By Sachi Badola ’26
If you asked any parent what they want for their child, they might say something like “health, success, and happiness.” Our parents want us to flourish, to seize the opportunities presented to us in the American Dream, perhaps accomplishing what they could not do with the stepping stones they have provided us. But at what cost?
Flourishing, defined as the presence of mental health, can be measured across various dimensions. According to positive psychologist Corey Keyes, a flourishing individual finds meaning in society, holds potential for growth, belongs to and accepts the society they live in, and feels as if they can contribute to society. However, despite the increase in telehealth resources and growing conversations about mental health and flourishing, in 2023, the U.S Surgeon General has declared an epidemic of poor youth mental health as a public health crisis. Why are adolescents suffering so much? Part of this problem comes from a culture obsessed with material success that has exploited the definition of flourishing, turning it into another competition – who is flourishing the most? Consequently, essential life skills needed to truly flourish, including help-seeking, boundary setting, and focusing on internal work rather than external validation, are not given enough time and attention. Without a working solution space to redefine adolescent flourishing and remove parental barriers towards adolescent help-seeking, parental and community pressures of flourishing will continually reinforce the teen mental health crisis. To get to the root of the teen mental health crisis, we must identify the struggling “flourishers.”
Adolescent perceptions of flourishing are often shaped by unrealistic metrics, resulting in an unhealthy pressure to flourish. In a study of Poplar Grove, a privileged community in the United States with significant numbers of youth suicide, many students reflected on the pressure to succeed academically and socially, living up to high expectations from their parents and community. In communities such as Poplar Grove, metrics of flourishing include good grades, acceptances from elite colleges, and climbing the social hierarchy. These metrics contradict Keyes’s social dimensions of flourishing- it can be challenging to find meaning and accept society if fear of repercussion and shame of struggle permeates the culture. If flourishing means belonging to a community, communities like Poplar Grove create unhealthy standards for this
belonging. Youth struggle to possess growth potential when failure is not an option. How can we contribute to a society that doesn’t cultivate our wellbeing and happiness?
Unhealthy metrics of flourishing also contribute to another challenge: stigma. Despite a better understanding of mental health and mental illness, the pervasiveness of stigma remains. Unfortunately, the pressure to flourish facilitates an achievement culture through which help-seeking and mental health problems are stigmatized, viewed as a hindrance to the image of flourishing. A 2018 study on parental stigma towards mental health issues revealed that parents remain a barrier to adolescent help-seeking as they fail to recognize mental health problems within their own child. In contrast, another study revealed that people with close relationships to individuals experiencing mental health problems were more accepting than those with a distant relationship. This highlights that parents may fear the label of their child not flourishing more than the mental health problem itself. As a result, they may normalize poor mental health to avoid repercussions of social exclusion and a desire to protect their child from the label of not flourishing. In the Poplar Grove parent community, this label is viewed as “a blemish on the perfect family”.
The pressure to flourish is not confined to individuals from backgrounds of higher socioeconomic status like Poplar Grove. For adolescents from disadvantaged communities, the very ability to flourish can create a different pressure. In a research study looking at individuals’ perspectives on flourishing, “less than half of Black interviewees reported flourishing as compared to more than two-thirds of white interviewees”. Even Black individuals with achievement culture metrics of flourishing, including high education, income, and success, reported feeling the negative impacts of systemic and systematic racism, which create obstacles to belonging and acceptance in society. Adolescents from marginalized backgrounds also face a similar pressure to flourish for their families- in a study involving undocumented Asian Pacific Islander youth, one participant reflected that “you come as an undocumented student… you’re kind of on survival mode…we didn’t risk our lives for me to sit around and be selfish and think about myself and do yoga”. Flourishing does not solely depend on an individual’s personal attributes but is profoundly influenced by external factors, including structural inequalities of racism and economic privilege. These pressures to flourish may look different for everyone, but they still exist and must be acknowledged as sources of poor mental health.
Positive psychologists may argue that taking the focus away from flourishing will worsen the teen mental health crisis. However, the solution is not to remove the focus on flourishing- it reiterates that poor metrics of flourishing and hyper-fixating on it can be unhealthy. University of Chicago sociologist Lauren Berlant offers an important perspective- incorrect metrics of flourishing builds a culture of cruel optimism: “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” At face value, we want the academic and social validation of flourishing. Communities like Poplar Grove reinforce the desire for perfectionism and
achievement- in turn, these desires work against our abilities to truly flourish, feeling that we can grow, accept, and belong. We need to question how specific communities and structures work against true flourishing.
How can we mitigate this catch-22 and help adolescents truly flourish? Starting with internal work, adolescents and parents must internalize a revised definition of flourishing- one that prioritizes self-care. Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin suggests four pillars: boundary setting, self-compassion, values, and power. With boundary setting, parents can help their children feel more empowered to advocate for themselves in society. Self-compassion allows for more opportunities to make mistakes and avoid comparison to others, allowing for growth potential. Lakshmin identifies the need to align values with your environment rather than forcing yourself to adapt to an unhealthy environment. Many families in Poplar Grove did not share the values of the community but worried more about leaving, worsening the mental health experience for adolescents who were seemingly flourishing on paper. Finally, Lakshmin emphasizes recognizing one’s power to seek help when needed. These four pillars offer a starting point for how adolescents and families can truly align with Keyes’ dimensions of flourishing: social coherence, social actualization, social integration, social acceptance, and social contribution.
Additionally, we need a culture shift in how we talk about the meaning of our work, success, and upward mobility- all flourishing elements when sought after with genuine desire and passion, not pressure and expectation. Harvard University’s Human Flourishing program exemplifies this shift, consisting of summer seminars for students with courses such as The Wisdom of Work, The Art and Science of a Meaningful Life, and Virtues, Vices, and Situations: The Importance of Character for the Good Life. By finding ways to value growth potential, curiosity, initiative, and encouraging adolescents to feel passionate about involvement, schools and communities can instill true flourishing early on. Another change involves parent-teacher stakeholder groups distinguishing emotional well-being and flourishing from material success across various parenting styles and ethnic groups,
We also need to work towards creating anti-stigma intervention programs that increase parental contact with adolescents, teens, and adults living with mental health issues and mental illness. By doing this, parents can better understand how ignoring mental health problems prevents individuals from flourishing. Similarly, schools can administer yearly psychological well-being surveys to identify which students might require extra in-school mental health support to improve measures of true flourishing such as autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations with others, and purpose in life. Social scientists must also investigate how the pressure to flourish manifests differently for adolescents from communities of color in structural contexts that do not allow for true flourishing, or when the pressure results from inequities and a lack of financial resources.
The cost is clear: adolescents will continue to suffer because of our culture’s hyper-fixation with flourishing and the pressure to succeed. It is not flourishing itself that is problematic, but an exploitation of its meaning and inadequate measures of it. We must foster a culture of true flourishing, ensuring that every adolescent can focus on meaningful growth, self-acceptance, and belonging in a society that values wellbeing, resilience, and the pursuit of happiness.
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