Well, perhaps we should put this post in the pet-peeves folder because the concept of overachieving is one of my pettest of pet peeves. May I list a couple of pesky overachievers? Leonardo da Vinci. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Marie Curie. Oh, right. Another overachiever: Steve Jobs. Lots of people we venerate are overachievers. So why is it a bad thing if your child is an overachiever? (It isn’t.)
Psychology has presented us—and especially parents—with a large number of useless or even harmful concepts. Overachieving is one of them. In a society that measures goodness and worthiness by busy-ness, achievement, and reward, the idea of stigmatizing those who achieve greatly is hypocritical, annoying, and downright stupid.
So, when the psychobabblers start talking about overachieving, what is it they are really saying? Well, firstly, I can’t help but wonder about just a soupcon of jealousy or envy: Let’s put down the really successful people. Somehow they must be psychologically compromised or emotionally stunted. But even more than that, what the concept is really about is that some people are super intelligent, talented, socially savvy, business savvy, artistic…and so it just messes up the norms of the bell curves upon which so much of the psychobabble world is built. And there is more to it.
I think there can be little question that some kids are over-scheduled, at least partially because their parents are hoping they will be “over-achievers.” Some are over-scheduled because that’s what a lot of parents do and there is the competition (overt or covert) as to who will really have the Ivy-League, NFL/NBA billionaire kid. Lots of scheduled activities, however, beats sitting with a smart phone and being on social media or lost in imaginary world of war and destruction. Still, none of that quite taps into the real issue I have with the very silly concept.
My real issue is that it is just one of the terms that gets used without much thought. It seems to have some sort of root in the idea (mainly false) that kids are being asked to work so hard at school that any anxiety or depression that might be noticed/diagnosed has to do with the academic rigors of school. Kids who work very hard and feel the stress of hard work get put into the anxious/depressed over achiever category because there doesn’t seem to be a category for them. Maybe the category, if there need be one is, hard-working kids who feel the effects of hard work. Maybe they don’t need a category?
I have no problem with hard workers and high achievers. Do you? Really? Hard workers who achieve greatly is a concept that makes sense. Over achiever? No. So the moral of the post? Think long and hard about the psychobabble concepts that professional advice-givers provide. If you can’t really make sense of the concept (or the diagnosis), it is possible that it doesn’t really make sense.
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