Parents (and I am among you) expend a lot of energy worrying about whether their children will succeed. Success is certainly important, but it serves a more important and more deserving god: happiness. Ideally, happiness should be the objective for all of our pursuits, intellectual, professional, personal, even parental. We invest ourselves in the subjects we do because they are the ones that excite us, and that excitement fulfills us emotionally as well as intellectually. The same goes for our professional endeavors: we apply for jobs, start businesses, forge relationships, and build careers based on which among them bring us joy, in whatever form. Obviously our personal relationships should make us happy; the ones that don’t are soon ended. As parents, we find great joy in seeing our children learn, grow, and discover their future selves. No pursuit is worthwhile if pleasure cannot be derived from it, from the ends if not, ideally, from the means as well.

We all want our children to be happy. They are, after all, children. Despite that desire, balancing happiness with achievement is a difficult task for a parent. 

Katrina Schwartz of KQED's blog Mind/Shift wrote this week about fostering positive mindsets in students.

Nicole Garman at Education World discusses why schools in Singapore better prepare students in math and science than do schools in America.

Stanford's Dean of Freshmen, Julie Lythcott-Haims, challenges parents and educators to examine how they approach the education and development of their children and students in a TED talk titled, How to raise successful kids - without over-parenting.

The ACT will now accommodate English language learners on the college readiness test.

Starting in the fall of 2017, the nonprofit will offer supports to English language learners to ensure that their tests accurately reflect their abilities.

For the first time, students will receive additional time on their tests, test instructions in their language, a separate testing room and have access to a bilingual glossary. Students are required to apply for the additional assistance from their school counselor.

The ACT used input from educational experts and civil rights advocates to determine how to offer support to English language learners without giving them an unfair advantage.

Many parents ask me how they can help their kids maintain a school-life balance without risking their high school, college, and future professional potential. In other words, “I want my kid to be happy, but I also want him to get straight As. How do I do that?”

Let’s start with an analogy.

Suppose you want to run a marathon. Without making comment on anyone’s current level of fitness, this is a tall order. You are given two choices:

• Run as far and as hard as you can every day until you can manage 26.2 miles, or
• Find a training regimen, preferably administered by an expert marathoner, and apply the techniques over the course of many months until the regimen and your trainer believe you are ready.

This is an obvious choice, yes?