The ambitious parent

Your child is a little genius - The ambitious parent

Think back to your childhood and consider how many opportunities you missed when you could have become a superstar. In every case, it was the fault of your parents, who didn’t understand that they should have started early to make you an Olympic champion figure skater, gymnast, or golfer, a Miss World contender, a brilliant pianist, or a Harvard student. If they had thought about it, where would you be today? Fortunately, now that you’re a parent yourself, you can experience this experience secondhand, and you can give your children the luck you didn’t have while basking in their glory. If you find the ambitious parent’s approach appealing, unforgettable moments await you. From the age of three, your child will act like a little pro, and you will be their agent. He will be like a blank slate for your shattered hopes. By encouraging him to strive for excellence in everything – sports, music, degrees – he is doing him a great service. Onward to glory! – whether he feels like it or not.

Before he can rebel against himself, before he escapes into various addictions or gets stuck unpredictably, he will already have several gold medals and various trophies in his hands to prove that he was right. It will certainly not be a walk in the park, he will have to be the prodigy's driver and banker at the same time, but it will be worth the effort.

Does the ambitious parent profile fit you?

To excel in this style, you better be a slave to public opinion. If you only buy branded products, if you constantly check what others think, if you are already in competition with your neighbors, then you have all the qualities for this job.

For an ambitious parent, children are primarily projects that must be managed with just as much determination as their career. Shaped with office tools – schedules, notepads, spreadsheets – the children of ambitious parents testify to the complexity of our time. If your child does not step out of line early enough, then in adult life he cannot avoid mediocrity. Demanding, perfectionist? Then he is ripe for ambition. Like those women who stay home with their children after an exciting career. When they become mothers, they expect the same talents from their children that have propelled them to the top of their profession: the art of achieving goals, networking and climbing the ladder.

Aggressively pushing your child's career forward fits harmoniously with other parenting styles: tyrannical, narcissistic, permissive, and condescending. If you find the ambitious type appealing, don't neglect other approaches that will allow them to develop a unique and personal style.

You are naturally ambitious if you have the following characteristics, opinions, and behaviors, whether it's about children, work, or relationships:

• The opinions of others determine how you feel about yourself.
• You sacrifice yourself and work hard for a higher purpose, but the higher purpose must directly benefit you, otherwise it's not worth the effort.
• Everyone is in competition with everyone else.
• There are two types of people: winners and losers.

Act without delay: Childhood is for the weak.

There was a time when childhood was free from constraints. Those on the verge of adulthood came out of school with no obligations: they played what they wanted, with whom they wanted, and spent long summers swinging their legs. Children got from point A to point B on deadly machines called bicycles. We might rightly ask how members of these generations achieved anything in life.

“Regardless of how well you control your temper, parenting inevitably produces strange behaviors – and I’m not talking about the kids.”

Bill Cosby

Fortunately, that era is a thing of the past. Today, it is possible to plan every second of your child's life to prepare them for real life. Just as we don't set our own schedules in the office, we would be doing our children a disservice if we let them daydream and get bored. The range of activities is vast, thanks to the proliferation of industries that strive to optimize children's performance: tutoring, soccer clubs, painting, music, dance and martial arts classes.

Needless to say, these classes need to start as early as possible if your child is to have any hope of achieving world-class performance. No star pianist started out as an adult. A gymnast’s career ends on their eighteenth birthday. And Tiger Woods hit his first putt at age six. As you can see below, true success begins before birth, with enrollment in the best preschool, which leads to the best elementary school, and then straight to Harvard.

Some parents worry unnecessarily: do their children really like this excessive activity? It doesn't matter. You know what's best for them, and if there's any free space in their schedule, you're doing your job poorly.

The Goal of Perfection: The Path to Failure

For the ambitious parent, there is no such thing as good—only perfect. If your child thinks that it is enough to aim for average, he will never realize his potential. And because there is always room for improvement, the unattainability of perfection and the inevitability of failure will constantly push him to do more. A series of outdated sayings sing the praises of mediocrity, emphasizing teamwork, sportsmanship, and incremental learning. But only the spirit of evil can inspire such values. To lead your child in the competition, you must instill in him a taste for victory and perfection at all costs.

My child is an excellent student: How can I do even better than the best?

We live in an age where children are wolves to children. Your precious offspring will have to compete with junior Einsteins and mini Nobel Prize winners in physics. If you can't read at a second-grade level in kindergarten, everything is lost to you. As you know, academic success is the new caste system of the modern world. If you don't enroll in the right kindergarten, where the waiting list is even longer than your career plans, say goodbye to the best universities, because one institution automatically leads to another.

Your child should be doing at least one hour of homework per grade. You read that right: that means that by the twelfth grade, at the graduation level, they should be spending twelve hours a day studying – no one ever said that academic success comes for free.

Some parents tend to label a 4 as “good enough.” They don’t realize that a 4 is the gateway to failure. Soon, it’ll be a 3, and before you know it, your child will be at the local education center planning their “career” with the career counselor. How can they look in the mirror like that?

