Deconstructing Success
Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
– Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Has it ever occurred to you that, for being one of the biggest ventures we take in our lives, parenting has one of the vaguest aims? How do we define success in parenting? To what end do we steward our children? To be honest, many of us parent with mixed motives: because everyone else is doing it this way. To make myself feel good or look good. To achieve through my kids what I couldn’t do in my own life. Because I’m too tired to do anything else. But on our better days, most would probably say that we are parenting our children to be “happy” or “successful.”
That seems pretty straightforward when our kids are young: keep diapers clean and tummies fed; read them books and teach basic social skills and boundaries. But as our kids get older, the choices become less physically exhausting but more formatively complex: which extracurricular activities do we start them on, and when, and how intensely? How much structure versus independence do we allow? What do we model in terms of how we live, what we read, whether we travel? How, in short, do we guide them towards “success”?
Soon it becomes clear that, for something so ubiquitously pursued, “success” is surprisingly hard to define. Is it having money? Power? Influence? A certain kind of reputation or educational pedigree? Is it whatever makes one happy?
Parenting not only exposes what we say we believe about success, but what we functionally believe it to be, as revealed by our unfiltered emotional responses, by how we spend our time and money, by what we pay most attention to. Are we more upset when our kids fail to be kind, or when they fail to get an A? Would we rather they spend their time in church community, or on a resume-padding activity?
When it comes to what we functionally believe about success, the data is clear. In one Harvard-based survey of 10,000 middle and high school students, a majority of teens say that while their parents communicate that being kind is important, they view “achieving at a high level” as more important than “being a happy person.”
The fact is, most of us, myself included, tend to follow our society’s definition of success by default. Depending on where we live, this may mean getting married by a certain age. It may mean gaining entrance to an elite college. It may mean achieving a recognizable level of professional or economic success. The unspoken belief is that you can maneuver your kids into these “successful” outcomes through sufficient backwards engineering. As Maria Semple puts it in her novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, “The first stop on this crazy train is Kindergarten Junction, and nobody gets off until it pulls into Harvard Station.”
The problem is, our society’s definitions of success are statistically untrue: once above the poverty line, there is no correlation between attending a prestigious college and career success. They are problematically narrow, not accounting for unique interests and strengths. And they are fundamentally unbiblical: would Jesus, an unmarried, uneducated laborer, have met these standards?
Certainly not. The people who would have been deemed “successful” in Jesus’ day would have been the Romans, or the Pharisees. I remember once deciding to look up the word “success” in the Bible and being astounded at how rarely it even appears. Slowly, it began to sink in that “success” is not a universal value, but rather one specifically shaped by our individualistic society. It is inherently comparative and external, neither of which are values in the kingdom of God. The Bible talks more about faithfulness. The master says, “well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25), not “well done, successful individual!” It’s an essential shift in worldview: our purpose is not to establish our individual selves in the eyes of the world, but to be faithful to what we have been entrusted with in the eyes of God.
This is not to say we are to disregard the achievements of our children or their future economic stability. Being wealthy, commercially successful, or academically acclaimed is not bad (see Joseph of Arimathea, Lydia, Paul), but it is clearly not the central aim of life or determinant of worth. The Christian life is fundamentally not one of individual accomplishment, but of surrender. The more we grapple with this truth, the more we are willing to shift our worldview, the more we can begin to understand what it means to parent our children with Biblical purpose.
