When successful parents show interest only when their child achieves something specific, and the child ends up tied to that pattern for life, what concrete psychological mechanisms keep the child from internalizing the act of proving their own ability in a positive way?

I want to state up front that acceptance and struggle is not a claim backed by established professional psychological theory; it is, for now, still at the stage of a philosophical and theoretical framework. When a child comes to see the process of proving their own abilities as a task for earning affirmation of their existence, the child does not come to choose that process actively; instead, they are pulled along passively. Because at a deep level of cognition the affirmation of existence and the proof of ability become strongly linked, the child can collapse easily when the external environment reaches a point where they find it hard to prove their ability.