Many people choose to live in Rye because of its excellent education and high-achieving schools: schools where students score well on standardized tests and a great percentage attend prestigious colleges.
What often remains hidden, however, is that students at High Achieving Schools — or HAS — are an “at-risk group” that is two- to six-times more likely to suffer clinical levels of anxiety and depression and two- to three-times more likely to suffer from substance abuse than the average American teen, according to a 2019 study from the National Academy of Sciences.
Many studies linking HAS and increased rates of mental health challenges in students were published by Suniya Luthar, Ph.D., and her colleagues during the past two decades and the trend was examined by journalist Jennifer B. Wallace in her best-selling book, “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It.” Wallace’s book identified the source of the problem as “unrelenting pressure to perform well in school and school-valued activities . . . where expectations are so high that anything less than what elsewhere would be considered excellent is considered here as failure.”
But before you put your house on the market, there are things you can do to counteract the toxicity. Despite factors beyond a parent’s control, like in-school expectations and competition from peers, new research focuses on a concept known as “mattering,” which includes feeling valued for who they are at their core by loved ones and communities, regardless of external evaluations of success. Psychologist Gordon Flett, author of the 2025 book “Mattering as a Core Need in Children and Adolescents: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Perspectives,” links “mattering” with lower rates of depression and anxiety, a lower likelihood of committing violence, and higher levels of achievement and motivation. Wallace’s research also concludes that mattering is a “protective shield” in HAS communities.
What makes children and adolescents feel valued? What makes them feel like they matter? According to Laura Witman, LCSW, clinical supervisor at Rye Youth Council Restore, parental encouragement, connection, and collaboration are key.
To make your kids feel that they matter, parents should help them develop skills and praise their efforts, not the end product. It’s OK to have high expectations and provide feedback to your kids, but recognizing their effort, even when the result is not perfect, helps. Praise a child for putting their toys away, even if in the wrong basket, and support a teen who is hard at work on a school project. “Without this balance, children can feel like nothing they do is good enough, which can impact their self-esteem and lead to unhealthy or unwanted behaviors,” Witman said.
Even in times of conflict, remember that your child’s feelings of “mattering” are at stake. Encourage your child to express a point of view or to have input in day-to-day problem-solving; it can help them feel more connected to you and increase their feelings of self-worth. It may take longer than simply asserting your own solution, but asking open-ended questions will help your children feel that they have an important role to play and that they can solve their own problems.
Inviting your child to collaborate in creating solutions to their everyday struggles – like developing their own system for organizing their toys or hanging their backpack on the foyer hook or by listening to their reasoning for wanting to do something may enable you to learn about their thought processes as well as about the things that frustrate them and lead to problem behaviors.
Such dialogue acknowledges the individuality of the child, reinforces their self-worth independent from accomplishments, and increases their feeling of “mattering.”
Lisa Dominici is executive director of the Rye Youth Council, a nonprofit in Rye that focuses on the social and emotional health of kids in grades K-12.
