I think it’s ridiculous that some parents do this to their children.
To be honest, some of this can happen very innocently.
Say that your a first time parent and have no real form of reference. You go to your child’s teacher conference. Sometimes I think teachers mean well and may tell you what your child needs improvement on, and the parent takes the remark to mean 'Billy can’t do X and what are we going to do!! I sometimes think that teachers don’t realize that the simplest throw away remark can send some parents into a tailspin. I’ve heard teachers say, *‘She/he’s capable or intelligent enough or has the potential to do it …’ * I think it’s remarks like this that send the parent in panic mode and they start looking for tutors and ways to help their child.
It’s like a patient going to a doctor and hearing, blah blah blah surgery blah blah blah cancer. When the doctor says, " If it doesn’t improve and I think it will, you might need surgery. We’ll do tests to rule out cancer, etc. but I don’t think that’s the case with you."
Believe me, I’m not blaming teachers and there certainly are parents who push their kids.
But sometimes I think it’s the case of a parent trying to do what they can to help the kid succeed but aren’t really sure what to do.
Shalmanese, great explanation! It sounds like you could write a book on this topic.
I’m also very curious as to how Asian-American families deal with kids that do get poor grades- none of the kids in this group that I worked with were ever close to failing in school, but were getting tons of support. On the flip side, I very rarely see the kids that are in dire need of extra help actually get it. It feels more meaningful to me to help save a kid from repeating the 5th grade, or to help a high schooler graduate, than make sure that honor student keeps his 4.4 GPA.
Yes, but in that case, does it mean we have to do something about the negative sociocultural connotation of the word “mediocre”?
I like Shalmanese’s explanation in the context of the Asian vision of self-improvement and higher goals, which can apply cross-culturally. However there’s still the issue with those other parents and their motivations – the ones derived from a culture that is “more materially/hedonistically motivated”, that may feel enlightened because they “delay gratification” but still are looking for gratification all the same. We know them, the OP knows them. They are the ones who are looking to place the kid in a competitive PRESCHOOL and will schedule every waking hour of the child’s life in some “productive” task because they are already looking forward 15 years to have them applying to Harvard/Stanford/Princeton and how horrible it will be to end up at State U. …
IMO the affirmative answeris conditional on that the financial success and social approval comes as a consequence of a primary striving for excellence, disposition to hard work, and desire for self-improvement, that the person has internalized and turned into a self-motivating drive (rather than having the financial success and social approval be the driver, and both that and the things you have to do to get there, remaining things imposed by The Man). Then given that positive scenario, if “success” is at hand, the person will be able to feel she is satisfactorily pursuing happiness AND as well enjoying material prosperity, AND still motivated enough to avoid stagnation; and if it’s not, she will be able to know that she IS doing hers best under the circumstances and failure to meet social standards of success is not a moral indictment on themselves.
OTOH if the only motivator is been *disparagement and censure for failing to meet someone else’s expectation * of outcompeting people you don’t even know, taking takes no regard for the child’s own motivations, you risk ending up with someone who is bitter no matter whether he’s taking over aerospace corporations or weaving baskets of organic straw.
The world is a competetive place. The reality is that not everyone gets to fullfil their dreams.
The phenomenon that Incubus is talking about is called “helicopter parenting”. Mostly it’s overprotective Baby Boomers who have become too involved with their childs lives and cannot allow them to go off on their own. They badger teachers and administrators over every grade, call the college daily and even get involved with their kid’s workplace. Basically always hovering around like a helicopter.
The problem is if you constantly hover around like that, they don’t learn how to think independently. They just complete the assigned tasks and wait for furthur instructions because god forbid they do the wrong thing. When they are on their own, they need constant validation and approval.
I see this at work with anyone under about 24. The will come up and interupt me (their project manager) every 2 minutes with an update or asking what to do next regardless if I’m on the phone or talking to someone else. Like “ooo!! ooo!! I’m done! Do you have any more for me to do?!”