Come on guys!

If a child is good at sports, there is no shortage of tools to help them win. Between 2000 and 2003, Cristophe Fauviau, a truly ambitious father, drugged twenty-seven opponents in the water bottles of his son and daughter's tennis matches. The young tennis champions (one of whom was only eleven years old), drugged against their will with the anti-anxiety drug Temesta, gave up the victory to the Fauviau children, weak and struggling with nausea. The last time ended with the death of a player who fell asleep at the wheel on the way home from a match and crashed into a tree.

But this is not the only example of athletes being pushed forward by obsessed parents. In ice hockey, an American father accidentally killed another father with a blow to the head during a children's training session. Texas seems to be a hotbed of ambitious parents. In 2006, a disgruntled father shot and killed his son's football coach, while in 1991, a cheerleader's mother hired a hitman to get rid of a rival's mother.

It is important to note that the children of such parents are not necessarily exceptionally talented players.

Only winners deserve your love.

If you let your child believe that you will love him no matter what, even if he fails, you are making a serious mistake. If you teach him that he has intrinsic value, regardless of whether he succeeds or not, you are preparing him for an idealized world that does not exist. In essence, we are the sum of our successes and failures, nothing else exists. As a parent, you must train your child to survive on his own. If you give him love that he does not deserve, you are raising him to be a defenseless slacker when he will have to survive on his own. Achievement equals love. Don't let one bit of that go.

To be a celebrity or to be nobody

A high-performing being distinguishes himself by publicly displaying his skills, talents, and techniques. The philosophical question, “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it have a voice?” is, of course, “no.” Why spend so much time practicing if we want to hide our achievements from the world?

Western culture encourages relentless exhibitionism, from "Nobody puts Baby in a corner" in Dirty Dancing to the popular refrain: "This little light of mine / I'm gonna let it shine."

Your child should grow up with the idea that his talent must be recognized by others. Inner self-realization is a luxury we cannot afford. When he becomes his own hero, then and only then will the world raise its eyebrows and take notice.

The stages of ambition

In the womb: Play classical music to your fetus by placing Bose headphones on your growing belly. Plan for your child's future. Enroll them in nursery school.

Newborn: Play foreign language audiobooks at bedtime.

Infant: Teach him sign language so he can communicate even before the speech area of ​​the brain is activated.

Toddler: Give him a golf club, a violin, and a book without pictures. Call him “little man” or “little lady” and respond with mockery to his childish behavior.

Child: Schedule him with tons of activities until he doesn't have a minute of free time, or vice versa, focus him on just one activity to reach world-class levels.

Teen: Fight teachers and coaches who are just trying to hold you back. Hire private tutors and prepare you for college entrance exams.

Teenager: Choose a reputable university by the age of fourteen. Make a list of all the preparatory institutions, talent screening exams, and courses to ensure you get a place.

Young adult: Polish your own academic record. Cheat if necessary. If that's not enough to get into a big-name university, study all the equivalencies.

Adult: Make social rituals mandatory for him that reinforce the image he has of himself among his friends: weddings, births, prestigious jobs.

Achievements of children of ambitious parents

By raising your child to perfection, you will raise him or her to be an adult with the makings of a superstar. He or she will be characterized by:

• psychologically rigid, risk-averse, pessimistic, uncreative;
• never satisfied with the results achieved, never satisfied with himself, considering himself someone who does not meet the standard;
• prone to anxiety, depression and psychosomatic symptoms;
• after such control, he is unable to lead or manage his own life;
• tends to give up on goals you worked hard for;
• full of resentment towards his parents;
• prone to addictions;
• prone to tantrums.

About doping at school

Once the preserve of bodybuilders and truck drivers, doping has finally become accessible to children. Ambitious parents know how to manipulate doctors into squeezing prescriptions for attention-deficit drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to help their children concentrate in school.

With such negligible side effects as loss of appetite, irritability, visual disturbances, stunted growth, hallucinations, psychotic behaviors, tics, and tremors, why would parents shy away from acquiring such drugs when their child's success is at stake?

Dysfunctional dictionary

The battered child syndrome

A situation where parents overload their children's schedules, put pressure on school performance, and expect their children to respond as if they were miniature adults.

Hyperparenting

Excessive supervision of the child, characterized by excessive involvement in controlling him, strict time schedules, and filling every moment with activity.

Trophy child

A child used to dazzle acquaintances and elevate the parental status.

Drive them immediately before it's too late

Your children only have a few short years in your life, so take advantage of the opportunity. With all that you have sacrificed to maximize their chances, they need to prove themselves worthy and justify your choice to put them above all else. If they object, remind them that they are only representing the opinions of an immature child. You know better than they do that the long-term payoff will far outweigh the short-term drawbacks.

The next chapter describes a style that shares many similarities with the ambitious parent: parental narcissism. What do you want your child to see when they look in the mirror? Themselves!

We will continue soon.