Why I Stopped Caring About Grades (and Started Focusing on Growth)

Seeing Education Differently

I’ve always looked at life through the lens of possibility. I can’t help it. My mind naturally asks, What could this be? I look at something as it is, and then I start imagining what it could become if it were aligned, purposeful, whole.

That’s how I’ve always viewed education. Not as a system to comply with, but as a tool to unlock potential.

Breaking the Pattern You Grew Up With

When I was growing up, homework was a battlefield.
If it wasn’t done, punishment followed.
There were rules, shouting, grounding, and sometimes worse. It created tension that had nothing to do with learning and everything to do with control.

That kind of chaos stays with you. You tell yourself you’ll do things differently, and then one day you’re standing in your kitchen watching your child struggle with an assignment, and you feel that same frustration rise in your chest. That’s the moment you either repeat the pattern or redesign it.

I decided to redesign it.

Redefining What Learning Means

I didn’t want my sons associating education with stress, shame, or punishment. I wanted them to see learning as something connected to their own goals, not something imposed by someone else’s standards.

So I stepped back and asked a bigger question:
What abilities will my children need to create the kind of lives they want?

If one of them wanted to be highly educated in a field, he’d need the ability to read deeply and retain information. If he wanted to start a business, he’d need to communicate clearly, understand people, and build trust. If he wanted to explore new ideas, he’d need curiosity, honesty, and discernment — the ability to tell the difference between truth and noise.

These were the abilities I wanted to make sure they had. Because those are the skills that make a person capable. And capability is what gives you confidence.

Teaching Toward Ability, Not Approval

That’s what I taught toward.
Not grades. Not scores. Not someone else’s definition of success.

It took more effort to parent that way because it required me to observe before I acted. I had to really study who my children were becoming, not who I thought they should be. I had to connect what they were learning to what they cared about.

When the bond is strong and you’re fully present, you start to understand where your child is — not just academically, but emotionally and spiritually. From that place, you can guide with precision. You’re not guessing. You’re shaping.

Aligning Education With Purpose

Education, for me, became about alignment.
Aligning their natural strengths with the world they were growing into.
Aligning what they were learning with what they would someday need.
Aligning myself with the kind of mother I wanted to be, not the one I had seen.

It’s not that I threw out academics. It’s that I stopped letting them define worth. The grading system was never built to measure wisdom or capability. It was built to measure compliance.

Raising Capable, Confident Thinkers

I didn’t want compliant kids.
I wanted competent, thinking, self-directed adults.

And that started by redefining what learning even meant inside our home.

Because when you teach your children how to think for themselves, they stop performing for approval and start building lives that make sense to them.
That’s the real education.
And that’s the kind of vision worth building toward.