How Hard Should We Push Our Child to Excel at School? By Dennis O'Brien

The following is a guest contribution by Dennis O'Brien.

The question of how hard to push children toward academic achievement sits at the intersection of love, anxiety, and competing theories about what actually produces successful, happy adults. There are no easy answers, but the research offers some useful guideposts.

The case for high expectations is not trivial. Meta-analyses of the research — notably Fan and Chen's 2001 synthesis of 25 studies — have found that parental educational expectations show the strongest relationship with student achievement among all forms of parental involvement, with an effect size around r = 0.30. Later syntheses (Jeynes, 2005 and 2007) reached the same conclusion: expectations outpredict homework help, supervision, and most other parental behaviors. Children who know their parents expect them to work hard and take academics seriously tend to perform better. Expectations communicate belief in a child's capability, and that belief matters.

The case for moderation is equally compelling. Research on perfectionism — the pathological form of high standards — documents the costs clearly: anxiety, avoidance, poor coping with failure, depression, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Children who are pushed too hard, too consistently, and with too much parental emotional investment in outcomes begin to experience school as a source of threat rather than a site of genuine learning.

The distinction that seems most important is between pushing toward effort and pushing toward outcomes. Parents who convey that they value hard work, genuine engagement, and learning from mistakes — regardless of grades — tend to raise children who are more resilient and more intrinsically motivated than parents who communicate that grades are the measure of worth.

There is also a developmental dimension. Young children need more encouragement and less pressure; adolescents can benefit from higher expectations while still needing space for autonomy. The right pressure is always calibrated to the individual child.

Push, yes. But push toward growth, not perfection.