Strive for Mediocrity
Hi All,
We’ve been talking about the five love languages a lot lately. Caroline and I are clearly ‘words of affirmation people’. Katherine falls under many categories including ‘words of affirmation’, ‘quality time’ and ‘acts of service. And Rob? He is an ‘acts of service’ guy all the way. One of Rob’s biggest acts of service is sending links to articles, videos and podcasts that he thinks we might like. He does this so often that I don’t always click through but when I do, I am always grateful.
Last week, Rob sent a link to an episode of Derek Thompson’s Plain English podcast titled “Happiness in America” which was great and led me to a second episode titled “Why Are American Teens so Unhappy?” with Matthew Biel, the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center.
There were so many excellent takeaways from this interview. That said, what really stuck with me was the concept that parents in certain socio-economic communities are causing themselves intense stress by trying to “future proof their children.” Biel explained that parents “experience the world as a world of scarcity. There are shrinking opportunities- it’s harder to get into the good colleges and there are fewer great jobs so I need to do everything I can to make sure my kid has every opportunity I had and that means SAT tutors and fancy summer experiences” etc. And of note, the anxiety we feel trickles right on down to our teenagers.
And then Thompson cited recent research that “richer countries have sadder teenagers.” These countries have “higher education standards which means they have more competitive and intense schools which means they have more scholastic competition which means that they have more stressed out teenagers.”
So let me get this straight… by worrying about our children and living in a rich country and sending them to a school with high education standards we are stressing them the heck out? This, of course, was not new news to me but hearing it all laid out so clearly was really eye opening.
So… what now?
Fortunately, there is one key piece of data that should allow us all to move on with more than a little hope at least in the realm of college admissions- an area of stress for parents and kids alike. Based on recent data, Thompson stated that “Where people applied to college is more predictive of future success than the school that actually accepted them. So habits are more important than the outcome of what school randomly accepts you.”
And I know that Thompson’s use of the word randomly was most likely, well, random but I think this comment was among the most important things said over this hour long, powerful conversation. We are at the point in college admissions where acceptances and rejections are more or less random. The number of applications for a stagnant number of spots has skyrocketed. There are far, far too many people applying for the process to be anything other than random. Each year it feels like more and more extremely qualified students are being rejected from the schools they would like to attend. Yet we are continuing to place enormous pressure on the academic and extra-curricular success of our children.
I know it is naive to think that one podcast can change a culture but I do hope that lots and lots of people listen to this episode and think about the small adjustments they can make in their families and their schools.
Placing pressure on ourselves and our children to control a process that is random isn’t working for any of us so perhaps a different approach is worth a try? For a few years, I have jokingly used the phrases ‘in our family, we strive for mediocrity’ to bring the stress level down a few notches. As a mom to two perfectionists, I know that I have the luxury to say this as neither Katherine nor Caroline are at risk of slacking off. But… I do wonder if we all started using this approach or something close to, if the stress levels could come down a bit?
I have a feeling the idea of striving for mediocrity might be controversial but bring it on! I could talk about this all day long…
xo,
Stacey
March Offerings
I consider myself the Queen of the Underachievers and the opposite of a perfectionist whatever that would be called. And I'm here to tell you that both of those things make for a much happier existence! Also, the "race to the top" has also been called the "race to nowhere" and I think parents need to stop inserting their own egos into their children's "success." Easy for me to say as I have a lot of privilege and that means that I and my family float through life a lot easier than many. But I have always parented with the idea that my kids' interests and happiness should come from them, rather than from the people around them. So if my son thought that competitive sports were "dumb" I let him find other activities where he was engaged and happy. If my daughter didn't want to go to camp with everyone else, I enjoyed having her home! If my daughter didn't want to take AP Lit Senior year, no big deal. If my son only wanted to apply to one college, great! Did other parents question all of these choices? Yes. But my kids were thriving and happy and in the end I knew that soccer, sleep away camp, a particular class or applying to 20 colleges weren't going to make my kids any more successful or happy. I wouldn't say that I (or my kids) strive for mediocrity. But neither do I think that we try to "keep up with the Jones" or "try to be the best." I'm happy with a mostly tidy house, because I understand that I'm fortunate to have a house at all! And keeping it only "mostly" tidy allows me time to read and enjoy life! That's good enough for me! I'll jump off my soapbox now...
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. As someone who has strived for exceptionalism all my life so far, I have been really asking myself how well it has served me in different phases of my career.