The Advantage of Working Without Ratings
In today’s attention economy, visibility is regarded as an unequivocal good. We see it everywhere: children as young as five “building résumés”, teenagers curating social media profiles like political operatives, and parents making decisions based on how they will signal to other parents. But what if this relentless pursuit of visibility is, in fact, a tax on our children’s development?
We have created a performance-driven economy that influences how children perceive their own worth from a very early age. When children learn that their value depends on external validation, they begin to pay what we might call a performance tax: energy that should be devoted to genuine development is instead spent managing how others perceive them.
We often see the following pattern: the child praised for being “gifted” begins to perform giftedness rather than simply learning. The teenager with impressive credentials starts to protect those credentials instead of taking intellectual risks. The young adult with the perfect résumé struggles when faced with situations where no one is evaluating their performance.
Children learn to optimise for ratings rather than genuine learning. They develop the skill of appearing accomplished rather than becoming truly capable. Most damagingly, they never develop internal standards of self-worth.
The cost becomes apparent in adulthood. The most important work takes place away from rating systems. Marriage, friendship, parenting, creative work, and developing expertise all unfold largely in obscurity. Adults who have never learned to work without external validation find themselves perpetually anxious, constantly seeking confirmation that they are doing things correctly.
The child who learns to function in obscurity develops different capabilities: building substance without requiring constant validation, failing without interpreting failure as a reflection of their identity, undertaking work that matters without needing external confirmation of its significance.
This is essential because most meaningful adult work receives no immediate validation. You build relationships over decades without a rating system to confirm you are doing it correctly. You develop expertise through years of practice without credentials to mark your progress. You raise children through thousands of ordinary interactions, with no real metric to tell you whether you are succeeding.
Internal Rating Systems
Even within families that consciously reject external performance culture, unspoken rating systems often emerge. Every family creates hierarchies of visibility, usually without conscious intent.
Birth order establishes inherent hierarchies. The eldest child naturally receives the most attention, setting a benchmark against which younger siblings are measured. Parents form expectations based on the first child’s development, and subsequent children are often compared, sometimes explicitly yet more frequently through subtle patterns of attention and response.
The “talented one” receives recognition, while siblings are defined partly in contrast. Academic achievement, athletic success, social ease: whatever traits parents unconsciously value create internal rankings. Parents do not deliberately establish rating systems; they simply respond naturally to their children’s differing qualities.
Children absorb these ratings with remarkable sensitivity, organising their behaviour to maintain or improve their position.
The child identified as “talented” faces pressures that others do not. Their identity becomes tied to maintaining this status. Success is expected rather than celebrated, while failure threatens their entire position within the family hierarchy. They learn to protect their status rather than focus on genuine development. Consequently, they avoid situations where failure might be visible and prioritise parental approval over authentic growth.
The overlooked sibling faces unique challenges. Being unseen presents difficulties, yet it also offers freedom. They can develop without constant comparison, experiment without the burden of disappointing expectations, and fail without jeopardising their standing, as no position has been assigned to threaten.
Watch how middle children often navigate the world differently. They learn early that attention does not automatically flow to them. They develop skills to function with less visibility and often build their capabilities quietly rather than performing for an audience.
One child might be known as “the academic one”, another becomes “the sporty one”. A third might be “the social one”. These labels feel natural, even affectionate, yet they function as ratings that influence how children allocate their energy. The academic child stops playing sports because it is not their domain. The sporty child disengages from intellectual pursuits because someone else occupies that position.
The rating system, however unconsciously constructed, restricts development by creating specialised roles instead of encouraging broad capabilities.
The families that work this out successfully are not those without differences, but those who consciously resist translating differences into hierarchies of worth. They create a space where children are seen for who they are, not for what they achieve. In this environment, every child belongs unconditionally and can grow without constantly measuring themselves against a brother or sister.
This requires us to become vigilant architects of the family culture, ensuring that differences in talent do not translate into hierarchies of inherent worth. Rating systems emerge naturally, yet parents must actively resist the tendency to compare, to slot children into positions, and to respond to talent with greater investment than they give to effort.
The question is not whether brothers or sisters will differ. They will. The real issue is whether these differences become labels that children must uphold, or merely variations that families accept.
The Work That Takes Place in Obscurity
The most important work of family life occurs in complete obscurity. Daily meals, ordinary conversations, and sustained presence over the years: none of these receive external recognition or acclaim.
Yet this invisible work often matters more than any visible achievement. It builds the internal world from which all subsequent capabilities emerge. The cumulative effect of five thousand shared meals cannot be measured at the time. The habit of being available for unstructured conversation creates the conditions in which genuine sharing can occur.
Only years later, when children return as adults and deal with their own challenges with skills you never consciously taught them, does the investment become apparent.
The Tyranny of the Visible Parent
Look what happens when family work becomes visible, when it is performed for external validation. The parent filming the “teaching moment” for social media has already shifted their focus from the child to the audience. The parent choosing activities partly based on how they will be perceived by other parents has already begun optimising for approval rather than relationship.
When parenting becomes a performance and family life is curated for an audience, the focus shifts from substance to appearance. Energy that should be devoted to genuine connection is instead spent managing others’ perceptions of that connection.
