The Day My Daughter's Grades Stopped Mattering to Me

I dedicated my book Make Reinvention Your Superpower to my daughter. Her generation, I believed, would need to learn, unlearn and relearn over and over again, more than any generation before them. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how much she would end up teaching me.

My daughter challenges nearly everything I have written. She does it every day, and she does it well. One of those challenges changed how I think about parenting.

Whose grades were they?

Like most parents, I cared about my daughter’s grades. I asked about them. I noticed them. I wanted them to be good, and I believed that wanting them was a way of caring about her.

Then she made me realize something uncomfortable. The grades mattered to me. They were becoming a measure of how I was doing as a parent, and somewhere along the way they had started to matter more to me than they did to her.

That was the day I stopped caring about them.

I don’t mean I stopped caring about her learning, or about whether she was working hard. I mean I stopped treating the number on the report card as the point. I had to trust my daughter enough to believe she already understood what matters: give it your best, learn from your mistakes and know that what you learn along the way is what eventually earns the good grades.

The quiet message grades can send

I’ve spent much of my career helping adults recover a sense of who they are after decades of measuring themselves by someone else’s standards. Many of them can trace the habit back to school. Grades, rankings and test scores were the first scorecards they were handed, and they learned to treat those numbers as a verdict on their worth.

When parents focus too heavily on the grade, we can send that same message without meaning to. The child hears that the outcome matters more than the effort, that the measurement matters more than the learning and that our approval depends on the number. Some children respond by working for the grade instead of the understanding. Others stop trying, because a number they can’t control feels like a judgment they can’t escape.

I wrote about how many of the yardsticks we inherit were chosen by someone else in Who Gets to Define Your Success? For many of us, that pattern begins at the kitchen table, with a report card.

The same thing happens beyond the report card. We label children early: the smart one, the athletic one, the difficult one. We sort them into tracks and categories, often with the best intentions, until they become everything other than who they really are. I have come to believe we should help young people understand who they are before, or at least while, we teach them new skills. A child who knows themselves can make a skill their own. A child who doesn’t will simply try to reproduce what they were shown.

Make your parents proud, in your own way

None of this means children shouldn’t want to make their parents proud. They should, and I want my daughter to feel that pride. The question is what we teach them to be proud of.

If we celebrate only the result, we teach them to perform. If we celebrate how they think, how they handle setbacks and what they learned, we teach them to grow. The first produces children who look successful. The second produces people who know who they are.

When the grade stops being the center of the conversation, there is room to talk about what a child is curious about, what frustrates them and what they want to try next. Those conversations reveal more about who they are than any report card can. I explored what that kind of parenting asks of us in Raise the Individual, Not the Resume.

Questions for parents

If you want to test where the grades sit in your home, try these.

• When your child shows you a report card, what is the first question you ask?
• Do they know you’re proud of how they learn, or only of what they score?
• If the grades disappeared for a semester, what would you want them to have learned?
• Whose disappointment are you protecting when a grade comes back lower than you hoped?

That last question is the hardest, and it was the one my daughter answered for me.

Trusting a child doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means placing the bar where it belongs: on effort, honesty and growth. In my experience, when children know who they are and feel trusted, the results usually follow. And when they don’t, the lessons they learn are worth more than any grade.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.