South Africa celebrated the Class of 2025’s record 88% matric pass rate, then, almost in the same breath, returned to its more familiar mood: anxiety. Twenty-five applicants for every seat at UCT or Wits. A youth unemployment rate above 62% for those aged 15 to 24. A top-class pass was reduced, for many, to a ticket into another lottery.
In a recent Daily Maverick op-ed, Dr Mark Potterton draws on American author Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It to name what so many parents, teachers and learners already feel in their bones. Our children are being crushed under the weight of a narrow definition of success, grades, rankings, prestigious admissions, and their mental health is paying the price. Students in high-achieving schools, Wallace notes, now sit in an “at-risk” category alongside the markers we know too well: anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, and self-harm.
At Rudder4Life, we recognised this pattern long before we had a name for it, emphasising the importance of mattering to keep youth engaged and resilient. Wallace gives us a powerful one: mattering.
What is “mattering”?
Wallace describes mattering as a two-sided experience. A child matters when they feel valued by the people around them, and when they feel they add value to others. It is the quiet, persistent sense that your presence in a room changes the room. That someone would miss you if you were gone. That your effort, your voice, your contribution counts for something beyond a grade on a page.
When children feel they matter, Wallace argues, they develop a buffer against stress and anxiety, fostering hope and confidence that resilience depends on their sense of belonging.
When children don’t feel they matter, Wallace calls this contingent mattering, which fosters the harmful belief that they are only lovable when performing. Her research among 18- to 30-year-olds found that 70% of students believed their parents valued them more when they succeeded in school. Seventy percent!
For a Grade 8 learner walking between a home under financial strain and a school measuring them by averages, contingent mattering is not an abstract risk. It is their daily weather.
Why Rudder4Life was built for this moment
The Rudder4Life Youth Development Programme exists because we saw, long before the statistics caught up, that our youth development needed something more than tutoring and more than motivational talks. It needed a framework that met the whole child, head, heart, and community, at the moment they were being told, implicitly and explicitly, that their worth was up for negotiation.
The Rudder4Success Framework was designed around a conviction that sits very close to Wallace’s idea of mattering. Ubuntu, umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people, is not a slogan for us. It is the architecture. A child cannot know they matter in isolation; they come to know it through being seen, being needed, and being trusted to contribute.
Every component of the Rudder4Life ecosystem is, in its own way, a mattering intervention. The Rudder4Life Youth Development Programme, delivered across 32 weeks in Grade 8, is built to help learners discover interests, identify sparks, and articulate a sense of purpose, the very tools Stanford’s William Damon (whom Wallace cites) recommends as an antidote to adolescent emptiness. The Rudder4Life Learner Guide and Rudder4Life Lesson Plans are not worksheets that rank children against each other; they are prompts that invite learners to notice what they value, what they care about, and how they show up for others. The Rudder4Life Learning Facilitation Centre (LFC), staffed by an experienced counsellor/facilitator, is explicitly designed as what Wallace would call a “mattering haven”: a safe place to land, where a learner’s worth is never in question. And our Pulse4Success digital platform is earmarked to track social, emotional and academic behaviours, not to sort learners into winners and losers, but to give facilitators an early signal when a young person is disappearing from themselves. None of this is hypothetical. It is how we work, week by week, in schools where the southeaster blows through the corridors, and the pressure blows through the gate behind it.
How the Rudder4Life Programme nurtures mattering
There are three practical ways the Rudder4Life Youth Development Programme moves mattering from principle into practice, and each one maps onto a specific gap the Daily Maverick piece identifies.
- We replace contingent mattering with earned belonging. Wallace warns that children bombarded with achievement messaging need at least one environment where their worth is unconditional. In the Rudder4Life LFC, facilitators are trained to separate a learner’s behaviour from a learner’s identity. A poor decision is not a verdict. Lessons open with rituals of presence, the circle, the check-in, the naming, that communicate a simple truth: you are here, we noticed, and that alone is enough to begin. By the time content is introduced, the child has already received the message they most needed.
- We shift competition from a verdict into a growth opportunity. Wallace does not ask us to eliminate competition; she asks us to reframe it. The Rudder4Success Framework does exactly that. Our lesson design deliberately blends individual reflection with collaborative tasks, peer recognition and community contribution. Learners are coached to see a classmate’s strength not as a threat to their ranking but as a signal of what is possible. In a stokvel, every member contributes and every member benefits; this is the social logic we translate into classroom practice. A win for one becomes evidence for all.
- We cultivate purpose over performance. Damon’s advice to parents, listen for sparks, ask what concerns them about the world, invite real contribution, and introduce mentors, is embedded structurally in the Rudder4Life curriculum. Across Terms 1 to 4, learners move from self-awareness to service: from “who am I?” to “what do I care about?” to “what can I do for others?” This is the intrinsic-versus-extrinsic distinction Wallace insists on. Wealth, status and image leave young people empty. Personal growth, relationships and community contribution fill them up. The 32-week arc is designed to bend the learner toward the second set, and the Pulse4Success data will allow us to see, in real behavioural terms, when that bend is taking hold.
The bigger picture: redefining success, our way
Potterton ends his piece with a challenge: redefine success beyond grades and prestigious admissions. In a South African context, he writes, this might mean a hotel school, a technical qualification, a different kind of path.
At Rudder4Life, we would go further. Redefining success means redefining the child, not as a bundle of outputs, but as a person whose mattering is not for sale. It means building the home, the classroom and the community into a triangle of belonging strong enough to hold a young person when the world tells them they are only as good as their last mark.
Table Mountain does not measure itself against Kilimanjaro. It simply stands, and everything around it orients accordingly. Our learners deserve to grow up knowing the same thing about themselves: that they are not in competition to prove they belong. They already do. That is what Rudder4Life was built for. That is what “mattering” looks like when you turn it into a programme.
This piece responds to Dr Mark Potterton’s op-ed “Incessant push to perform taking a toll on children’s mental health” (Daily Maverick, 19 April 2026), reflecting on Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It“.
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