NYT The Daily: The Parents Aren't All Right
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Anonymous
I know a 9 year old who occasionally has 4 different overlapping sports schedules, mostly select teams so he can't even go to all the games. He keeps getting injured. I predict that by the time he's up for a scholarship he will need knee surgery. |
Anonymous
+1 I worked until I paid off my student loans and our finances were in the green. I am happier now and so is my family. If others want to judge my choices and call me lazy I don't care. My DH sees and appreciates all I do, my kids + dog get more of my attention and that is all the praise/accolades I need. |
Anonymous
I haven’t listened to the episode yet but I have the same view as the above. If we eliminate race/ethnicity and then (likely) athletics and other experience and talent in the college admissions process the only metric left will be academics. Cram schools and the like. |
Anonymous
Very few kids are getting recruited to attend a college they would otherwise not be admitted to and very few kids are receiving scholarships. As someone who did go through the athletic recruiting process for college and played a sport at an Ivy, I have a good sense of the amount of rigor and luck required, and most people will not have enough of either to make a very intense level of commitment at a young age worth it. That said, a certain amount of specialization in a sport coupled with participation in other sports would be the best approach in 5th grade. Puberty can completely change a child’s athletic trajectory and too much specialization can lead to overuse injuries and burnout. All this specialization and pushing at a young age seems to model this fear about a poor science test. It’s a refusal to let our children fail because of our discomfort with failure as parents and the “stakes being so high”, but what we all know is that very few people fail up indefinitely and there is an inevitable fragility that comes with being protected from the consequences of one’s actions by adults as a child, teen, and young adult. George W Bush meant something different when he coined the term the bigotry of low expectations but in a way the sentiment fits here because in expecting so much from our children we end up expecting very little because we take on the burden of filling whatever gap there is between their capabilities and our expectations. In doing so we then stress ourselves out and we fail to equip our children with tools to advocate for themselves, to accept a bad grade and figure out what must be done to change that grade (i.e., study differently). It is so much better to learn good study habits in 5th then it is to get C’s in 9th. |
Anonymous
Yes it is. I can give you examples but those are just anecdotes. My niece dropped out of college and started working at a small company who specialize in some hi tech stuff that I can’t remember. She started as a clerk and she is now VP of sales making about $400k a year with commissions. Another niece had a hospitality degree from a second tier university. Her job was suspended with Covid. She got a job recruiting and working mostly at home. She made at least 3x more money than her event manager job. There’s more than one way to do well in a career. It’s not only college, job interview, office, promotions, retirement anymore. |
Anonymous
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You can't win though. My kid is currently at a school with very little intensive parenting. Guess what: it sucks. Kids are poorly behaved because they don't have good role models and their parents make no effort to correct bad behavior or encourage things like kindness and empathy. Test scores are abysmal and a lot if kids don't try at all. There are even bright kids I know to be string academically and they will denigrate studying as a "waste of time" because their parents do not emphasize education. The kids eat endless junk-- parents will send in a bag of Doritos and some fruit snacks and that's lunch. And that's a parent who bothered to pack a lunch. The school lunch is free but awful. A small group of us who actually give a damn petitioned to change vendors last year it was so bad and it's moderately better but still regularly fails to involve a single vegetable.
We are obviously planning to leave as soon as we can and I know it will be hard to adjust to a school where most parents are "intensive." But at least those parents care. It is really hard to parent a kid when so many if their classmates' parents don't give a damn and don't try. Intensive parenting is stressful and I try to be balanced but I don't think people understand how bad the alternative is. |
Anonymous
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I agree it’s the stress about there not being enough good jobs for everyone and the labor market changing so quickly you can keep up (major in CS! No, don’t—all the CA jobs are being done by robots! Data science! No wait, robots are doing that now too! Wait we don’t even call it robots anymore—it’s AI!”)
My brothers grew up in the 50s and 60s, HS in the 70s. They got bad grades and smoked pot and got into actual fist fights. They got yelled ant by my dad annd grounded obviously but it was all basically fine. They have successful careers now. Nowadays if your son got into a fist fight, omg, you would be a social pariah and he’d probably be suspended. Get a couple of Cs and you’ll be lucky to get into any college. It’s a lot of effort to raise kids who don’t make mistakes! I’m a pretty low key parent that doesn’t care what other people think of me, but it’s still pretty stressful. |
Anonymous
| Also, parents are expected to be so perfect now. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, if I screwed up, I got yelled at and told I was being an idiot. If I was really really bad, I would get spanked. I’m not saying that I support that approach, but now we tell parents you can’t spank your kids, you shouldn’t yell at them, you shouldn’t tell them that they are idiots, etc.—you just need to establish conditions under which they can thrive and engage in a reasonable discourse with tjhem about how they can meet those expectations, enforcing fair and consistent consequences for undesired behavior. That is waaaay harder than the old “Just wait until your father gets home!” Model of parenting. Of course it’s stressful — it’s a lot of work to parent that way! |
Anonymous
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Everyone is right -- the problem is higher standards for parents AND a move toward dual-income households. We did both at once. We expect parents to parent as though they have nothing but time and endless patience and limitless resources but at the same time it's almost impossible to afford a middle class lifestyle on a single income so most parents work.
No wonder parents are struggling. What would be great is if we could keep the good shifts in parenting (toward actually caring about and spending time with your kids instead of ignoring them and hitting them) but get rid of the other stuff. I am skeptical this will happen any time soon though. |
Anonymous
And extremely hard to find the right balance. It’s a big reason why permissiveness has become so common. We’re not supposed to hit or yell at kids so when they push boundaries for the millionth time that day? What happens then? Parents ignore it. |
Anonymous
That’s ridiculous. Housing is so expensive because of the land. Saving one bedroom won’t solve that. Activities for kids are a fraction of my property tax bill. Community college? Go read the stats on outcomes of CC students and get educated yourself. Its a waste of two years because they will not be prepared for actual university anyways |
Anonymous
The daily’s coverage of this article literally says it’s because of economic insecurity— kids of the 80s are the first gen to have large portion do worse than their parents, and they want to protect their kids from similar downside in economic security |
Anonymous
Okay? I’m still certain that if moms weren’t working full time they would be better rested and healthier |
Anonymous
Do you also complain bc you’re not allowed to pack Spam and Jello for lunch anymore, you actually have to give fruits and vegetables? |
Anonymous
At the expense of their health. |