Absolutely. But the idea is, that in a race where of necessity there will be vastly more losers than winners, not all “losers” (circumstantially, someone who scored lower) are “Losers” (existentially, someone who is inferior in character).
Of course, I am fully aware of the opposite (and potentially more destructive) risk, of the attitue where folks scorn the high-achievers as “elitists”, “pointy heads”, etc. That’s another whole chapter.
It isn’t just academics - happens with sports as well. Parents push their kids to be better and better hockey players/football players/tennis players. I can name a dozen people I’ve run across who - while driving their kid cross state to play soccer or basketball assurred me this time well spent would result in college scholarships and/or a pro career. I know one person who had a good atheletic college scholarship (women’s golf) and her parents never pushed her.
And, yeah, maybe Wayne Gretzky sits around and thanks his dad for pushing so hard that he got a pro career … wait, no he doesn’t, the thing Gretzky says is that he loved it so much his parents needed to drag him off the ice - he lived his dream, not his parents.
Ah, you’re writing about me and about 10% of my school and high school classmates.
An example from my own experience: grades 4th to 8th, English was a boring thing that had no application in real life (hi Kyla!) and which you had to learn by rote. I “combined forces” with 8 other students in the exams and we got only 5s (0-10 scale, 5 is pass).
9th grade. The new teacher asks do we like English; half the class says no. She wants to know why, we explain it’s all rote and has no logic. So she says “oh, but it is perfectly logical… it’s just like Spanish!” and proceeds to write on the board:
to go to
ir a
Ohmygod! It really is the same! The first two weeks were spent looking for common structures in both languages.
That first month I got a 9’75 in English. By myself, no “cooperative exam taking”. My parents, as they had been doing since 6th grade, spent half an hour dissecting my grades and explaining all my wrongdoings in a dark room where the only light shone over my mother’s click-clicking needlepoint, but I was too happy to notice.
The happiness motivated me like my parents’s “half an hour of the fourth grade” never could. So next month I work like I never have and bring my average up by a whole 1’5.
So what happens? My parents spend half an hour dissecting the fact that I have gone down in English, from a 9’75 to a 9’50. Hello, in an exam that was 40 questions, that means I got two answers wrong and last month only one!
“I have raised my average” was not an accceptable argument. “It’s the highest grade in the class” was not acceptable. They could compare me to other classmates; I could not.
When the school offered a course in “better studying”, who was there? Myself, of course. And every other student who already could read fine (1/3 of the course was faster reading, I tested at 450wpm on the first try and 6000wpm as my record), whose grades didn’t depend on being part of a “good class”, whose biggest problem was not lack of studying methodology but lack of motivation because our parents were. Never. Satisfied.
We were 20 (out of 200); 15 of us went into Engineering, Chemistry or Physics; 4 into Phylology (Germanics, which means “English and German”). The teachers for those subjects, as explained before, were able to spark our interest, plus those majors didn’t require high GPAs. The 20th became a Vet doc like his dad: his idea of bad grades was 9’xx, but his parents thought the priests were inflating his grades… (fer chirssakes, a Jesuit inflating grades? Hon, hell will freeze over, thaw and refreeze before that happens). Vet school required the highest GPA.
I swear, if my parents had been able to say “good work”, my grades would have skyrocketed. I got two 100% in college, plus a 97% (all of which came with fellowships) and their remarks were “looks like you can do things right when you decide to”.
They try to motivate you and all they do is screw your self-esteem. At least that’s how it worked for us, from conversations with my fellow 10%'ers.
It’s a distressingly large phenomenon in my area. It amazes me whenever we go out with a group of parents who obsessively compare stats and sports accomplishments. When you ask them about the kids’ academic accomplishments, they shrug. “Just keep the grades high enough to keep playing.”
