The helicopter parents won - a look back

[Anonymous]

I have 3 kids and people on this thread seem to be overly focused on the sports. I have kids who have done science, instruments, dance, model UN, art, chess, theater and anything else that my kids may have wanted to try.

I have one kid who loves dance. I never thought I would be a dance mom. My friends who have girls in dance, cheer and gymnastics don’t push their girls. The girls push themselves and we are forced to sign them up for a higher level. We all started with one day a week at the local community center.

My one friend has a daughter who does gymnastics full time and does homeschooling. My friend did not push this at all. Her daughter begged to do this for years and parents gave in. They are a middle class family and I know they stretch their finances to support the daughter. The summer programs cost them thousands of dollars and they are always traveling for tournaments. I 100% do not consider them helicopter parents. They have other kids who just play rec sports.

OP, I don’t think you should beat yourself up. If your kid was a super strong swimmer, s/he would have known and been invited to higher competitions. You already did a lot volunteering and coaching.

[Anonymous]

Pp here. I just read OP’s last post and can see that they they may not have taken them to the next level. I do think there are borderline kids. I have a 7th grade boy who loves basketball. He is borderline good enough to get on the high school team and we are doing all we can for him to get better. This is kid driven. As the parent, I do research and ask around for recommendations and he has gotten significantly better after the extra training. Volunteer parent coaches on rec teams was not enough.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

-1. Tutors are not the exception. You just come from a crowded, disadvantaged country, and you think it is the norm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

DP. Nothing against tutors where needed, but the future’s great minds are not incubating at Kumon. Give me a break.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

-1. Tutors are not the exception. You just come from a crowded, disadvantaged country, and you think it is the norm.

*tutors are not the norm.

The PP parent is telling you that some kids are intended for math, and some are not. Period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

OP: were you a completely hands-off parent that didn't do anything with your kids? There's an extremely wide range of effort levels between helicopter parent and lazy)uninvolved parent. Neither of the extremes is healthy. The only metrics you seem disappointed by is your kids' colleges and lack of playing sports. Are they actually slackers? What aren't you explaining that's the real cause of your disappointment?

OP here: At the time I thought we were doing a lot- we had the kids in rec sports, we sat with them while they did their homework, met with their teachers, volunteered at swim meets and even coached a few teams early on. But what we didn’t do (what I now regret) is that we never push into that next level.

The kids were happy and doing well so we didn’t want to push them into advanced math. They were successful on their rec teams so no travel for us. I think our motto was good was good enough.

But looking back on it the decision not to take it to the next level was a decision not to go to thier first choice schools or play the sport they loved for their highschool.

I’m not unhappy with how they turned out or their experience in highschool. I’m sure they have a great future ahead of them. But it bugs me that I was making decisions years ago and I didn’t connect up the conquenses at the time.

For them they’ve always been happy bright kids and they’re still that way but they weren’t excited to get rejected from thier first and second choice schools or from not making the hs baseball team. They really loved youth baseball and the ideas niether played an inning of hs ball kills me. The majority of the pictures of the boys when they were little are baseball pictures. I just didn’t understand the level of competition.

I'm a PP that's been beating up on you a bit, but I can understand this a little more. I still don't think you're talking about being a helicopter parent. Would you really trade the joys you did experience and the kids you have so they could have pictures on the high school baseball team. but I understand second guessing what you did. Not because you (or your kids) failed, but it's human nature to always wonder did I do do enough?

Give yourself some grace. I'm sure you did your best with what you knew and the resources you had available and it sounds like your kids will be fine. You're probably holding on to baseball regrets more than they are and you admitted they're in good colleges (probably with classmates of actual helicopter parents that view their kids as failures).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have 3 kids and people on this thread seem to be overly focused on the sports. I have kids who have done science, instruments, dance, model UN, art, chess, theater and anything else that my kids may have wanted to try.[u]

I have one kid who loves dance. I never thought I would be a dance mom. My friends who have girls in dance, cheer and gymnastics don’t push their girls. The girls push themselves and we are forced to sign them up for a higher level. We all started with one day a week at the local community center.

My one friend has a daughter who does gymnastics full time and does homeschooling. My friend did not push this at all. Her daughter begged to do this for years and parents gave in. They are a middle class family and I know they stretch their finances to support the daughter. The summer programs cost them thousands of dollars and they are always traveling for tournaments. I 100% do not consider them helicopter parents. They have other kids who just play rec sports.

OP, I don’t think you should beat yourself up. If your kid was a super strong swimmer, s/he would have known and been invited to higher competitions. You already did a lot volunteering and coaching.

I think if your kid is involved in these, especially dance/instrument/theatre, it can be hard to do that AND be involved in a team sport. I don't know what else OP's kids did. Maybe she is saying they did this and that, but never really got great at anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

DP. Nothing against tutors where needed, but the future’s great minds are not incubating at Kumon. Give me a break.

i don't care for kumon, and i don't consider that tutoring (isn't that a website). but yes, i will hire a phd student in chemistry to help my 7th grader pursue their interests. same for history. they are certainly not gonna get that kind of intellectual stimulation in their middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

-1. Tutors are not the exception. You just come from a crowded, disadvantaged country, and you think it is the norm.

i said - not so long ago. darwin was tutored. einstein was tutored. von neumann was tutored. they didn't learn their foundations from your run of the mill HS or middle school teacher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have 3 kids and people on this thread seem to be overly focused on the sports. I have kids who have done science, instruments, dance, model UN, art, chess, theater and anything else that my kids may have wanted to try.[u]

I have one kid who loves dance. I never thought I would be a dance mom. My friends who have girls in dance, cheer and gymnastics don’t push their girls. The girls push themselves and we are forced to sign them up for a higher level. We all started with one day a week at the local community center.

