No parent has ever admitted it, but we all know that we are in a secret, silent competition with each other.

Nobody will say the word, or admit it which makes it impossible to opt out because you can't deny something nobody admits is happening. But it shows up in subtle ways. 

For example, the middle school tennis team takes seven kids.

Volleyball takes twenty, which sounds generous until you see the crowd at tryouts.

So every autumn a lot of children who worked genuinely hard and are pretty skilled don't make it and as parents, you have to blame that decision somewhere or rather on someone.

It usually goes as: the school is biased or the coaches have favorites and then everyone vents about it together, which feels much better than the alternative.

The academic version is quieter and runs the same way.

Around where we live there's regular, advanced, and accelerated levels. Some children are doing math three full years ahead of everyone else. There are talented and gifted programs, and opportunities for kids to literally go to higher level schools. Every one of those is a line, and every line has kids on both sides of it.

So somebody's child gets into the double accelerated math program. Nobody mentions it to you and a sequence starts in your head anyway:

“Why isn't my kid in that? Should I be doing something? Should I get him a tutor so he gets in. Does it even matter? That mom is pushing her kid too much. I would never do that”

That's the competition. It runs entirely inside your own skull, nobody keeps score, and you will never be told when it ends.

I'd like to tell you I'm above this but I'm not.

I get that exact sequence. But, I shut it down, usually inside a minute, landing in the same place every time: he's still a kid, he's doing fine at his own level, that's enough.

Shutting it down isn't the same as not having it and I'll be honest about something else. I think it gets worse from here. My kids are in fifth and eighth grade and very little of this has real stakes attached yet. In high school, when it starts counting toward college, the pressure will be considerably heavier.

It's also my first time. I've never done this before, and the results won't arrive for another decade. So when I say “none of this matters, let him be a kid” and then look around and see him in a lower-level class than someone else's child, of course I wonder whether I've got it wrong.

That's what making decisions without knowing the outcome actually feels like.

Once you see it this way, you notice something: there is no group of serene parents standing off to one side who have solved it.

The parent with three tutors is in it. The parent who says they don't care is in it, some of them have a tutor they will never mention to anybody. The parent complaining about the biased coach is deep in it. I'm in it, writing this.

There are only people at different points between having the thought and doing something about it, which is oddly a relief.

If everyone's in it, then having the thought isn't a character flaw. It's just the weather. 

This isn't really individual parents being competitive. It's structural and once you see the structure, it's much easier to stop blaming yourself for reacting to it.

Our area has a lot of immigrant families, and I'll say this as someone who is a child of the group and inside it  rather than outside it. Many of the people who came here were the highest achievers in their own countries. Academic success wasn't a pleasant outcome. It was the mechanism to route out and up.

You don't put that down at the border. It comes with you, it shapes how you raise your children. The research on this is sharper than I’d like to admit.

Excessive pressure to excel is now listed among the top four risk factors for adolescent mental health. The other three are poverty, trauma, and discrimination.

Suniya Luthar at Arizona State has spent thirty years on this, and students at high-achieving schools are now formally described as an at-risk group. Not despite the schools being good, but because of what comes attached to them.

When parents ask her where all the pressure is coming from, her answer is to ask them: where is it not?

Early signs, peer envy in particular, tend to show up in middle school, which means now. 

You don't. That's the first thing, and it's worth saying plainly.

You can't leave the environment. I'm not moving out of my neighborhood over a math track and neither are you and you can't stop having the thought.  I've been trying for years and it turns up on schedule.

But there's a gap, and the gap is entirely yours.

Between the thought arriving and you doing something about it, there's a space. Everything that actually reaches your kid has to travel through it.

The feeling is invisible. It costs your child nothing, they cannot see you noticing that somebody else's kid made the team.

The action is what lands on them or the tutor that appears. The extra practice that gets added, the thing you ask about first when they get in the car.

So discipline isn't serenity. It's much smaller and far more achievable: feel whatever you feel, and don't let it sign anybody up for anything.

Most of my thoughts don't make it across that gap because the gap is the only part of this I have any say over, so I've learned to guard it. 

Researchers asked more than 500 middle school students to rank six values by how much their parents prioritised them.

Three about achievement: get into a good college, excel academically, have a successful career.

Three about character: be respectful, be helpful, be kind to others.

The students ranked what they believed their own parents cared about most. Not what the parents said they valued. What the kids had worked out from living with them and which way a child ranked those lists mattered for how they were doing, how much pressure they felt, how they handled it.

Here's what came back:

The kids who thought both their parents valued kindness well above achievement did better than everyone else — and not just emotionally. They did better at school too.

The kids who thought achievement came first had higher anxiety, higher levels of depression, lower self-esteem. And they performed worse academically.

That's the part I keep turning over. It isn't that pushing achievement costs you a happy child in exchange for a high-performing one. The kids who believed their parents put achievement first got more anxious and got worse grades.

The lowest-scoring group of all; psychologically and academically were the children with at least one parent they saw as prioritising achievement, and at least one parent they experienced as highly critical. Those two together were the worst combination in the study.

So: your kid can't see the thought. They can't see you deciding not to act on it.

They can only see what you let across and they have already, quietly, put it in order.

I used to think the goal was to stop caring. To reach a place where another kid’s placement simply didn't register.

I've given that up. It registers and it’ll register harder in high school.

What's changed is that I've stopped treating the feeling as a failure. I can't do anything about the feeling, and I wasted a fair amount of energy being annoyed with myself for having it, which is its own small competition, just with a different opponent.

The gap is the part that's mine.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