Most adults, even those who are high-achieving, don’t expect perfection from their peers, co-workers, or themselves. A great accountant might be a terrible cook. A great salesperson might not be able to fix anything around the house. The best coach might be a working example of disorganization in her office. There are too many roles to be played for any of us to reasonably expect that one person could excel at all of them.
Yet sometimes, we forget to extend that same consideration to high school kids.
High school students are constantly being measured, scored, and evaluated. Their grade on a paper, their score on the SAT, their GPA, their number of community service hours, the awards they’ve won, whether or not they’re a starter or the first chair or the acknowledged leader—it’s easy for even the most nurturing parent to focus on the weaknesses and look for ways to address them. But the message that sends to kids is that they have to be great at everything, that anything less than perfection is a smudge that needs to be buffed out.
I’m not arguing that kids should never be evaluated or that parents should simply accept any outcome. Anyone who plans on going to college and having a job someday needs to be comfortable with some evaluation. And a student who’s failing math has more than an imperfection—that’s a real struggle that needs to be addressed.
But parents who celebrate their student’s strengths and who praise effort over outcomes are more likely to have happy, successful students, students who aren’t afraid of challenges and are more likely to reach for what they want.
When the college admissions anxiety makes you start seeking perfection from your student, take a step back and treat them like imperfect adults.