Many of our arguments center around me wanting her to do better in school because I know she can versus her doing just enough because she’s already at the top of the class. To which I responded in a condescending tone, well, if your peers are mediocre, do you want to be just average or you want to excel? Her quick retort, “It’s not always about the grade. It’s about my stress level.”

While I understand that she has stresses and have even written about it, I failed to understand how doing well at school is a cause of it. Especially since she grasps many subjects so easily. And even at subjects she doesn’t have an affinity to (like STEM), I often help her with homework and even offered to hire a tutor and she does well. “Dad, it’s not like I don’t understand how to solve binomial equations, I do. I just don’t enjoy doing them and will do the minimum required of the homework and understand it well enough to get a decent grade on the test. I also hate memorizing dates in history. And I hate multiple choice questions because each of those answers are right—at different times. But you lump it all into one category and call it school and assume I should just ace it.”

I was trying to unpack what she just said to me. But even before I can start to unravel the multiple points she made, my daughter continued, “Dad, you don’t like driving in the city. It stresses you out because of all the crazies out there. But you like cross country driving. It’s not the same thing. I know. School’s kinda like that for me. I really like some of it and I can barely stand other parts. And I want a social life. I want to hang out with friends. I want to veg out and sometimes, I want to do nothing. And I want to sleep in until noon on Sundays.”

 

It was the shortest conversation I ever had with me saying the fewest words.

 

All of a sudden, I got the feeling that I was putting her into a box and judging her on everything that didn’t live up to my expectations. While I thought that that might be true, the reality is that I care deeply for her to do well. Nah, not just well, excel above and beyond her peers. I recall a conversation I once had with my daughter about only achieving an 80% grade in a test and used the analogy of a doctor only being successful 80% of the time or an engineer who build bridges that may fail 20% of the time.

Before I could even finish my own thoughts, her onslaught continued, “School is important for me too. I know I need good grades to get into good schools and doing slightly better than some of my friends who coast isn’t good enough—even for me. But I do well. I got a 97% on that other test. All you said was, ‘good’ and then talked about the others that weren’t 97%.”

I back-peddled my demands and offered that I was proud of her achievements. “I just need you to back off, dad. Just a bit so I can have a break. A quiet moment. A safe space. And didn’t you say that failure is itself a good teacher?” Well, yes, but—. “I’m not failing, dad. I’m far from it,” she interrupted before I can finish my sentence.

Then without saying a word, I nodded and simply uttered, ‘I understand’. I have read and written enough that academic pressures placed on a child can crush their own motivation and can ultimately have a negative impact. I also recall how I caused the music to die one day and she wanted to give up cello.

I backed off and for a brief moment, recognized that my daughter was defining her boundaries with me as I had done for her when she was younger. For a brief moment, I stopped being a parent and just listen to her as a person who had something to tell me not as my child, but as a young person living with a middle age man. And for one brief moment, I understood her challenge. It was the shortest conversation I ever had with me saying the fewest words.