What Does It Mean to Raise a Successful Child?
Why the traditional metrics of achievement may not mean anything
When you have children, a sort of arms race begins where you employ any means necessary to turn your child into a superb human being. It starts with breast milk and daycare, tee ball and piano lessons, winter jackets and gloves, reading and math, on to better test scores, travel leagues and college scholarships, and up through internships, job opportunities, credit scores and down payments.
You’re trying, after all, to make them successful. A productive member of society. And the faster they reach various milestones (learning to read), the more they can accomplish (honor roll) and the higher the ultimate socioeconomic status they can achieve, the better you’ve done. Right?
Well, not necessarily. As the (often struggling) parent of a five-year-old I’ve thought about this a lot lately. What does it mean to be successful? What does it mean to raise a successful person?
There are a number of areas most people seem to be focused on:
Social Success
Academic Success
Athletic/Artistic Success
Career Success
Socioeconomic Success
Recently, my son was in a minor soccer program at the park district. It wasn’t a team. It was barely even a practice. It was a short, low impact series of drills and scrimmages. Most of these kids didn’t even know which net to kick the ball towards. And my son, he fared worse than most. Didn’t want to participate. Refused to participate. Afraid of the other kids. Didn’t score a goal.
A failure on the Social and Athletic metrics, which could ultimately lead to a life of shyness, loneliness and despair. A sign of things to come. Destined to struggle in all areas of the success spectrum!
None of It Matters
But here’s the thing. None of it matters.
Seriously, who cares? We’re focused on the wrong metrics.
An introvert who is terrible at soccer could go on to become a neuroscientist. Are you going to feel bad about that?
That same award-winning neuroscientist, though, could be a disaster interpersonally. In and out of multiple marriages. Kids won’t talk to him. You get the picture.
Another great example is Tiger Woods. His parents literally raised him to become the world’s greatest golfer. And it actually worked. Imagine all the things you’ve tried to get your kids to do — whether they’re children or adults. You couldn’t pull it off. You failed. They turned him into the best in the world.
Yet while Tiger is off the charts on the Athletic, Career and Socioeconomic scales, he’s sort of a messed up person. I don’t say this to judge him, but he’s been reckless with his safety and in trouble with the law; refuses to truly grapple with his flaws; lives in tremendous physical pain; blew up a marriage to a beautiful model; got sued by an ex-girlfriend.
He’s still enormously successful. But is he happy?
Now you could say that what he lacks in his life is balance. That’s the downfall of extreme success in one area. You don’t have balance. Sure you want to be good at hitting a ball, but what about painting a picture?
This is another thing that’s big in the parenting world. They’re good at sports, but they’re not good at school. They’ve got straights As, but no friends. They’ve got a lot of friends, but no career ambitions.
So we try to fix it with classes and activities and tutors and playdates. Or punishments and discipline. Screaming and yelling. Kindness and compassion. Dedication. Commitment. Excellence.
Take a step back and ask the following question: are renaissance men inherently happy? And if they are, how do you create one? How do you train one?
Take, for instance, this whole thing with Academic Success. It’s talked about like vegetables — indisputably good for you. But the fact is academic success could range from very important to not important at all. What if you barely get through school, but go on to become the next great entrepreneur? After all, some of the richest people in the world are college dropouts.
Yet we puff our chests out over our kids’ straight A’s.
It’s not that straight A’s are bad or that dropping out is good. The question is does that academic success make them happy now or in the future?
Or look at Social Success. Ever meet someone with a million friends and no one to talk to? Yes, good relationships are foundational, but they come in a lot of forms and on different timelines. Some people don’t really spread their wings and open up until much later in life. It’s never too late.
A whole life spent stressing the tactics of success — structure, structure, structure; playdate, playdate, playdate; practice, practice, practice; study, study, study; win, win, win; money, money, money; wile out, wile out, wile out; settle down, settle down, settle down — could easily backfire. Or, at the very least, turn out much differently than you had intended.
If you had to choose between your child becoming a world class athlete with demons galore or an average joe with contentment in their heart, what would you choose?
Wrong answer. The point is you don’t get to choose.
Parenting Philosophy
My parenting philosophy is two-fold and it’s very simple:
Show the child they are loved.
Protect their general health and safety.
Everything else, to me, is tactical. Yes, I have certain preferences for how I want my child to act, but to the extent to which they will make him a “good person,” a “successful person” or a “happy person”, I’m deeply uncertain.
