On Raising Excellent Kids

“Your kids are going to fall behind.”

Recently, I was discussing with a parent who’d been warned that their negligence was costing their 8th grader a shot at pursuing his dreams. The parents hadn’t planned out his entire curriculum for the next 5 years, and because certain high school courses come with a GPA, if you don’t map it out, you risk leaving potential points on the table. That kid might slip a few spots in his class rank. Apparently, other parents had full-on color-coded spreadsheets to maximize their kids’ odds.

I’ve ​written before about the craziness of youth sports. The private coaches, when a kid is 7, travel teams at 8, promises of athletic scholarships, and dreams of professional leagues. But we haven’t addressed its close cousin: the college admissions arms race, which includes specialized tutors designed to give your ACT a boost, resume counselors (and writers), and guides to the exact high school classes you should take to optimize the balance of perceived rigor and GPA. Gone are the days when your kid says, “Hmm, drama sounds fun, European history looks interesting.” Now it’s all about optimizing for an outcome.

The arms race in sport and academics comes from a similar place: a parent’s (very genuine) wanting the best for their children, wanting to give them every possible opportunity. So when confronted with the opportunity to give your kid a slightly better shot, who isn’t going to take it?

In sports, it’s the financial freedom of a scholarship. In academics, it’s the promise of a school that’s ranked just a bit higher, which implies improved future earnings. But the maximizing and optimizing for a future outcome carries a cost. It doesn’t cultivate the underlying ingredients that help our children turn into happy, healthy, successful adults. Decades of research tell us that we need intrinsic motivation to be the main driver. A ​meta-analysis​ of over 200,00 students found that intrinsic motivation predicted higher performance, persistence, and well-being, whereas ego-involved motives linked to ill-being. We need that spark of curiosity that pushes us to explore a topic out of our own free will. And how do we cultivate intrinsic motivation? By pursuing our interests, by dabbling in a range of pursuits early on so that we can figure out what in the world we actually like; by surrounding ourselves with peers who challenge us and support our interests; by going down the rabbit hole on something that catches our attention. It’s the kid who tries speech, debate, theatre, and western literature; even if those classes don’t give them the GPA boost of AP Physics.

We’ve ​known for 50+ years​ that overemphasizing academic rewards and outcomes undermines intrinsic motivation. We can point to all sorts of ​research​ that shows helicopter and bulldozer parenting is linked to mental health issues, and that ​autonomy supportive​ parenting predicts better academic and psychological development.

Yet the temptation to over-optimize, to clear the path and focus on getting that shiny outcome, is still there. We keep telling kids to take this class to get a slight edge in class rank. Show up to practice not because you enjoy the sport, but because this is your ticket. The pull is strong. And for good reason. It’s scary to be the parents who don’t go all-in on U8 baseball when all your peers are. It’s easy to feel guilty that you aren’t taking a GPA-boosting class when your entire neighborhood is doing that. After all, don’t you care about your kids? That guilt can make us throw away everything that research tells us and everything that we know. I get it. I live, eat, and breathe mastery. And still, at times, I have the feeling of, “Should I be doing more for my kid?”

Consider this your permission to acknowledge the guilt and anxiety that come with raising kids. It’s normal. But, as I so often write about, those emotions can be nudges we learn to sit with or alarms that make us panic and us go against our values. When everyone is screaming at you to panic, it’s easy to understand why your brain goes there. In these situations, it’s crucial to keep returning to your values. How do you instill the underlying ingredients? How do you stoke intrinsic motivation and curiosity? How do you create lifelong learners? How do you give kids tools to sometimes take the wrong path, fail, and yet pick themselves up and find a new path?

Before we wrap up, I want to leave you with an example from my own experience.

My brother is a well-known economist with a PhD. My sister is a genetic counselor. In the family, I had the worst class rank and test scores of the Magness trio. In no small part because while my brother and sister were pursuing their academic interests, I was off running 15 miles a day. The irony is that I got accepted to pretty much every college in America (even though I had much lower test scores and GPAs) simply because I could run in circles faster…but that’s a story for another day.

Surely, in a house filled with academic heavyweights, there was a push to play the college admissions game. Nope. In high school, my brother took German for four years because it was interesting. He nerded out in extracurricular clubs that didn’t do much for his resume. My sister played tennis and sang in the choir. She was no phenom, but she liked being on the team and slowly worked her way up to varsity. I opted out of advanced math the minute he had the chance, replacing it with “office aid” so that I could do less homework and spend more time running.

There was never a mention of class ranks or getting into prestigious schools. In fact, when I was a senior in high school, after visiting an Ivy League school, my dad told me not to get carried away by the prestige and that it didn’t make much sense.”Ivy schools don’t give athletic scholarships. You could go here and be in debt for a long time. Or you could go somewhere else for free.” If there’s one thing my parents did, it’s that they never got caught up in the chase.

There’s a reason every coach preaches process. It’s why Bill Walsh titled his book The Score Takes Care of Itself. It sounds cliché. It sounds simple. But all of these coaches realize the same thing the research on motivation tells us: Build the underlying ingredients. Stoke intrinsic fire. And the outcomes take care of themselves, from winning games to pursuing careers.

It’s scary to let go. But that’s kind of the point. The easy thing is to quell the anxiety, to bulldoze, to over-optimize. The hard thing is to sit with the anxiety and ask: Are you raising your kids in accordance with your values? Are you giving them valuable tools and helping light the fire? That’s what matters most over the long haul.

— Steve