Pressure on kids

Pressure on kids must be the worst injustice tolerated in society today. Even more than tolerated, it is cultivated. Fear of the future makes parents choose for a complex path of training towards ‘high performance’. The rat race starts at birth. Life is a steep climb to the top.

It is good to motivate and stimulate kids to reach something in life. But what if the basic talents are simply not there? Or what if the talents are there, but the kids suffer under the pressure exercised upon them? Very often, failure anxiety destroys all talent.

Nowadays, studying for a degree is not even enough, you have to acquire a whole bunch of skills on top. You have to play sports, music, golf and practice Japanese martial arts. You have to learn to dance. You need social skills, learn to organise events and develop leadership. You have to acquire experience. You have to do an internship at Google and Apple. By the time you’re 25, you should have travelled to New York, Mumbai, Shanghai and Singapore.

I don’t mean to say the development of talents is not important. We don't want children with the complacency of Rip Van Winkle. But we need to be realistic. The virtue of patience is required, as well as true motivation and curiosity. Some kids are under too much pressure and disappointment is lurking when they get older. Another problem is that some other kids are not participating in this mad rat race. They may stay behind because they were born in the wrong household. They risk to bully their better fellow class mates and drive their teachers to a burn-out. Most of them will never really be fit for modern office life.

People don’t realise sufficiently that talent development is only part of your full personal development. What strikes me, is that people have become very demanding in terms of performance, but in return, as if it were some kind of compensation, they stay extremely permissive in terms of attitude. The reason is that our society is based on meritocracy. In terms of discipline, style, politeness and friendliness, we have lowered the standards considerably and nobody seems to mind.

I refer to my blog “Raising kids in the 21st century”.