Excerpt from Madeline Levine Blog / Courageous Parenting

Second-Hand Performance Anxiety:
5 Reasons Why Parents Fret Over Their Kids' Performance

Welcome to the season of parental anxiety. As surely as winter melts into spring and Uncle Sam demands his yearly tribute, we start worrying about end of semester tests, registration deadlines for the "right" summer camps and the arrival of college acceptance (or, heaven forbid, rejection) letters.

That parents fret about their kids' performance is no secret. Why and what to do about it is less clear. In this blog I'm going to explore some of the reasons behind the handwringing. Yes, we all love our kids and we all want them to be successful. But that has always been true of parents, and yesterday's parents didn't obsess over every test grade and spend every spare minute shuttling them to rehearsals, matches and tournaments ...did they?

No. They did not. (Ask yourself: did your parents parent the way you do? Did your friends' parents?)

You probably know my position on overparenting. However well-intentioned, it doesn't do kids (or parents) any favors. Research has proven this again and again, and has shed light on the damage it causes in the form of stress, sleep-deprivation and a variety of shortfalls in personal development, notably resilience and coping skills. Yet before parents can stop pressuring, driving and controlling their children they must first understand what's driving their anxiety.

• The risk of going against perceived community values. Peer pressure is a powerful force. That's true for adults, too. When everyone else is hiring tutors at the first sign of an A-minus and pushing their kids to pursue two or three extracurricular activities chosen with an eye toward bolstering their college application, to do otherwise is to go against the cultural norm. Even if we know in our heart that deviating from said norms is best for our child, no one wants to be perceived as a "not good enough" parent.

So many parents describe feeling like "a salmon swimming upstream." To watch your neighbors spend thousands to send their child to the top academic enrichment camp while yours hangs out at the local YMCA day camp all summer is tough. Even knowing he needs that break from the rigors of school, it's hard not to second-guess yourself. It takes conviction and self-assurance and, yes, great love for your child. It is also part of your responsibility to be more tuned to the needs of your child and her healthy development than to community norms.

• The belief that not providing all possible opportunities and enrichment experiences will put your child at a disadvantage.Here's the remedy for this one: realize that many of the strategies we use to optimize our children's potentials are based on faulty thinking. Ironically, pressuring them to achieve, scheduling them to the max, and dismissing unstructured play as a waste of time is not only not helping our kids, it's actually harming them.

For the most part, our children don't need a puppet-master directing them to the "right" activities. They do need the space and freedom to find their internal motivation and develop self-efficacy.

Kids with no down time miss out on the vital developmental tasks of childhood. It's through unstructured play and "hanging out" that children hone social skills, imagination, persistence, and a sense of self. The foundation gained in childhood is critical for eventually building a healthy adult.

• A dearth of career opportunities. It's true that the economy is grim, that jobs are in short supply, and that our kids will graduate childhood and enter a super competitive "flat world." I won't deny this reality and I do understand why parents feel they must give their kids every advantage. But—again—the things we're doing to provide that advantage are the exact opposite of what most kids need.

A singular focus on academics keeps kids from developing other life skills critical for success in a global economy: the ability to self-motivate, collaborate, problem-solve, and persevere when the going gets tough. These are the very skills business leaders say so many young employees lack; instead, they display a sense of entitlement and a distressing lack of work ethic and "grit." When we turn our children into good-grade machines and neglect the rest of their development, we set them up to fail in the business world.

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