When my kids were babies, a friend once said to me: “I miss having babies. Because you just love them for who they are — not for what they do.” That stayed with me. Because when children are very small, their worth feels so obvious. Nobody asks a six-month-old what they accomplished that day. Nobody wonders whether a toddler is impressive enough to deserve affection. They don’t need to achieve anything in order to be adored. They exist, and we love them.
I remember thinking very clearly that I always wanted my children to feel loved that way. For who they are, not for what they achieve, produce, perform, or decide. And I do love them that way.
But I also notice how easily the “for what they do” narrative creeps in.
I get excited about achievements. Proud of things they accomplish. Overly invested in small decisions that likely do not matter nearly as much as they feel like they do in the moment. Like most parents, I want to celebrate their wins. I want them to feel confident and capable and successful in whatever version of life they eventually build for themselves. None of that is inherently problematic. Pride and encouragement are healthy parts of parenting.
I just never want them to confuse my pride in them with the reason they are lovable.
Because I sit with so many adults who learned very early that love, approval, belonging, and worth had to be earned. Sometimes it was earned through achievement. Sometimes through usefulness. Sometimes through being easy, impressive, productive, successful, high functioning, or “good.” Sometimes nobody ever explicitly said, “You are only lovable when you achieve.” But children are extraordinarily perceptive. They notice what gets attention. What gets praise. What disappoints people. What makes adults light up. What creates approval. And over time, many people quietly internalize the idea that their value lives in their performance.
When worth becomes tied to achievement
You can often see this dynamic still operating decades later. It’s the adult who feels deeply uncomfortable resting because productivity has become psychologically fused with worthiness. The person who feels disproportionately devastated by criticism because achievement is carrying the weight of their identity. The person who accomplishes objectively impressive things while privately feeling terrified that without those accomplishments, there would be nothing valuable left.
And unfortunately, achievement can become a very effective but temporary strategy for regulating self-worth.
For a moment, accomplishment creates relief. Validation. A feeling of being enough. But the feeling rarely lasts very long, because external achievement is not particularly good at permanently resolving internal insecurity. Which means the cycle often continues. More striving. More proving. More performing. More pressure.
Not necessarily because someone is shallow or overly ambitious, but because achievement has quietly become emotionally loaded. It no longer feels like simply doing well. It feels tied to safety, identity, belonging, and lovability.
That’s part of why so many high-achieving adults struggle so profoundly when they fail, burn out, get laid off, experience illness, lose status, or simply stop functioning at the level they’re accustomed to. It’s not only the external loss that hurts. It can activate a much deeper fear underneath it all: If I’m not producing, succeeding, or excelling…who even am I?
As a therapist, I see this constantly. People who appear highly successful on paper but who feel chronically anxious, chronically inadequate, chronically afraid of falling behind. People who have spent years building careers, identities, and lives around being competent and impressive while privately feeling exhausted by the pressure of having to continuously maintain it all.
And to be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with achievement. Accomplishment can feel meaningful, fulfilling, creative, exciting, and important. There is nothing unhealthy about ambition itself. The issue is not achievement. The issue is when achievement becomes the primary source of emotional worth.
We are worthy before we prove anything
One of the things I think about often, both as a parent and as a therapist, is how hard so many adults work to recover a sense of worthiness they once naturally possessed before they ever proved anything at all.
Before the grades. Before the résumé. Before the promotions. Before the awards. Before becoming the reliable one, the successful one, the helpful one, the easy one, or the impressive one.
Children do not enter the world believing they need to earn their right to exist. They learn it gradually through experiences, relationships, environments, and systems that consciously or unconsciously attach value to performance.
And eventually, life humbles every single one of us somehow. Illness. Aging. Grief. Failure. Rejection. Burnout. Circumstances we cannot control. There will inevitably be seasons where we are not producing at the level we once did.
If our worth has been built entirely on performance, those seasons can feel psychologically catastrophic.
Which is why I think that comment about babies stayed with me all these years later. Because underneath it is something profoundly important that many adults lose contact with somewhere along the way: the idea that human beings are inherently worthy before they achieve anything at all.
Imagine how much healthier we’d all be if we didn’t spend so much of adulthood trying to recover a sense of worthiness we once naturally had before we ever needed to prove ourselves to anyone.
