The helicopter parents won - a look back

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just reread OP’s post and I don’t think trying to motivate your kids or allowing them to reach their full potential is hekicopter parenting.

My teens are very much in charge of their own lives. We help give them the tools to succeed. If anything, the parents who stick their head in the sand and do nothing seem surprised when their kids are not very high achievers.

Involved parents are important for teens.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just reread OP’s post and I don’t think trying to motivate your kids or allowing them to reach their full potential is hekicopter parenting.

My teens are very much in charge of their own lives. We help give them the tools to succeed. If anything, the parents who stick their head in the sand and do nothing seem surprised when their kids are not very high achievers.

I think people are getting defensive and misunderstanding people’s criticism
Of helicopter/snow plow parents. Of course parents should give their kids the tools succeed in life. But that’s not the same as micromanaging a kid with the sole purpose of getting them into an elite college. And if you are a parent in this area, you have seen it. I’m talking about parents who pick their kids’ ECs and classes. Freak out over a B+. Go to the college board forum or AAP forum. It’s bananas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just reread OP’s post and I don’t think trying to motivate your kids or allowing them to reach their full potential is hekicopter parenting.

My teens are very much in charge of their own lives. We help give them the tools to succeed. If anything, the parents who stick their head in the sand and do nothing seem surprised when their kids are not very high achievers.

I read too as traditional helicopter parents.

Being involved in your kids life and interest is not helicopter parenting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m sending my youngest to college next year. He got into a good school early addmission and all of my kids did well. But as I look back on this parenting experience it occurs to me that the kids with the fanaticaly involved parents did the best - academically and athletically.

When the kids were in early elementary school, I remember shaking my head as my fellow parents talked about advanced math tutoring for their kindergartener or plotting to get their second grader on the most competitive travel team. At the time it seemed so silly to chart out the life of a kid who still needed naps. However, looking at those kids now - those are the kids who are going on to play sports at top colleges.

My takeaway is that even if you are a committed free range parent - your kid is in a competitive environment competing for scarce opportunities to go to top schools and play for competitive school teams.

I’m not unhappy about how my kids turned out or their experience in high School. But I don’t think I realized the the decision not to push advanced math in grade school meant a diminished opportunity to go to Tech or UMD. I definitely didn’t realize that only doing town baseball (and not travel) meant that they wouldn’t make the highschool team.

Your kid is fine, OP. My kids are fine. Most kids who don’t have helicopter parents are fine.

It not like my kids were slouches. They played on at least one rec team every season. Swim team in the summer and got good grades and scores on standardized tests.

But I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve pushed harder our results would’ve been much better.

Or your kid might have developed anxiety or depression from being pushed so hard and then not have ended up at Tech or UMD anyway. Or ended up and then unalived themselves freshman year for fear of failure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just reread OP’s post and I don’t think trying to motivate your kids or allowing them to reach their full potential is hekicopter parenting.

My teens are very much in charge of their own lives. We help give them the tools to succeed. If anything, the parents who stick their head in the sand and do nothing seem surprised when their kids are not very high achievers.

If your definition of being a high achiever is, as OP states, "playing sports at top colleges," then the vast majority of kids are not going to be high achievers. What a silly goal.

Even "vast majority" is overstating it. You're talking about roughly 2% of all high school athletes going Division 1.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:OP, what do you think they "won" exactly??

Bragging rights

Do people know longer believe certain schools matter in terms iof hiring or recruiting after graduation? The mock disbelief by people here is amusing. Nobody seems to know what OP is talking and would certainly never influence or assist their kids in any way. Sure!

My company is headquartered in Boston. We do NOT hire from Harvard or MIT and the ones who are from those schools don't tell people. We have sr. people with (gasp) community college degrees. The company is thriving.

Our DC new hires are also not grads from fancy colleges but regular state schools.

There are jobs for all different types of people. One job is perfect for an MIT scientist where people skills are not needed. There are jobs in sales for people who graduated from local state colleges. There are jobs for community college graduated with technical certifications or degree.

