Seven-year-olds who are afraid to make mistakes. Twelve-year-olds quitting the sports they used to love because “it’s just not fun anymore.” College graduates with the right schools and the right jobs walking into a therapist’s office and saying they have never been less happy in their lives. Two decades ago, these were the exceptions in a family therapy practice. Now they are the norm, and the parents raising these children are not doing any better. By the measures she sees every day, they are doing everything right and still feel as though they are failing.
Dr. Maggie Vaughan, MFT, PhD, is a psychotherapist and relationship expert, the founder of Happy Apple NYC, a psychotherapy center focused on relationships, and the author of Beyond Perfect: How Overwhelmed Parents Can Break Free From Performance Culture. Speaking on The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi, she described a shift she has watched unfold across twenty years in private practice, first in her clients and then in the research she went looking for to confirm she was not imagining it. What she found is that the way most families are raising children today is optimized for the wrong outcomes, and both generations are paying for it.
How Fifty Years of Good Intentions Built a Pressure Cooker
Dr. Maggie Vaughan is careful to say that performance culture did not arrive overnight and did not come from bad parents. She traces it back roughly fifty years. In the prosperity that followed World War II, parents began investing in their children’s futures in ways earlier generations could not, envisioning education rather than a direct path into the workforce. That investment came from love. Then, in the 1980s, something shifted. Government supports that families once relied on, like free aftercare at school, were pulled back and became stigmatized as creating dependency. The message parents absorbed, in Vaughan’s words, was “you’re on your own. If your child is falling behind, you and you alone are responsible for that.”
Layer on the explosion of parenting books telling mothers and fathers exactly how to produce a successful child, an economy that no longer allows one parent to stay home, extended family and neighbors who are no longer nearby, and a youth sports industry Vaughan says now generates $40 billion a year, and you have a system in which more is expected of fewer adults than ever before. Parents are not caught in performance culture because they are anxious or status-obsessed. They are caught in it because every signal around them says that keeping up is how you keep your child safe. Understanding that the pressure is structural, not personal, is the first thing Vaughan wants overwhelmed parents to take in.
Why the Kids Who Look Fine Are Not
From the outside, the children Dr. Maggie Vaughan treats appear to be thriving. They attend the best schools, earn the grades, and have parents who dote on them. Yet in her experience, some cannot sleep, some cannot eat, and some simply cannot stop doing the things that are making them miserable. She cites research showing that kids at high-achieving schools are twice as likely to develop an addiction of some kind by the age of 27. Burnout rates among children are, in her words, “through the roof,” and the average age at which kids quit a sport now falls somewhere between 11 and 14, with the most common explanation being that it is no longer fun.
The mechanism, as Vaughan explains it, is that activities have stopped being about exercise, friendship, or trying something different, and have become entirely about performing. When there is always an agenda attached, children lose intrinsic motivation, the sense of purpose and meaning that motivates people for a lifetime. The young adults who come to her practice after highly curated childhoods have gotten into the college, graduated, and landed the job, and then discover they do not know what they actually enjoy or why they are where they are. Vaughan’s point for parents is not that ambition is wrong. It is that a childhood built on outcomes can quietly strip away the internal engine a child needs to want anything for themselves.
What Children Are Really Doing When They Perform
One of the most clarifying ideas Dr. Maggie Vaughan shared is why children keep performing even after the joy is gone. From the earliest age, she explained, a child will “do exactly what makes their parents happy.” When a parent lights up, the child repeats whatever produced that reaction, whether it is jumping jacks or a jump shot, because that is what makes them feel lovable and special. None of us, Vaughan said, wants to be just a number on the planet. That drive to stand out and stay loved is wired into us.
The problem arrives when one activity becomes the thing that earns love. A child who feels most cherished when playing basketball well pours everything into basketball, attaches their identity to it, and gradually loses sight of the other things they once loved, like playing in the dirt, climbing a tree, or coloring. As the pressure to achieve in that activity grows, they stop enjoying it but keep going anyway, because walking away would mean losing the thing their self-worth is attached to. Vaughan noted that this pattern does not end in childhood. People seek their parents’ approval and admiration for their entire lives, and when they never received it, they often end up in her office decades later. For a parent, the practical takeaway is to notice what you light up for, and to make sure your child sees that spark for who they are, not only for what they produce.
The Stomach Ache That Is Really Anxiety
Children rarely have the vocabulary to say they are anxious, so the signs a parent is most likely to miss are physical. Dr. Maggie Vaughan pointed to stomach pain, headaches, unusual tiredness, and a sudden desire to avoid certain activities as the most common ways distress shows up in kids who cannot yet name what they feel. A parent might read these as a weak immune system or ordinary complaining, when the body is doing the talking.
