The helicopter parents won - a look back

[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.

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

I maybe didn't say it in this thread, but I believe that. You can have a great childhood and productive adulthood if you don't or can't participate in activities. It's ok the kids will be alright

[Anonymous]

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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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

Structured activities can be great, but I think necessary is a stretch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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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.

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

That seems to be the disconnect- I don't think anyone (?) is arguing that kids shouldn't have ANY downtime. I'm the PP former high school teacher. I think where I noticed the issues were with kids who didn't participate in ANY activities. I do think that's a red flag. If you're trying to get into a decent college and motivated to study then you typically also realize you need some sort of ECs. So usually these kids are not focused on their academics in addition to having a ton of free time on their hands. It just usually doesn't work out well even if the parents are unaware of what the kids are getting into during this free time.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

That seems to be the disconnect- I don't think anyone (?) is arguing that kids shouldn't have ANY downtime. I'm the PP former high school teacher. I think where I noticed the issues were with kids who didn't participate in ANY activities. I do think that's a red flag. If you're trying to get into a decent college and motivated to study then you typically also realize you need some sort of ECs. So usually these kids are not focused on their academics in addition to having a ton of free time on their hands. It just usually doesn't work out well even if the parents are unaware of what the kids are getting into during this free time.

My oldest just started high school. My friend told me that our high school is split into two groups - academically oriented kids and the not. The academically oriented kids are the ones who want to go to a good college. They are the ones who WANT to do activities that will help them get into a good college.

Then there are the kids who don’t care.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

That seems to be the disconnect- I don't think anyone (?) is arguing that kids shouldn't have ANY downtime. I'm the PP former high school teacher. I think where I noticed the issues were with kids who didn't participate in ANY activities. I do think that's a red flag. If you're trying to get into a decent college and motivated to study then you typically also realize you need some sort of ECs. So usually these kids are not focused on their academics in addition to having a ton of free time on their hands. It just usually doesn't work out well even if the parents are unaware of what the kids are getting into during this free time.

My oldest just started high school. My friend told me that our high school is split into two groups - academically oriented kids and the not. The academically oriented kids are the ones who want to go to a good college. They are the ones who WANT to do activities that will help them get into a good college.

Then there are the kids who don’t care.

I didn't do a ton of activities growing up, but I knew what I wanted and worked very hard to get it academically. Its, not at all that didnt care avout my future, but i also valued being a kid and my childhood/free time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

Eh. Several posters seem to be arguing that not participating in activities is perfectly healthy and normal.

Are you making that up or can you quote a single post where someone said that kids shouldn't participate in any activities? I haven't seen that stated once in all of these pages.

Several posts on this page including the other 14:54 poster.

I asked the question AND I'm the 14:54 poster. The list of activities were things kids can do in their free time in addition to structured activities. Structured activities are necessary as is unstructured free time.

Structured activities can be great, but I think necessary is a stretch.

I think this is the other end of the unhealthy extreme and I'm a big advocate for balance. What DO your kids do when they aren't in school? Even going back to the 80s/90s, the kids that didn't do extracurriculars did not turn out well. I can't imagine they'll fare better now.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

No one is arguing that kids should be couch potatoes. Kids should excel in school and participate in activities. That is not the same as curating a kids’ life so that they end up in an elite school. It cracks me up when DCUMers get so defensive about “achieving” and yet have minimal reading comprehension/critical thinking skills.

DP. I have often wondered why ostensibly intelligent people (such as one finds in this area) not only lack critical thinking skills but seem utterly unable to articulate the “why” of their beliefs or defend any of the values they claim to hold dear. I suspect it’s because they are always in a kind of structured activity/testing state of mind (preoccupied with doing things the “right” way, or getting to the “correct” answer). Most of them have clearly never thought deeply about any social, political, philosophical, or spiritual matters - they are just following some sort of #lifegoals checklist and congratulating themselves on checking off more boxes than their neighbors.