There is no one pathway to a happy life. There is no guarantee that your Harvard degree will get you a dream job. There are so many graduates of top schools who all look the same it’s tough to stand out.

Needing to go to certain colleges to get a certain job is outdated. It’s not the 1970s anymore. Computers and tech changed everything. We have self taught programmers getting who make more than than software engineer college graduates. Start up companies where the whole office can make a high salary. My niece went to a low level college for even planning and marketing. During Covid she got an interview for sales at a start up company. She made $350,000 her first year. It was an in demand product and that’s about all an excellent sales person needs. Entrepreneurs are making good money if they found a niche market.

It’s hard for the old school people to understand.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:But my kids weren't a breath away from an anxiety disorder and are happy people. I think that's worth more than going to a higher-ranked college.

OP here. I don’t think that was the choice. My kids were probably going to be happy either way.

The realization that I have come to is that I traded opportunities to improve my kids chances for easier weekends and less hectic weeknights.

At the time I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing - but that’s what I did.

If we had pushed math more would they have had a better chance at UVA and Michigan- almost certainly.

If we had done travel sports I don’t know if they would have played in college but they would’ve almost certainly made the highschool baseball team.

In the plus side I did have a lot more in the 529s than I would have if I pursued additional opportunities.

What gets me is I thought we were already doing a lot. We sat with them while they did their homework., they were always on a team I even coached a couple of their teams early on.

For the posters, who were saying that life’s a marathon, and not a sprint. I think you’re missing the point. A parent’s strategy is open as many doors as possible. It’s up to them to choose the door. I think the net results of not pushing harder in sports and academically was there fewer doors for them to go through

The doors are not exclusively located on college campuses, is the thing.

But those doors are always available. At what point are those other doors not open?

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

There are finite opportunities to enter service academies, skilled trades programs (alone or as an adjunct to high-test liberal arts education), and particular niche institutions of higher education that may be better fits for a given person than the most elite colleges.

There are finite opportunities to prevent stress-mediated mental health problems that can last a lifetime (or end in death).

There are finite opportunities to be fully present in the life one is leading today, vs simply striving for a specific future outcome. This moment will be gone when that future arrives; it can’t be gotten back.

These are all doors that can and often do close while the focus is single-mindedly on college admissions.

You can't open all the doors all the time but you can't argue that pushing your kids to do their best and fulfill their potential closes any doors. And doing that doesn't close the door to service academies or trade organizations. Explain how after a parent doing their best means a kid can't go to a trade school? This makes zero sense. Sitting on the couch at home vs participating in sports, clubs, music, theater doesn't close any doors. Being a couch potato will certainly limit opportunities.

Such black and white thinking. Why are the options being a couch potato or being in travel sports/being over scheduled? It’s a continuum.

The black and white thinking is coming from the other direction with people claiming that unless kids are totally self motivated and seek out every opportunity on their own, even in 2nd grade, their parents are forcing them and are mentally unwell. Then the people come on claiming they did absolutely nothing for their kids and then went to an Ivy (decades ago). Get real. Lots and lots of people are doing the utmost to help their kids along the way and OP can see it. People are delusional pretending this isn't actually happening.

Help your child to help them maximize their potential. The problem is "helping" your child for the sole purpose of reaching some elite threshold and anything less then that is failure. Life isn't D1 scholarship+ Ivies or bust.

But without helping your kid, you'll never know what their limits will be. Point is, you definitely won't get there if you don't even try.

Y’all seem to have so much difficulty understanding this. The kid may do better, in the net, without your “help” if the “help”
is what OP is describing. Yes, you will know what their limits will be. It will be what they achieve—and it may be more than they would have achieved if you had tried to stage-manage like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:But my kids weren't a breath away from an anxiety disorder and are happy people. I think that's worth more than going to a higher-ranked college.

OP here. I don’t think that was the choice. My kids were probably going to be happy either way.

The realization that I have come to is that I traded opportunities to improve my kids chances for easier weekends and less hectic weeknights.

At the time I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing - but that’s what I did.

If we had pushed math more would they have had a better chance at UVA and Michigan- almost certainly.

