbance not only to us, but to our kids. Our kids’ resilience rests on our resilience. And our resilience rests on our relationships. So we should be prioritizing those relationships, building up our resilience. If we don’t want to do it for ourselves, do it for your kids.

JoAnn 

Absolutely.

I think those are great ending words. Thank you so much for joining us, Jenny. It’s been a pleasure. And of course, we’ll have to talk to you again when your new book comes out.

Jennifer Wallace

Yeah.

I would love that. Thanks so much.

JoAnn 

our interview with Jenny was amazing. She was delightful and so insightful. that rhymes, delightful and insightful.

we touched a little bit about what is happening. Why is achievement culture so much worse for our kids than it was for us? And it’s funny because it ties into the book that never ends that I’m reading, the Dr. Gabor Mate’s book, The Myth of Normal.

Brie Tucker 

Ha ha ha.

JoAnn 

because I’ve been mentioning it for four or five months now. Guys, seriously, on Audible, it’s 18 hours, 18 hours long. And it’s good. It’s real good. I don’t want to stop, but it’s 18 hours long. So it’s taking me some time to get through it. But something they mentioned in what I was listening to today is that in our society, particularly here in America, we’re seeing a dissolution of the middle class.

So like we’re having this really, really high class and we’re having this really, really low class. And we’ve been taught for a while that the way you succeed in life, the way you survive is you achieve and you get to like these high levels, which really worked in our parents’ generation where they got their degree, they got in at the company, the company took care of them, they got their pension.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah.

JoAnn 

And that was all provided for them because there was a middle class. But now what’s happening is that so many people are being left to survive on their own, where they don’t have the supports of a pension. Sometimes they don’t even have the supports of good health insurance because it’s not provided by our society and companies can fire you and let you go. And jobs aren’t really so long-term anymore because

Brie Tucker 

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

JoAnn 

The bottom line is the most important. So they will have these huge massive layoffs more often and replace a lot of the jobs with machines and technology, which, you know, I’m all for machines and technology, but there also has to be support for people and that’s not happening. And so we put this pressure on our kids that succeed, succeed, succeed, succeed. And my gosh, it’s so much harder now. So you have to push harder and harder and harder to get to that level, which isn’t exactly

Brie Tucker

Yep.

Right.

JoAnn 

beneficial to them.

Brie Tucker 

Exactly, exactly. And we talked about this too in a podcast episode last month we had with Eric Tipler talking about how much more competitive it is just trying to get into college, which I feel like is a one side of this like 10-sided die. Like college is a big struggle and it drives a lot of that toxic achievement, but it’s not the only piece there.

JoAnn 

Mm-hmm.

Brie Tucker (

Like if your kid, if you’re not even thinking about college, your kid’s not gonna go to college, they are still susceptible to this like overachieving aspect. It’s not just tied to college, but that’s definitely a front runner there with it. So.

JoAnn 

No, it’s not just tied to college. It’s funny. The book even goes so far, this myth of normal book goes so far as to call America no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy where the choices, it’s where it’s like Russia with the oligarchs. And it’s like there’s a rich few making decisions, which we are seeing now in America. We are seeing like the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk, like everybody making these decisions because they have the money.

Brie Tucker 

What’s an oligarchy? I don’t even know that.

JoAnn 

to put behind them to get out of it. Small businesses and other things promoting good stuff for people can’t even compete with the marketing behemoths that these big companies have. And these big companies keep buying up smaller companies and being bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it’s very, very hard in America today to actually get ahead and be taken care of unless you

Brie Tucker 

Yeah, exactly.

JoAnn 

get in with one of these big corporations to take care of you. I mean, that’s where I’m seeing it. That’s how we’re taken care of, because my husband is part of this big corporation. And if he were ever to lose his job, guess what? We’d be screwed. Well, we wouldn’t be screwed because we’re preparing for it. But it would be hard.

Brie Tucker 

But it would be hard. It would be hard. Yeah, no, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah, it’s a tough, yeah, I have, we have a 24 year old who is struggling hard trying to figure out how to just have the basics right now. It’s really, really hard out there. And then I have a senior and a junior and it’s just, it’s very concerning, but.

The good thing from talking to Jenny is that there are things we can do. We can help our kids like feel more of the mattering. Mattering matters. I wanted to say that so bad during the interview. It’s so corny and cheesy, but mattering matters. And it’s not necessarily tied to achievement, but it does help with achievement. There’s so many things that we can do to help our kids.

get through this and to help ourselves get through this and get to a better spot because it’s coming. It’s got to be.

JoAnn 

Mm-hmm. It is. There has to be, and especially like, even though we don’t like to talk about it, the politics really do matter and what’s being pushed forward. I mean, this episode is airing November 12th, which will be after the presidential election. I am willing to bet and put money on it that we will have a who we think is winning, but no definite winner yet because I bet there’s going to be a lot of recounts and challenges.

Brie Tucker 

Yeah, 2020 took a while too. Geez, how long did that take? That took a few days. Yeah.

JoAnn 

challenges to it. Knock on wood. hope that Kamala’s in there, but please. I mean, if you’re with us this long, you know how we feel about this. So we’ll give it to you there. The supports need to be done for people, for people to actually survive in today’s day and age. And that’s all I’ll say, but go get Jenny’s book.

And I love that I can call her Jenny. did ask her at the beginning of the podcast what I could call her. So it’s Jenny.

Brie Tucker 

Soon she said Jenny, I’m like, we’re all good friends now, because it’s Jenny. It’s Jenny.

JoAnn 

We’re good. We’re good. But honestly, this book, Never Enough, so much good stuff in it. my gosh, and look, one of our friends gives the little preview. Never Enough is the book for our times by Ned Johnson. He gives a little thing. Yeah. Yeah. We also have two people we interviewed giving thanks for Never Enough as well. So Lisa Demore is right up there, top.

Brie Tucker 

didn’t even notice he was on the top there too. my gosh.

JoAnn 

Go listen to our Lisa D’amore episode. And then Tina Payne Bryson is right down here at the bottom. So go listen to our Tina Payne Bryson. 

Brie Tucker 

I’m running out of room to write down all these episodes for the show notes, man. my gosh.

JoAnn 

But until the… Yes. Until next time, remember, the best mom’s a happy mom. Take care of you. We’ll talk to you later.

Brie Tucker

Thanks for stopping by.