“Total MOM Fail!” exclaimed a recent Facebook post by a mom of two boys. Her 9-year-old son, she explained, needed postcards from people who live out of state, for a homework project. “If you can, mail me one today or tomorrow,” she wrote. “Please let me know and I will message you the info.”
At what point had this become her failure? Wasn’t it her kid’s job to keep track of his assignments and to do the actual legwork?
In a word, yes, says William Stixrud, a clinical neuropsychologist who has worked with area families for 35 years. “One of the basic formulas of child-rearing is not to do for your kids what they can do for themselves. It weakens them and makes them more dependent on us. It reduces their ability to become resilient. The way to develop resilience is to experience stress and deal with it.”
And yet so many of us are guilty of the opposite. We pack our kids’ lunches when they’re running late, and when they forget those lunches (or math homework, or musical instruments or umbrellas), we run those items up to school, lest they experience the pangs of hunger, a bad grade or wet clothes.
Incidents like these are low-stakes, but they are training grounds for self-sufficiency, Stixrud says.
A kid who packs his own lunch has control over what he eats and pride in his independence. And it only takes one incident of being benched for a young soccer player to remember her mandatory shin guards the next time around.
In his book, The Self-Driven Child, which he co-authored with Ned Johnson, Stixrud urges parents to be a “non-anxious presence” for their children—a guide who is there to help when asked, but doesn’t hover, interfere or push a personal agenda. “
But show me a non-anxious parent in McLean, Arlington or Falls Church,” he jokes, good-naturedly. “There’s all this fear that if I don’t push my kids constantly, other kids will get ahead of them. This thinking is delusional. So many parents think it’s worth it for kids to be stressed or anxious or tired if they eventually get into a really elite college—but nope. If kids develop an anxiety disorder, it changes their brain, and that makes them more vulnerable to chronic anxiety or repeated bouts of depression.”
Much of what drives us as parents, of course, is that protective instinct. It’s wanting our kids not to feel pain. But deep down, the compulsion to “save” them is also about us.
“We have this fear that we’re not being good enough parents,” says Josie Woods, director of student support at The Potomac School in McLean. “Am I giving my child every possible opportunity to be competitive in this world, whether that’s in sports, academics, the arts? When we allow our kids to fail, sometimes parents see that as a parental failure. So the anxiety we have about putting our kids at a disadvantage makes us want to swoop in.”
Lynn*, an Arlington mom of three, agrees. “I think every parent wants their child to find something to hang their hat on—something that gives them confidence,” she says, “especially when other parents are talking about their kids’ résumé and activities. It is hard for kids—and parents, too—to stop comparing themselves to each other.”
Studies indicate that kids today are experiencing higher rates of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem than previous generations. Some experts say parents are inadvertently feeding that beast.
Rachel Bailey, a parenting coach based in Vienna, is routinely tapped to lead parenting workshops at Arlington and Fairfax County schools. “I started out working with teens,” says Bailey, a former therapist and ADHD coach, “but I realized the greater need was to work with parents”—specifically, knowing when to dial it back and resist the temptation to intervene.
“When kids are really young, we have to solve their problems for them,” she says. “But at a certain point the hovering takes a toll on both kids and parents. No one really tells parents: Stop. Let them do it for themselves. That’s where I come in.”
The overreach is pervasive, Bailey says. She sees parents doing their kids’ chores because it’s easier than fighting with them, and meddling in their kids’ friendship dynamics. “You have to protect your 2-year-old from being hit by another kid on the playground, but by grade school or middle school they need to be managing their relationships by themselves.”
Why is it so hard for us to butt out? “The biggest piece of this is that we, as a generation of parents, don’t know how to handle discomfort,” Bailey observes. “Our way of coping with discomfort is to control things,” when the more productive approach is to teach kids how to problem solve.
“I like to start by having parents ask their kids, ‘What do you think you should say to your friend?’ ” she advises. “If they want to offer [their child] a suggestion, they can say, ‘I’ll tell you what I would do, but I’m not X years old and I haven’t been in your classroom. So how do you need to change it so that it will work for you?’ I want [parents] to give kids the tools rather than doing it for them.
The helicoptering doesn’t end when kids graduate from high school. “Parents are dramatically more involved in college students’ lives today than in decades past—and you’d be hard-pressed to find a college administrator who sees that as a good thing,” says Ponneh Varho, managing partner of the D.C. office of executive search firm Isaacson, Miller, where she specializes in placing high-level administrators at Ivy League and elite liberal arts colleges. As someone who works closely with deans of student affairs, Varho has a front-row seat to many of the most pressing issues on college campuses.
