How do we raise successful children?

“All our dreams can come true; if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney.

Whilst we can all, hand on heart, say that we want our children to be successful. The stranger thing is that few of us have actually stopped to properly articulate what success actually looks like.

One of my favourite parts of being a headmaster is interviewing parents as part of their child’s entrance into the school. I love this job as you find out so much about how other families work. Through a series of very simple questions you can find out a great deal about people and culture. For example, it was lovely to learn about how many children in Asia live with their grandparents or the families of the parents’ brothers and sisters. It was interesting to learn that many mothers in Thailand continue to breastfeed until much older than we tend to do in the west. It’s also amazing how many families send the mother to a different country or a different city to seek education for their children, making huge sacrifices for education . One of my favourite questions was always: what does success look like for your son or daughter?

I asked this question to hundreds of parents before I even began to think about it for my own daughters. I began to wonder how many people go through their entire parenting journey without even questioning what it is they are trying to do? Imagine doing your job without any idea of the goal of your work, like labouring in a mine endlessly cracking away at a wall without any idea what you are digging for. I guess many people do have this problem. So, how do you start to define success?

The default answer for me always seems to be orientated around money. I would like my daughters to have money, a nice house, I would like them to be able to come and see me and my wife when we are old and decrepit, I would like them to be able to go on holidays and see the world, have nice food, a gym membership, maybe a cat with a fancy name like a persian blue. All of these things are essentially the same thing: I would like them to have money, not so much that they become uber rich and lose touch with reality, but enough for them to be able to access the parts of the world which are hidden from many of us: nice restaurants, beaches, the posh supermarkets, all of the stuff which appears to have been annexed by the rich, likes goat’s cheese. How they spend the money is up to them, as long as they buy me a nice Christmas present.

Then I began to reflect on what gives me pleasure and what has given me pleasure throughout my life. I quickly realised that money gives me absolutely no joy whatsoever and that everyone I know enjoys a whole range of things, but literally nobody’s wellbeing depends on their bank balance. Sure, we all need enough money to survive and an incorrigible number of people are still living in poverty.What I mean is that, once people get to the point where they have enough money to be comfortable, any additional money does not seem to make any inroads in their path to personal happiness. In fact, it can often be the opposite. More money brings more problems, more stress and less happiness because you have to worry about losing money, investing money, even managing assets and fretting about getting the best returns. Afterall, what’s the good of a week on a Greek island each year if you spend the other 51 weeks in misery, living a life you hate. Plasters don’t fix wounds.

“Always remember, money isn’t everything — but also remember to make a lot of it before talking such fool nonsense.” Earl Wilson

As time went on I became more and more inspired by listening to the parents who spoke to me about what success looked like for them. When I asked parents they rarely spoke about money at all, instead they talked about what they want for their children’s future. They wanted them to be positive, to be confident, and they wanted them to be able to look after themselves. I realised quite quickly that all of the parents defined success as something apart from money, instead the common thread intertwining their answers was happiness. We all want our children to grow up to be happy.

Defining success in terms of happiness seems so obvious that it made me question why my initial thoughts had defaulted to money. In psychology there is a known trait where people subconsciously take very complicated questions and replace them with much simpler questions in order to solve them. For example, if you asked me what car to buy I wouldn’t have a clue. I don’t care enough to be bothered to research cars. I don’t know what factors to prioritise: should I go for fuel consumption, torque, car tax band, make, model?….I have no idea. Instead of answering the question ‘which is the best car?’, for which you’d need to look at many competing and contradicting factors, I would replace this with another question like ‘which car looks the nicest?’ I like shiny ones myself so I would buy the shiniest one I could find.

In the same way we take the question ‘what will make my child happy?’ and people like me might replace it with a simpler question such as ‘how can I give them the best chance of making enough money?’ It is not a stupid thing to do and economic security is certainly important, but doesn’t answer the original question. In fact, it is so easy to conflate wealth with happiness that even the original definitions of happiness blurred the divide between feelings and money: the original meaning was something similar to “lucky, favored by fortune, being in advantageous circumstances, prosperous” (*), which quickly became “greatly pleased and content”. In the 14th century happiness must have been closely matched to wealth as so many people had so little and being ‘prosperous’ gave you a better chance of survival so I suppose that being alive is always going to be considered happier than being dead!

It is no wonder how people naturally confuse happiness with finance, but it is clear that we now want success to mean more than the salary we earn or the savings we have. This is important because, if we are trying to produce successful children, and if success is defined in terms of monetary outcomes, then we will parent in a very different way to parents who define success purely through happiness.

What are the consequences of prioritising economic safety over other factors? It would be lovely if we could do everything as a parent but, frankly, we have to prioritise. If we prioritise the financial side of things our priority will be learning and getting the best education outcomes possible so that you can leverage your grades to get better jobs and higher salaries.The best education outcomes possible depend on the university you attend so parents will do anything they can to prepare their children for Ivy league universities, Oxbridge and other top institutions. How do you do this? Well, what I have seen is that parents try to push their children to be academically strong from a young age.

