When I took charge of my kids’ education six years ago, my biggest goal was reigniting the love of learning. Now that the fire is lit, I’m interested in what I can DO with it.
That question led me to Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World: How They Got That Way. Published in 2013, it follows three American exchange students through Korea, Finland, and Poland, countries seen as academic superpowers. Rankings have shifted since and some of Ripley’s school-reform claims have not held up. But an important truth remains.
The highest-performing educational systems do not just teach differently. They see children differently.
Ripley holds up a mirror to America and asks us to look hard at school and our culture surrounding it. Reading her forced me to confront how much I had absorbed that children are fragile, that struggle is a problem to remove, that learning happens mainly through the right curriculum rather than the culture surrounding it. The countries that outperform us assume the opposite. They treat education as the central work of childhood, and they see children as strong enough to do that work.
Below are the best of Ripley’s arguments, checked against newer evidence, and translated into what I am actually changing at home.
Now that the learning fire is lit, I want to do something with it: raise the bar, build a culture of learning, and start treating my kids like the capable adults they will become. With that in mind, let’s begin.
✨High expectations work, and they can be warm.
All three of these academic superpowers had high expectations for their children. The top five countries globally in 2026, as measured by PISA (an international test measuring mathematics, literacy, and science) still cluster in Asia: Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. These cultures all have high, high expectations of their students.
While the book presents anecdotal evidence, a meta-analysis (the strongest research publication) representing over half a million parents concluded that positive parental expectations were associated with better grades. As I conclude in What if the Tiger Moms Were Right?, Warm Tiger Moms are a formidable approach to parenting.
One of the biggest changes I’ve made in my parenting approach this year is increasing my academic expectations of my children. It’s a gentle, but strong presence. They are taking harder classes and more of them.
My voice is saying, you can jump higher, do more, achieve greatness.
It’s possible to push our children without burning them out. Find what lights them on fire and find ways to make it more rigorous. My oldest loves mythology, so she’s taking a Greek mythology class with a PhD archeologist which has composition, literary analysis, art, and history all tied into one.
It’s a far cry from what she was doing last year in scope and intensity — and she’s happier for it.
✨Education is a culture, not a curriculum
In Korea, it’s not just parents and teachers that value children’s success. It’s the whole country. Every year graduating high school students take a national exam. Children arrive in suits and dresses. Local shops decorate signs with well-wishes, and non-test-taking children who could be at home playing create a tunnel for test takers to go through while they cheer. The country even redirects planes so as not to disturb children while they take their tests!
If everyone around you takes education seriously, your kids will too. That’s especially true as they age. Your teens will increasingly take more cues from their peers and teachers than from you — a normal and healthy phase of development, though not pleasing to us parents.
Ensure that your children are surrounded by peers who value rigor and success. I’ve been carefully selecting academic communities for my children so they have peers and other mentor voices that I trust to encourage them in the right direction. We can’t (nor should we ) control all aspects of our teen’s lives, but ensuring that their world is filled with high quality community is essential.
✨Treat hard work as the path to excellence
Perhaps my favorite reframe from the three academic superpowers is that parents and educators assume all kids can be gifted by simply working hard enough. It’s not technically true. There exists no parenting hack that will transform all children into academic geniuses. But I discuss in Can You Train Your Child to be Gifted?, there is an awful lot you can do.
For me, it means first and foremost purposely finding opportunities (and time) for my children to pursue their unique aptitudes. My youngest is taking programming and has access to accelerated math programs which is attuned to her natural talents. What will you do?
✨American parents protect children from the very strain that builds capability
In every country mentioned, children would regularly have their scores announced in class. Grades were never a secret. It was assumed children were strong enough to take this burden. And the truth is most are. When I mentioned this to my Indian-born husband, he said one of the oddest things about graduate school in the US was that no one would share their scores with each other. Back in India, students would pore over exams together to figure out what they did wrong and how to fix it. You can’t do that if you keep your test hidden.
Kids are more capable than we think. If we treat them as brittle sandcastles that fall apart under pressure, they certainly will. If we treat them as capable and strong, they will rise.
I’ve absolutely fallen victim to this mindset, and I’m fixing it right away. As a parent, it’s hard to watch our kids struggle. Sometimes, we want to remove those obstacles. I’ve asked myself often how much math my oldest really needs to learn. But removing this obstacle will make her weak. She’ll think she’s not smart enough to do math. I don’t want that for her. I must be cheerleading on the side as she clears her own hurdles, not running ahead to remove them.
✨Parents transmit values by what they spend time on
One of the easiest, most delightful ways to improve your children’s academic success is simply reading to them. Shared reading is one of the most consistent predictors of early language and literacy. Kids who are read to tend to start school ahead in vocabulary and language, and that early advantage carries through elementary school as they become better readers and writers. The effect is largest in the preschool and elementary years, but there is no reason to stop! I’m still reading to my middle schooler.
What changes with age is how parents should be involved.