I know of one kid whose parents have put him in a league which has two or three games every week. As the kid’s dad told me, “It’s a 7-day a week commitment.”* The kid is eight years old!*
A phrase you hear frequently in these discussions is: “Remember Joey Mason*” Joey played football in highschool and got a scholarship to the state university. From there, he went to a very forgettable third-string career in the major leauges, playing for a very low-ranked team. I always want to rebut, “Remember Sara Miller*?” She was a girl who went to Harvard because of her academic excellence and now she works for a Fortune 500 company making more money than Joey Mason. But he’s the hero, the one to emmulate.
Though I know the funding comes from different sources, it always makes me gnash my teeth when I see two side-by-side articles in the local paper: one touting the new football field and new uniforms for one of the local team, and the article beside it noting that there aren’t enough text books for all of the kids this year-- students will have to share. Speaks volumes about our priorities.
- Not their real names, of course.
Weel, in sports like swimming and tennis, it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to have a successful career without parents “pushing” children. That is because the athletes in these sports keep getting younger and younger, and there is NO way that a 12 year old is going to endure hours of swimming laps or doing croos-court interceptions wityhout Mommy and daddy pushing them. Is this a good thing? maybe not, but if you want to be a competitive swimmer or tennis player, that’s what you have to do.
And what if Mommy and Daddy want you to be a competitive swimmer or tennis player, but you just want to go out with your friends and live a ‘normal’ life?
It depends. If the child is very talented and wants to be a competative athelete, then yeah, the parents may have to push to keep the kid on track. Most of the time, that’s not what we’re talking about. Many of these kids who are pushed and hounded are mediocre atheletes even at the school-age level. They’re never going to be star atheletes even if they practice 24/7.
One kid I know wanted to play basketball. His father told him that if he wanted to play basketball, he also had to play football. If he wouldn’t play football, he wouldn’t be allowed to play anything. The kid didn’t like football and he wasn’t very good at it, but his dad had been a “star” in high school football and by God, his son would be, too, if he had to drive the kid into exhaustion to do it.
Weren’t sports supposed to be* fun* for kids? Yeah, it was supposed to teach them about competition and teamwork, but I thought the main idea was that the kids would have a good time doing it. Some parents drive their kids so hard that there isn’t an iota of fun left-- it’s all a deadly serious business.
There also ought to be more consideration for their growing bodies. I know of a couple of kids who have gotten injuries to their knees or elbows that they’ll have to live with their entire lives and they’re not even adults yet. A teenager shouldn’t be in physical therapy, and espcially shouldn’t be urged by their parents “to play through the pain” when they know that stress on the injury may cause more damage. (Racing horses are treated with more consideration!)
Like the others, I disagree. Parents have to put themselves out a lot to support this, and they might have to help their kid over times when they feel down, but if a kid doesn’t want to be a champion, no amount of pushing is going to make him one. When my daughter was riding, we had to get up early to take her to the barn, but we almost never had to push her. When she got her license, she was always there on time, and we never once had to wake her up or prod her. She’s no champion, but she wanted to do it.
Another example is acting. Despite stories of horrid stage mothers, auditions for kids are done withoutt the parents present. If a kid didn’t want to be there, it would become obvious very quickly, and the kid would stop getting auditions.
Twelve year olds can endure quite a lot of they’re motivated.
I’m still waiting for an explanation of this statement.
Here’s an article from today’s SF Chronicle about parents like this.
The most damning thing in there, to me, is when one of the mothers “scoffs at the idea of letting children learn at their own pace. If parents want to try that, go ahead and roll the dice” :rolleyes:
Poor kids.
My sister-in-law swam competitively in school, so her daughters did, too. When I visited, usually during the holidays, the kids were quite willing to go to practice. They were on swim teams, so they got to hang out with friends–as well as swim.
One of them made Olympic tryouts but was not picked; she’s now coaching swimming in her spare time. BOTH of them got athletic scholarships to good schools; one got an academic scholarship for graduate school.
