Parents who love to praise their children as gifted and take pride in their child having innate talent are inadvertently causing extremely serious harm to their child and putting terrible pressure on them. How to raise children properly is always a timeless concern for parents.
A little over a year ago, people admired the parenting strategy of a parent who brought a female Vietnamese student into Harvard, and the public marveled at a boy who was considered a prodigy for his extraordinary English ability. Yet, in recent days, the story of a Canadian girl hiring someone to kill her parents left everyone stunned, questioning whether training a child to be so well-rounded is truly right. Could academic pressure be too heavy for our children? Are we doing the right thing for our children? This article shares my view on this issue.
Hard Practice and Parental Intervention Do Not Cause Children to Lose Creativity
The first counterargument to the view that studying too much leads to failure is a statistical confusion. People are generalizing a conclusion based on a few isolated phenomena. Every year in this world, how many cases are there of children shooting and killing their parents or committing suicide due to the overly heavy pressure to succeed? That figure is certainly not large enough to become statistically significant. The press has turned an isolated case into a very unscientific generalization that studying a lot and doing many extracurriculars will lead to children becoming “mentally unstable.”
The absurd conclusion people draw from a few suicide cases is that the Asian way of raising children brings short-term benefits, whereas the European/American way brings long-term benefits. Children raised in the European-American style will be more creative than those raised in the East Asian style. Those who draw this conclusion probably haven’t seen how Western children from many affluent families in the US are educated. In the US, there is a very famous term, “soccer mom,” meaning a mother who devotes 100% of her time to her children. Kids from well-off families in the US are also extremely busy. They study everything from academics, sports, and music to art; their schedules are no less packed than those of East Asian parents’ children.
Every year, Harvard rejects many (white) American students with straight-A records, high SATs, who are school presidents or leaders, sports team captains, full of talent, speaking two or three languages… Such cases, if in Vietnam, would easily be acclaimed because very few Vietnamese students are so “all-around talented.” So why are East Asians often mentioned while European-Americans are rarely mentioned? Because East Asians are usually 1st-2nd generation and mostly poor/middle-class struggling families, their success stories always evoke strong emotions in many people. As for European-Americans, “hard working” is a normal thing.
Nor are (white) European-Americans completely immune to the heavy pressure to succeed. Just recently, the University of Pennsylvania (a member of the Ivy League) raised an alarm over several freshman students committing suicide, and this was judged not to be a rare phenomenon among top-tier universities in the US.
The second observation is that Asian children (who are trained a lot and play little) are not as creative as children raised in the European-American way (who study little and play a lot). This is a very unscientific assertion.
No research or statistics indicate that a child who studies many things is less creative than a child who idles around, and vice versa. The more a child is exposed to various academic fields, basic sciences, music, art, sports, etc., the more the child benefits from an interdisciplinary approach, which is very advantageous for creative ability. Taking calligraphy classes since his university years helped Steve Jobs tremendously in thinking about the beauty of Apple designs. Leonardo da Vinci, considered one of the most creative human beings in history, was also an interdisciplinary researcher, spanning painting and sculpture to engineering, physics, and more. Creativity is not something that falls out of the sky as many mistakenly believe, nor does playing more make one more creative than studying more.
Besides, becoming a creative person requires an entire supporting ecosystem. No matter how extraordinary a child is, they cannot become Steve Jobs in Vietnam, where the legal, financial, and cultural systems supporting businesses are still very poor. An Asian-heritage Yo-Yo Ma moving millions of hearts with his supreme cello sounds had to be in the US, not in a place where individuality is suppressed.
Furthermore, excellence almost always comes with hard practice and the close, committed companionship of parents, especially in fields like music or sports. If one studies the lives of successful people like Yo-Yo Ma (the famous cellist), Tiger Woods (former world number one golfer), or Maria Sharapova (tennis queen), one always sees long-term hard practice from a very young age with the very early and tight involvement of parents. Tiger Woods’ father and Maria Sharapova’s father sacrificed all their time and energy for years so that Woods and Sharapova could train at the highest athletic level. Contrary to many emotional assertions, success usually bears a huge imprint on the parents.
Stress caused by the pressure to succeed is not due to studying many things, but also has another very major cause.
The Theory of “Relative Deprivation”
One of the deep-seated causes of collapsing under the pressure to succeed is the effect of “relative deprivation.” According to sociological theory, this effect posits that people compare themselves to others in the same context as them. For example, a student will evaluate whether they are good or not by comparing themselves to their classmates. “Well-rounded/talented” students will compare themselves to other “well-rounded/talented” students rather than comparing themselves to low-performing students. Consequently, there will always be students who constantly feel inadequate even when they are already very outstanding. This has a major impact on their learning motivation and self-confidence.
