Almost 15 years ago, I sat in a large lecture hall at Harvard Law School during first-year orientation. Then-Dean Elena Kagan (now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan) was on stage. My memory of it is a bit hazy, but as I recollect, one theme of her speech was that the cut-throat competition that had characterized many of my fellow students’ lives up until that point could dial back. After all, once a student started at Harvard Law, she or he had already won the brass ring.
Good advice. But even at the time, I was dubious. First, it seemed unlikely that some of my fellow students—who at this point had been trained for years to run faster and faster academic races—were even capable of approaching life with that kind of mindset. More practically, the competition was obviously not over. Indeed, it had barely begun: There were still seats on the Harvard Law Review to fight for and prestigious judicial clerkships to attain, and for those who aimed at judgeships or Senate seats, “winning” was still decades away.
That sort of academic pressure can start early. In her 2023 book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, Jennifer Breheny Wallace shares story after story of high school students who enter pressure cooker schools and break. One story revolves around “Catherine,” who devoted years of her life to trying to get her son into Yale. She said that by her son’s junior year, “most of their interactions and conversations were about his performance and his college admissions.” It backfired tremendously: By senior year, her son had stopped going to classes and played video games all day. While he did go to college (not Yale) “[w]ith the help of medication and intensive therapy,” he flunked out. He didn’t figure out what he wanted to do with his life until his late 20s. Catherine said that she “got so swept up in her son’s performance that she nearly crushed him.”
In addition to anecdotes, numerous studies show that high-pressure schools are a significant risk factor for mental health issues. The problem is so acute, the Washington Post reported in 2019 that “[a] consensus study report … by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine added youths in ‘high achieving schools’ to their list of ‘at-risk’ groups, along with kids living in poverty and foster care, recent immigrants and those with incarcerated parents.”
This matches a phenomenon I saw years ago when I was in college: Kids had competed so fiercely in high school that they burned out, arriving at college unmotivated and uninterested in the world around them. For some, even if they made it through college and graduate school, their competitive drive still eventually ended in burnout in middle age. It is as if some parents read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua as an instruction manual. Instead, the blockbuster book by Chua is a cautionary tale on the dangers of applying intensive parenting to a child who refuses to be molded. As Chua recently pointed out in an interview, “It was a memoir about my daughter rebelling … and … how I kind of pulled back.” Chua’s younger daughter simply wouldn’t go along with her mother’s plans for academic success, and they both ended up better off because of the daughter’s pushback.
The flip side of the coin, however, is underinvolvement in children’s well-being. As Rob Henderson, a former foster child who eventually went to Yale, wrote in his memoir Troubled, “I had little supervision at home and no one who took an interest in my grades. When adults let children down, children learn to let themselves down.” Often, it is poorer kids who are the most impacted; in Baltimore, for example, where 24 percent of school-age children live in poverty, only 26 percent of students are proficient in language skills, and only 8 percent are proficient in math. There is evidence that teacher expectations motivate students, and students from disadvantaged backgrounds are further disadvantaged by low teacher expectations. Parental expectations have a significant impact on the academic outcomes of poorer students as well.
In aiming for a middle ground between neglecting kids and pushing them too hard, how should we measure academic success? This question played center stage when considering how to educate my children. Ultimately, my husband and I chose an unusual route: We homeschool.
Homeschooling is not for every family, or most families; many parents do not want to or cannot homeschool, and many kids are perfectly happy in their good (or great!) schools. Still, homeschooling has been good for our family. Our kids don’t get grades or class rankings. While these metrics are probably a necessary evil in schools, I’m cognizant of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, once a metric is put into place to assess performance, people start to game the system in ways that can be destructive to actual quality outcomes. (One obvious example: students who take easy classes in college to protect their GPA rather than challenging themselves with interesting and difficult material.) How do we evaluate our homeschooled kids’ learning instead? We do administer standardized tests to our kids as a gut check, but that is only a minor part of our evaluation, which includes the following questions:
- How many books have they read?
Viral essays in The Atlantic and Slate reveal that students are arriving at elite colleges unable to read entire books. This is, it seems, in part because many schools have simply stopped assigning them. Per the Atlantic essay, some high school graduates earn their diplomas without having been asked to read a book from cover to cover. In an interview, Karen Vaites, founder of the Curriculum Insight Project, noted that “some of the most popular [English Language Arts] curricula used in thousands of schools across the country don’t include reading whole books as part of the work students do.”