“There’s a swath of students who are high-achieving but broken on the inside,” she says. “Their sense of self is damaged and they’re saddled with ‘imposter syndrome’—the sense that they don’t really deserve to be at these schools. Kids are calling and texting their parents all the time, and parents have deans on speed dial. Kids are not being allowed to stumble and recover. Counseling services are in high demand, and suicide rates are alarming.”
Varho recalls the president of one elite college noting that incoming students are increasingly grappling with feelings of isolation combined with pressure to achieve. (In a 2018 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “pressure to excel” was listed as a significant threat to adolescents’ wellness and ability to adjust—along with poverty, trauma and racism.)
“If you’re a college that attracts kids at the top of their class, they’re not all going to be at the top of their class once they get to college—90 percent of kids will no longer be in the top 10 percent of their class,” says Varho, who lives in Falls Church and has two kids of her own. “They are overwhelmed and lacking a strong sense of independence and agency, which is what helps them cultivate the tools to handle the next chapter of life.” And they are leaning on their parents for support.
“What’s at the core of all this,” she says empathetically, “is an intense love, a wanting to do what’s best for our kids. Kids now have stronger relationships with their parents than seemingly ever before. So, on the one hand, we’re cultivating these strong relationships, but on the other hand, there’s an undeniable spike in mental health problems.”
In many ways, that impulse to step in has become culturally ingrained. “It’s hard in this area to opt out because you feel like you’re swimming upstream,” Varho says. “You have to fight your own parental insecurities. You don’t want to be seen as a neglectful parent who’s not setting their child up for success, who’s not attending every PTA meeting or pushing harder to get their kid into advanced classes.”
One thing you can do to help mentally prep your kids for college (and adulthood), says Jessica Lahey, author of the best-selling book The Gift of Failure, is to make sure the college application isn’t the first time they are confronted with official, consequential paperwork.
“It’s important for kids to learn how to fill out forms and meet application deadlines well before college. School, camp, driver’s license, medical and job application forms are great places to practice,” she says.
“Supporting your teen’s autonomy does not mean you abandon them to their own devices; it means that you step back and wait until they need help before jumping in. When they do need help, guide them toward finding the answers themselves (‘Well, where might you look up your doctor’s address and phone number?’) before handing them over. Calendar alarms, set sequentially one month, two weeks, and one week before applications are due, can also keep them on track for long-term planning.”
Our tolerance for mediocrity and imperfection isn’t what it once was. Casey Robinson, principal of H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program in Arlington (she’s also a member of its Class of 1995), says she’s witnessed a gradual and somewhat insidious evolution. “There was certainly more failure in Arlington 25 years ago,” Robinson says. “Part of it is this refusal to let kids fail—or even get a B or a C. There is this pressure from the parents for a perfect transcript. So now the grades kids get don’t actually reflect their ability or work ethic. As a result, kids who have gotten straight A’s and done all the things they’re supposed to do don’t get into the [colleges] they want because those A’s don’t mean what they used to. The things they’re striving for become false measures.
“It’s our brightest kids who end up cheating,” she adds, “because they feel like they have so much on the line—that if you get a B, that will be the end for you.”
Founded in 1971, H-B Woodlawn is a public school, but offers an alternative academic model in which students have more control over their education. (The school is co-governed by students and faculty, and students have a say in the curriculum.) Students are encouraged to have a voice and to figure things out for themselves. And yet even in this environment of empowerment, Robinson sees parents wanting to shield their kids from disappointment—like the predictable flurry of emails at the end of the quarter asking what their students can do to get an A in a given class.
“Allowing your child to struggle is an essential part of the learning process,” Robinson says. “But there’s this fear among parents that if they let their kids fail now, it will keep them from getting into college. They’re okay with allowing their kids to struggle in theory, but it’s much harder to do in real life.”
Especially when there are so many resources out there to prevent so-called failure—resources that friends and neighbors are readily tapping into.
Michelle Scott, founder of the Tutoring Club of McLean, says she has preschool parents asking for help in giving their kids a leg up over their rising-kindergarten peers—or at the very least, making sure they are on pace with certain benchmarks: “Sometimes they have an older sibling who struggled with reading and they want to ensure that the younger child doesn’t have the same challenge.”
Scott says she coaches parents to focus on the work rather than the grades, starting when kids are young. For parents wanting to prep their kids for tests like the CogAT (Cognitive Abilities Test)—which is administered in elementary school and used to identify students who might benefit from advanced placement—she emphasizes that no amount of test prep will fast-track a kid who just isn’t ready for advanced classes.
