Parents love to tell you about their kids. More specifically, parents love to tell you how smart their kids are.
One can’t get within a stone's throw of a PTA meeting or book club without hearing things like, “Well, you know, Caden was placed in the gifted and talented program,” or “Jimmy knows all his letters and he’s only 2!” or “Riley can actually play Beethoven’s Fifth on the xylophone with her eyes closed.”
You know what you don’t hear nearly as often?
Parents bragging about their children’s emotional well-being. When is the last time you heard someone boast that their fourth grader is gifted at talking about his feelings? Or that their 6-year-old seems to really understand herself?
Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown that intelligence does not equate to happiness. In fact, often the opposite is true. According to Viatcheslav Wlassoff, PhD, “Researchers link scoring straight A grades in school to a fourfold increase in the chances of developing bipolar disorder in adulthood.”
Medical Daily pointed out that slight to severe mental illness is often associated with higher intelligence and creative thinking.
Clearly, there is a bit of dark truth to the old adage “ignorance is bliss."
Harvard University, the most competitive academy of learning in the world, has over twice the national average of student suicides. The Harvard Crimson has estimated the school's suicide rate at about 18.18 per 100,000, or as much as 24.24 percent, if students taking leaves of absence are included in that count.
These students are arguably some of the most driven and most intelligent in the world; but clearly, some of the unhappiest. They reached their goal, they made it into Harvard, they did what they had been trying to do for their whole lives. They probably assumed that would fix everything, they had studied their way to happiness. But when it didn’t work, when the same sadness rose in their bellies or the anxiety tightened their throats, they realized logic and hard work couldn’t solve the problem of themselves. For the first time in their lives, they gave up.
Throughout our academic careers, we are told the recipe for fulfillment is good grades, good SATs and acceptance into a prestigious college. It often feels like our GPA determines our worth. Our college acceptance letters feel like they define us.
We are so full of algebraic formulas, presidential election dates and the structure of a plant's cell, there is hardly any room left for our sense of identity outside of school. We connect our worth to our achievements and when we inevitably fail, our very sense of self is lost. We have spent so much time trying to make our brains eventually employable, we never paused to understand things that defy logic, like our inner selves.
It’s time parents start to proudly say, “My daughter is doing fine in school, but more importantly, she is so happy.” It should be more important to love yourself than to ace the exam. It’s time we start giving students the time and resources to get to know themselves and to deal with and process emotions, instead of just burying their heartache in their next school project. It's time it becomes more important in our society to foster a healthy relationship with ourselves and the world, than it is to be on the honor roll.
It's time academic success doesn’t mean the sacrifice of mental health.
John Stuart Mill famously said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” But who cares if you have straight A’s if you look in the mirror and see someone you don’t like? Why should it matter that you got into every college you applied to if you cry yourself to sleep? If the fool and the pig are happy, why would I want to be Socrates?
