I cared about my grades as a student.

My parents did too, although not oppressively so. I learned early on the positive attention that came along with A's. Once they knew I had internalized their expectations as my own, they focused on all the other things they had to worry about while raising six children.

My parents assumed I would try my best in school, because, why wouldn't I?

They relied on twice-a-year report cards and occasional progress reports to reaffirm this belief.

My relationship with grades became more complicated when it was my children being assessed. After elementary school, not a single paper report card comes home.

Like students across the country, all of their grades are accessible through an online portal. The portal for our district is called Infinite Campus. Even the name sounds ominous. So vast, those grades -- creeping into every corner of time, space and existence.

Teachers are expected to post every homework assignment, quiz and test result. Some schools send notifications with each update. Some parents download the portal app on their smartphones and check the updates hourly. I never became that involved, but during the first year of this transition to online grades, I paid close attention to my daughter's marks. If I saw a score that seemed lower than usual, I would urge my child to take the retest. If an assignment appeared to be missing or incomplete, I'd suggest she talk to her teacher or turn it in for partial credit. I would remind her and follow up frequently.

It took me a year to realize that so much information can quickly go from blessing to burden. I wanted her to do her best, but not because I had a hawkeyed focus on her scores.

I can be a slightly obsessive, competitive workaholic, and worry about my children being too similar and feeling so much pressure. But then I also worry about them not being motivated and competitive enough. I recognized this impulse and wanted to check it before I made all of us miserable. Up-to-the-minute, 24/7 access to their grades isn't the best thing for my mental health, or my relationship with my children.

I also didn't want to become a crutch for her academic achievement. If there is a missing assignment, let her figure out how to make it up.

Easy access to every grade can flip a free-range parent into a hovering helicopter. One parent posted a question on the Free Range Kids website which asked: Are hourly report cards a good idea?

Parents have to figure out where their child thrives and struggles, and decide how to help them grow in the areas they need extra support. Some kids need additional academic help. Others need to grow emotionally or to learn independence.

I decided that by taking responsibility for my child's work, I was robbing her of the opportunity to do so on her own.

This year, I never logged into the online portal. I asked regularly about what she was learning in her classes, which books she was reading and how the tests were going. If she was struggling with a subject, we helped her or found a tutor who could. I talked to her about her presentations, group projects and class discussions. I responded promptly to any teacher email and attended all the conferences. I volunteered for field trips but stepped aside from school projects.

As an Asian-American mother, I may be parenting against type by opting out of hypervigilant grades monitoring. For children of immigrants, there can be a culture of high academic expectations. I don't have the will (or energy, frankly) to be a Tiger Mom, but I lean in that general direction.

Even with this hands-off approach, I knew I had a safety net.

My husband kept tabs on her progress through the website. He is much more laid-back about all aspects of parenting, so perhaps it makes more sense for him to keep an eye on the online grade book.

I asked her if she noticed that I hadn't checked in on her specific grades this year.

"Not really, because Dad was stalking my grades, like, every week," she said. (He looks at her grades every few weeks.) It's kind of like role reversal, she added, that her father would ask about assignments.

I explained to her the difference between internal and external motivation.

"I want you to learn to do well for your own satisfaction -- not to please your parents or teachers."

"I do everything for myself, anyway," she said.

Were truer teenage words ever spoken?

I asked her how she ended up doing this year. Just as good or slightly better than last year, she said.

Bonus: I had nothing to do with it.

Dr. Li Ern Chen was training as a surgical resident at Washington University in St. Louis when she saw a peer humiliated in the operating room. It wasn't the first time.

A well-known surgeon was the teaching physician in the room. He would interrupt a resident's work if he or she made the slightest move he didn't like. The surgeon would instruct the doctor to stop working and go stand in the corner.

"Put your instruments down and step away from the table," Chen recalls him saying to his trainees in the middle of a surgery. If the doctor being reprimanded was engrossed in treating the patient, the surgeon would rap his or her knuckles with a metal instrument before sending the doctor to the corner, she said.

"It was awful," Chen said. "People would come out of the OR crying."

The doctor's behavior was legendary and tolerated for years, she said. Hundreds of people had witnessed it, but no one ever spoke up or challenged him. He has since left the institution. Even though Chen was never personally targeted by him, it made a lasting impression on her.

"In academic medicine, there is very much a hierarchy," she said. "The people at the top have the power. They also have the ability to abuse the power."

Chen made it her mission to flatten that hierarchy.

Chen said she didn't feel she could make a difference by speaking up as a resident, because she was in a culture that tolerated that doctor's abusive behavior. She has now made it part of her life's work to create a different culture -- on a much larger scale.

She now oversees surgery departments in 19 hospitals in Texas. She has instituted a standard of mutual respect among surgeons, nurses, residents and students in the operating rooms.

"They will treat all people with respect," she said. Otherwise, she takes corrective action. "People are not allowed to get away with it."

