There are no guarantees, and trying to optimize for happiness could very well lead to more unhappiness than doing nothing or optimizing for exceptionalism or something else instead. And that's even if you have a theory for how to optimize the thing in question. If instead you're just stumbling around or working off vague hunches or the latest parenting fads, or perhaps overcompensating for something in your own childhood you thought was a parental mistake, don't be surprised if whether they do or don't become or achieve what you hoped for seems pretty uncorrelated with your own efforts.
As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.
As for "we", we should want a diverse range of values for what we want of ourselves and our children; universalism in any form is dodgy. A lot of types of parents don't care at all about their kids becoming exceptional or not, for various reasons. Some might instead hope for something different or just don't seem to care about their kids' futures much at all (kids as unattended grass). Tiger mom types seem to care about kids becoming exceptional in something, though other values are mixed in there too, and anyway it doesn't matter if I think their antics don't seem like a great way of achieving them. Some parents want their children to inherit the family business that's served everyone well for a couple generations, who cares what the children think or what the rest of the world looks like now. My point here is just that it would be a mistake for the collective "we" to create an ordered ranking of such preferences and enact grand goals to try to make every child exceptional, or every child happy, or every child something else; it's already unfortunate enough that small collectives seize power and enforce their own mostly arbitrary preferences on the rest of us, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't.