The Danger of Over Celebrating Early Peaks
The last few weeks have been manic with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles attending graduation and prize-giving ceremonies all around the world. It’s been a wonderful thing to participate in and observe as a parent, godmother, friend, and aunt. It’s been fascinating to observe several children over the last twelve months cap off school season with solid achievements bagging awards
for scholastic attainment, sports prowess, exceptional musical talent, and more. Not only do we celebrate the children’s victories but we, as parents, are being congratulated for our hard work and resilience. These superb grades and outstanding performances are often innate but require diligent harnessing through the investment of class teachers, extra lesson teachers,
sports/music instructors, and educational centers.
They are relentless, expensive, and time-consuming but they yield results.
Kudos to all of the mothers, fathers, family support networks, and children for rallying around this hunger for success. But why do we do it? So our children can rise to the next stage of superlative schools, of course! But that’s not all. We want our children to learn critical foundational principles such as grit, focus, determination, ambition, hard work, what it takes to succeed, how to fail with grace, how to function effectively in teams and harness competitive dynamics in groups, etc. And when the children deliver these excellent results, we applaud them and their parents and sing praises to God Almighty for the miracles He has performed.
Notwithstanding the proven accolades, I can’t help but feel as though this generation of children are under a tremendous amount of pressure to produce marvelous results in everything that they do. Are the laurels good enough reason to push the children so hard? Is pushing them necessarily a bad thing?
Most parents that I’ve spoken to will tell you it’s not and they attest to the benefits of this type of extreme guidance. Many of them refer to themselves as Tiger Mum’s, in honor of Amy Chua’s book
called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which became a global bestseller in 2011. It was a provocative approach to parenting and many in the West thought Ms. Chua’s brand of parenting was downright abusive. Those of us parents from Africa read that book, saw her results – Ivy League educated children – and became energized in our incessant pursuit of academic and extracurricular brilliance for our children. How much of this pushing and prodding is a reflection of our own insecurities and need to relive our lives vicariously through our children though?
I recently participated in a camp for fifty distinguished secondary school girls organized by Junior Achievement Nigeria as a senior woman in finance. The girls were highly engaged and had a number of insightful questions to ask. There were four of us on the panel and we each told our story about the journey from their age to where we are now. We were a motley crew of women with deeply entrenched careers in finance from different backgrounds and life journeys. During the course of the interactive session, I noticed a number of questions from the girls seeking advice as to how to convince their parents to let them pursue their own desired educational journey. Parents seem to be imposing their dreams, desires, fears and insecurities on their children and in many cases they aren’t listening to what they want. How much of this driving and guiding is for our own selfishness and pride? I acknowledge that as parents we are wise and have the benefit of experience but there is a dangerous line between guidance and control.
Recent research from Karen Arnold, a professor at Boston College and the author of Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians indicates that this early superlative achievement isn’t even an indicator of success for those same children in the future. Essentially, 90 percent of the valedictorians she tracked over time cultivated good professional careers, less than half reached the height of their professions and none changed the world nor currently runs it. “It seems that the traits that set one up for exceptional success in high school and college – self discipline, conscientiousness and the ability to comply with rules – are not the same traits that lead individuals to start disruptive companies or make shocking breakthroughs” says Arnold. But maybe we aren’t preparing our children to be disruptive or to spark a new paradigm – we just want them to get good jobs?
From an article in Time.com, I read a quote from Arnold stating “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries
. . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
Let’s not debate the results of this research because while I have read a host of others which support its conclusions, I have also read others which dispute them. I think it’s fair to agree that purely focusing on scholastic achievement and excelling in a carefully selected group of extracurricular activities is a fraction of the story. While we desperately want successful children, we don’t want those that are frazzled, anxious, depressed, and confused. We must find a way to cultivate their intrinsic talents and push them just enough and save the celebrations for the real life wins such as acts of kindness, exemplary leadership, helping those that are struggling in a certain topic that is their strength, etc.
I came across a pretty unusual yet beautiful commencement speech by one of my favorite US Supreme Court Justices (no one tops RBG, sorry.) I have always thought that Chief Justice John Roberts was the best example of luck meeting opportunity. Google how he became the SCOTUS Chief Justice and you will see why. He was recently invited to speak at his son’s ninth-grade graduation ceremony and a brief excerpt may be found below for your deep reflection. It applies to the aged and the young amongst us:
“Now the commencement speakers will typically [..] wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope
you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I
hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and
understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now
and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening
to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend
upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.”
Parents, let us celebrate our children’s successes but we must also raise tenacious children who know how to deal with the vagaries of life and can pivot out of difficult situations without detrimental effects to their mental health. Let’s raise smart children who are streetwise and know how to make decisions by reaching out to the adults in their lives but ultimately owning their space and their course. Let us celebrate their resulting financial independence and their ability to tip the world on its axis through their great ideas.
