Forum: What steadies a person is worth that is given rather than earned

Imelda Santos Caleon is right that student stress is often rooted in care rather than in fear of failure as such – the dread of letting down the people who matter (“It’s not just exams that pressure students. It’s the fear of letting us down”, Oct 15).

Across several high-income countries, treatment for depression and anxiety has become far more available since the 1990s, yet prevalence has not fallen. We must ask what young people are carrying in the first place.

Everyone rests their life on something: results, a job, a relationship, the regard of others. Most are good things. The difficulty begins when a good thing becomes the thing holding up our whole sense of who we are.

The writer observes that we cannot tell our children marks do not define them, while organising their lives as though every mark does. But broadening the definition of success, whether in sport, the arts, service or finding a passion, offers more ways to succeed and therefore more ways to fail. The weight moves without growing lighter.

As a gerontologist, I see the other end of this. During the pandemic, older adults faced the greatest risk from the virus and yet reported lower psychological distress than younger adults.

Part of the reason is time. With the years, most people learn how little of life they control, and those who age well have found firmer ground – in relationships, in faith, in belonging to something larger than themselves. They have lived through loss and found that they survived it. Our young have not had that teacher, and the story we offer them is smaller: their own portfolio, measured against everyone else’s. A story that small cannot bear the weight of a life.

What steadies a person is worth that is given rather than earned, being valued before achieving anything, and remaining valued after failing. That is something families, schools and communities either convey, or fail to.

Wee Shiou Liang