“The messaging some kids are absorbing from their parents and their peers is that if they’re not in honors or intensified classes, it feels like they’re with the ‘dumb kids,’ which is a shame,” Scott says. “The older they get, the harder it is for parents to let them fail, once it starts to affect their high school transcript. We have high-schoolers taking five AP classes—which is great if that’s what they want to do. But if a parent is pushing a kid to do that, it causes so much extra anxiety during years that are already so stressful. Their grades start to suffer. They may start to lie to hide those failures and won’t ask for help, which can lead to anxiety and depression or entitlement and helplessness,” she says.
Northern Virginia has a lot of smart kids. But they are still kids. “When we hear that our kids are smart [or talented], our instinct is to push them to their maximum potential,” says Kathy Essig, a longtime executive functioning coach and co-founder of The Study Pro in McLean. Restraint is hard—especially when it means taking a season off from a travel sport or opting not to take high school-level math in middle school.
As an educational coach, Essig helps students whose executive functioning skills—the ones that help you plan, analyze, organize and prioritize both short- and long-term tasks—are out of sync with the academic expectations put on them. She says she works in tandem with parents to figure out where to set limits on their parental “helpfulness.”
“So much of what kids are experiencing today is that the academic rigor has outstripped their processing skills,” she says. “Intellect is part of it, but there’s also the ability to interpret directions, complete work in a given amount of time, perform analysis. All of those are executive functioning skills. Your brain has to mature to the point where you can perform them. It’s maturational. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with our kids, it’s that we’re not giving them the time to grow up that we had and that our parents had.
In today’s intensely competitive academic landscape, however, the tendency isn’t to give it time. It’s to provide scaffolding.
“That’s where all the tutors come in,” Essig says. “Then the danger is that kids have support all along the way and then get to college and flunk out. Or there’s a huge rise in anxiety as soon as they’re on their own. I’ve worked with three students who fell apart in college—three kids who attempted suicide. You have to ask yourself: What are we pushing toward?
“We have to get the idea out of our heads that our kids’ accomplishments are something for us to brag about at cocktail parties,” Essig continues. “You have to parent the child you have, not the dream you had the day they were born. A child will try to live up to their parents’ expectations, but you don’t want that to overwhelm their sense of self. You need to make sure they understand that they still have value, even if something doesn’t go as planned. If you let them land where they’re supposed to, it will be much better for them.”
Donna*, an Arlington mom whose son recently graduated from private school, remembers being taken aback when his adviser laid out all the options for tutors, test prep and admissions coaches his junior year. The idea of professionally polishing his college applications felt wrong. “I’d rather have my son get in on his own merit. Plus, it doesn’t really matter where you go to college,” she says, noting that she and her business partner earn the same salary, even though her partner was an Ivy Leaguer and she attended her state university.
Furthermore, you’re not fooling anyone when you do your kids’ work for them or speak on their behalf, says Ben Sessions, an Arlington dad of two who conducts admissions interviews for an elite New England university. That college interview? Recruiters can tell when a passion has been dictated by a parent—versus one that represents a student’s genuine interest.
“After spending an hour with a kid, you can tell what’s a reflection of them versus what they’ve been told to say,” Sessions says. “Kids who follow a path set out by their parents tend to have less-interesting things to say because the path wasn’t necessarily their own. When kids are internally driven, it’s pretty apparent—they’ve got that sparkle in their eye.”
Take, for example, community service. “For the kid whose parents sent them to Costa Rica for a week to do a one-off service project, the conversation around service might not be as authentic,” he says. “To make an impact, you don’t need to fly to Ghana. It can be more interesting to talk about the ways they contribute locally [versus trips] that are more like tourism.”
Parents should also keep in mind that a 17- or 18-year-old is not a finished product, Sessions says. Teens need space to figure out what they want to pursue—even if they’re not deciding as quickly as their parents would like them to.
“If you give kids license to fail, to try something and see where it goes, it may not be 100 percent what you want. But we need to give kids room to develop that voice, that passion,” he says. “What I’m looking for is something that will distinguish them from other candidates—sustained interest in X and how they’ve pursued it and what they’re going to continue to do, as well as their maturity level. Are they going to be ready for whatever college is going to throw at them?”
