Your Child Can't Be Anything.

Posted by Dr. Gopal Unnikrishna Kurup


Your Child Can't Be Anything.

 

Many Parents as well as some books say to children that " you can be anything if you put you mind to it wholeheartedly.

What could possibly be wrong with telling our kids they can be anything? Plenty.

 First, studies show that pursuing overly-ambitious goals can be harmful. When researchers study organizations that set stretch goals for employees–goals intended to motivate high performance–they find that these lofty goals often have significant negative side effects. In particular, they find that when people are focused on a goal, and failure to achieve that goal has high costs, unethical behavior increases. Many kids report feeling intense pressure to achieve in school and beyond, and many more kids say they have cheated. 

 Some attentive parents may rightly emphasize the role of imagination :"What you can achieve is limited only by your imagination!". Some may also say that more important than imagining a goal is working hard to achieve it. True, but even if the message “You can do anything!” is broadened to include hard work, it still falls short.

This is because telling kids that they can do anything—whether fueled by imagination or hard work—obscures the critical role of chance in success. Not every child who wants to be a surgeon or sports star can become one, even if they work hard at it. At the same time, in every success story there is the grace of good fortune. Our futures are shaped by many forces beyond our control, including chance, genetics, and other accidents of birth. Then too, statistically speaking, most of us will be average

 This is not to say that parents shouldn’t expect their children’s best or encourage them to work hard and persevere, just that a focus on achievement per se ultimately does kids (and ourselves) a disservice. When we create a mindset that high achievement is better than being average–that high achievers are more special or deserving–we diminish kids’ ability to value both themselves and others. 





Annotated:www.washingtonpost.com