I think I was a pretty laid-back mom. I expected my daughter to do her best in school. When she had bad test grades, my only question was whether she understood where the problem lay. And regarding activities - the rule was: as long as I was the chauffeur, she could have one and only one activity that required me to take her somewhere. Over the years, she tried ballet, tap, gymnastics, piano, softball, and swimming. Once she got a license, her activities were limited only by the requirement that her grades not suffer.
She’s now a junior in college, on scholarship, doing quite well. When she was going through a stressful period, we let her quit her job to concentrate on her studies and we picked up her bills for a few months.
Truly, all we asked her to do was give her best effort. Sometimes I think we were the anomolies. My own sister spent way too many years driving her kids thither and yon. Whatever works, I guess.
Slacker mom checking in. I made a real attempt to let me kids be kids. I signed them up for stuff they wanted to do - then had the rule that they had to finish it. (So they couldn’t quit mid-way through a 5 week gymnastics course if they decided they didn’t like it.) I wanted them to do at least one activity beside school work - they get to pick - other than that they’re on their own.
In that context - my kids are completely different from each other in this regard and approach life totally differently. I am convinced that successful people are successful for reasons that are 90% their innate attributes and 10% general environment. There are TONS of exceedingly successful adults who grew up in what would be considered deprived childhoods, and, of course, tons of kids who were pushed and pushed that have issues as adults and are a burden on society.
My oldest came out of the womb driven - she loaded on a hectic schedule, was in all the advanced classes, did band and sports, graduated top in her class. She wanted to do every bit of it (her dad actually thought I should have stopped her from being in so many activities), and would have been bored and unhappy if she had been given the instructions to just “be a kid” and stop being so busy.
The other two are happily figuring out what they like and don’t like. My middle child entered high school as a very shy kid. She’s warmed into choir, then school plays, and now, as a senior, tried out for and got a speaking part in the spring musical. I’m sure that if I had badgered her about trying out for speaking roles before this year, or enrolled her in the local theater’s kid’s camp, etc. she would have run screaming.
One thing I observed about my oldest daughter’s peers. While she was getting good grades and doing lots of activities on her own initiative, there were other kids along side her being pushed by their parents. These parents would often compare their kids to mine with the “so, what other activities is she doing?” type questions. Early on - middle school and 9th and 10th grade - those kids often did lots more than my daughter. They took math at the local college, for example, because they had already “tested out” of the best the high school has to offer. In 11th and 12th grade a great many of them started pusing back and seriously rebelling against their parents. Doing stuff like drugs, getting pregnant and running away with slacker boyfriends, and so on.
Moral of this long winded post - pushing kids to achieve isn’t going to make an average happy-go-lucky kid into the next Donald Trump, and it’s more likely to make them less productive as adults than if they had been allowed to work their way through childhood at their own pace.
Wow, I guess my mom was a slacker mom. We were allowed to do extracurricular activities if we wanted, but we weren’t forced to. Her only requirement was that we not fail (Generally we brought home pretty good grades, although I did fuck off a lot Freshman year).
My middle school tried to get me to fill out a four year plan in 8th grade. I clearly recall looking at the woman they’d sent over from the high school with the most incredulous look on my face and going “I’m 13. How the hell am I supposed to know what I want to do when I grow up? That’s five years away!”
As far as I know, they’ve stopped doing that now. I could be wrong, but I remember my parents making a rather strenuous objection at a school board meeting following that.
It took until my senior year of high school to find out what I wanted to do with my life. And not even like, the beginning of the year - almost the exact end. And here I am, doing it, making enough money to live on (albeit not totally comfortably) and I didn’t set one foot into college. If I could pull a success story out of my ass, the poor kids in high school can take a break and be kids.
This is the other end of the spectrum.
I think it’s probably fair to say that there is a huge range of parenting/teaching approaches. At one end of the range there are hyper-competetive parents pushing their five year olds through 18-hour days of private tuition designed to make them into nobel-winning supermodels by the age of 20. On the other hand there are kids who are never expected to grasp anything more advanced than the idea that pulling their pants down before taking a dump is a good idea. I doubt either is representative of the majority, but from what I have heard low expectations and guaranteed ‘success’ (in the form of handing out pass grades just for turning up) may be a more widespread problem than excessive pressure to excel.
I think a lot of it is some parents wanting anybody else to raise their kids.
They got married because It Was The Thing To Do (plus the dress is pretty!).
They had kids because It Was The Thing To Do.
Then they had the next one because It Was The Thing To Do.
But they have no actual interest in this person. So they sign the kids up for foreign language, judo, tennis, soccer, ballet, sunday school, trips to the moon and a summer camp that will turn them into the next Einstein, only with better hair.
If the kid “fails” at anything, it’s the fault of anybody but the parents because, you know, the parents did sign the kid up for everything!
