Can anyone help me understand family with really low expectations for their kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s hilarious how sanctimonious phonies populate this forum — e.g. every teen is a good human being! Meanwhile the school and real estate forums are all about obsessively studying free lunch, rental and test rates to avoid lower class schools and neighborhoods and maximizing your real estate investment. Too funny.

Seriously. Love how the DCUM -- we are barely scraping by as lower middle class at 300k crowd is suddenly jumping all over OP because she wants her kids to go to college, have a $$$ profession etc. You know all of you are doing what you can to live in the "right' districts -- i.e. white/Asian with a huge % going to college, low teen pregnancy, low school lunch -- and get your kids into the right colleges so they'll launch into ibanking, law, med, tech etc. But how dare OP criticize BIL/SIL for letting their kids hang out with the pregnant losers who'll be working retail jobs!?

OP -- are they small town people? Bc this mentality totally exists in small towns. There are SO many kids dropping out, pregnant at 16, doing drugs, barely making the grades in school to where it's known that their future will consist of retail or factories. So then the regular families who have kids who are B or C students, who go to school, don't make trouble and are just gaming all the time at home -- they AND THE KIDS start to think -- OMG we really have our lives together, such great kids, they'll do great in life. Reality is that was considered fine in 1970, but it certainly isn't competitive in 2019. Often the parents realize it when the kid goes to the middling local u and then it becomes abundantly clear as they graduate in 6 yrs hopping from one major to the next that this is a kid destined for a paper pushing office job, and couldn't become a dr. or lawyer even if he wanted it bc he's so far behind what is considered good in the normal world.

Sorry I -- and I suspect OP -- want more for our kids. I want drs., lawyers, or bankers with a few ivy degrees. And I'm Asian so it's perfectly acceptable to let these expectations be known in our homes and our kids do work up to those expectations.

Nailed it. Well put. Perception is a wild thing. You can tell these folks their kids are behind until you're blue in the face and they will not believe you. They'll think you're nuts. They just can't wrap their head around what's out there outside of their own zip code.

Behind according to what metric? Future $$? A prestigious career in the future? A lot of us don’t care about that. Doesn’t mean kids like you describe are behind.

[Anonymous]

OP, what are your personal achievements?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Behind according to what metric? Future $$? A prestigious career in the future? A lot of us don’t care about that. Doesn’t mean kids like you describe are behind.

In the UK, we call adult children doing nothing, NEETs for Not in Education, Employment or Training. You think idle kids like that are fine/average and self-sufficient children destined for success are mere overachievers? I'm confused by posts like yours. It's not 1965, there aren't any factory jobs to give idle unskilled young people a decent life. If you're not interested in college you better be ambitious in something, seek training somewhere. If you're just a layabout with flunky friends you're going to be a lifetime leech.

[Anonymous]

You’re enlightened OP. The situation you describe is why low and middle income school districts so rarely produce top students. It’s not extra funding or a brand new building or how many iPads are at school or Common Core — it always goes back to the family.

[Anonymous]

I don't get people like that either, OP.

[Anonymous]

OP, you asked for help understanding. Is that the case or were you looking for people to back up your assessment of those people?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, are these in laws from a different culture or nationality than you are from? Are they your husband’s family, or the family of a sibling of yours?

OP, if you’re still around, any insight on this? Are the in laws from a different culture from yours that your own culture might typically look down on?

[Anonymous]

op sounds just like my in laws. Some people are tiger parents. Some people are not. How is this hard to understand?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You’re enlightened OP. The situation you describe is why low and middle income school districts so rarely produce top students. It’s not extra funding or a brand new building or how many iPads are at school or Common Core — it always goes back to the family.

+1. Especially the low/middle income school districts in rural areas. The expectations for those kids are just different from our expectations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You’re enlightened OP. The situation you describe is why low and middle income school districts so rarely produce top students. It’s not extra funding or a brand new building or how many iPads are at school or Common Core — it always goes back to the family.

+1. Especially the low/middle income school districts in rural areas. The expectations for those kids are just different from our expectations.

Especially if they want to students to stay close to home as adults, enhanced expectations will not keep them there. And, if the kids are average academically, it may be for the best.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When you realize just how much can go wrong, their goals sound fine. I have a friend who says “alive at 25” is his goal.

