Everyone Wants a Child Like Eileen Gu
Violeta Gordeljevic on warmth and high expectations together
Blog post notes
parenting
Notes on Violeta Gordeljevic’s Substack post: accomplished children come out of demanding childhoods, and the parenting that produces them is warm and expects a lot at once.
Everyone Wants a Child Like Eileen Gu, by Violeta Gordeljevic on Substack, 4 September 2026.
Children like Eileen Gu come out of demanding childhoods, and the parenting behind them combines warmth with high expectations. Gu is the Olympic freestyle skier who also scored 1580 on the SAT and studied at Stanford. Gordeljevic sets her against current advice that favours unstructured play, and points to Djokovic, Polgár and Yo-Yo Ma as further cases of sustained parental expectation and practice.
- Passion follows competence. Gordeljevic argues that “passion doesn’t usually come first”: a child comes to love an activity after exposure and practice have made them good at it.
- Authoritative parenting. The term from developmental psychology for warmth together with high expectations, as distinct from a permissive style that asks little of the child. In her words, “The choice was never between pressure and love. It was always meant to be both.”