During the Q&A portion of an admissions information session, I saw a question from a mother. Her daughter is in 7th grade and has given nearly all her free time to figure skating. The mother said her daughter works incredibly hard — and truly loves what she does.

Then she wrote this:

I read the question and stared at the screen for a long time.

On the surface, she was asking about figure skating. Underneath, she was asking something else entirely:

My daughter loves something she won't "succeed" at. Does it still matter?

I've worked with countless mothers like her. As a mother myself — of a 13-year-old boy — I understand that anxiety. And as someone who has completed clinical mental health counseling training, for the first time I saw it clearly: in the love of this generation of Chinese-American parents, there is an equation we haven't even realized is there.

I. The Equation Living in Our Unconscious

The equation goes roughly like this:

It's not written in any book. But it lives in the unconscious minds of many Chinese-American parents. It is the way that many of us — a generation that often climbed from small Chinese cities to America by placing first on every exam — express love.

We believe: fill in all these metrics, and our children will be safe.

So hidden inside that figure skating mother's anxiety was a cost-benefit calculation: can my daughter's thousands of hours on the ice be converted into the "admission" on the right side of the equation? If not, shouldn't we redirect that time toward something more "useful"?

But there is one fatal problem with this equation:

It's wrong.

II. Three Pieces of Real Admissions Data

I'm not saying this on feeling alone. Here are three pieces of hard evidence.

The first:

The second:

In the 2018 SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard was forced by the court to make public its internal admissions scoring system. Harvard rates each applicant on six dimensions (1 is highest, 6 is lowest): academic, extracurricular, athletic, school support, overall — and one dimension called personal rating.

What does a score of 1 on "personal rating" mean? Harvard's internal documents state it directly:

This is a hard metric, ranked alongside GPA and SAT. It is not a matter of whether an interviewer is having a good day. It is not a "soft" indicator. Harvard literally assigns a score of 1 through 6 on this dimension in every applicant's file.

The third:

Former New York Times education journalist Jeffrey Selingo spent an entire academic year — 2018 to 2019 — embedded in the admissions offices of three universities. From reading files at 7am to committee meetings at 11pm, he was present throughout. In his 2020 book Who Gets In and Why, he wrote:

What does it mean to put these three pieces together?

It means the equation living in our unconscious is not the equation that top universities actually use.

We have been solving a problem that doesn't exist.

III. The Children Being Hurt by This Equation

But if this article stopped here, it would still be a strategy piece — just with a different strategy — on "how to get into Harvard."

I want to go one layer deeper, and talk about something that troubles me far more.

Arizona State University developmental psychologist Suniya Luthar spent nearly twenty years studying one question: what kinds of adolescents are most at risk for serious mental health problems? Her findings, published in American Psychologist in 2020, identified four major risk factors for adolescent mental health:

Please read that line again.

The "best schools," the best school districts, the most competitive peer environments — the very things parents exhaust themselves to give their children — are classified by science alongside poverty, trauma, and discrimination as developmental risk factors.

A 2021 study by Luthar found further that children raised in high-achieving environments face developmental pressures that can increase their likelihood of developing internalized mental illness — anxiety, depression — in adulthood by:

I stopped when I read that.

We Chinese-American parents — myself included — often feel we are protecting our children by giving them the best resources, pushing them onto the best tracks. But Luthar's research contains a sentence that punctures this illusion:

One more set of numbers: from a 2022 national health survey of 350,000 college students published in the Journal of Affective Disorders:

Your child may be falling apart right now. They won't tell you.
Because we taught them that falling apart is weakness.

IV. The Good Student Trap

At the same session, one of the speakers — Brian, a Mensa member who was raised from childhood as a "gifted" child — said something that sent a chill through me.

He said that children raised as "gifted" develop, by middle school, a particular personality trap:

After he said that, I thought of several students I'd worked with. Their transcripts had never seen a B. But when I asked them, "If you could do anything, what would you most want to do?" — they went silent.

They didn't know the answer.

We think we're raising "excellent" children.

We are actually raising children who can only function in environments where everything is graded.

The children that top universities want — according to research by William Damon, director of Stanford's Center on Adolescence — are different.

In a 2008 national survey, Damon found:

Most critically, Damon found: purpose cannot be imposed from the outside. It can only grow slowly in an environment where it is supported and seen.

You cannot push a child into having purpose. You cannot engineer a "distinctive passion" through a capstone project. You can only water — like a gardener — and wait patiently.

This is why the entire methodology of "early planning," "differentiated advantage," "building your child's narrative arc for applications" — even when every individual step looks right — ultimately reverses itself.

Because the methodology itself is a form of pushing. And what gets pushed into existence cannot grow into genuine purpose.

He was right. But the entire product system he was operating within — early planning for grades 5–8, young-age AI camps, capstone project coaching, differentiated advantage building — does exactly the opposite. It pushes and pulls.

Good educational principles, conscripted to serve the wrong purpose.

That was the most painful thing I took away from the entire session.

V. Back to the 7th Grade Figure Skater

After all of this, I want to go back to the 7th grade girl on the ice.

If her mother ever sat down in my consulting room — I don't think she'd lead with figure skating.

She'd probably sit quietly for a moment. Then she'd say:

"I honestly don't know if my daughter is happy."

At that moment, here is what I would want to say to her:

Your daughter, on that ice, thousands of hours, falling down over and over, getting up, adjusting, trying again — what she is doing, in developmental science terms, is called the development of resilience.

She is building something called "I can persist at something that won't pay off immediately" — a psychological structure that Luthar's research identifies as one of the most important protective factors for adolescent mental health.

She is doing something she loves from the inside — something no one told her to do. Right now, her brain is growing what's called intrinsic motivation — and thirty years of Self-Determination Theory research tells us this is the single most central source of a person's lifelong wellbeing and sense of achievement.

She may not make it to the Olympics.

But she is growing into one of the 20% in Damon's research who have purpose.

And your fear that this is "useless" —

It comes from the fact that our generation of parents was trained to recognize only one kind of usefulness: converted into scores, converted into awards, converted into admission letters.

But Selingo spent a full year inside a college admissions office. The truth he witnessed was this: what top universities want is precisely the child who loves this thing beyond utilitarian logic.

Your daughter's thousands of hours have not been wasted.

Not because they might eventually count as a boost in her college application.

But because those thousands of hours are growing her into a whole person.

Afterword

I closed the session before it ended.

I thought about my own 13-year-old son. He plays hockey, rows, plays soccer. He probably won't become a professional athlete either.

But I watch him on the field — fully present, not caring about the score, not looking to see if anyone is watching —

And I think: this is enough.
This is enough.