How Do I Get My Son to Be More Ambitious? Practical Parenting Tips From a Mom Who’s Been There
The plastic chair next to my 9th grader’s math desk squeaked when I shifted, and the teacher tapped Jake’s half-blank extra credit sheet with her pen. “He aces every test, understands every unit,” she said, leaning forward. “This 10-point assignment would push his B+ to an A. He just turned it in blank. When I asked why, he said B+ is good enough.” I nodded and smiled like I wasn’t mentally ticking off all the other times Jake had said that: turning down the varsity soccer spot because 6 a.m. practice “wasn’t worth it,” turning down extra dog-walking shifts even though he’d been begging for a $1200 custom gaming PC, quitting the school debate club after one semester because “the meetings are boring.” All I could think on the drive home was: what’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he more ambitious?
I badgered him that afternoon, pointing out all the opportunities he was wasting, all the talent he was leaving on the table. He just pulled his hood up, clicked his headphones on, and didn’t say a word. I spent the next month scrolling parenting forums, staying up late reading articles that told me I was either pushing too hard or not pushing enough, until I called my cousin Lila, who’s been a high school guidance counselor for 22 years, and met her for coffee. I ranted for 15 minutes straight about how Jake just won’t try, how he’s wasting all his natural talent, and she stirred her black coffee and said, “First question: what do you call ambition?”
I said the obvious: good grades, getting into a good college, working hard to get ahead, the usual. She said, “Most parents see ambition as checking the boxes they care about. What’s Jake spending 10 hours a week on when he doesn’t have to do it?” I thought about it. He’s at the skate park every day after school, filming clips, editing them for TikTok. He spends whole weekends building custom mechanical keyboards for his friends, most of the time he only charges them for parts, no labor. I’d always called that messing around. She said, “That’s ambition. He’s choosing to work hard at something he cares about. You just aren’t calling it that.”
That hit me harder than any advice I’d read online. She didn’t give me vague tips about being supportive, she gave me small, concrete things to try that I could fit into our regular routine. The first was: stop asking him to care about your goals. Start connecting what he cares about to the skills you want him to build. Instead of nagging him about extra credit to get into college, which means nothing to a 14-year-old who doesn’t even know what he wants for dinner next week, connect that extra credit to his goals.
I tried that that same week. I saw him scrolling his TikTok for you page, complaining that his views had stalled out for months. I said, “That stats extra credit you never turned in? You could do your project on how posting time affects skate TikTok engagement. You’d get the 10 points for your grade, and you’d get actual info to grow your own account.” I didn’t push it, just said it and left his room. Two days later, he asked me to help him make a spreadsheet to organize his data. He got an A on the project, pulled his math grade up to an A-, and gained 1,100 followers in the next month by shifting his posting time to after school. It worked way better than any nagging I’d ever done.
The second small shift she suggested was: reward effort, not just the outcomes you want. I used to give Jake $20 for every A on his report card, but I never said anything about the 12 hours he spent building a keyboard for a friend who couldn’t afford a new one. Now I don’t tie rewards to my own checklist. If he spends a full weekend working on a project – any project – I’ll pick up half the cost of new parts, or buy him his favorite barbecue takeout, or just share his latest video to all my friends. It’s small, it doesn’t cost a lot of time or money, but it tells him his effort matters, even if it’s not for a class I care about.
It’s been two and a half years since that parent-teacher conference, and it’s not like Jake’s suddenly turned into the overachieving kid I thought I wanted. He still turned down AP Physics this year to take a digital media production elective. He still skips honor society meetings because he says they’re just “clout for people who want to pad their college apps.” He still turns down extra shifts bagging groceries at the local store because he’d rather spend that time editing videos.
But last month, he organized a skate jam at our city’s run-down downtown park. He reached out to a local skate shop to sponsor prizes, made a full promo reel and flyers, called the city three times to sort out a last-minute permit when they told him he couldn’t use the park without one, and rounded up 72 kids from three different nearby towns to show up. He spent three weeks working on that after school, every day. No one made him do it. He didn’t get a grade or a trophy for it. But it mattered to him, and he put in the work.
I still catch myself worrying some nights. I wonder if he’ll regret not taking harder classes, if he’ll struggle to get into the college he wants, if he’ll ever “live up to his potential” the way people talk about it. But I’ve stopped trying to cram his ambition into the shape I thought it should take. Some days we still bicker about unfinished homework, some weeks I slip back into nagging, and he still shrugs it off and goes back to what he’s working on. For now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How Do I Get My Son to Be More Ambitious