In education, according to psychologist Herbert Marsh and journalist Malcolm Gladwell, this phenomenon leads to a very common situation known as the “Big Fish in a Small Pond Effect.” A big fish will feel bigger if it is in a small pond, whereas it will feel very small if it lives in the middle of the ocean, even though the fish does not change in size. A student’s self-evaluation of themselves is inversely proportional to the prestige of the school. Excellent students may (feel) very average in an environment full of outstanding students. Therefore, except for those who are exceptionally brilliant at the very top, students studying at Le Hong Phong or Hanoi-Amsterdam, as well as outstanding students at Harvard or Oxford—especially those at the bottom of the class—will always feel pressure because they compare themselves with peers in their own school.
Instead of being top-of-the-class students in a moderately stressful environment, their self-esteem and self-confidence at the bottom of the class in an environment of overly brilliant peers have been severely damaged. In many cases, if they were in a moderate environment, they could have pursued their big dream of becoming a doctor or a scientist. However, severe loss of confidence causes them to choose an easier path, ultimately becoming very ordinary individuals who do not dare to pursue big dreams.
Therefore, it is completely normal for children or adults in the top tier to often experience stress. Parents should not blame themselves for putting pressure on their children, as that is the price to pay when our children belong to the elite group.
Don’t “Deify Your Children”
For parents, the main issue is how we teach our children to view stress and failure. Parents need to educate children to conquer themselves, not to compare themselves with other people’s children. Never praise a child for their talent; instead, praise them for being hard-working and putting in effort. This is extremely important. Parents who love to praise their children as gifted and take pride in their child having innate talent are inadvertently causing extremely serious harm to their child and putting terrible pressure on them. We love to praise our children as “gifted” without knowing that it is our most “foolish” compliment.
Yet, most of humanity loves to be praised as “geniuses,” “gifted,” or “talented.” Why do people like to give and receive compliments about being “gifted”? Quite simply, “being gifted” means being “superior” to others from birth. A “gifted” person, in the deep subconscious, is placed (by society) one step higher than “ordinary people,” like a deity compared to a mere mortal. Who doesn’t like to be viewed as a “deity”?
Being a “deity” or “gifted” implies that one doesn’t need to practice or work hard to become talented. A child praised as “gifted” will be pinned into what is called a “fixed mindset.” With this mindset, intelligence or talent is limited by innate ability, and no matter how hard one tries, it cannot be surpassed.
As a result, a child praised as gifted will tend to run away from difficult challenges. They also usually avoid criticism because, subconsciously, they cannot bear the thought of becoming an “ordinary person.” A “gifted” child will also gradually lose the willpower to strive, work intensely, and be diligent. Every time they encounter a difficulty, they will blame it on a hundred external reasons rather than their own effort. There will come a time when they feel and blame the whole world for being against them rather than looking at themselves. And when they can no longer do anything, they will resort to extreme actions such as suicide, murder, depression, etc.
This is especially important for outstanding students because there are usually some tasks that are easier for them than for ordinary people, which also means that when they no longer find those tasks easy or when things don’t go their way, they get discouraged very quickly.
The “Growth Mindset”
Meanwhile, people—especially children—with a growth mindset view the issues of talent and failure in an entirely different way. Those with a growth mindset understand that, neurologically, true talent is built through hard practice and must be continuously honed to be maintained. Talent does not depend on innate ability. The advantage of a starting line is merely a favorable beginning, but in the long run, success is like a marathon where the most persistent person is the winner.
Children with a growth mindset will view failure in a different light. They will not let themselves be defined by failure because they understand that failure is an unavoidable “necessity” to achieve success. They understand that the brain can only retain major lessons through experience and failure. Failure, therefore, is actually a necessary prerequisite to reaching success. When facing failure, children with a growth mindset will certainly feel sad, but they will not lose heart and will remain very persistent.
At the same time, the reaction of children with a growth mindset to criticism will also be different. They do not view criticism as bad, but as feedback so they can change for the better. Instead of shrinking away from criticism like children with a fixed mindset, they receive it with a constructive mindset and actively seek ways to improve themselves.
Therefore, alongside investing in children’s education and sports training, parents need to properly understand and perceive how to view success and talent. Do not turn your child into a “prodigy”; instead, help your child become a “winner in a marathon.”