If we had done travel sports I don’t know if they would have played in college but they would’ve almost certainly made the highschool baseball team.

In the plus side I did have a lot more in the 529s than I would have if I pursued additional opportunities.

What gets me is I thought we were already doing a lot. We sat with them while they did their homework., they were always on a team I even coached a couple of their teams early on.

For the posters, who were saying that life’s a marathon, and not a sprint. I think you’re missing the point. A parent’s strategy is open as many doors as possible. It’s up to them to choose the door. I think the net results of not pushing harder in sports and academically was there fewer doors for them to go through

The doors are not exclusively located on college campuses, is the thing.

But those doors are always available. At what point are those other doors not open?

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

There are finite opportunities to enter service academies, skilled trades programs (alone or as an adjunct to high-test liberal arts education), and particular niche institutions of higher education that may be better fits for a given person than the most elite colleges.

There are finite opportunities to prevent stress-mediated mental health problems that can last a lifetime (or end in death).

There are finite opportunities to be fully present in the life one is leading today, vs simply striving for a specific future outcome. This moment will be gone when that future arrives; it can’t be gotten back.

These are all doors that can and often do close while the focus is single-mindedly on college admissions.

You can't open all the doors all the time but you can't argue that pushing your kids to do their best and fulfill their potential closes any doors. And doing that doesn't close the door to service academies or trade organizations. Explain how after a parent doing their best means a kid can't go to a trade school? This makes zero sense. Sitting on the couch at home vs participating in sports, clubs, music, theater doesn't close any doors. Being a couch potato will certainly limit opportunities.

We’re having two different conversations, I think. My point is that when parents “doing their best” means optimizing their child for elite college admissions only, they are in fact closing other doors. Service academies require additional kinds of achievements and qualifications that aren’t 100% aligned with elite college admissions. The same, to a larger extent, goes for trades programs that any given person might find a dramatically more satisfying basis for lifelong earning ability—and control over their own time and working conditions—than attendance at HYP.

As anyone living through RTO to an office for no real reason can attest, these are not small issues.

I notice that the mental health issues involved in pushing as hard as OP is proposing don’t fuss you much. Godspeed to you!

Yea you are on your own tangent. Nobody is talking only about elite college.

Perhaps we are reading different threads. The one began with the OP saying she had been a laid back parent and was dissatisfied with “the results,” that the helicopter parents “won.” Her measure of this is college admissions.

What was the beginning of the thread you have been reading?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just reread OP’s post and I don’t think trying to motivate your kids or allowing them to reach their full potential is hekicopter parenting.

My teens are very much in charge of their own lives. We help give them the tools to succeed. If anything, the parents who stick their head in the sand and do nothing seem surprised when their kids are not very high achievers.

If your definition of being a high achiever is, as OP states, "playing sports at top colleges," then the vast majority of kids are not going to be high achievers. What a silly goal.

Sports aren’t everything. No, I do not think a kid playing sports at an elite college is a high achiever. Very few kids can make it to be a college recruit. No amount of pushing and parent involvement can get a kid to that level.

[Anonymous]

OP here - the level of delusion, defensiveness and projection on this thread is epic.

My opinion after reading the “maybe your kid would have ended up with mental health problems” and the “people who go to elite colleges are stupid” posts is that people are trying to justify there own parenting styles/children’s outcomes. To be honest, I’m sympathetic to that reaction because it was mine for years - I didn’t want to compromise my relatively peaceful weekends or laid back summers so I hid behind a wall of excuses and made up fears.

My point is rather banal: if you put more effort into your children you are likely to get better results. Of course there’s a point of diminishing returns or even harm. But I think now that those point were much further off than I realized. I don’t think my children would have suffered from psychological problems if we did travel sports. And I certainly don’t think my kids would have been rendered helpless if we pushed math more in elementary school.

Ultimately I think we missed opportunities- there’s no way to know if our outcomes would have been better- but I think it’s likely.

Maybe a less controversial way to say it is: as a parent the season to truly help your child is much much shorter than you think. You really have about 10 years (give or take) 5-14. Before they’re 5. It’s really more about the nitty-gritty of life diapers and wellness checks. By the time they’re 14 they’re in real competition with their peers (starting spots and SATs).