I find this deeply concerning. First, the ability to read a book develops critical habits of attention, which are fundamental to the ability to absorb complex information. Second, the stories we tell our children deeply shape their childhoods and adulthoods. I don’t want those stories to mainly come from TikTok. A good story takes time to build; a 30-second clip inherently can’t provide the depth and breadth of a fairy tale or reading Treasure Island.
Thus, a central organizing principle of our kids’ education is reading books. My husband reads aloud to the older kids every night before bedtime, and I read aloud to them most days as well. My husband and the boys finished the entire Ranger’s Apprentice series this year—that’s 12 books!—and I’m tackling the Chronicles of Narnia series right now. I assign dozens of books for them to read themselves annually for school, aiming for a mix of classic literature, historical fiction, modern prize-winners, and interesting nonfiction. They read voraciously for pleasure as well, though admittedly, those books are mostly junky graphic novels and stories about video games. We go to the library at least once a week, sometimes more, and routinely fill up a milk crate with borrowed books.
I can’t give my kids a trust fund. But I am confident that by the time they become adults, they’ll have read hundreds or thousands of books—an inheritance of a different kind.
- Can they talk about complex issues with us?
I can’t confidently predict what communication will look like when my kids are adults. Will ChatGPT and its ilk completely eliminate most media jobs? Will every children’s book in 2050 be illustrated by AI? I don’t know. (Although I suspect the answer to both of these questions is “No.”) However, I do know that regardless of how smart computers get, there is a lot of thinking that they can’t do for us. My husband and I both prioritize talking to the kids about important issues, while also taking their questions and concerns seriously. Questions about the Holocaust, September 11, family life, the problem of evil: These and many other themes come up repeatedly, the conversation developing and deepening as our kids, the oldest of whom is 10, mature.
One of my favorite parts of homeschooling is that it allows me to study with our kids. Rather than an expert-novice dynamic, much of our “class time” is me learning alongside the kids from a textbook or other expert source. If someone is asking a stupid question, it might well be me. Recently, my husband—not a coder—worked with the kids on designing a computer program that would let them solve a tricky math problem. All did not go smoothly, and there was frustration over wrong paths taken and mistakes. A real expert would have done it much more quickly. However, this way, the kids got to see what real-life problem solving is like: messy, frustrating, and requiring persistence. I hope their ability to tackle challenges will be boosted by the fact that their parents talk through issues with them, rather than simply telling them the right answer.
- Are they working hard and playing fair?
Ultimately, there’s no substitute in life for hard work. This is a key lesson I try to teach my kids daily, most often by modeling it. However, you don’t want to push a child too fast, too far. As a parent, I feel like I’m perhaps better able to gauge my individual child than a teacher with a big classroom. One kid has more natural aptitude in math, so it’s good to advance him in that a little faster. That same child regularly breaks down in tears over writing, so we take that slower. Plus, hard work is easier when you are doing something you love. My oldest said he wanted to learn some chemistry this year, and I paid for a fourth-grade online chemistry class, which he loved doing, even though it was pretty challenging.
I can’t give my kids a trust fund. But I am confident that by the time they become adults, they’ll have read hundreds or thousands of books—an inheritance of a different kind.
The most important thing to me is that while my kids are working hard, they are also playing fair. We have no issues with AI “cheating” because we don’t have grades, and writing is done cooperatively via editing drafts with me. I regularly encourage the kids to work together to solve problems. My oldest son, for example, is often a mentor to my second son for science and math questions. Additionally, it takes a lot less time to teach at home than in a classroom—there’s no homeroom, transitioning between classrooms, waiting for other students, etc. This leaves plenty of time for the kids to play. They have many friends, and their peer relationships (outside of sports) are not competitive. I could not put it better than Peter Gray, a Boston College professor who specializes in research about the value of play for children and who wrote last year:
[T]he truly successful people in life—the people who are happy in their own skin, who enjoy their career and family, who are valued as friends and colleagues, who contribute more to the world than they take—are people far more oriented toward cooperation than competition. Nobody truly succeeds alone. If we succeed, we do so because others help us along the way, and they help us because they like us, and they like us because we like them.
This is what academic success means to me: raising children curious about the world, oriented toward cooperation, and able to do hard things. None of this, by the way, requires homeschooling your children. But in our case, homeschooling has allowed us to shape our kids’ education around these principles, and we are grateful. If our children decide they want to aim for elite higher education someday, we’ll be delighted and supportive, of course. But it will be because that is their goal—not ours.
