FOREWORD

In order to write my dissertation on student engagement with learning, I spent a year shadowing five high-achieving high school students in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the kind of engagement I was hoping to document. Instead of being genuinely motivated and excited by their courses and activities, many of the students admitted to “doing school”—going through the motions, cheating, cutting corners, and ultimately not learning the material in depth. Most felt overloaded by homework, exams, and extracurricular activities that interfered with their sleep and social lives. The pressure to over-achieve eventually took its toll on them and led to high levels of physical and emotional distress and exhaustion.

A few years later, I co-founded Challenge Success, an organization that promotes student well-being and academic engagement. Our surveys of over 200,000 high school students from high-performing schools showed similar results: students were stressed, exhausted, and disengaged from school. Our findings are underscored by recent reports that have classified students from high-achieving communities as an “at-risk” population— along with young people living in poverty, foster care, and those with incarcerated parents.¹ While some stress is necessary and can be healthy for adolescent development, we know that an undue amount of pressure placed on kids at home or school can be harmful to their well-being.

As parents, we all want our kids to master certain skills and concepts, but our largely singular focus on a narrow notion of success as defined by grades, test scores, and college admission has resulted in a lack of attention to other components of a successful life—the ability to experience joy and good health; to make ethical decisions; and to be independent, resilient, and engaged critical thinkers. Overzealous parents tend to check grade reports daily, edit essays, correct problem sets, and hire tutors and consultants—all in the name of academic achievement. But in doing so, they often lose sight of the bigger picture. Many well-meaning parents give their teens a pass from doing chores so that they can have more time to study, allow teens to be on phones and devices at the dinner table and late into the night, intervene with teachers and coaches instead of letting students advocate for themselves, and hover and helicopter without realizing that they are actually impeding important growth and maturation.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard about plans for The Parent Compass: Navigating Your Teen’s Wellness & Academic Journey in Today’s Competitive World. The book offers practical tips and tools for parents who want to raise healthy, resilient, and motivated adults. This is something we all want for our tweens and teens, but in our hyper-competitive culture, this is not an easy task. Cynthia and Jenn have been working with teens for a combined thirty-plus years and have their fingers on the pulse of the ever-changing adolescent landscape. They have created a much-needed compass to help parents resist the urge to micromanage and to help each of us reflect deeply on our actions and make changes to support our children’s long-term well-being and success. I hope you will spend time with this book, completing the exercises and questionnaires, reading through the scenarios, discussing sections with your family, and helping to spread these ideas to others by modeling positive parenting in your community. Let The Parent Compass be your guide to better parenting.

Denise Pope, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at Stanford University and the co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit that partners with schools, families, and communities to support student well-being and engagement with learning.