What Happens When Parents Take School Too Seriously: Real Tips For Letting Go
I was folding soccer warm-ups on the bleachers last Saturday, when I heard Lisa, the mom of one of my daughter’s 5th grade teammates, laughing so sharp it wasn’t really a laugh. Her son had missed the unit math test the week before to go to his grandma’s 70th birthday out of state, and she was convinced this one B+ would tank his chances of getting into honors algebra in 7th grade, which would tank his chances of getting into a good college. I just sipped my lukewarm coffee and didn’t say anything, because 5 years ago, I would have been right there with her.
My oldest is 16 now, but when he was in 3rd grade, I had my own wake-up moment with a diorama. The assignment was to build a scene from your favorite book, and Jax got distracted building a Lego spaceship all week and left it to the night before it was due. I stayed up until 11 pm gluing green felt grass and cutting tiny popsicle sticks for a Little House on the Prairie log cabin, yelling at him for being irresponsible the whole time. I was convinced that if his project didn’t look good, he’d get a bad grade, that bad grade would keep him out of the gifted program, that would put him on a track of lower-level classes in high school, and… well, I don’t even know what I thought would happen after that. I just knew it was bad.
The next day he came home with a B. He’d forgotten to write the name of the book on the front of the diorama. I fumed, fired off an email to his teacher asking if he could correct the mistake and get his grade changed. She wrote back 10 minutes later that stopped me cold: “I get it, I’ve been there. But do you remember what the project was for? It was to get kids to talk about what they read. Jax gave his presentation yesterday, he could retell every plot point, even explained why he relates to Laura being mad at Mary. The diorama grade doesn’t change that he met the goal.”
That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t taking school seriously for my kid. I was taking school too seriously, way more seriously than the teachers who ran it, way more seriously than it ever needed to be for an 8 year old. I’ve watched it play out over and over since then: I volunteered in the 4th grade library last year and watched a 9 year old cry over a 93 on a science test, because his mom told him no straight A’s meant no summer camp. I’ve seen parents argue with teachers over a half-point deduction on a essay for a 10 year old. It’s everywhere.
I started making small, concrete changes in our house that have helped me step back, and they’re things any parent can try without rearranging your whole life. The first rule I made is: any grade higher than an 80 doesn’t get a comment from me unless my kid brings it up first. If they bring home an 85 on a spelling test, I just sign the folder and move on. No “why didn’t you study more?” No “can you retake it to bring it up?” If it’s below 80, we talk about it, but we start with “do you understand the material now?” not “how do we fix this grade.”
The second thing I do is make sure we have at least one ungraded, low-stakes activity going at all times, something that doesn’t count for anything. Right now, my 11 year old does pottery at the rec center one afternoon a week. She doesn’t enter contests, nobody gives her feedback on how good her mugs are, she just goes and gets clay everywhere and makes lopsided bowls for the family. My 16 year old spends weekends fixing old bikes for neighbors for free, just because he likes it. No one keeps score, there’s no progress report, it reminds all of us that not everything you do has to be ranked or improved to be worth doing.
Third, we fix the problem, not the grade. If Jax didn’t understand cell division for his AP Bio test, we watch a 10 minute YouTube video together after school, we don’t sign up for an $80 an hour tutor just to get his grade bumped from a B to an A. If Mia struggles with long division, we do five extra problems a night for a week until she gets it, we don’t make her do an extra hour of worksheets every night just to hit a certain percentile on the state test.
A couple months ago, we had a parent-teacher conference for Mia, and her teacher said “she’s a solid B student, she participates, she helps the other kids with reading, she’s always kind.” I said “that sounds great” and the teacher looked actually surprised. She said most parents would have already asked what we can do to get her grades up to A, to prepare for middle school honors classes. That stuck with me.
I know what the pushback is: school matters, good grades get you into college, good college gets you a good job. I don’t argue that. But what I see more often is kids burning out by 10th grade, or growing up not knowing how to do anything that doesn’t look good on a resume, or having no idea what they actually enjoy because they’ve spent their whole lives checking boxes their parents told them to check. A friend of mine’s kid graduated top of our class last year, got into an Ivy League school, and deferred for a year because he had a full panic attack before move-in. He told his mom he didn’t even know what he wanted to study — he just did what everyone told him he should do for 12 years.
I still slip up. Last week, Mia told me she didn’t want to do the school spelling bee this year because she gets too nervous on stage, and I almost opened my mouth to say “but you’re so good at spelling, it would look good on your middle school application” before I bit my tongue. Instead I said “okay, no problem. Want to get ice cream after school?” She grinned and said yes. Some days I still wonder if I’m doing it wrong, if I should push harder, if I’m setting them up for failure down the line. But then I look at Jax, who can fix any bike you put in front of him, who shows up to every one of Mia’s games even when he’d rather hang out with his friends, who texts his grandma every Sunday to ask how her tomato garden is growing. The stuff that matters isn’t on the report card. This whole letting go thing is still a work in progress, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than holding on too tight.
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