Don’t give up those 10 year lightly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Met a kid great career and he only talked about going to Wilson (JR but Wilson when he graduated 10 years ago).

He was in the CS and doing well but never once mentioned he where he went to college. As you can advance in that field without a degree.

I asked where he went to college and he reluctantly told me Harvard. He said his career was stunted post college as he was the Harvard grad - either it was too easy for the Harvard grad or too hard for a new hire. His friends from Wilson who went to UMD and UDE; etc were doing more interesting things and advancing. He took Harvard off his resume and his career got so much better.

Companies don’t think of Harvard when they are looking for engineers or computer science / programmers. They look towards MIT, UMD, schools that are known for quality programs in that field.

I’ve got a lot of family members from present to way back that went to Harvard and they never had to hide it or talk about it once they were working adults with families.

What did he put on his resume as his source of training?

[Anonymous]

My kids are 18 and 16 and have found areas that they excel in that I would never have guessed. So I don’t have the same conclusion as you, OP.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:But my kids weren't a breath away from an anxiety disorder and are happy people. I think that's worth more than going to a higher-ranked college.

OP here. I don’t think that was the choice. My kids were probably going to be happy either way.

The realization that I have come to is that I traded opportunities to improve my kids chances for easier weekends and less hectic weeknights.

At the time I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing - but that’s what I did.

If we had pushed math more would they have had a better chance at UVA and Michigan- almost certainly.

If we had done travel sports I don’t know if they would have played in college but they would’ve almost certainly made the highschool baseball team.

In the plus side I did have a lot more in the 529s than I would have if I pursued additional opportunities.

What gets me is I thought we were already doing a lot. We sat with them while they did their homework., they were always on a team I even coached a couple of their teams early on.

For the posters, who were saying that life’s a marathon, and not a sprint. I think you’re missing the point. A parent’s strategy is open as many doors as possible. It’s up to them to choose the door. I think the net results of not pushing harder in sports and academically was there fewer doors for them to go through

The doors are not exclusively located on college campuses, is the thing.

But those doors are always available. At what point are those other doors not open?

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

There are finite opportunities to enter service academies, skilled trades programs (alone or as an adjunct to high-test liberal arts education), and particular niche institutions of higher education that may be better fits for a given person than the most elite colleges.

There are finite opportunities to prevent stress-mediated mental health problems that can last a lifetime (or end in death).

There are finite opportunities to be fully present in the life one is leading today, vs simply striving for a specific future outcome. This moment will be gone when that future arrives; it can’t be gotten back.

These are all doors that can and often do close while the focus is single-mindedly on college admissions.

You can't open all the doors all the time but you can't argue that pushing your kids to do their best and fulfill their potential closes any doors. And doing that doesn't close the door to service academies or trade organizations. Explain how after a parent doing their best means a kid can't go to a trade school? This makes zero sense. Sitting on the couch at home vs participating in sports, clubs, music, theater doesn't close any doors. Being a couch potato will certainly limit opportunities.

Such black and white thinking. Why are the options being a couch potato or being in travel sports/being over scheduled? It’s a continuum.

The black and white thinking is coming from the other direction with people claiming that unless kids are totally self motivated and seek out every opportunity on their own, even in 2nd grade, their parents are forcing them and are mentally unwell. Then the people come on claiming they did absolutely nothing for their kids and then went to an Ivy (decades ago). Get real. Lots and lots of people are doing the utmost to help their kids along the way and OP can see it. People are delusional pretending this isn't actually happening.

Help your child to help them maximize their potential. The problem is "helping" your child for the sole purpose of reaching some elite threshold and anything less then that is failure. Life isn't D1 scholarship+ Ivies or bust.

But without helping your kid, you'll never know what their limits will be. Point is, you definitely won't get there if you don't even try.

Y’all seem to have so much difficulty understanding this. The kid may do better, in the net, without your “help” if the “help”
is what OP is describing. Yes, you will know what their limits will be. It will be what they achieve—and it may be more than they would have achieved if you had tried to stage-manage like this.