A great example is discipline. Especially for younger kids, this is a key issue. And it will come up later, you’ll tell yourself that your son is an underachiever because he didn’t have enough discipline. Check that, it was because you were too hard on him.
If you look at the “literature” (i.e., academic research and Instagram), what are they saying? Gentle parenting. Understanding. Compassion.
On the other hand, if you tell someone how horribly behaved your child is, they’re likely to say you need to be more firm. Lay down the law. Don’t put up with it. Send them to timeout. Take away their things. Don’t be their friend.
We could have an endless debate about the effectiveness of those methods. Maybe your discipline gets them in line but causes an even more dangerous rebellion. Or your permissiveness results in trouble at school and work, and ultimately, jail.
The other big one is the activities — swim lessons, swim lessons, swim lessons; ballet, ballet, ballet; tee ball, tee ball, tee ball; camp, camp, camp; and of course the most unequivocal, inarguable necessity — learn to play a fucking musical instrument!
I don’t care if it’s a fucking banjo, a fucking piano, a fucking French Horn — put your hands or your mouth on something that produces sound!
I kid. But in all seriousness, if you raise someone who doesn’t know how to read music, that’s on you. Big mistake.
You could say that swim lessons fall into the category of health and safety, because drowning is a leading cause of death. But I do question, if water is so dangerous, why do we spend such an inordinate amount of time at swimming pools?
The point is we don’t know if our kids need more structure or more freedom to play. And even they may not know until they’re 50. I have my opinions, but I could be wrong. I could be wrong about almost everything. That’s why I focus on the two things — show them they’re loved, protect their general health and safety. Not because I have it all figured, but it keeps me relatively sane in what can seem like a losing battle.
Something Isn’t Working
You’ve probably seen the research about Americans’ declining happiness.
We’ve pinned the blame squarely on the shoulders of social media and … the phone. Instead of spending time doing healthy things like sleeping or exercising, we’re watching reels and harassing each other online. Makes sense, it’s a good explanation.
This decline — if you accept that it’s even happening — also coincides with the rise of this sort of obsessive parenting where we’re with the kids 24/7, falling all over ourselves to meet their every need. Turning birthday parties into wedding-scale events.
I can’t prove one way or the other whether this has had any impact, but the whole idea of a decline in happiness should at the very least make us question what happiness is and how to get it.
Because, in the end, I really believe a happy person is a successful person regardless of what they achieve.
Take a Breath
In my view there’s only two things that will definitively make your child unsuccessful:
They don’t love themselves
They’re not safe
№ 2 just means they’re not hooked on heroin or base jumping, engaging in criminal activity, that kind of thing. That’s the practical part of success. You have to be relatively healthy and not in some kind of grave danger.
The other part is having the self-esteem, self-love, the internal foundation to overcome the inevitable failure, the disappointments, the haters and just the downright bad luck. Most people will work so hard to become something and have to settle for something else. The ones that do get there often regret it.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re a genius at math, an elite athlete, a renowned artist or a billionaire. It might. It very well might. Your career might make you happy.
You may also achieve at a level that everyone would applaud and have just as big a void in your heart as anyone else.
So why should we obsess so much on whether or not our kid learns to play an out of tune piano? Because even if they become a concert pianist or the next John Legend, it may not matter.
Take a breath. You haven’t failed because they haven’t learned to read or they’re pissing themselves or they’re shy. You also haven’t succeeded because they’re dominating a travel league.
The hard part is that raising children means you’re going to have to make a decades-long series of tactical decisions and tradeoffs based on core values — your heart will break through each painstaking milestone — and in the end you won’t know if you’ve been successful.
Only they will.
I agree with so much you said here. Take my son for example: he plays a lot of baseball. Do I love to see his skills progress and his team win? Yes. But for me the big takeaway is that when he started, he was so unbelievably shy that 2 teams in a row he let the coach call him by the WRONG NAME simply because he didn’t feel comfortable talking to others. Next was complete and total meltdowns when he “failed.” Now I see a kid who is a leader on the field by explaining the game to those who are new and a kid who has learned to handle himself when he experiences defeat/struggles.
For me, this is success. He can now go into the world confidently and know that he can face challenges and deal with them when things don’t go his way.
We are careful to honor his requests for “downtime” and recognize when he is doing “too much.” Balance and love for the win.