By middle school, kids need more discussion about school than they need direct help in homework. For example, my 12 year old has a strong drive to learn and wants to do much of it on her own. What she still needs help with is: structuring her time, figuring out how to study for a test, and navigating conversations with teachers and coaches. Those skills matter as much as geometry.
Talking about school also tells your children what you value. But don’t just discuss grades or how well they did. Ask what they are interested in, what they want to study, what they think. My nine year old spent hours coding a game with a jumping cricket. My job was to listen, to ask questions, to be present at what lights her up. Your children deserve real conversations with adults who takes them seriously.
✨Don’t let sports outrank the culture of learning
One of the largest noted differences between US schools and her academic superiors was the US’s emphasis on sports. Sports are an increasingly large part of the K-12 experience. It’s easy to see why. Universities often recruit students to fill their teams, making it easier to get into a school (or get a scholarship) if you are an athlete too. In addition, there’s a lot of money to be made around selling that dream to parents.
Last year we were part of a competitive team sport. It was obvious to me that none of the kids were going to go “pro.” They weren’t even the best in our local area, but that didn’t stop the parents from hiring private coaches encouraging more and more competitions. Kids were even expected to leave school early some days.
For us it meant less time as a family, more time centered around my daughter and her ambitions. It taught her the wrong thing. That sports was more important than family and academics. It also quietly taught her that the world should revolve around her.
In Finland, Korea, and Poland, kids still play sports, but they are recreational. They do them after school to wind down and enjoy time with each other. That sounds incredible. A social outing with no pressure where kids get to exercise, be in the sun, and learn valuable skills like gracious winning and losing? Where do we sign up for that?
Sports and extracurriculars in general are wonderful for your children. They build discipline, strength, resilience, and allow children to express themselves. My oldest is still on a competitive team (though one that values family-time), and my youngest is doing several activities this fall like choir, art, and theater. But my children also know that these are for fun and health. Not their future careers. That will be true for most children.
Side Note: If your child has an interest that can build to a career, please pursue it. My point is decide what you value and double down on that.
✨These countries are far from perfect
I’ve painted a pretty rosy picture of these academic “superpowers” of the mid-2010s, but not everything was butterflies and rainbows. Nearly universally, Korean students don’t just attend school but extensive hours-long instruction at hogwans. Instruction stretches until the government mandated stop time of midnight. So many places were skirting the rules that the police started raids to stop children from studying until 3am! Korean students more or less go to school twice a day, every day. It’s stressful and demanding.
No one is looking at 2013 Korea and thinking This the best way to do school.
The lesson is seriousness about learning, not a sixteen-hour school day.
There are other more complex, nuanced issues that the book brings up that I don’t have time to discuss in depth: arguments over mixed-ability classrooms, considerations for the background of students, and spending and where it should go. The book raises as many questions as it answers. Moreover, Poland and Finland no longer remain the superpowers they were making one wonder why their rankings have faded — maybe a topic for a future post.
What has not faded is we must start seeing children as capable
Children aren’t fragile wallflowers that can’t handle getting things wrong. Children are strong. They can be independent, in charge of their studies; they can handle disappointment. .
Our kids also need support, but not in the ways many American parents are giving it. Our children need a culture of learning around them, where everyone from their parents, teachers, coaches, and even apparently air-traffic controllers, think that what they are doing is valuable.
I can’t overhaul American education.
I can change the culture in my house.
I help my children with learning, show my values by reading and learning too, put education above other activities, talk with them about their work and their lives, and perhaps most importantly I’ve started treating them as capable.
What will you do?
~Dr. Claire ♥️
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I stopped putting sales calls in the articles because I hated it so much (you probably didn’t love it either). So, this is now the only place I ask. Thank you for your support. It means the world to me♥️
There is so much here that resonates with me. The trust in children’s capability, the willingness to let them struggle, the importance of a culture that takes learning seriously. All of that feels very close to how I think about my own children. I am addressing your very good article as a mirror not a target.
As I read, I noticed some paradoxes arising in me around my own efforts as a parent. I want to challenge my children because I believe they are capable. But at what point does challenging them become me deciding what they ought to care about? I want to resist removing obstacles from their path. But how often am I also the one choosing which obstacles should be in their path in the first place? I want them to become independent, capable adults (I too treat them as the adults they will become). Yet how much independence can they really develop if I remain the main architect of what they study, what counts as worthwhile, and what deserves their effort?
I definitely don't think we should simply withdraw and leave children entirely to themselves. Parents inevitably shape the environment, transmit values, open doors, and sometimes insist on things children would not choose on their own. But your article left me wondering where that boundary lies. When I am up at 2AM thinking about my kids’ education, this is probably the question I struggle with most: how do I take responsibility for creating a rich environment for them without subtly taking ownership of their lives?
Phenomenal article. I think here in the US, children are viewed incredibly fragile and incapable, in relation to learning. For example, my mother was an elementary principal and told me that the district outlined that kindergarten students should learn to count 1-10. Concurrently, the Montessori she enrolled me in had us doing 1-100. I do believe in assessing a child’s capability and not capping their learning. Thank you for this!