(Yes, I may be too cynical. And some of my classmates’ parents were already like this)
PS: I knew what I wanted to do at age 3. But I’ve never had any class or extracurricular activity that was specifically intended to prepare us to “travel a lot on my own”! It’s a way of life, not a career
I went to school in that area of Massachusetts to a very similar high school, down to the integrated busing. And yes, it was exactly like that. I remember having a major tracey flick-like breakdown when I got deferred from Georgetown. The school was so competitive the high school had gotten rid of valedictorian, class rank and even AP designations. Every honors class was taught at the AP level and taking the test was your own responsibility.
On one hand I remember it being a miserable experience. On the other, I breezed through undergrad with minimal effort and graduated in three years since I had something like 7 APs racked up (I like prizes). One thing I would do for my own kids is to let them know that the “name” of your undergrad really doesn’t matter that much when you’re on a professional school path. What I resent most is the way the school made me feel like not getting into Harvard meant I was going to be lying in a gutter somewhere and I think the way in which our guidance counselours would discourage kids from attending UMass as though their lives would be ruined was also sort of suspect. While the town is in the same group of towns in wealth as Newton, you still had people who were there from “back in the day” prior to the real estate explosion who seriously could not afford to send three kids to Bowdoin or Bates or whatever.
So I’m ambivalent about it. It certainly molded me in terms of ambition because every kid I knew was going some place like Harvard and I didn’t want to be left behind and that trait has remained with me to this day (aside from my current slacking with my current employers). On the other hand, my high school classmates and I still play a game of “who is making more money/went to the best colleges/grad schools” etc. etc. whenever we run into each other that is probably stupid and disturbing and sometimes I think my ambition is pretty reckless.
Incidentally-about 3 kids I’m still in contact with from high school emailed me that article yesterday!!
I see this a lot where I work. Many of my students in our tutoring center take ‘tutoring’ as one of many things. Saturdays are the most depressing days. I try to demonstrate to my students that hard work is important, but working to accomodate free time is just as crucial. I have a lot of kids tell me, “I don’t get free time”.
What do they spend their saturdays doing? Tutoring, then chinese school, violin lessons, then separate tutoring to get them done with Algebra. The grade these students are in? 5th/6th grade. :dubious:
Since I grew up in this area I can tell you this is entirely untrue. One thing that the authors of this article shied away from noting is that the populations of these types of towns-especially Newton (and the one I grew up in) is predominantly Jewish followed closely by Asian (Indian, Chinese and Japanese in that order). For a solid portion of my classmates (and me) the drive for education and academic success was based quite a bit in our cultural backgrounds.
Not to mention the fact that while my parents and my classmates’ parents expected us to achieve, a large part of the insane pressure put on us was somewhat self-inflicted. In my experience, the parents don’t have to push all that hard, we were just modelling ourselves on what we saw at home.
In my opinion, statements like “the parents have no real interest in them” etc. etc. are pretty arrogant. I’ve always felt that people who don’t take an interest in the lives of their children at all are the ones who have no real interest in their kids and the parents in the article are actually supportive without being insane.
That’s pretty ridiculous. Even in high school, I was never that overburdened.
I graduated high school in 2002. My parents were a little old fashioned with my upbringing, but I still had some structure. I didn’t have extracuricular activities in elementary school (unless Sunday School counts), I played sports in middle school (softball in 6th grade, volleyball in 7th and 8th), and added on two or three extracurriculars when I was in high school. I volunteered because it was mandatory in high school, and I almost always had free time on weekends to do what I needed. When I didn’t, I was playing club volleyball and we had an all-day tournament. At least I was getting exercise!
The only pressure I got on my parents was to make sure that I was doing well and trying to succeed in all of my classes. Everything else was secondary to me getting good grades.
Pst, check out my location. I was writing from the Spanish side. There is absolutely no way I can post from the, say, NYC side since I’ve been to NYC half a dozen times, always on vacation or day trips. And I know plenty of parents who insist in thinking of their child as some idealized image rather than the real person, even after said child has become a parent him/herself. I’ve heard things like “my son isn’t gay! He can’t be gay! It’s all (his lover’s) fault!” To me, that’s having no interest in the real son. Who so happens to be gay. Or to hate soccer. Or to not want to be a truck driver like his daddy (descended from a long line of muleteers).
Also, please note that I emphasized some in my original post. I do not believe that every parent whose kids are involved in twenty zillion things fits the case I pointed out; but some do. For example, SiL’s parents, who would sign up their son for every sport the school offered (he hates sports) but couldn’t be bothered go to their daughter’s athletic meets and volley matches (for which she’d signed up voluntarily because she likes sports; she worked part-time as an aerobics instructor while in college). They weren’t much interested in the “real” either-child, if you ask me.