Or something like that.

[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:

Anonymous wrote:

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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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

DP- but all the checked out parents are saying the same things. "Boredom is good! I ran around the neighborhood not doing activities and look at me now, I'm doing great!" Everyone's upbringing inspires and influences their parenting choices.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

When I was a kid, I was indeed often bored. I was a very active and social teen. I didn’t go to as good of a college but I did end up at an ivy grad school where I met my DH.

I want my kids to try their best and end up happy well adjusted adults. My kids will have trust funds so their lives are very different than mine.

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

When I was a kid, I was indeed often bored. I was a very active and social teen. I didn’t go to as good of a college but I did end up at an ivy grad school where I met my DH.

I want my kids to try their best and end up happy well adjusted adults. My kids will have trust funds so their lives are very different than mine.

I truly don’t get it. What’s the problem with your upbringing? Do you think your kids would have bigger trust funds if you didn’t watch tv as a kid? Would you gave gone to an ivy-er grad school had you gotten into a better college?

[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:

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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

DP- but all the checked out parents are saying the same things. "Boredom is good! I ran around the neighborhood not doing activities and look at me now, I'm doing great!" Everyone's upbringing inspires and influences their parenting choices.

What do you mean by “checked out” parents?

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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.

Did Darwin or Einstein make the high school baseball team? Just think of what could have been if their parents had pushed just a little bit harder!

Interestingly Einstein credits his mother forcing him to play violin as critical to his success. Anyone saying that it's all just a highly motivated child has no idea what they are talking about and is oblivious to the world around them.

"It isn’t easy to nurture a genius, let alone raise one. In their case studies, the authors found that every child who went on to be successful had unique stories about how their were raised, but their plots were all the same: They had parents who made very strategic parenting choices."

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/15/how-this-formula-that-helped-albert-einsteins-parents-raise-a-genius.html

Ah well, I already let my kid quit the violin and we both agree that we’re much happier for it.

But at least you tried. It's the parents who think the kids are in the driver's seat and must be entirely self motivated who will be left behind.

I signed my kid up for private violin lessons at age 6 and we stuck with it for about 5 years, but it was increasingly become a source of contention, and it was clear it was not really going to be a thing for him. Meanwhile, my daughter, who had never really expressed any interest music at a young age, joined the middle school orchestra, fell in love with playing the cello, and will play at least through high school. I’ve never once had to remind her to practice. She just found something that clicked and ran with it. I’ll take the latter experience any day.

And maybe if your daughter had been encouraged to take instrument lessons at a younger age, she'd have loved it. Starting in middle school with a school level orchestra is pretty low level, and she is now capped at how well she can play.

That is such a sad, sad view of life. Who gives a flying crap if a kid doesn’t end up at the very top of something? Low level? They found something that brings them joy. Fun. Joy. Do you understand the concept of having an interest bc it’s fun and enriches your life vs. just something to add to a CV or college app? You people are pathetic.

These people aren’t raising kids - they’re raising future college students.

We all are doing what we think is best for our kids. Personally I think parents just relaxing on the weekends and letting their kids be on their iPads and other screens is a huge disservice to the children. I grew up watching tv during most of my spare time. There is so much to be done. I know parents think being bored is going to create all this amazing self motivated projects from kids but this isn’t what happens. I want more for my kids. I want them to do more, achieve more.

Well it sounds like your boring upbringing has inspired your adult self motivated project to live vicariously through your children. What exactly is the endgame?

DP- but all the checked out parents are saying the same things. "Boredom is good! I ran around the neighborhood not doing activities and look at me now, I'm doing great!" Everyone's upbringing inspires and influences their parenting choices.

What do you mean by “checked out” parents?

The ones who do the absolute bare minimum. They don't sign their kids up for activities b/c they don't want to drive, don't want to spend time, money, weekends, etc. Because "what's the point, they will never be great." It's a lazy cop out.