Although there are many joys when it comes to parenting a child of your own, one of the best accomplishments you can have as a parent is to see them succeed in life. This is the logic behind every parent who overreacts to a bad grade in the academic field, or who screams and yells at a referee in a sporting event who seemingly calls a foul on their kid incorrectly. These reactions come from a place of love and desire that their children succeed, no matter what their endeavors are in life.
However, where does the line get drawn in terms of what constitutes success for each and every child? Even though we all want our kids to be the next Einstein or the next great athlete, the fact of the matter is that achieving those levels of success and brilliance are not only statistically unlikely, but largely due to hereditary factors beyond the child’s control.
Every parent’s own personal bar as to how far their children go in life will directly depend on their own willingness to push their child to succeed (although sometimes pushing them too hard can lead to very bad consequences in the long run). But at the very least, it should be every parent’s goal to have their children do better than they themselves did in their own lives when they were younger.
A common example of this is when a high school dropout has a child of their own. For this parent, having their child actually graduate from high school is a significant achievement and one worth celebrating, especially in context. This child very likely does not have the same resources as a child whose parents have graduated from a four-year college, let alone a high school, and so it is not always reasonable to expect this child to achieve the same level of success as the child from another objectively more successful family. In this context, it is a real achievement if the child is able to go further along in the education system than his or her own parent did, by graduating from high school.
Obviously, it is in a parent’s best interest to have their child achieve the highest levels of success as humanely possible, but no two situations are exactly the same. If you as a parent are able to get your child to surpass your own achievements, you have shown that you can make a life better and provide a better standard of living that you yourself had when you were growing up. By helping your child achieve this particular and unique level of success, you can rest assured knowing that you did your job and were truly successful as a parent.