“How can I help my child become the best version of themselves?”
Now there’s a question that we hear a lot in modern parenting. On both a direct experience level and a philosophical one that looms over parents collectively.
It sounds like a beautiful aspiration. It comes from a place of love, hope, and the deeply human desire to give our children opportunities we may not have had ourselves.
But at some point, “helping children grow” has become strangely difficult to separate from “constantly trying to improve them.”
Spend enough time around parents today, and you’ll notice a throughline running through countless conversations. Which enrichment class is worth the money? Is phonics better than whole language? Should they start coding? How much screen time is too much? Are they reading enough? Social enough? Confident enough? Independent enough?
Again, none of these questions is inherently wrong. They’re thoughtful questions asked by people who care.
But the problem is what happens when they become relentless.
When every stage of childhood begins to feel like something to optimise, children slowly stop being people we’re getting to know and instead become projects we’re trying to perfect.
This isn’t always obvious. Of course, it rarely sounds like criticism. It sounds more like, “Let’s just help them improve this.” Then the next thing. And the next.
Sound familiar?
Many children grow up in homes where there’s always just another trait to smooth out. Another habit to correct. Another skill to build. Another milestone to chase. Even praise carries the implication that today’s achievement is simply tomorrow’s baseline.
Without meaning to, we adults end up creating an atmosphere where “enough” is always just over the horizon. Just one more little push, and another, until we finally get there.
Psychologists have long observed that children develop their sense of self through repeated interactions with the important adults around them. And as we constantly say, they don’t only hear what we say; they absorb what consistently captures our attention.
If much of our attention is directed toward fixing, correcting, and improving, kids may gradually conclude that who they are today is always subject to approval again tomorrow.
That is an exhausting thing to carry.
Ironically, many parents don’t notice this because improvement itself is rarely framed as harmful. Societally, we celebrate ambition, admire discipline, and encourage growth. As we should, of course. Growth is one of life’s great joys. But growth and perpetual dissatisfaction are not the same thing.
One is rooted in the idea that there is always more to discover; the other in the belief that who you are today isn’t quite enough. Children notice the difference, even if they can’t explain it. Or even if you can’t tell that they did.
As we’ve seen in Imagine If, it shows up in the child who becomes anxious about bringing home anything less than perfect marks. The teenager who apologises before showing you something they’ve made. The child who constantly asks, “Was that good?” before deciding how they feel about their own work.
And then, they’re no longer engaging with learning itself. They’re scanning for evaluation instead, like life is just one big giant exam to prepare for.
Over time, this changes something fundamental: curiosity giving way to performance. Play giving way to productivity. Exploration becomes something that needs to justify itself.
One of the hidden, yet greater tragedies resulting from this is that children stop doing things simply because they enjoy them. Reading becomes preparation for exams, sport becomes preparation for scholarships, and music becomes preparation for competitions. Even rest starts needing to be “productive.” And anyone reading this knows how this epidemic of earning rest and resting ‘correctly’ plagues our adult lives.
The irony, of course, is that many of the qualities parents hope to cultivate—creativity, resilience, confidence, intrinsic motivation—are difficult to create through constant optimisation. Why? Because they grow in environments where children feel accepted as they are, even while they’re still finding themselves.
We’re the ones who need to remember this: acceptance and growth are not opposites. In fact, they’re partners.
People are often far more willing to take risks when they don’t feel they’re constantly being assessed. Adults know this instinctively. Think about the difference between working for someone who notices only your mistakes and someone who genuinely believes in you. In one environment, you spend your energy avoiding failure. In the other, you spend it exploring what you’re capable of.
Children are no different.
This doesn’t mean lowering expectations or abandoning all guidance. Children benefit enormously from challenge, encouragement, and adults who believe they are capable of difficult things. But there’s a meaningful difference between helping a child grow and making them feel like they are always under renovation.
We practice this constantly at Imagine If. The understanding that perhaps one of the most generous things we can offer our learners is the experience of being fully loved and seen before they have earned another achievement, mastered another skill, or become “the next” version of themselves.
To let them experience the rare feeling of being enough, while still growing, and thus being present.
Because children, and people, will spend their entire lives changing. They need others who remind them that growth is not proof that the current version of them was ever lacking in the first place.
If this article resonated, our book Unfiltered Parenting explores these themes in greater depth, offering thoughtful and practical insights into raising children without turning childhood into a lifelong self-improvement project.