Not long ago, I was scrolling through Facebook when I came across a blog post: "When Parental Expectations End Up Crushing You." It broke my heart to read this young woman's innermost thoughts, explaining unobtainable goals held by her parents and the effects it had, not only on her outward performance but in her deepest, most personal thoughts. When I first read it, I immediately related her situations to my own, to the heavy weight of the desires held by my own successful parents and the toll it took on my own self to be demanded to be held to such a standard. My heart broke for her, not because of her wording, but because I understood. I knew what it was like to have that weight on the shoulders of a young person who didn't even know the person she was yet, let alone know the person she was expected to be.
Then I took a step back.
I'm a pre-law student with a full-ride to what is known as a public Ivy League school. I am applying a semester early to the school within my university that carries my major, and I have decided to add a minor and a certificate to my list of credential goals, on which I will be working on next semester as I await my acceptance to the Grady School of Journalism, a top journalism school in the country. I know what I want to do with my life at the tender age of 19, but more importantly, I do it well and with great passion, also taking time to do things that make my heart and soul happy. I am a well-rounded, driven individual with an understanding that, while your work, major and education are important, they are not your identity and do not encompass who you are as a whole and complete person.
I always worked hard in school so that I could do everything that I wanted to do and succeed in every aspect of my life. But how would I have grown in such a high expectation for myself if I hadn't first had it expected of me by someone else?
Parents are there to hard-press you on all sides to make sure — not that you succeed by their own standards but by your own. Parents expect greatness of you because they are trying to build a need for greatness that you have within yourself. And it shouldn't crush you, it should build you.
It should give you an edge to yourself that many millennials find themselves without. It should give you desire to succeed and a basis for the desire to succeed in everything that you do. It should push you to be even better than you were before and give you a great strength to yourself that you both demand and that you have internally. And it should give you enough strength to know when expectations are too high, to know your limits and to be respectful enough of them to tell people to back off when they push you — even if the ones you are telling to back off are your parents themselves.
Parents just want what's best for you. But they aren't perfect, and they don't always get it right. Sometimes their way of desiring your life to hold all the joys it can come off as too high of an expectation, but even by unintentionally setting the bar too high in your eyes yields incredible outcomes, ones that you do not yet see, although someday you will. So accept those expectations with grace, expecting in return that they will, in fact, bring you exactly to where you want to be.
