Despite the lack of an overt tiger mom and family, I somehow adopted the Overachiever’s mindset at a young age. It took two decades and untold mistakes before I was able to step back and try to understand what happened with any honesty or empathy. And in this Katie Couric interview, David Brooks gave an incredible response to a question about overachievers and parents:
A lot of parents especially in our demographic love their children passionately, also desperately want their children to do really well in life, get into college, get great careers, and so these two forces collide to mean intense attention, intense effort, intense care and love for the child, but also intense anxiety about them not doing well, not getting into the right college, not getting the right job and intense love and relief when they do something well. So the kids are bombarded in a world in which when they do something well they get super bursts of love and when they don’t do something well there’s a little withdrawal and they begin to feel conditional love…I’ll love you as long as you’re on my balance beam but if you get off my balance beam you’re in trouble and we’ll cut you off, and I see this in my students, that the will for unconditional love terrifies them, it leads them to lack of internal criteria to make up their own decisions, it makes them in the most concrete sense have two majors, one for mom & dad and one for me, and they live under this inability to really lead their own lives, because the final act of parenting is letting go and I see some of the parents not come to convocation because they don’t like the job choice, and I’ve seen some very strange things in our culture, in our high-achieving high-pressure culture
This! Minute 54. Try to watch the whole thing. If you’re busy and pressed for time, you can listen to it at 1.25 or 1.5x to speed things up :)