We had a kid who used to rip off pages of her Kumon worksheets and hide them all over the house to get out of doing them. (Like there were twenty pages and she would pull off like six to make her job a little easier.) she is now an adult and occasionally we find another little stash when we get a new entertainment center or something. She turned out fine but in retrospect she was never going to be a mathematician and clearly was very strong willed. There is a limit to how much you can control another person. And we were never able to instill a love of math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:But my kids weren't a breath away from an anxiety disorder and are happy people. I think that's worth more than going to a higher-ranked college.

OP here. I don’t think that was the choice. My kids were probably going to be happy either way.

The realization that I have come to is that I traded opportunities to improve my kids chances for easier weekends and less hectic weeknights.

At the time I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing - but that’s what I did.

If we had pushed math more would they have had a better chance at UVA and Michigan- almost certainly.

If we had done travel sports I don’t know if they would have played in college but they would’ve almost certainly made the highschool baseball team.

In the plus side I did have a lot more in the 529s than I would have if I pursued additional opportunities.

What gets me is I thought we were already doing a lot. We sat with them while they did their homework., they were always on a team I even coached a couple of their teams early on.

For the posters, who were saying that life’s a marathon, and not a sprint. I think you’re missing the point. A parent’s strategy is open as many doors as possible. It’s up to them to choose the door. I think the net results of not pushing harder in sports and academically was there fewer doors for them to go through

The doors are not exclusively located on college campuses, is the thing.

But those doors are always available. At what point are those other doors not open?

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

There are finite opportunities to enter service academies, skilled trades programs (alone or as an adjunct to high-test liberal arts education), and particular niche institutions of higher education that may be better fits for a given person than the most elite colleges.

There are finite opportunities to prevent stress-mediated mental health problems that can last a lifetime (or end in death).

There are finite opportunities to be fully present in the life one is leading today, vs simply striving for a specific future outcome. This moment will be gone when that future arrives; it can’t be gotten back.

These are all doors that can and often do close while the focus is single-mindedly on college admissions.

You can't open all the doors all the time but you can't argue that pushing your kids to do their best and fulfill their potential closes any doors. And doing that doesn't close the door to service academies or trade organizations. Explain how after a parent doing their best means a kid can't go to a trade school? This makes zero sense. Sitting on the couch at home vs participating in sports, clubs, music, theater doesn't close any doors. Being a couch potato will certainly limit opportunities.

Such black and white thinking. Why are the options being a couch potato or being in travel sports/being over scheduled? It’s a continuum.

The black and white thinking is coming from the other direction with people claiming that unless kids are totally self motivated and seek out every opportunity on their own, even in 2nd grade, their parents are forcing them and are mentally unwell. Then the people come on claiming they did absolutely nothing for their kids and then went to an Ivy (decades ago). Get real. Lots and lots of people are doing the utmost to help their kids along the way and OP can see it. People are delusional pretending this isn't actually happening.

Help your child to help them maximize their potential. The problem is "helping" your child for the sole purpose of reaching some elite threshold and anything less then that is failure. Life isn't D1 scholarship+ Ivies or bust.

But without helping your kid, you'll never know what their limits will be. Point is, you definitely won't get there if you don't even try.

Y’all seem to have so much difficulty understanding this. The kid may do better, in the net, without your “help” if the “help”
is what OP is describing. Yes, you will know what their limits will be. It will be what they achieve—and it may be more than they would have achieved if you had tried to stage-manage like this.

Yeah sure, kids can sign themselves up for extra classes, practice, and other opportunities. Just says you don’t know much about any of this. Behind every highly motivated kid is a highly motivated parent.

[Anonymous]

We pushed but not full power. Kid didn’t even want to apply to MIT because “too much like the most stressed out kids at my high school.” Kid is at UMD now, so good success. We went out for ramen yesterday and kid missed part of the Super Bowl party to hang out with us. Kid said that they were happy that we stopped by and it was fun to see us. Kid then went back to the library to study for high level STEM class with friends with game on their phone in the background.

My heart is full.