Sometimes the best way to teach our kids resilience and independence is to leave them alone—to resist charging in to save the day, even when our internal alarm bells go off. “I’ve had to tie my own hands behind my back with my daughter,” says Ami Foster, a former college admissions coach, ever mindful of the advice she used to give parents of the students she coached. She bit her lip when her daughter (now a senior at Yorktown) came home and worked on art projects last spring instead of studying for her AP tests.
“It didn’t look like what I wanted it to look like,” Foster says, “but she felt that she’d studied sufficiently in class and was comfortable with that. I chose not to add more pressure.” (When her daughter’s scores came back it was clear that, in fact, she had studied sufficiently on her own.)
Molly*, an Arlington mother of two teenage boys, says there have certainly been times when her sons’ definition of “good enough” didn’t measure up to hers. But in the end it wasn’t about her.
“I remember the year my son got a lead role in a show at his school,” Molly says. “He had a solo he didn’t think he could sing because the notes were too high. I was conflicted about letting him fail—onstage, no less—but I backed off and let him figure it out on his own. I didn’t hire a vocal coach. I didn’t advocate with the director to give him a different role.”
On opening night, his voice did crack, she says, “but he still got lots of compliments and kudos. I think he felt good about doing it by himself. That sense of independence was more important to him than hitting the high notes. In the end I was glad I sat back and let it be.”
In retrospect, Molly says, paying attention to both sons’ cues—in all kinds of situations—was key. “I started to back off when it became clear that they were [interpreting] my involvement as me not trusting them to get stuff done on their own. If they said to me, Mom, I got this, what I really needed to do was believe them.”
Sometimes figuring out where to draw the line between being supportive and overbearing is tricky. Sharon* recalls how, in elementary school, her older son was identified early on for his exceptional intelligence. He built his identity around being a “super-smart kid,” she says, “but he also suffers from anxiety and depression, is a disorganized thinker with a touch of ADD, and struggles with processing speed in math.”
Come high school, her son started losing focus and missing assignments. Soon those incidents spiraled into feelings of anxiety and hopelessness over missing work—at which point he would convince himself that it was too late, so why bother. “It was incredibly hard for him to ask for help,” says the Arlington mom, “even after repeated examples of people being willing to help him.”
Shifting the focus of their conversations from grades to mental wellness, Sharon figured out how she could help while still empowering her son to take responsibility for his own assignments.
“I check Canvas with him and help him create schedules for getting his work done, but I have never done his work or asked a teacher to give him more time,” she says. “I have, however, stood over him as he wrote emails to teachers to ask to set up a time to meet. When things spiral, I reach out to the counselor to ask if we can talk or set up a meeting with a teacher to help prioritize late work and make it seem less daunting.”
The emphasis isn’t so much on preventing failure, she says, as it is on recognizing how her son’s emotional challenges operate under the surface, and helping him learn how to counteract those feelings of futility. As he now eyes colleges, Sharon says he’s broadened his view: “I am grateful that he doesn’t think that it’s Ivy or bust, because that sort of pressure might really harm him.”
Take a step back, experts advise, and there’s one big question we should be asking about our kids: What’s the ultimate goal?
“Our family mantra was always: It’s not about what you earn, it’s about what you learn,” says Denise Clark Pope, a California mom of three and author of “Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. She’s also co-founder of Challenge Success, a Stanford University-affiliated organization that seeks to broaden the cultural definition of success.
Grades and accolades, Pope would argue, aren’t the ultimate prize. “If my kid came home and said, ‘I got all A’s,’ I’d say, ‘That’s great, but what did you learn?’ We not only refused to buy into the system, we also helped them manage the pressure they put on themselves. Because if you love learning and you do it for the right reasons, you’re going to do even better.”
Paula*, an admittedly hard-driving parent whose kids attended Arlington public schools (both now have graduate degrees), laughs when she thinks back on some of the clashes that took place in their house—particularly with one child whose academic proclivities were at odds with her own. “There were times when I was so exasperated with her, when I thought, She’s going to end up working at McDonald’s!” Paula says. “My husband would have to bring me in off the ledge. He’d say, ‘Let her be who she is.’ I’m so Type A, and she’s totally the opposite. She may have met some expectations, but she never did it the way I wanted her to do it.”
Here, Paula pauses and takes a deep breath. Her daughter, having found a career she loves, is now happily teaching at a school in California. She’s recently become engaged and is getting ready to start a family of her own. In other words, she’s just fine.
“I’m at a place now,” Paula says, “where I look back and think, What was I so uptight about?”
*Pseudonyms used for privacy
Adrienne Wichard-Edds is a journalist and college essay coach based in Arlington. Follow her on Twitter at @WichardEdds.