“I’d rather have a happy kid at UMD than a miserable one at Harvard”

[Anonymous]

You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP why aren’t you wealthy enough after working at those unicorn companies & going to top schools to not have to worry about this nonsense. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it?

OP here. I do work at a unicorn. I still want my kids to have a rock solid work ethic and experience with high-pressure, intense, and stressful environments.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Well, for one, I’m not letting my kids major in the humanities. So there’s that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Sounds like you joined the human race and lost

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP why aren’t you wealthy enough after working at those unicorn companies & going to top schools to not have to worry about this nonsense. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it?

OP here. I do work at a unicorn. I still want my kids to have a rock solid work ethic and experience with high-pressure, intense, and stressful environments.

Best way to do that would be to tell them to go survive for a year on their own at 18. Buy then a plane ticket to a city on the opposite coast. If they come back alive a year later, they’ll survive anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Well, for one, I’m not letting my kids major in the humanities. So there’s that.

If your education & jobs were worth it you’d be wealthy enough by now for it to not matter what your kid majors in. But you’re still a UMC striver stuck in the rat race. You’re in the same mindset as a 6th grade teacher or engineer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Well, for one, I’m not letting my kids major in the humanities. So there’s that.

Starting the day your kid turns 18, you have literally zero authority over them.

[Anonymous]

You sound utterly miserable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP why aren’t you wealthy enough after working at those unicorn companies & going to top schools to not have to worry about this nonsense. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it?

OP here. I do work at a unicorn. I still want my kids to have a rock solid work ethic and experience with high-pressure, intense, and stressful environments.

Your kids might not want to be in high-pressure, stressful environments. They’ll decide on their own if they want to or not, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Sounds like you joined the human race and lost

OP lost. She has no financial freedom.

[Anonymous]

Management consulting? Investment banking? Those are not middle or upper middle class careers.

[Anonymous]

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This is absolutely false. When a parent withholds love from a child early on and only grants it when the child is achieving, the child will do anything for the love. Period. To assume they would rebel is naive.

By the time they are an adult, they will feel resentment.

+1. I know lots of my peers have lots of issues with their overbearing parents but don't have the energy or boldness to confront them.

-1

OP here. I’ve never met these poor tortured tiger cubs you’re mentioning. I was pushed, and so were most of my high school friends, by immigrant tiger parents. We are grateful. None of us are resentful. You’re making up a figure in your mind.

NP here. OP - you are coming at this from your experience. Maybe your social circle really are all happy. Or maybe some of you friends are really good at hiding their thoughts from you, or themselves even. But I’m a high school teacher in a magnet program and see a whole lot more kids than you, and I can assure you that not everyone belongs or is thriving in the magnet environment and they are very conflicted about college and the major that has been chosen for them by their parents. Every year out of ~100 11th graders I have 2-3 of them literally crying in my office over not earning a perfect 4.0 due to my class. It doesn’t take long for the rest of the stress story to come out. Other teachers relate similar experiences. I’d estimate 10-15% of the magnet kids are truly unhappy due to being pushed too hard (not including the general 50% of them who are pretty stressed with high workload.) On the adult side, in our department of 15 there are 2 teachers who were career changers who switched to teaching after a few years because they didn’t like the field chosen by their tiger parents and didn’t enjoy their elite college experience.

Your experience is not the same as everyone’s OP. I agree with the nuanced premise from the other post (big fish, small pond is equally successful and less stressed/happier).

You are wrong! Just plain wrong. Totally wrong. If someone goes to Towson or another middling college and then Harvard for grad school, they will be crushed because they are not used to being the big fish in the small pond anymore. They will be crushed because they never learned how to deal with the intensity and stress of a pressure-cooker environment (which, BTW, every successful job requires). I would much rather have my kids learn how to handle being in a stressful, pressure-cooker environment in high school or college than grad school.

I would rather my children not go to grad school. Hopefully, they’ll do undergrad right & start earning, saving & investing as soon as they graduate.

OP here. FWIW I’m with you. I’d much rather have my kids go straight into a lucrative career in tech or finance or consulting at 22 than waste another five years in a PhD program (which almost always have a negative ROI) or law school. That way they can start saving and investing much earlier and take advantage of compound interest. It’s also why I’m amused when people say that SLACs are great because they’re great at being grad school feeders. That is a terrible economic decision.

And the highest paying tech jobs don’t hire Towson grads. The unicorn companies that give employees the big bucks — Stripe, Figma, Discord — do not hire from Towson.

So you think all decisions need to be "economic"? I want my kids to make a living, and afford a decent place to live etc . . . but being rich is not my goal for them.

I’m assuming you must be rich, and plan on giving your kids a trust fund. Literally everyone I know wants their kids to be UMC, and that requires a tech/finance/consulting/medicine/law income these days.

Nope. I am solidly middle class and would rather my kids be middle class doing something they love than selling their soul for a bigger house and fancier zip code.

The moment you “take a job you love,” you lose your earning power. Most jobs are a grind, even the ones in “passion” fields. Most people would be better off just acknowledging that work is a grind and taking a job that pays well. There are tons of threads on this site from NPO workers and other “do-gooder” jobs who regret going into their field.

Cynicism is alive and well on DCUM.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“I’d rather have a happy kid at UMD than a miserable one at Harvard”

This is like saying I'd rather be a happy peasant than a miserable king; I'd rather be a happy pig than a mad genius like Van Gogh, or Newton.

Sounds romantic - but no.

Congrats, you win for dumbest analogy of the day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP why aren’t you wealthy enough after working at those unicorn companies & going to top schools to not have to worry about this nonsense. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it?

OP here. I do work at a unicorn. I still want my kids to have a rock solid work ethic and experience with high-pressure, intense, and stressful environments.

What’s the point if you don’t get to enjoy the money?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You lost the game & are on the race to nowhere. If going to a top school & working at Citadel was really so important you’d be a multimillionaire. You’d have zero qualms about your DD majoring in history or english.

Sounds like you joined the human race and lost

OP lost. She has no financial freedom.

OP here. Between DH and I, we have a NW of ~$3 million in our late thirties. Our kids are set to inherit a few million each. But they will blow through it if they don’t have a work ethic and an ability to survive and thrive in difficult environments.

DH and I are both the children of working-class Asian immigrants. We would hate to have the third-generation decline start with them.