My one friend has a daughter who does gymnastics full time and does homeschooling. My friend did not push this at all. Her daughter begged to do this for years and parents gave in. They are a middle class family and I know they stretch their finances to support the daughter. The summer programs cost them thousands of dollars and they are always traveling for tournaments. I 100% do not consider them helicopter parents. They have other kids who just play rec sports.

OP, I don’t think you should beat yourself up. If your kid was a super strong swimmer, s/he would have known and been invited to higher competitions. You already did a lot volunteering and coaching.

I think if your kid is involved in these, especially dance/instrument/theatre, it can be hard to do that AND be involved in a team sport. I don't know what else OP's kids did. Maybe she is saying they did this and that, but never really got great at anything.

Pp here. My kids all do different things at various levels. We never make them do anything they don’t want. I made my kids learn to swim and they hated that. They still don’t love going to the pool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is all about inner drive. Full stop.
Beyond that, if you do happen to have a genuinely driven kid it is a parents' core responsibility to support them in time, money and encouragement to fulfill their potential.

Rationalize as many do, but any parent who does not do so has seriously done a disservice to their child.

My husband loves tennis. He never had formal tennis lessons. He did make his high school tennis team. He would never make the team around here but back in the early nineties, being athletic and able to hit a tennis ball was enough.

My kids have played tennis since preschool. They played daily during Covid. We have the resources to provide them with the right coaching. A kid who is playing for fun has no chance against my kid who has played almost every day since being able to hold a racquet.

And who really cares? The commodification of sports/intense focus on success in sports as the end is doing more harm than good for your kids. They're burning out, getting injured, suffering mental health, and parents are overspending chasing the delusion that they can mold their kid into an athlete when the ultimate goal should be enjoying the process of sports. Your unathletic but well coached tennis player is not going to play in the U.S. Open and it's weird and unhinged to compare him to a casual for parental bragging rights

Truth right here

Actually sports are good for mental and physical health. Where are you getting this non-sense or is it to justify your unwillingness to parent?

Actually, it's the physical activity and the team aspect that are good for mental health. No one need to play a D1-level sport to achieve mental and physical wellbeing. The PP's point was that pushing kids to be in the top 1% of their sport can be harmful. They said, and I'll quote it for you since you seem to have missed it. THE ULTIMATE GOAL SHOULD BE ENJOYING THE PROCESS OF SPORTS. You'll get the mental and physical benefits while achieving that goal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

-1. Tutors are not the exception. You just come from a crowded, disadvantaged country, and you think it is the norm.

i said - not so long ago. darwin was tutored. einstein was tutored. von neumann was tutored. they didn't learn their foundations from your run of the mill HS or middle school teacher.

Oh my god, you all seriously think you have little Darwins and Einsteins, don’t you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP you don’t have enough perspective on this yet. From where you sit getting into a great college is the end goal. But it’s not really.

Once all these kids are 30, come back and tell us which are happiest and most productive in something that matters.

Life does not stop at 30, or 40, or 50, unless you die, and we all want to die before our children. If you classify everything into this win/lose dichotomy you will always feel insecure and miserable.

I have a friend who had a fabulous career and ambitious husband at 30-something, turns out he was an addict and died and left them all penniless a couple of years later. Oops, looks like she “lost” right when she was supposed to be winning!

I don't want my kids to “win,” I want them to be resilient and handle the curveballs life throws at them, because there WILL be curveballs. And travel soccer won’t necessarily give them that particular skill.

Just get them a math tutor, that oughta do it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

You tried to instill a move of math with kumon?!?!? Lol! I'm a scientist and we instill a love of math by watching birds hunt and explaining the mechanics of their necks, or looking buildings being built and talking about the loads on the cranes. You know, things that are actually interesting to a kid. The math is just the language to describe it. I have 4 kids that love math, physics, and BOOKS. The teens want to be a writer and a doctor, one kid is undecided, and the little one wants to be a ballerina. They all love math and are good at it but don't necessarily want to be mathematicians.

"That mom" here. For the record, neither my husband nor I are math people. We speak a bunch of foreign languages but math is not our thing. I would literally have no idea how to talk about loads on cranes with my kid. So yeah, we tried Kumon. Kid wants a phd in philosophy. no money in that. I would have loved to have had the secret sauce that makes a kid that loves math.

please don't listen to this arrogant fool. tutors can help teach subjects that are taught poorly in school. tutors were the norm, not the exception not so long ago. many great minds and scientists had nothing BUT tutors.

-1. Tutors are not the exception. You just come from a crowded, disadvantaged country, and you think it is the norm.

i said - not so long ago. darwin was tutored. einstein was tutored. von neumann was tutored. they didn't learn their foundations from your run of the mill HS or middle school teacher.

Oh my god, you all seriously think you have little Darwins and Einsteins, don’t you?

so you just realized now you are a neglectful parent? happy to provide that service.