Lofty goals (for kids and parents) aren’t always a good thing

No, you can’t be anything you want...

When my son turned one, friends gifted him with an illustrated Snoopy

You Can Be the Dog book called

Anything.

On page after page, this chirpy book shows Snoopy engaged in a variety of impressive professions: Sports Star, Surgeon, Flying Ace, and so on.

Dressed in the garb of his chosen occupation, Snoopy is pictured as a "world-famous lawyer," a "worldfamous literary ace," and even a "world-famous grocery clerk." Snoopy is superlative in everything he does.

The book was big and bright and colorful, and probably intended for an older child since the pages — instead of being thick and sturdy like board books — were made of regular paper.

When my son tried to turn these flimsy paper pages with his pudgy little hands, they inevitably ripped. Which delighted him, so he ripped them more. I let him. I even helped him sometimes.

You might think this permissiveness was due to a laid-back nature, or some lofty ideal of allowing my son's curiosity (paper rips when I pull it!) to range free. You would be wrong.

The real reason I didn't mind him ripping the pages of this book was because, as a psychologist and parent, I deeply object to its core message, which is succinctly stated on page one: "Just like Snoopy, what you can achieve is limited only by your imagination. You can be anything!"

This message — that our kids can do and achieve anything they put their minds to — can be deeply alluring to parents. What parent wouldn't want to believe that their children's achievement is limited only by imagination, and to encourage their kids to pursue ambitious goals, like becoming a surgeon or a tech company founder?

What could possibly be wrong with telling our kids they can be anything? Plenty.

First, studies show that pursuing overly-ambitious goals can be harmful. When researchers study organizations that set stretch goals for employees — goals intended to motivate high performance — they find that these lofty goals often have significant negative side effects. In particular, they find that when people are focused on a goal, and failure to achieve that goal has high costs, unethical behavior increases.

As an example, the study's authors point to the unfortunate experience of Sears, Roebuck & Co. executives in the 1990s. When the company set a high bar for auto repair sales quotas ($147/hour), hoping that this would spur staff to higher sales and productivity, the company found instead that staff overcharged customers and recommend unnecessary repairs. As one of the researchers notes: "When employees care exclusively about reaching a goal, and bad things can happen if they fail, cheating goes up."

It's not hard to see distressing parallels between this finding and contemporary statistics about our children. Many kids report feeling intense pressure to achieve in school and beyond, and many more kids say they have cheated. As Rutgers professor Donald McCabe, a noted authority on cheating, says: "I don't think there's any question that students have become more competitive, under more pressure, and, as a result, tend to excuse more from themselves and other students, and that's abetted by the adults around them."

Some attentive parents may rightly point out that Snoopy's message to kids emphasizes imagination ("What you can achieve is limited only by your imagination!") instead of focusing on the essential ingredients of effort and persistence: More important than imagining a goal is working hard to achieve it. True, but even if the message "You can do anything!" is broadened to include hard work, it still falls short.

Telling kids that they can do anything — whether fueled by imagination or hard work — obscures the critical role of chance in success. Not every child who wants to be a surgeon or sports star can become one, even if they work hard at it. At the same time, in every success story there is the grace of good fortune. As Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman puts it: "Success = Talent + Luck. Great success = A little more talent + A Lot of Luck."

While Kahneman acknowledges that skill is a key part of success, his work emphasizes that chance plays a predominant role. This can be a bitter pill for those who want to believe that we control our own destiny, and that, therefore, our destiny reflects something about our internal qualities, such as ability, drive, or worth. Implicit in this way of thinking is a different equation: Highly successful person = person with the right stuff. From here, it's not a far leap to the notion that the haves have it because they are innately special, or because they worked hard and deserve it.

Of course, there are many who don't work hard to develop their skills and pursue opportunities — and who therefore are unlikely to achieve success if chance comes knocking — but the reverse is not true. Just as with the proverbial wet sidewalk (if it rains the sidewalk will be wet, but the sidewalk being wet doesn't always mean it rained) people with average resumes are not necessarily less outstanding or deserving.