Why Family Support Still Builds High Flyers
When a student stands at the top of the national merit list, earning Trinidad and Tobago’s President’s Medal for CAPE, the public tends to reach for easy explanations: “natural brilliance,” “good school,” and “hard work.”
All true, but incomplete. Excellence like that is rarely a solo act. It is usually the visible tip of an invisible system: family routines, sibling modelling, emotional buffering, and the quiet, repetitive labour of support that turns potential into performance.
This year’s CAPE President’s Medal winners, Elizabeth Singh of Naparima Girls’ High School and Aaliyah Serrette of Bishop Anstey High School East and Trinity College East, didn’t just top a school; they topped the country’s scholarship field, each leading her subject grouping.
Their achievement is a national headline, but it also invites a more useful question: what made it possible for a teenager to sustain that level of performance across two years of CAPE?
The first answer sits inside the home. Developmental science has a blunt message: children grow inside ecosystems. The most immediate ecosystem, the family, shapes attention, resilience, discipline, and identity long before any exam paper is written.
That’s the core insight of ecological models of development: the “microsystem” of daily life becomes the engine of capacity.
In high-performing families, support is not only financial. It is structural. It looks like protected study time, predictable routines, reduced friction, and parents who treat learning as normal, not extraordinary.
It is also emotional: someone who notices stress early, stabilises mood, and keeps a young person from spiralling when self-doubt shows up. When Aaliyah Serrette told students to choose friends carefully because habits and mindsets spread through proximity, she was describing a social truth that also applies at home: environments shape people.
Sibling influence is the second, often underestimated, lever. “Following in your sister’s footsteps” is more than a nice line for a graduation speech. In developmental terms, a sibling can be a living blueprint: proof that a pathway is real and a practical guide on how to walk it.
The older sibling demystifies the process: how to study, how to organise and how to cope with pressure, while the younger sibling absorbs not just advice but expectation. In a household where one child has already normalised high achievement, the next child grows up breathing a different kind of air: excellence is familiar.
You can see how this works in public snapshots of scholarship success. A few years ago, when Anjali Maharaj, a Naparima Girls’ student, won the President’s Medal, the reporting did not frame it as a solitary triumph; it showed a family scene; father, mother and sister physically present and emotionally invested in the moment.
That matters. It signals to a young person that achievement is not only theirs to carry; it is shared, celebrated, and supported.
Research backs up what those family photos quietly reveal. Large-scale reviews repeatedly find a positive association between parental involvement and academic achievement, especially when involvement looks like academic socialisation, such as expectations, aspirations, planning, and values; not nagging homework supervision.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes a similar point: parental involvement at home and school is linked to long-lasting benefits in learning and socio-emotional development.
Collective discipline
But the most important mechanism is not “helping.” It is scaffolding support that temporarily carries a learner until they can carry themselves. That idea sits at the heart of the zone of proximal development: people can do more, sooner, with capable support than they can alone.
A good family doesn’t do the work for the child; it builds the conditions under which the child can do the work consistently.
This is the real case study: the President’s Medal is an individual award, but it is often the product of collective discipline. If Trinidad and Tobago wants more of these success stories, policy should stop treating families as background scenery.
Schools should train parents in practical academic socialisation, not just invite them to prize-givings. Scholarships should include mentoring structures that replicate “sibling footsteps” for students who don’t have that model at home.
And public discourse should expand its definition of merit: not only who studied hardest but also who were supported well enough to keep studying when it got difficult.
Talent is everywhere. The difference is how many homes can turn it into momentum. Sunshine Today extends hearty congratulations to the 2025 President’s Medal winners, Aaliyah Serrett, of Bishop Anstey High School East and Trinity College East (BATCE), and Elizabeth Singh, of Naparima Girls’ High School, on their successes.