Families that carry out their most important work away from external judgement create something that endures precisely because it was not built for an audience. They focus entirely on what truly works for these specific children, failing privately, adjusting their approaches, and changing direction without having to explain themselves to critics who are not living their situation.
The families producing the most impressive visible results are often not those building the strongest foundations. Meanwhile, other families work in obscurity, accumulating thousands of ordinary interactions that no rating system can capture.
The Long Accumulation
Family building unfolds over decades with no audience rating the work. This absence of external measurement is not a problem to solve but a feature that permits a different quality of attention.
When no one is evaluating your parenting, you can focus on what actually matters with these particular children rather than on what would look impressive. You can abandon approaches that aren’t working without having to justify the change to an audience. You can make decisions based on what you observe rather than on what parenting experts recommend.
The work accumulates invisibly. Small daily choices compound into capabilities that emerge years later. The result appears suddenly - a capable adult who knows how to deal with inevitable difficulty - but the foundation was laid through thousands of interactions that occurred when no one was watching.
This is why families that work in obscurity often build more substantial foundations than families performing for external validation. Without the performance tax, all the energy goes into the actual relationship. Without the need to document or justify choices, parents can respond to what’s actually happening rather than to how it might appear.
The work remains invisible until the results become apparent: adults who possess internal standards, who can build meaningful relationships without needing constant external confirmation, who understand that the most important work happens away from any rating system.
What Obscurity Allows
Being overlooked offers advantages that visibility cannot provide.
Children working in obscurity may:
Experiment boldly because no one is monitoring their experiments. They can try approaches that might not succeed, abandon them when they don’t, and try something entirely different. The child building a treehouse learns through failed attempts that go undocumented. The child learning to draw fills sketchbooks with attempts that no one evaluates. These failures cost nothing because they occur in obscurity.
Pivot freely when evidence suggests a better path. No one is monitoring their consistency. A child who spent six months obsessed with dinosaurs can give up that interest in favour of astronomy. A child who tried piano can switch to drums without having to justify why the first attempt did not work out.
Discover something uniquely their own: an unusual combination of interests, an unexpected approach to a problem, or a perspective that would not emerge if they were seeking approval.
Contrast this with the child whose every attempt is documented, photographed, and rated. They quickly learn to avoid situations where failure is possible, sticking to what they know works.
Highly rated children face various pressures. Once recognised as “academic” or “sporty” they can become trapped by these labels. Changing direction may then feel like failure.
These advantages compound over the years. A child who has learned to function in obscurity develops capabilities that a constantly evaluated child cannot: comfort with uncertainty, a willingness to fail, the ability to work without external validation, and internal rather than external measures of progress.
By the time they reach adulthood, they possess a resilience that the performance-focused child lacks. They navigate situations where no one is assessing them, work on problems that have no immediate solution, and persist through periods when external validation is absent.
The Transition
Being underrated offers certain advantages, yet obscurity cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, children require the resources, opportunities, or recognition that visibility provides.
The question is: when does obscurity shift from being an advantage to becoming a liability? The answer depends on what the child is creating, yet the principle remains the same: use obscurity to develop genuine substance, then pursue visibility strategically rather than desperately.
The failure mode is premature visibility: the child collecting credentials without developing capability; the teenager building a social media platform before creating anything worth sharing; the young adult seeking recognition before establishing competence worthy of recognition.
The credential becomes the goal rather than the capability it is meant to signify. People begin to serve the rating instead of developing the qualities the rating is intended to measure.
Knowing when to emerge from obscurity requires judgement that no formula can replace. However, we can observe a general pattern: obscurity is most valuable during the building phase, as it allows for focused work, radical experimentation, and failure-rich learning.
Once they have built something substantial and developed capability through unseen repetition, visibility then shifts from being a cost to becoming a tool. They have established internal standards that remain unaffected by external ratings.
The Private Workshop
Those who have learned to build substance without seeking external validation possess advantages that the visibility economy cannot replicate. They focus entirely on their work while others manage their image, fail cheaply while others fail expensively in public, and experiment radically while others must maintain consistency with their established position.
The families in which this understanding runs deepest often produce the most capable adults. They discern between substance and appearance, and between genuine capability and external validation.
They taught children to behave appropriately, whether or not anyone was watching; to develop internal standards rather than constantly seeking external validation; and to create things that matter, regardless of whether anyone is evaluating them.
When those children face adult life, where the most important work takes place in obscurity, where success often follows long after the effort itself, and where capability matters more than credentials, they are better prepared than children raised in the performance economy.
Seeking visibility while building a family often undermines its very foundation. When a family performs for external validation, it prioritises the wrong metrics. This teaches children that their worth depends on external approval rather than internal truth.
In the work that matters most, being underrated is not a disadvantage to be overcome. It is a condition that allows the real work to take place. The underrated are working in a private workshop, creating something authentic; a freedom for which the overrated would pay dearly to regain. They have the liberty to concentrate on developing genuine capability until they have built something substantial enough for visibility to enhance, rather than distort, their work.
Richard Morrissey is a father of nine and the author of the forthcoming eBook, “Forge Your Path: A Father’s Guide for Young Men.” His weekly reflections on family life are published at Happy Family, Better World. ForgeHub (theforge-hub.com) serves as his platform for men seeking practical wisdom, developing authentic skills, and reflecting on how to live purposefully in a complex world. His political writing can be found at Medium.