How do you raise high achievers?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an average person and would like my child to have a chance at being a high achiever in life. How can I help or guide him?

Label them as adhd asd and diagnose them with anxiety disorder

What is wrong with you? Seriously!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Find a good mating partner.

DH and I are both high achievers in academics. Both sets of grandparents were also well educated high achievers. We do not come from a family of athletes. My son loves basketball but I just don’t think he has the genetic makeup for it. He is an average height Asian kid.

So do we, and yet .... that is neither necessary, nor sufficient.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My husband is a high achiever and I sort of am (I'm more of an "effective person") and our kid is shaping up to be pretty high achieving in high school.

My advice is:
- facilitate good habits. things like finish what you started, if something takes less than 5 minutes do it now, screens off when studying, screen time rules in general (age limits, app restrictions, put away at night, no way when with family or at dinner), study, be on time, brush your hair and look presentable, etc..
- make sure their friends are good kids. you can't 100% control this, but we did in certain ways and by high school our kid had friends who would ride in our car and talk about their classes and their extra curriculars and what jobs they wanted to work together in the summers (instead of just show each other TikTok videos and being idiots, which I am sure they do, but not all the time and not around us)
- present opportunities for activities and extracurriculars and model these behaviors
- work with them to help them learn concepts and think about hard things like tests and college
- teach them that they need to put themselves out there to achieve. it's not really enough to just apply to something and hope you're picked. you have to network and leverage and ask for what you want and also be good enough at it.

It helps if they are smart and kind and thoughtful.

So I'd say 50% nature 50% nurture but the jury is still out on my sample size of 1.

You need nature and nurture, but the bigger part is luck -- so many things outside of your control can derail it all, and most of the time, you as the parent will not even know what it was.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an average person and would like my child to have a chance at being a high achiever in life. How can I help or guide him?

Talk to them all the time, starting the day they are born.

Narrate your life. Explain concepts, vocabulary, causal relationships.

Your kids will literally be years ahead of their peers.

This has nothing to do with a kid becoming high achieving

Shows how much you know

"There was a direct correlation between the children who’d heard a lot of parent talk and how prepared they were to learn once they arrived at school. Hart and Risley wrote, “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies [grew] and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age 3 and later.”"

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/42177/what-parents-can-gain-from-learning-the-science-of-talking-to-kids

Higher IQ does not equal driven.

PP here who initially posted about talking to kids (I did not subsequently post the study info)

Agree that high IQ does not equal high achieving.

But constant narration and discussion also helps develop communication, critical thinking, a moral code, etc.

I’d argue that, taken together, these factors dramatically increase the likelihood of being “high achieving”.

Also makes for strong, independent human beings, which was goal #1 for us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an average person and would like my child to have a chance at being a high achiever in life. How can I help or guide him?

Talk to them all the time, starting the day they are born.

Narrate your life. Explain concepts, vocabulary, causal relationships.

Your kids will literally be years ahead of their peers.

I have a friend who does this and I wonder when they have time to let it mull in their brains and think independently.

It's not literally "all the time", but it's many times most days.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an average person and would like my child to have a chance at being a high achiever in life. How can I help or guide him?

Label them as adhd asd and diagnose them with anxiety disorder

I am not PP, but this IS happening. Google it. People falsely get their kids diagnosed to give them an advantage in education.

Every university now maintains an “Office of Disabilities” to offer services and to do that, these offices keep detailed records on which students claim disabilities. ADD, ADHD, Asbergers, etc, are disabilities.

Up to 25% of students at many universities are registered as disabled.

Does anyone seriously believe the actual rate of disability is 25% ??

It gets worse. Most universities have significant percentages of international students. They actually rely on these students financially because they pay full out of state tuition.

If you subtract the international students from the percent disabled, then the percentages go way above 25%. Interestingly, virtually no international students claim the extra disability benefits.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an average person and would like my child to have a chance at being a high achiever in life. How can I help or guide him?

Label them as adhd asd and diagnose them with anxiety disorder

I am not PP, but this IS happening. Google it. People falsely get their kids diagnosed to give them an advantage in education.

Every university now maintains an “Office of Disabilities” to offer services and to do that, these offices keep detailed records on which students claim disabilities. ADD, ADHD, Asbergers, etc, are disabilities.

Up to 25% of students at many universities are registered as disabled.

Does anyone seriously believe the actual rate of disability is 25% ??

It gets worse. Most universities have significant percentages of international students. They actually rely on these students financially because they pay full out of state tuition.

If you subtract the international students from the percent disabled, then the percentages go way above 25%. Interestingly, virtually no international students claim the extra disability benefits.

Anyone who claims there is not major corruption/ abuse to the disability system in the US is either severely naive or they are lying / cheating the system and don’t want to admit it.

[Anonymous]

There are smart aholes.

Teach kids to be empathetic, they will always be smart. We need more nice people and less aholes

[Anonymous]

Wow . Nature /Nuture 101. I am a normal guy. I work in education, went to an average college, played sports but wasn't a standout, and my wife was pretty much the same as I . AND or daughter is ridiculous. She is an excellent athlete who is going to play at a topnotch college. She has over a 4.0, and we have never ever had to ask about her grades or HW or anything.
She just is who she is. I wish I thought I was some kind of super parent, but I just think that for whatever reason that is just who she is innately
We have other kids who we love the same as her, but they are just different ( she is the oldest). One of our younger kids may not go to college at all which we are fine with because he/she has other interests that he/she can pursue .
I never offer advice unless someone asks, but since you asked I would say just let them be themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow . Nature /Nuture 101. I am a normal guy. I work in education, went to an average college, played sports but wasn't a standout, and my wife was pretty much the same as I . AND or daughter is ridiculous. She is an excellent athlete who is going to play at a topnotch college. She has over a 4.0, and we have never ever had to ask about her grades or HW or anything.
She just is who she is. I wish I thought I was some kind of super parent, but I just think that for whatever reason that is just who she is innately
We have other kids who we love the same as her, but they are just different ( she is the oldest). One of our younger kids may not go to college at all which we are fine with because he/she has other interests that he/she can pursue .
I never offer advice unless someone asks, but since you asked I would say just let them be themselves.

I think it used to be how you describe your daughter is. Some kids were just smart and driven but now every parent wants their kids to be smart, top athlete, land at a top college etc. It just seems unfair to force kids into a mould to fit your desires or expectations. And this I feel is mostly driven by ego. We don’t want our kids to be less than other kids in any way possible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We have two kids currently at top colleges. Here are some things we tried to do:

- Limit screen time as long as you can. We had zero screens until age 2 and held off on phones until 8th grade
- Expose them to the world…museums, age appropriate performing arts, gardens, travel, restaurants, wide range of people and experiences. Doesn’t have to be expensive and there are a lot of free things to do in the DMV area
- Have dinner together every night and talk with each other. When they are younger, okay guessing games at meals
- Attend their events, show interest and be supportive
- Let them try lots of things and quit at appropriate intervals if they know the activity is not for them
- If they find something they’re passionate about, let them go all in and support as much as you can afford and tolerate
- Applaud their effort and not so much their accomplishments
- Lead by example: volunteer, show up at work and at home, take care of your health, celebrate milestones large and small, love your own life fully

I thought I was going to hate this list. But this is fantastic and what all parents should do. Love the lead by example

I particularly like "what you can tolerate in the 3 bullet from the bottom. I encourage my daughter's interests but some are so tedious to me.

[Anonymous]

The high achievers I know were neglected as kids.