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.

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

[Anonymous]

OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

Very sad. Not in the way you think, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

It sounds like you don’t know how to be happy. You raised successful kids but you’d rather spend your time in an imaginary world full of random choices you didn’t make rather than celebrate the choices you did make.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

It sounds like you don’t know how to be happy. You raised successful kids but you’d rather spend your time in an imaginary world full of random choices you didn’t make rather than celebrate the choices you did make.

I also know a mom who did everything supposedly right, got her two kids into coveted ivy schools but the kids aren’t happy. They did get the right jobs after graduation to learn it wasn’t for them.

My oldest just started high school and the principal told us that we should not raise our kids to be unhappy in their adult lives after majoring in something they thought they should do or attend a certain college to grow up to be unhappy adults.

My kids do a lot, are exposed to a lot. I want them to be passionate in what they do.

[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.

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

Yes, sounds pretty lazy to live in your tiny little bubble. Do you hav agoraphobia or something?

[Anonymous]

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.

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

Yes, sounds pretty lazy to live in your tiny little bubble. Do you hav agoraphobia or something?

Ok, but if the kid is happy and healthy what exactly is wrong with this? Maybe I was just a weird kid/teen, but I never felt a need to go out with friends to do anything huge. We went out all, movies, amusement parks ect and that was great, but we really were content to hang out at home.

[Anonymous]

Won what?

This kind of crap is why everyone is miserable and anxious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

It sounds like you don’t know how to be happy. You raised successful kids but you’d rather spend your time in an imaginary world full of random choices you didn’t make rather than celebrate the choices you did make.

I also know a mom who did everything supposedly right, got her two kids into coveted ivy schools but the kids aren’t happy. They did get the right jobs after graduation to learn it wasn’t for them.

My oldest just started high school and the principal told us that we should not raise our kids to be unhappy in their adult lives after majoring in something they thought they should do or attend a certain college to grow up to be unhappy adults.

My kids do a lot, are exposed to a lot. I want them to be passionate in what they do.

this is such an immature understanding of choices and careers.

most kids don't know what they want. insofar they do, they are focused on what they want to study, rather than what they want to be. but what matters are types of careers, not 4 years of classes. parents typically know much more about the latter than their children do. it is a parenting malpractice to saddle a teen with a choice with great consequence for the their life, a choice that they really don't know how to make (so they rely on friends, or what campus they like and other completely irrelevant stuff).

also, the idea that kids who major in what they like are going to be happy adults is not evidence based. it's just an assumption. but often, what you think you like and what sounds fun turns out not be fun at all, and jobs based on it turn out to be even less fun. money might seem as a non-issue when you are young and your parents are footing the bills, but what happens when you are 40, or 50 or 60?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s a marathon op. I know Harvard grads who became associate professors. I know Yale students who dropped out 20 years ago and never went back. I know state schools students who founded tech companies. I know Ivy League grads who never married or had kids.

Same.

[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.

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

Yes, sounds pretty lazy to live in your tiny little bubble. Do you hav agoraphobia or something?

Ok, but if the kid is happy and healthy what exactly is wrong with this? Maybe I was just a weird kid/teen, but I never felt a need to go out with friends to do anything huge. We went out all, movies, amusement parks ect and that was great, but we really were content to hang out at home.

Ok, but if everyone isn't exactly like you, isn't that ok too? Some are high energy, like sports, hobbies, activities, and being active. It doesn't make their parents nuts or mean they are going to have mental breakdowns.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

Yes, sounds pretty lazy to live in your tiny little bubble. Do you hav agoraphobia or something?

Ok, but if the kid is happy and healthy what exactly is wrong with this? Maybe I was just a weird kid/teen, but I never felt a need to go out with friends to do anything huge. We went out all, movies, amusement parks ect and that was great, but we really were content to hang out at home.

This is DCUM. Being content does not compute. If it’s not THE BEST school or THE BEST sports team or THE BEST job, it’s nothing. If your kid isn’t a nationally ranked athlete, or winning robotics competitions or raking in the cash at some super sought after job, they you all suck. There is no middle ground. There is no being happy. There is no being content.

The sad part is, it’s not really about wanting the best for the kid. I honestly believe it’s the parents living through their kids. It’s bragging rights, pure and simple. If it wasn’t, they would be happy if their kid was happy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I’ve been reading along and some people have said interesting helpful things (some people have not). My point when I started this thread was even if you think you’re doing a lot for your kids (and I certainly did at the time) your kids live in a competitive space. So the decision not to press sports or academics (or whatever activity you want) to a high level (what I thought was a ridiculous level at the time) may actually be a decision not to make the highschool sports team your kids want or get into thier first choice college.

I wish I understood that when I was making my choices. Whether or not that ultimately matters to thier life path can never be known but in the intermediate term those choices have clear effects.

Finally, I seriously doubt that I would have regretted doing more but I definitely regret doing less.

I think this is the key. Not everyone who tries their hardest at track will be Usain Bolt. Not everyone who has a math tutor will be Einstein. In fact, I'd argue that no matter how hard you try at either of those things (or a million others), 99.9999% of people will never be Usain Bolt or Einstein. I'm not saying that's what you wanted for your kids, but thinking that if they had done travel basketball they would have made the high school team is making a lot of assumptions. Same with having a math tutor and getting into their first choice college. They may have done all the right things and still not reached those goals.

All that to say, I think the point is, when you focus obsessively on specific endgame, it is often going to lead to unhappiness because no particular path guarantees a particular outcome. You can get your kid a math tutor in PreK and they're still not going to get into Harvard, either because they're not smart enough, they don't have hooks, or the coin toss didn't go their way, who knows. But focusing on achieving X can be an unhealthy way for kids to grow up. That's the point people are trying to make. I'm not saying your kid wanted to go to Harvard or that they wanted to play in the NBA, I'm just saying it sounds like you made the best choices for your family at the time and your kids have grown up successful and happy. That is most people's main goal, so congratulations! I wouldn't sweat over lost practice time/money spent on a travel team/afternoons with a tutor. It's quite possible your kids could have ended up overly stressed about academics, exposed to steroid use while on an athletic team, etc. I'm not saying that's a sure thing, of course plenty of kids achieve academic stardom and handle the stress just fine, and not all athletes do dangerous things, I'm just saying you don't know how the path your children took would have been altered by those decisions and since it worked out pretty well I wouldn't spend time second-guessing myself. But that's just me. I wish you peace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are mistaken. Those doors are not always available.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What if they read books with their kids and have deep, meaningful conversations? What if their house is the house that’s always open for friends to come hang out? What if they hike/bike/play catch with the kids, just within the confines of their own neighborhood?

Are they still “checked out”? Still lazy?

Yes, sounds pretty lazy to live in your tiny little bubble. Do you hav agoraphobia or something?

Ok, but if the kid is happy and healthy what exactly is wrong with this? Maybe I was just a weird kid/teen, but I never felt a need to go out with friends to do anything huge. We went out all, movies, amusement parks ect and that was great, but we really were content to hang out at home.

This is DCUM. Being content does not compute. If it’s not THE BEST school or THE BEST sports team or THE BEST job, it’s nothing. If your kid isn’t a nationally ranked athlete, or winning robotics competitions or raking in the cash at some super sought after job, they you all suck. There is no middle ground. There is no being happy. There is no being content.

The sad part is, it’s not really about wanting the best for the kid. I honestly believe it’s the parents living through their kids. It’s bragging rights, pure and simple. If it wasn’t, they would be happy if their kid was happy.

Pretty much sums up DCUM

[Anonymous]

OP I recommend the book Thrivers. It talks about the impact of "pushing" on teens. It's not always positive.