Harvard grad, bestselling author, and toxic-parenting researcher who spoke to 6,500 moms and dads: The counterintuitive way to help your kids succeed

It feels natural to many parents to worry about their kids. In an increasingly uncertain world, you want to ensure they’re on the right path and have the tools they need to succeed.

But when your worry grows out of control and veers into anxiety, it can negatively affect mental health — yours and your child’s. That can do more harm than good, and even hurt your child’s ability to succeed in the long run, according to award-winning journalist and parenting researcher Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

Wallace is the author of the book “Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It,” for which she collaborated with the Harvard Graduate School of Education to survey 6,500 parents across the U.S. (She herself also holds a degree from Harvard.)

“The future has never felt so unknown and so fraught,” Wallace tells CNBC Make It. “Parents today believe that getting their kid into a ‘good college’ will act as a kind of life-vest in a sea of economic uncertainty.”

But when that concern becomes anxiety, it can spread from moms and dads to children through a process psychologists call emotional contagion. 

Various studies have found surging mental health issues for college students across the U.S. over the past decade. One recent Healthy Minds Study of 96,000 U.S. college students found that 37% reported suffering from anxiety disorders and 15% said they’d seriously considered suicide within the past year.

Anxiety and depression are linked, and psychologists say people who suffer from either or both can suffer from a lack of motivation and can develop a fear of failure that prevents them from taking the sort of risks that are necessary to achieve important goals.

“Unfortunately, what I’ve seen in my reporting, and what the statistics and the studies show us, is that the very life-vest we’re hoping to put on our kids to keep them afloat in an uncertain future is actually … acting more like a lead vest, and drowning too many of the kids we are trying to protect,” she adds.

The counterintuitive way to help your children keep their heads above water, then, is to model for them how to cope with stress.

Reframe your outlook, suggests Wallace. Manage your own anxiety so as to avoid putting too much pressure on your kids. Your belief in their resilience, and your unconditional love, can benefit them far more in the long run.

The role of a parent, Wallace notes, is to ensure their children have the skills to survive in the world as adults, particularly after their parents are no longer around to help them. In that sense, parental anxiety is literally an evolutionary reaction meant to help parents sniff out and react to any dangers their children might face.

Still, the “biological tripwire can create false positives,” where parents overreact by worrying excessively over factors that don’t actually threaten their children’s safety, Wallace writes, like getting into a brand-name college.

You might overreact to the fear that your kid won’t be accepted to the Ivy League or your state’s flagship university because you’ve convinced yourself that their long-term security depends on it, for example.

It’s called the “smoke detector principle,” Wallace says, citing University of Michigan psychology professor emeritus Randolph Nesse, one of many scientists she interviewed for her book. Nesse talked to Wallace about a scenario where an over-sensitive smoke alarm beeps loudly, signaling a fire, even if it’s only been set off by burnt bagel.

Reminding yourself that the panic you’re feeling is a false alarm can help.

Look to reframe your mindset around worrying about their kids’ futures. After all, Wallace notes, they’ll probably be fine even if they don’t follow the exact path you’ve envisioned. Going to a highly-selective college — or any college at all — doesn’t actually guarantee higher long-term earnings, after all, research has shown.

And success can take lots of different, often unexpected, forms.

In her book, Wallace spoke to Tina Payne Bryson, a pediatric and adolescent psychotherapist, who offered up four questions parents can ask themselves in order to reflect on the anxiety they’re transmitting to their own children:

• What extracurricular activities are on your child’s calendar? “How are they spending their time? Is it a lot of achievement-oriented activities, tutoring [and] things like that?” Wallace says.
• What are you spending money on for your child? “Is it tutoring and coaching and travel sports leagues?” she says.
• What do you ask your child about every day? Do you only care whether they aced their math test, or are you showing concern for how they’re doing and what they care about?
• What do you argue with your child about?

“Those four questions [tell you] a lot about what you are signaling to your kids,” Wallace says.

Most parents likely don’t think they’re putting too much emphasis on how much their kids perform in school or other activities. But taking stock of what you discuss with your child and what’s on their schedule could reveal that you’re contributing to the pressure and stress they feel, or even reinforcing the idea that their worth is tied to their performance. 

In addition to psychologists and parents, Wallace interviewed students across the U.S. for her book. Of the children she spoke to, she says, the ones struggling the most with anxiety and other mental health issues “were the kids who felt like their value as a person was contingent on their performance,” both in school and other competitive activities.

Getting that idea across, rather than the idea that a kid is loved and accepted no matter what, is rarely the goal for any parent or teacher.

“The task of adolescence is to help our teens develop a sturdy sense of self,” Wallace says. “We undermine that when we send them messages — in the wider culture, in our homes, in the classroom — that your value is contingent” instead of unconditional.

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