Shaheed Rahman

From early on, we teach our children that feeling good about themselves requires them to perform for us. When they are young we give them stickers and certificates when they do what we say. We praise them for ‘being good’ and give them consequences when they disrupt our plans. We make them feel bad when they don’t measure up, and link our approval to their wellbeing. As they get older, those who find academics easy get awards, whilst those who don’t go to detention. We tell them that their whole life is dependent on exam results, and that if they want an interesting future, they’d better try harder at English and Maths now. I’ve even seen it said that a school should insist that children continue to work through extreme distress, because good exam results are the best way to enhance their happiness in the long term. It’s all based on the idea that if our children achieve and comply, then they can be happy. And that if they don’t, then they have no right to wellbeing. They should have tried harder. There’s a problem with this. Not all children can achieve at school. Not all of them can be successes. No matter how hard they work. No matter how good their school is. That’s because doing well at school really means ‘doing better than the others’ – and the ‘others’ matter too. Some are always going to get the lowest results. Some are always going to struggle more. And they matter too. It’s not surprising that by the time they are teenagers, so many of our children are despondent. They know they aren’t going to be the high achievers in exams, and they’ve been told that this is the only way that their life will go well. They think that they can’t be happy without those scores, because this has been their whole life. We need to stop telling our children that they must earn their right to be happy. For when we tell a generation that their wellbeing rests on their ability to do better than all the others, it’s not surprising when so many of them are distressed. We’ve set them up for despair.