Why I Don’t Worry About My Child Who Will Never Be Student of the Month, and Worry About The One Who Gets it Every Year

Every month, schools all over the country pick their Student of the Month—the one who exemplifies good behavior, follows the rules, helps others, and performs well academically. In my house, I have one child who has never received this recognition and probably never will. And then I have another child who gets it almost every year. But here’s the thing—I don’t worry about the one who doesn’t get it. I worry about the one who does.

My younger daughter is the textbook definition of a good student. She follows the rules, even when they don’t make sense. She never challenges authority, even when she should. She never argues about grades, even if she’s been graded unfairly. To her teachers, she is polite, obedient, and enthusiastic. At school, she is the child who would never show that she is upset or frustrated. Instead, she waits until she gets home, where she feels safe, to cry her eyes out. She is friendly, compassionate, and eager to help anyone who is struggling. Part of this comes from her genuinely kind heart, but I know a deeper reason lies beneath: she wants to be accepted, loved, appreciated, and noticed. In her mind, the best way to achieve that is to be the ‘good girl’—to be helpful, agreeable, and always pleasant.

My older daughter, on the other hand, has never been Student of the Month, and I don’t expect her to be. She is smart, independent, and unafraid to challenge the status quo. She stands up for herself, questions authority, argues about grades, and—yes—sometimes talks in class, and fools around in the hallways, as any teenager developmentally SHOULD. She doesn’t always color inside the lines, and she isn’t afraid to speak up when something doesn’t feel right. While she also desires love and acceptance, she is unwilling to suppress who she is to achieve it. And because of that, I don’t worry about her as much.

People-pleasing is a burning candle - it shines brightly for everyone else, but it consumes itself in the process. It looks wonderful and is useful for others—teachers love these kids, peers admire them, and parents take pride in their ‘well-behaved’ child. But underneath, it’s exhausting. My younger daughter has learned to suppress her emotions in order to fit into the mold of the perfect student. She has internalized the message that crying is weakness (part of that was my doing as she was growing up, because I didn't know any better), that arguing is disrespectful, and that her worth is tied to how well she performs in the eyes of others.

When I look back on her childhood, I can see the patterns. She was always the child who did what was asked of her. She was the one who learned to push aside her emotions when they became inconvenient to those around her. She was the one who was told to ‘stop crying over every little thing.’ She struggled to get A’s in her early years at a private school, and while she achieved them, they came at the cost of tears, frustration, and immense pressure. She figured out that the way to be successful was to suppress—her feelings, her frustrations, her exhaustion. She learned that in order to be a ‘star student,’ she had to smile, comply, and never push back.

And that is why I worry. Because life is not kind to people who have spent their entire childhood molding themselves into who they think they’re supposed to be. One day, she may find herself in situations where she needs to say no, but she won’t know how. She may find herself accepting mistreatment because speaking up feels foreign to her. She may struggle to set boundaries, to advocate for herself, to understand that love and acceptance should never come at the cost of her own well-being.

As parents, we often celebrate the ‘good kids’—the ones who never cause trouble, never push back, and never make waves. But I’ve come to realize that what the world praises isn’t always what’s best for my child. I want my daughter to be kind, but I also want her to be strong. I want her to be helpful, but I also want her to know that she doesn’t need to earn love by pleasing everyone around her. I want her to respect authority, but I also want her to recognize when something is unfair and have the courage to speak up.

So, while I’m proud of both my daughters, student of the month or not, I worry about my younger one far more than my older one. Because life is not a classroom where you can always earn a gold star by following the rules. Real life requires resilience, confidence, and the ability to stand tall even when the world expects you to shrink to its demands and expectations. I bet if we look back through history, we’ll find that the true world-changers were rarely people pleasers or the star students of their classrooms.

My hope is that over time, she will unlearn some of the messages that have shaped her into the ‘perfect student.’ That she will see her worth outside of awards and approval. That she will learn that she doesn’t have to be everything to everyone in order to be enough. Because she already is.