It may seem counterintuitive to reduce pressure on grades, especially if we see our child as achieving below their capacity. The instinct to increase pressure makes sense. But we know from the science of motivation and autonomy-supportive parenting that the more pressure our kids experience, the worse for their wellbeing and academic performance. But reducing pressure does not mean discarding expectations for academic performance.

Since we’re not getting rid of long-used external motivators like grades and test scores anytime soon, we can start tipping the scales toward internal motivation at home with how we parent.

No matter our personal opinion about the utility of homework, our child will likely come home with some version of schoolwork at home, and we have to decide how to approach it. Some parents may simply email the teacher and state, “We’re not doing homework in this household.” For those of us either on the fence about the value of homework or pro-homework, approaching it within the autonomy-supportive framework can help us all thrive rather than barely survive.

Earning top scores and grades as the way to be successful becomes constricting and oppressive for many of our children, and feeds controlling parenting. Not to mention the pressure from kindergarten on to make sure our child is prepared to be competitive for a “worthy” college. I titled my book chapter about school, “Raising Real Success: From Grades to Grit” because the first step toward change in our unhealthy achievement culture is to tackle our mindset about school by redefining success. 

Let’s take this new school year with a new resolve to find opportunities for our children to do more for themselves—for their growth and for our stress!

Let’s shout it from the rooftops: internal motivation is what often leads to better performance over the long run. And persistence. And joy.
How can we nurture internal motivation as a vehicle for performance, skill growth, and staying with activities instead of quitting? How can we help preserve the love of the game? Or instrument. Or performing art.

Youth sports has been swept up in the intensive parenting tsunami, becoming yet another symbol of our status and success as parents while wreaking destruction on family life, family budgets, and even the love of the game.

The problem is we need a total revamp of our parenting culture that has somehow veered into the danger zone of equating total self-sacrifice with good parenting.

Many parents automatically do so much for their kids that we probably do not realize we have sort of programmed our children to expect a full-service instead of self-service lifestyle.

I’ve been hearing from parents everywhere that they have noticed even less independence in their children since the pandemic. My theory is that pandemic life fed the flames of intensive parenting due to the high stress and anxiety about our children’s welfare. In place of encouraging independence, the fear of all bad things happening to our children (including actual life and death fears) made us more protective.

Whatever your summer screen time situation, I’m here for you to take at least some struggle out of the power struggle.

What I try to communicate as much as possible in this culture of pithy reels and clickbait headlines is that the general home environment you create as a parent matters more than each specific interaction between parent and child.

We don’t discuss this enough, this parenting challenge of recognizing our child’s separate self and refraining from projecting our own idea of who they are, yet it’s so crucial to raising our kids. The core of autonomy-supportive parenting is that we are raising our child to be who they are (and to know who that is), and not who we want them to be.

Our kids feel pressure when we are controlling, but that might be because we are feeling so much pressure. The more we feel pressure—whether that’s external from work/family/community expectations or internally driven by our ideas of “good parenting”—the more stressed and defensive we may get to prove to everyone else and ourselves that we know what we’re doing. That combination of pressure, stress, and defensiveness to prove ourselves can increase the impulse to control.

When you start a conversation with your kids about the summer schedule, how do you approach the discussion in a way that doesn’t set up a summer-long battle of the wills?

By definition, parenting includes having expectations and standards for our children, setting limits, and directing our children to do things they don’t want to do—like pick up stinky socks littering the house. (Please tell me that’s not just my kids.) So, how do we accept our responsibility to actively raise our children while not controlling them?

The reality is that we want to feel in control as parents, and we usually don’t. Feeling out of control naturally leads to more controlling behaviors, which ends up doing more harm than good in parenting. Such as undermining our child's personal sense of control. When we control our children more, they feel more out of control themselves. We rob them of exactly what we are seeking for ourselves.

For our homework conundrum, I aimed to balance what felt like several competing interests: nurturing my young son’s internal motivation for learning, respecting the teacher’s way of running her class, and coaching my child through doing things he doesn’t like. How do we achieve all this without homework turning into a daily power struggle?

The bottom line is if we want to raise children who feel autonomous in the world – a strong sense of self and self-worth, living by their values – we need to be less controlling. When we control less, our children experience more freedom to explore the why of behaviors, internalizing the purpose and meaning of doing what we want them to (like be on time) instead of learning to do a behavior just to please us or avoid punishment.

Rooted in a theory about what all humans need for well-being (called Social Determination Theory and backed up by research), autonomy-supportive practices build autonomy, relatedness, and competence in our children. Further, they can be used flexibly within a framework, rather than a prescriptive, “you must do these 10 things all the time to raise an amazing child.”