The parents’ group chat is blowing up again.
Someone sends a message: “I heard the class next door has already started learning third-grade math. Are we falling behind?”
Your child is sitting next to you, eating an apple. While eating, he tells you about a grasshopper he caught with his classmates at school today.
He looks quite happy.
But you suddenly feel he shouldn’t be this happy.
He should be doing practice problems.
This feeling is familiar, isn’t it?
You know perfectly well that your child is doing fine right now—healthy, has plenty of friends, and remains curious about the world. Yet, you are anxious. Anxious about “what he will do in the future.” Anxious that he “can’t keep up.” Anxious that he “isn’t working hard enough.”
You think this anxiety is about your child.
But there is a harsh possibility: this anxiety is primarily about yourself.
Psychologist Alison Gopnik—one of the most important researchers in developmental psychology—uncovered a fact in her research that most parents ignore:
The correlation between parents’ level of anxiety about their child’s future and the actual difficulties the child faces is extremely low.
In other words: highly anxious parents do not necessarily have children who face more problems. Less anxious parents do not necessarily have children who are doing better.
The source of this anxiety is not the child’s reality. The source of the anxiety is the parents’ own internal narrative.
Think carefully about the moments that make you the most anxious.
Is it when your child fails a math test? Or is it when you see in the group chat that someone else’s child got a perfect score?
Is it when your child says, “I don’t want to learn the piano”? Or is it when your colleague mentions her daughter just passed her Grade 8 piano exam?
Most of the time, what triggers your anxiety is not your child’s situation, but the comparative information you receive.
This is a classic availability bias—the more vivid and glaring the information you receive, the more you perceive it as “universal” and “urgent.”
Every day in the parents’ group chat, people show off test scores, tutoring classes, and their children’s talents. All you see is “the best of others.” What you don’t see is this: those parents are anxious too; they are just anxious about the things you are showing off.
Your anxiety likely has an even deeper source: your own regrets.
You didn’t have the opportunity to learn an instrument as a child, so you are obsessed with making your child learn one. You failed your college entrance exam, so you are hyper-sensitive to your child’s grades. You feel your own life has some “if onlys,” so you project these “if onlys” onto your child.
This isn’t a bad thing. It shows you care.
But the problem is: your regrets and your child’s needs are not the same thing.
You are trying to make up a class for him that he never even enrolled in.
You fear he will repeat your mistakes. But his mistakes will likely be completely different from yours. The world he must face, the resources he has, his personality, and his talents—they are all different from yours.
Using your past to be anxious about his future is like using an old map to navigate a new city.
Gopnik put it very directly:
“Good parents are not gardeners. Good parents are soil. The job of the soil is not to dictate which direction the flower grows, but to ensure that no matter which way it grows, it has enough nutrients.”
When you are anxious, you are not acting as the soil. You are acting as the gardener—holding shears, trying to prune the flower into the shape you want.
The next time you start feeling anxious in the parents’ group chat, try doing one thing.
Put down your phone and look at the child next to you.
What is he doing right now? Is he happy? Is he doing something that interests him?
If the answer is “he’s doing fine”—then your anxiety, in all likelihood, is not his problem. It is yours.
Your anxiety needs to be processed. But the way to process it is not by pushing your child, but by facing yourself.
That kid eating an apple and talking about grasshoppers is doing just fine right now.
Let him be fine for a little while longer.
[ One Thought ] — Decision-making can be practiced.
