The new year is a great time for a fresh start. Pew Research reports that 3 in 10 Americans report making at least one resolution this year. Couple that with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that we are living in the era of 20% of teens often feeling anxiety, 40% of high schoolers reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year and 20% of the same population seriously considering suicide in the last year, and we have a great time to think of pivoting in a new parenting direction.
As a parent and mental health professional, I’m keenly aware of the gravity of these numbers and it raises the question: What New Year’s resolutions could we make regarding our parenting approach? I think it’s an opportune time to focus our parenting aims on fostering kindness in our children over boosting intelligence. Let me explain.
Forced to choose, most parents would publicly declare they would rather their children be kind than smart. This is the most socially acceptable answer, likely for fear that people would judge them for being insensitive individuals. However, most modern parents are answering “kind” with their words but “smart” with their energy, time and money.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The “smart kid” industry has skyrocketed over the past decades. Tutoring companies have popped up in many a strip mall and are now multimillion-dollar companies with stakeholders and market share. They are franchised much like McDonald’s. Instead of a cheeseburger meal with fries, it’s multiplication worksheets with a side of STEM kits.
Many parents seem peripherally aware of the eroding mental health of our youth but are still driven by achievement, test scores and college acceptances for fear their kids will lag behind the pack.
The cognitive approach of child raising is fairly new in the historical millennia of parenting. According to Paul Tough, it originated in the 1990s with a national report stating that many children were not arriving at kindergarten with enough cognitive stimulation from age 0-3 and therefore failing to be “ready to learn.” This reflected more of a sociological trend of single parenting, dually employed parents and, in general, fewer hours of time spent with unpaid caregivers. A slow evolution into what it looks like to be a “good parent” has ensued.
Products assisting parents in “educating” their children skyrocketed into a $66 billion industry in 2024 and is projected to grow to a whopping $126 billion by 2032. Baby Einstein, BrainPOP, KiwiCo, Little Passports and MindWare are but a few. We’ve all heard of them, and I’ve even clicked “buy now” with the dazzling promise of raising a savant.
This market tops the massive youth sports industry by an incredible $20 billion. It’s easy to frown on parents shelling out big bucks for youth sports, but clearly there’s a more ravenous desire for a math-lete.
Overemphasizing the cognitive approach also plays a factor in driving many of our youth and teens down a road of anxiety and depression. With little emphasis on connection through relational, emotional and even spiritual well-being, parents’ limited energies are increasingly geared to the performative and external.
No matter your preferred theory on the vast field of child psychology, this sole approach leads to an off-balance method of parenting.
Let’s pivot this year instead to prize in our kids a posture of kindness and benevolence toward others. Sociological research tells us time and again the health benefits of helping others and can even help bring relief from anxiety, depression and loneliness. Forcing kids into kindness isn’t effective, but creating habits of altruism within the home can be highlighted. We can put our time and money behind our new approach and donate blood, volunteer once a month at the food bank and help the elderly woman into the grocery store.
Kids won’t listen to what we say if it’s not backed up by what we do with our time and money.
Judging by the statistics on the mental health of our children, are we ready to admit that what we’re doing as parents might need to change? Do we think good grades, good colleges and good jobs will make our children (or us) happy? Many have bought into the belief that if one got Sally’s brain loaded with enough of the right information at the right time, in the right school, she’d be set up for a life of success.
Redefining success for the modern parent is key.
So how can we chip away at changing such an ingrained parenting approach? Small steps have proved to be the best ways to tackle comprehensive change. Identify one dream for your child that is outside of the external realm of academics and in the internal world of character development. Make a point with your kid to start just one conversation a day about opportunities for compassion, service or faith. Instead of focusing only on grade performance in your parent teacher conference this semester, inquire if Junior is helpful with peers and respectful to teachers.
And little by little, we’ll start to dream bigger dreams than IQ maximization, and we’ll begin to instill the value that who our children are on the inside is more important than what they accomplish on the outside.
And my guess is, they might not even miss those STEM kits.
Beth Collums is an Atlanta-based writer with a professional background in child and family therapy. She often writes about mental health, relationships and education.
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