People love this mom's sassy but honest answers in her 4-year-old's school progress form

Editor's note: This article was originally published on September 20, 2022. It has since been updated.

Kids these days encounter a lot more pressure than their parents did when they were their age. Be it on the academic or the social front, right from a very young age, they are burdened with a mountain of goals they are to achieve along with—if not before—their peers. While most parents are aware of this fact and therefore try to be easier on their offspring, others are so caught up in the rat race of life that they drag their young ones along. Emily Gould, an American author and "mother of two Little Monsters," as she describes herself in her Twitter bio, is not one of the latter.

Gould won the internet's approval when she shared how she filled out a form enquiring about her goals and expectations for her 4-year-old son's school year. The author didn't quite understand why she had to have any particular ambitions for a 4-year-old child and made this very evident with her answers to the questions on the form. She responded to the question, "Socially, one thing I would like my child to work on this year" with "Not being a popular mean girl." 

"If I had to choose only three words to describe my child, I would choose," was another prompt that required her to answer. In response, Gould stated that she would describe her child as a "radiant, self-sufficient and effortlessly cool" person. However, it was her sassy response to another question on the same page that got social media users praising Gould for having her priorities right where they should be when raising a tiny human being. This question required her to name one thing that she would like her child to work on this particular school year in terms of academics. "LOL, who cares? He's 4," Gould reminded the school authorities.

She also expressed how proud she is of the person her child was shaping up to be in the last question on the page, which asked: "Is there anything else you would like me to know about your child?" While there is probably a lot Gould could have said about her kid, she contained it all in this response: "You will love Ilya. He's such a sweet person that sometimes I wonder if he was switched at birth. (Then I remember I had a home birth, lol.)" Gould shared a photograph of the form and her responses to the prompts in it, on Twitter, captioning it: "Just being honest."

Many responded to the tweet, praising Gould's parenting style. "Very honestly told, for a four-year-old, there should not be any burden of assignments academically or any kind of work... you are a very good mom," wrote one Twitter user. "This is what a parent must understand. Let them grow, don't compare, give good support, be there as a friend, slowly teach values to the child," tweeted another.