In my experience adults are not good enough judges of capabilities for this to be non-damaging. I’ve tutored lots of kids in math at lots of different ability levels. Except in cases where the parents were highly-involved high-achieving mathematicians and the kids were high-achieving as well (math olympiad prep basically), parent and teacher evaluations were not more informative than mere report cards, which were not all that informative (grades and test scores are very predictive if you have a standard life path, but you should not have a standard life path, there are deep interventions available for math for most students imo.) I imagine the same issue exists in other fields, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who I think would be competent to give their child useful assessments of their long-term capabilities in more than two fields at a time, even assuming the children were not vulnerable to the self-image damage that I think you’re basically ignoring here.
Ideally parents can help here by giving best-effort objective assessments.
In my experience adults are not good enough judges of capabilities for this to be non-damaging. I’ve tutored lots of kids in math at lots of different ability levels. Except in cases where the parents were highly-involved high-achieving mathematicians and the kids were high-achieving as well (math olympiad prep basically), parent and teacher evaluations were not more informative than mere report cards, which were not all that informative (grades and test scores are very predictive if you have a standard life path, but you should not have a standard life path, there are deep interventions available for math for most students imo.) I imagine the same issue exists in other fields, and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who I think would be competent to give their child useful assessments of their long-term capabilities in more than two fields at a time, even assuming the children were not vulnerable to the self-image damage that I think you’re basically ignoring here.
Ideally so, though children often don’t trust their parents to be objective (and are often correct not to).