Challenging highly trained colleagues is not without personal risk. The norms and routines of a clinical practice, like any ingrained or habitual behaviors, are difficult to alter, according to a commentary by Dr. David Shearn in the Western Journal of Medicine. That would appear to be especially true for the high-pressure stakes of an operating room, where the surgeon literally holds a patient's life in her hands. Attempting to change years of tradition on top of years of training could cause a revolt by those invested in an older system.

It was for this stand that Chen was honored recently, along with four other groups and individuals at the HateBraker Hero Awards in St. Louis.

Susan Balk, the founding director of HateBrakers, said the goal of the nonprofit is to encourage ordinary people to "hit the brakes" on bullying and hatred. At this year's awards, the organization honored individuals and groups from around the country, including a group of students from Old Bonhomme Elementary School near St. Louis. The kids demonstrated outside of their school after learning that a driver had shouted racial slurs at an African-American crossing guard at the school.

"I believe we learn from role models," Balk said. She described the honorees, including Chen, as heroes who showed moral courage. They disrupted a cycle of abusive behavior or violence by educating and leading.

"We should be celebrating that kind of triumph publicly," Balk said. The awards program noted that Chen confronted bullying and hazing, and these reforms have reduced errors and benefited patients, as well as the health professionals.

As a pediatric specialist, Chen has worked with hundreds of children and their families. She hopes parents also impart the same idea to their kids as she pushes in the OR: Everyone is different, and everyone brings something valuable to the table.

"It's not about how old you are or how smart you are or who your parents are," she said. There are some individuals who cannot feel good about themselves unless they are putting people down, she explained.

Along with repairing broken bodies, she set out to fix a broken system.

She had taken an oath to heal, and is keeping that promise in more ways than one.

It's impossible to escape Mother's Day.

While the intent is to show some love for the first person with whom we are wired to bond, it can be a painful day for many. It's an occasion touched with grief for anyone who lost a mother too young, and for women who struggle with infertility or who have lost a child.

But there's another group rarely discussed around the commercial celebration of motherhood: those who were raised by unloving, abusive or narcissistic mothers.

Across cultures, a mother is considered synonymous with selfless love: a child's natural protector. In the wild, a mama bear is the ultimate fierce guardian. For those who grew up with this kind of loving, protective mother, it's hard to imagine what it's like being raised by someone so broken she leaves lasting scars.

Rayne Wolfe, author of "Toxic Mom Toolkit: Discovering a Happy Life Despite Toxic Parenting," is familiar with dreading Mother's Day. The run-up to the holiday can be crushing for those who grew up in an abusive family, she said.

"I was neglected. I was literally not fed. I was exposed to sexual abuse and abused by my mother's second husband," she said. Wolfe remembers trying to wake up her mother, passed out from drinking, as a child when she was hungry.

Her mother would ask to see her hands.

"If my hands weren't shaking, she wouldn't feed me," she said.

Making things worse, young victims tend to be ashamed of what they have experienced, and often hide their parent's abuse or neglect.

Mother's Day isn't the only holiday that can be a trigger point for emotional wreckage -- Valentine's Day is rough after a breakup, as is Christmas without a loved one.

But there's an added terribleness when even the premise of the holiday taunts you.

Mother's Day is a major commercial event, with total spending projected to reach $21.4 billion this year -- outpacing Valentine's Day by nearly a couple billion. The bombardment in store displays and advertisements is matched by the outpouring of social media tributes. Public adoration flows through our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram timelines all weekend. I enjoy publicly celebrating my own phenomenal mother, but the day is fraught for those who had to seek refuge from a mother, rather than turn to her for protection and support.

Wolfe, who said she went through a lot of therapy to understand what happened to her as a child, advocates self-protection: In some cases, it makes sense to limit, or even end, contact. Emotional abuse is just as traumatic as physical abuse.

When her mother was dying, a social worker from the hospital called Wolfe and suggested it might be time for her to "bury the hatchet."

Wolfe asked the social worker if she had ever met Wolfe's mother. She suggested spending some time with her, and then calling Wolfe back if she still believed she needed to be there.

"I never heard from her again," she said.

As an adult, she has nurtured an online community of those who have suffered from toxic relationships with their mothers. She asks them to start planning, six weeks out, what they will do on Mother's Day. She gives her readers permission to skip family events that leave them feeling worthless or sad. She encourages them to see their parent with adult eyes.

"It's disheartening when you are a good person, and you don't have a loving mother figure in your life," she said. Those who were not mothered can feel very isolated.

Fortunately for Wolfe, her father remarried when she was 16. She describes her stepmother, whom Wolfe cared for as she aged, as a beautiful and lovely person.

"There was a part of me that could never trust an older woman," she said. Her stepmother helped heal that part.

Proving that it takes a lot more than biology to be a mother.