And my sister-in-law still swims for exercise. Many women of her age avoid sleeveless dress–she doesn’t.
Having been one of those kids who grew up under such parents, I find I’m rather ambivalent towards the whole thing. On the one hand, I feel that my parents definitely helped me to push myself harder and that’s what got me where I am today. Not that I’ve done anything earth-shattering or newspaper-worthy in my life (yet!) but I received (and am still receiving) an education that I feel I can be proud of. On the other hand, I am STILL haunted by that fear of disappointing my parents. To them, doing well was a given and falling below that line was unacceptable. I was the child who was terrified of getting a B because of what my parents would think of me. They rarely praised me when I did well, but always scolded me when I slipped.
Shalmanese mentioned that Japanese culture thinks there is always room for improvement and that’s why they are constantly striving to do better. This was basically what my parents thought: you CAN do better, so you MUST. But why be so negative about it? This is what gets me about Asian culture (or Korean culture - I’m not sure about others) - praise is considered bad. It makes children arrogant, supposedly. So parents are constantly throwing away the carrot and using the whip, in the hopes of cultivating humility in their child. So the child ends up feeling that A is the norm and B is something to be ashamed about, instead of feeling proud of their A and accepting that sometimes, Bs happen to the best of us. It not only makes for a stressed-out child starving for parental approval, it also ironically cultivates a kind of arrogance that lurks beneath a veneer of humility. “I am depressed over my B, but you are satisfied with it, which makes me somehow better than you.”
My point is this: there is a healthy was to encourage children to improve themselves, and there is an unhealthy way to do the same thing. I’m not even talking about pushing children to do their best versus pushing them to be the best. My parents were forever telling me, “We’re not expecting you to do more than you can do.” Which was true. When I was pushed to do my best, I was at the top of my class. My parents weren’t pressuring me to do something I couldn’t. But for them, that was the norm and it didn’t particularly deserve praise. Whereas falling below this so-called norm deserved censure. And what was always dominating my thoughts was, “What will it take for my parents to be proud of me?” (I’m not saying they weren’t - they were. But I didn’t know that when I was 10 because they never actually told me.)
So I’m not against the concept of forever striving to better oneself. But I am against doing it in a negative way. Praise given where deserved does not have to lead to arrogance.
adds HazelNutCoffee to her list of heroes
You know what I wonder? I wonder how much of this has to do with the partial importation of culture and immigration. I wonder this of course because I come from a family of immigrants, then I up and immigrated myself. (Old World to Old World in two generations.)
One of the things I have noticed is that there are a number of things that the parents in my own family have done because it was the right way to raise a child, which backfired on them in ways they did not really understand. And the reason was, at the end of the day, their children were growing up in a culture which does not value the same things they do. Or at least does not express them in the same way.
So the message, which had been sent from parent to child for god-knows-how-many generations in the Azores (inour case), suddenly got garbled in transmission when it was sent to kids being raised in the US. There isn’t the cultural support in the US for some of this stuff, there aren’t the safety valves and community counterbalances in place to make the message make sense. In a very real way, I think, you cannot import part of a culture without changing it.
But I truly do not know how anyone can parent in any way other than what seems right to them.
I find this is already happening with my own children here in Holland and they are very young. It is both more and less difficult in our case because my husband is Dutch and therefore has the same sort of basic norms as the rest of our community. More difficult because it comes up more quickly; less difficult because at least my husband and I are not left wondering about why those other people are acting this way.
For us it is a small gap but nevertheless noticeable; if the cultural gap were wider I imagine the effects would be greater.
Bravo, HazelNutCoffee… (see, the kidat least had good taste…
) …and very applicable even when not in the “different culture” mode. Plenty of plain-whitebread parents seem to have assumed they should manage their children’s upbringing in the same hard-driving way they’d manage business competitiveness (“gimme 110%! failure is not an option! second place is just the first of the losers! know your place!”).