"I want my kids to be happy...and get into Harvard."

A ten-year-old spinner sneaks a moment’s glimpse of the outer world. At the time this photo was taken, she had already been working over a year. Location: Rhodes Mfg. Co., Lincolnton, North Carolina. (Library of Congress)

How do you measure the value of a human life?

Is it measured by how successful someone is? Well then, how do we define successful? And how do we measure success?

Parents want the best for their kids — that appears to be universal. But there is no objective measurement of what best means.

To generalize mercilessly, I have observed three ways in which parents grapple with this issue.

The first group of parents has high explicit expectations of their children. These kids know exactly what’s expected of them and how they are supposed to represent their family. They have many opportunities but few choices. Success is defined by getting top grades and high standardized test scores, excelling in extracurricular pursuits that the family values (for instance, sports, violin, chess, or academic competitions), getting into a top college, and pursuing a traditionally prestigious profession.

The second group of parents has expectations for their children. These may be explicit or implicit and revolve less around achievement than states of being: They want their children to be happy, actualized, fulfilled, and joyful. They follow the child’s lead in terms of pursuing activities and shaping of identity. There is room to fail, room to quit, and room to grow.

The third group of parents has high implicit expectations of their children, but low explicit expectations. They pretend to be or believe themselves to be in the second group, but are actually in the first group. They say that they want their children to be happy and actualized, but they crave the validation of having a traditionally successful child. Because of this conflict, they are less likely to support or manage the child in ways that foster such success (for instance, maintaining a daily routine to ensure that homework gets done or enforcing practice of a musical instrument). Their kids tend to be enrolled in activities that are important to the parent and activities that are important to the child, resulting in an overload of commitments.

I believe that many of the parents in the third group are looking for a pathway toward being the second type of parent, but have gotten lost. This happens because it’s very difficult to quantify a child’s self-actualization, joy, and fulfillment. It becomes easier to use achievement as a proxy for these things. Furthermore, when you’re in a culture that values achievement, it feels deeply uncomfortable to push against that. No one wants their kid to be the weird one.

This mismatch between the implicit expectations (“Get excellent grades, be great at sports and the arts, and get into a top college" ) and explicit ones (“We accept you for who you are and want you to be happy”) causes anxiety and uncertainty for kids whose parents are struggling to reconcile the two. And if kids feel that they can’t or don’t know how to please the adults in their lives, they eventually stop trying.

Clearly, a lot is at stake here. But if you’ve found yourself relating to the things I’m saying here, don’t beat yourself up. All of us are doing the best we can with the information we have. I’m pointing out this dynamic not to be critical, but to help all of us to better serve the children in our care. If we are aware of our own values and expectations, and honest about them even if we don’t like the way they make us look, we can be deliberate about what we want to do moving forward. We can make a conscious choice, as opposed to an unconscious one. That represents growth for us — and creates a clearer path for our kids.