You can buy flashcards designed to teach children vocabulary almost from the moment they leave the womb. There are gadgets and gizmos which will teach your toddler to read. There is a proliferation of resources, often expensive, designed to teach number recognition, addition, subtraction and other basic maths from an incredibly early age. Parents send their children to classes to get them ahead. So the focus on success being about money has the effect of focussing education on examinations and this can be seen in extremis in China.

In China the school education system comes to a crescendo when the students study the Gaokao, which is the single determining factor of whether students get into university. This exam is so important that it has been known for traffic to be stopped and cities to come to a halt while students complete the examinations that are considered to determine the rest of their lives. The importance is so great that parents will send their children to a second school in the evening for years before the Gaokao, dropping music, sport and any social commitments to ensure that they have the best chance of ‘success’. This happens everywhere in the world to a greater or lesser extent when we focus on examinations and knowledge acquisition in order to get the chance to go to a top university and get the best chance of earning lots of money, but is this view of success right?

The first thing we need to know is whether education focussed on exam grades prepares children for the future world that they will inhabit. As a headmaster I often get asked how our school gets our students ready for a future when everything is changing so quickly. Some people would answer this in terms of teaching computing, or ensuring that their students are taught coding from a young age, and this is clearly helping them adapt for the skills needed in the current job market. However, I feel that it is only part of the answer. In a future in which automation and machine learning will feature more and more, we need to prepare students to excel in the areas that can never be devolved to machines. These will involve many things and perhaps the most important of them are empathy, confidence, creativity and problem solving. If you have empathy you will work well with others and fit into a team. If you have confidence you will try new things and be prepared to take risks. If you have creativity you will be able to be flexible in your approach and find ways around obstacles. If you are a good problem solver then you will find solutions. These are the things that we will always need, regardless of how the future unravels.

Let’s look back at whether this fits in with the skills the ‘flashcard and study school’ children will develop. These students will learn that the point of school is to pass an examination, to go to university and earn lots of money. This narrow focus means that rote learning is the priority and students can learn things without fully understanding them. It can mean that students see their role as the receiver of knowledge who has to regurgitate it during examinations like a chubby sparrow feeding its young. It’s not an image that motivates young children, so they don’t give their best and have to work longer hours. This leads to unhappiness in the present with a view of buying happiness in the future.

Even as a teacher I am not immune to being caught in this trap. For example, I always used to get sucked into commercials that promised to make my child a ‘whizkid’ or raise their reading levels. I would always be anxious if my daughter was not doing as well as the children in her class, I would wonder whether I should be teaching them a foreign language or pushing them harder. It is always easy to get sucked into the version of success that really is not fit for today’s world. And you know what? Everytime I do, I get anxious. I get anxious and angry and these reflections are mirrored back to me by my children. By trying to make them happy through achieving ‘academic’ success, I actually end up making them, and me, miserable!

We need to dig in and think a bit more about this complicated question of ‘what makes my child happy?’ instead of reducing it to a simpler one and focussing solely on the economic version of victory. For each of us this answer will be different and my answer has changed over the years that I have worked with children ranging from 2 to 18 years old. My job has given me the opportunity to watch the development of many happy children and I have been able to watch them as they grow up and mature into happy young women and men.

There are no two happy people who are exactly alike and happiness is not constant, all people have ups and downs. However, the students that I have seen grow up to be happiest are those that have a positive outlook on life, the ability to show grit and determination when given a challenge, and those that have the confidence to try new things. Their outlook on life affects how they react to people and situations: if it’s negative they assume the worst and if it’s positive they assume positive intent on everything around them, which makes them react more calmly and empathetically, and prevents them from feeling that the world is against them when things go wrong. This is linked to the other two areas, because staying positive will lead you to believe that you can do things with effort and that continuing to do your best will achieve the task, hence confidence and grit.

The skills of confidence, grit and positivity do not come from rote learning and on seeing exams as the goal of education. These skills are developed by having engaged children who are given freedom to explore things themselves and have the confidence to do so. They are developed through allowing children to be involved in a range of different things with a range of different people and being told that they ‘can do that’ rather than that they are no good. It is done through fantastic schools, by parents letting their children play and have free unstructured time and by pursuing different activities and encouraging children to stick with them. These things will give children the skills needed for the changing future and I have seen.

From everything that I have seen in education it is clear that success for children needs to be defined more broadly than monetary confines which leads to the wrong type of focus in education. In the end we all want our children to be happy and I would argue that each of us needs to think harder about what happiness means for us. If we can do that then we can understand the reasons for the choices we make for our children.While others may be spending evenings revising for exams, my girls will be doing things that will help them be positive, gritty and confident. I may not be able to make them happy, but I truly believe that this will give them the best chance. However, I still want them to buy me a nice christmas present.