Notes on Parenting from a 25-year-old overachiever

I love my parents. But like most parents, they made some fundamental parenting mistakes whose consequences I will spend much of my adult life painfully trying to reverse.

Like most well-meaning parents, mine too spent their lives teaching me how to make it in this world:

1. To survive
2. To succeed.

My purpose for being in this world was simple: I needed to first of all stay alive, and then I needed to succeed — at school, at work and at life in general. The repercussions of failing at any of these things were equally straightforward: unsuccessful children are not good children and bad children do not get daddy and mummy’s love.

So I strived. I fought for small and big wins and stumbled over my own feet in my scramble to deliver my newest addition to my victory board to my Assessors. A pat on the back for a job well done was everything. Albeit, momentarily, before the celebration grew old and the attention of my Assessors, which my six-year-old little soul craved desperately, shifted, once again, from me.

So I got back out there. To plough for one more trophy. Then again. And again.

At 24, I finally had succeeded in amassing enough trophies to, at last, hold my Assessors’ attention for long enough to feel its warmth lastingly at last and wrap myself around in it. I had become permanently successful. I had become a permanently good girl.

At 25, I have had the privilege of living with both so little and with so much. So little love and so much love. So little approval and so much approval. So little acceptance and so much acceptance. So little celebration and so much celebration. So little money and so much money.

So I know. I know that every new accomplishment will leave you a little bit more hollow than it found you. If the happiness you seek from it exists only on the outside.

I know that depression and anxiety will likely visit you more often than they visit the ones around you who seem to need so little from the world. The ones who from a young age were taught that true love is not transactional. That you don’t have to constantly prove yourself deserving of it, even at six years old.

At 25, I know that overachievement is not to be celebrated, admired or, more ignorantly, envied. That overachiever in your life or on your TV screen is fighting silent battles you would never wish on yourself. And that accomplishing things is the only way they feel they in fact deserve a place in the world. It is how they get acceptance and the attention (which for a moment feels like love) they desperately crave. You are lucky for knowing love to be so simply and freely given and so unconditionally.

At 25, I know that it is healthy to want so little from life. It is proof of contentment and proof of security and self-love to believe that others will love you for who you are, instead of what you have and what advantage of status that gives you.

At 25, I know how parents make the monumental error of offering their children transactional love, approval and acceptance, berating them harshly when they don’t top their class or earn an average mark on a test. I know how damaging this practice is for the child — and later, the adult — and for your relationship with your child and their future adult self.

At 25, I implore you to cut this cycle with your children. Allow your child to earn a happy average in school, allow them not to excel in extracurricular activities but rather to enjoy their experience and learn from them. Teach them the meaninglessness and emptiness of material wealth.

Teach them the innate value of self-love and love for others. This is where true happiness comes from — not from the cars and houses you want them to own and buy for you, lavish prestigious weddings and exorbitant bride prices. Not from awards and money and promotions or otherworldly successes.

Take it from someone who has “everything” and nothing. Take it from someone who has “everything” and would happily trade it all for a do-over.

It’s hard to lay claim to the idea of getting parenting right. For all people, the most that they can realistically do is their best to not screw up their kids too badly. Try not to screw up yours. Do not perpetuate the ignorance our parents attached to material success and “strong names”.

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This post was edited seventeen times to remove the tears that spilt all over it.