Real Talk

Dear Parents, Are We Raising Our Kids In A Toxic Achievement Culture?

by Kevyn Gohu
August 14, 2024

Although we wish for our kids to achieve excellence, when does it become too much?

When we were kids, many of us heard the words “perfect score” growing up, often hearing from our parents that our “grades” and “achievements” are what people look at. But now that we’re adults, we get to look back – did our grades or achievements really affect an employer’s or investor’s decision? How many companies require a transcript of records upon onboarding? And if we’re company owners, do we even care to look at those?

Let’s be honest: people don’t even look at whether we got an A, B, or C. They probably just want to make sure we graduated from that school which, all we can do is submit a diploma and be done with it.

So, why do we push our kids so hard to achieve? And most of all, what will those achievements do for our kids?

Grades: Their Worth and Their Weight

When did grades become such a big thing? It all started when Americans tried to find a more applied way to analyze human behavior. Thus, they came out with all sorts of standardized tests with questions that were supposed to check if these people had the qualities they were looking for.

Eventually, schools picked up on the trend and found it as a way to quickly rank and check if students absorbed knowledge. It was efficient; with one set of test questions, a teacher could test over 40 students and check which ones understood the lesson. After that, they discovered that the amount of points could possibly measure the degree of understanding. Depending on the number of correct answers against the number of mistakes, schools would use these numbers to come up with ways to sort or improve the child’s learning experience.

How Grades and Achievements Became a Measure for the Human Experience

But let’s be honest: there’s a level of comfort found in relying on numbers. They’re concrete, easy to understand, and there’s nothing else to think about.

However, its advantage of simplicity is also a caveat. While numbers verify the existence of something, it doesn’t elaborate. A 60/70 is usually interpreted in one way: 60 correct answers and 10 wrong ones. However, it doesn’t answer: what topics did our kids not understand? What part of the lesson didn’t make sense? Was it how the question was phrased?

While test-making is an actual college class for both Psychology and Education degrees, its creation and interpretation are often left to the laymen. Without any training, it’s easy to over-read and misassume what the grade represents. Because we live in a fast-paced environment, we neglect to deeply investigate why our kids only got these grades or scored those numbers. We only see the numbers and interpreting them as bad or good.

Thus, we fixate too much on the results and forget to look where the problem started.

It carries to other things

Unfortunately, that approach carries to other things which is why some children fail to cope with their shortcomings.

Not everything has a grade or a wide spectrum, so when our kids are given a task, they only see two emotions: happy or sad. Despite emotions being a complex range of feelings and thoughts, our behaviors and body language tell them if they did well or not. It’s not commonplace to say something like, “On a scale of 1 to 10…”

Nor do our kids think in scales. They usually think in binary – 0 or 1.

0 for no, 1 for yes.

It’s only when they become teens that they eventually build the vocabulary to express themselves in degrees. But the damage is already done; there’s still that part of them that follows the output-based, black-and-white mechanics.

Is it wrong for parents to want their kids to achieve?

There’s nothing wrong for a parent to want their kids to achieve.

Achievements celebrate the effort we pour into a task. They gratify, praise, and sometimes, give us the love that we so desperately seek. However, failure shouldn’t be a reason to withhold something especially our love for our kids. If anything, a failure is when we should love even harder. Our kids don’t need us to beat down on them when the world isn’t even bothering to think whether it should or shouldn’t.

Do we celebrate achievements? Yes, we should.

But do we celebrate failures? No. But we believe in celebrating the lessons we’ve learned after mourning the time and effort we’ve lost in a pursuit.