Her advice is to give the child the words. Vaughan suggested naming what you have observed and connecting it gently to what might be behind it, for example, noticing that the stomach aches started around the time the audition came up and asking whether nerves might be part of it. Naming the feeling often brings immediate relief, because the child realizes that what they are experiencing is a recognizable thing rather than something wrong with them alone. And the moment a parent names it, Vaughan said, “you’re kind of in it with them,” which is itself a comfort. The skill here is not diagnosis. It is helping a child build the emotional vocabulary to understand their own inner weather.
The Three Beliefs That Are Burning Parents Out
Dr. Maggie Vaughan identified three beliefs that quietly drive the exhaustion she sees in parents. The first is that your child’s success is your report card, which makes opting out of the race feel impossible, because backing off would be a public verdict on your parenting. The second is that the more you do, the better your child will turn out. Vaughan cited a study of roughly four thousand children showing that an extra hour of homework each night offered zero academic benefit and caused measurable harm. “More input equals better outcomes,” she said. “And that is not what the statistics show.” The third belief is that love means maximizing a child’s potential, which teaches the child that they are most lovable when they succeed and at risk the rest of the time.
What these three beliefs share, in Vaughan’s view, is a focus on outcomes that nobody controls. Whether a child makes the team, wins the game, or gets the grade is never fully in the child’s hands or the parent’s. What a child can always control is behavior and values. Vaughan encourages parents to pivot toward those, to ask whether their child was a good teammate, prepared well, and tried their best, and to treat losses exactly as they would a win when those standards were met. The relief this offers is real. When you measure what is controllable, you stop being wound up over every result, and so does your child.
“A child who builds a solid foundation of self goes places, period. And success winds up being the side effect.”
Dr. Maggie Vaughan, MFT, PhD, Psychotherapist and Founder of Happy Apple NYC
What the Research Says Actually Predicts a Happy Adult
If parents are optimizing for the wrong things, what should they be optimizing for? Dr. Maggie Vaughan laid out the findings she considers most important. Self-control at age three, not IQ and not grades, predicts savings, health, and employment all the way up to age 32, and she was quick to reassure parents that self-control can still be developed later if a three-year-old does not have much of it. Kids with strong social skills in kindergarten are twice as likely to earn a college degree and 54 percent more likely to graduate from high school. And a Harvard study that followed people for roughly 75 to 80 years found that the number one predictor of adult happiness was not wealth, achievement, or GPA. It was the warmth of close relationships while growing up.
Vaughan is not telling parents to cancel every activity. Her guidance is to make sure the family is prioritizing emotional regulation, social skills, and warmth, and then to schedule everything else around those things. One of her simplest recommendations is a regular family meal, which she acknowledged is hard with competing schedules and does not require anyone to cook. She said regular family meals are associated with a 25 percent decrease in mental health disorders in children up to age 22. The lesson is that the small, unglamorous things nobody is optimizing for turn out to matter most.
Cut One Thing and Take the Family’s Temperature
For a parent who wants their child to be okay but is afraid to stop pushing, Dr. Maggie Vaughan’s starting point is deliberately small. She often suggests families cut just one thing, the activity a child likes least, while keeping the others, and then take the internal temperature of the household. In her experience, families notice fairly quickly that they are connecting more deeply, having more fun, and that the whole house feels lighter. It takes trust, she said, in the research, in your own instincts, and in your read on how the family is really doing, and it happens in baby steps rather than one dramatic exit.
Her other recommendation is one any parent can do regardless of how busy they are. When you reconnect with your child after school or after work, resist opening with the book report grade or tonight’s homework. Instead, ask how they are doing and what they need. Ask what they are worried about and what they are excited about. Vaughan’s message is that “kids need to be seen,” and the way you show a child they matter is by taking a real interest in their inner life. The families she sees who make these shifts, she noted, tend to achieve at just as high a level as before. They are simply happier while doing it.
You Are Struggling Because You Care
Dr. Maggie Vaughan wants overwhelmed parents to know they are in the majority. She cited figures showing that two-thirds of parents in the United States report burnout and that half describe parenting as completely overwhelming every single day. That does not make the exhaustion enjoyable, but it does mean it is not a personal failing. “If you’re struggling,” she said, “it’s because you care. You’re a highly conscientious person.”
Her invitation is to consider that doing less might serve your child, your family, and yourself better than doing more. That means letting kids figure some things out on their own, not fixing everything, not overscheduling, and not overspending. Parenting, in her words, is a gigantic mess and total chaos, and you do not need to be a perfect parent for your child to turn out well.
What stays with you is her final point about warmth. It predicts adult income, emotional health at midlife, and whether a person feels their life has meaning, and it costs nothing. It does not require quitting your job. It requires a little curiosity and a little spark when your child walks through the door. If you can pull that off, Dr. Maggie Vaughan says, you are doing great.