This. I know two separate families who each started out with 3 kids and had only one of the three survive to 25. One lost a daughter at 16 and another daughter at 22, and have only their son. The other lost their middle son at 4 and their oldest son at 24, only the youngest son has survived. All a mixture of illness, accidents, and suicide. I don't know how any of them go on. I am sure they'd trade the world for a living child pregnant out of wedlock, or flunking community college, or in the basement playing Call of Duty 18 hours a day. It only takes one moment to ruin everything and shatter all expectations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I honestly don’t see a problem with this. In a lot of ways it’s probably better than the pressure cooker scenario so common here.

Because there's no healthy medium between psychotic tiger parenting ... and hands-off cluelessness where your kids mix with future trailer park residents?

You are a true piece of work. I grew up in a trailer park, went to college, didn't get pregnant until my 30s, never been hooked on drugs, oh, and I make well over 250K. I look back on my childhood and don't ever think we were trash and my parents were amazing. They don't have college degrees but worked hard for their family and gave us the room to figure out what makes us happy.

I can't wait until karma catches up with you!

+1. I grew up in the ghetto in South Africa under the apartheid government, went to a prestigious university (the first in my family to do so), and have lived, and worked in, several countries. I'm not saying this to be smug, but to show that it doesn't matter where you come from or what your parents have because if you don't know how to push yourself, no-one can do it for you. Parents who do everything for their children are not helping them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would be very careful being judgmental OP. You have no idea how that is all going to work out until all your kids are grown. Seriously, we all know families who were judgmental and ended up with kids who crashed and burned. Not saying that will happen, but kids can be unpredictable and so can life. Slow your roll. Trust me.

This is so true.

My parents expected we would go to college. I was the valedictorian, went to an Ivy League school and grad school, never touched a drug or had sex in high school type. So worked out for me.

My middle brother had some mental health issues and a rebellious streak. There were drugs. There were not straight As. And it turns out when your kid is 15 years old, you can refuse to drive them places, but you sure can't control their social circle at school. The scariest part for me was that one or two if his friends killed themselves in high school, so I just wanted him to get through alive. It took him until his mid-20s to graduate from his third college after bouncing back home a few times and working fast food, but he has a career he truly loves where his rebellious steak is a strength now.

Youngest brother is autistic. Will probably never be self supporting, didn't go to college, lives at home, a big issue for my parents is planning for after they're gone.

My point is that "high expectations" really only works on the kids who are already prone to doing what you want. There are a lot of issues where they will not help your kid make it ok to adulthood, and sometimes academic achievement isn't even the biggest thing you need to focus on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Behind according to what metric? Future $$? A prestigious career in the future? A lot of us don’t care about that. Doesn’t mean kids like you describe are behind.

In the UK, we call adult children doing nothing, NEETs for Not in Education, Employment or Training. You think idle kids like that are fine/average and self-sufficient children destined for success are mere overachievers? I'm confused by posts like yours. It's not 1965, there aren't any factory jobs to give idle unskilled young people a decent life. If you're not interested in college you better be ambitious in something, seek training somewhere. If you're just a layabout with flunky friends you're going to be a lifetime leech.

For a bit of perspective:
My adult DD is very intelligent, but has ADHD. She wasn’t diagnosed until the summer before 9th grade so she didn’t get the accommodations that might have made it possible for her to do the AAP for MS and HS that you might have predicted from her ES performance and IQ. Instead, we let her do honors classes and sports. She did so many sports and was super social. She went to a decent college where she made HR and majored in the same field as her ES friends who did the AAPs. At graduation, all entered a tough job market for that field. Fast forward three years and she is one of only three kids from that ES peer group employed FT in that field and the only female. The rest are living at home working PT or they left the field that they prepared for from age 11. My DD doesn’t have the secondary school transcript full of promise, but she has amazing memories of middle and high school and still got the career she wanted. More than one way to skin a cat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You’re enlightened OP. The situation you describe is why low and middle income school districts so rarely produce top students. It’s not extra funding or a brand new building or how many iPads are at school or Common Core — it always goes back to the family.

+1. Especially the low/middle income school districts in rural areas. The expectations for those kids are just different from our expectations.

Increasingly, they are producing nicer and more emotionally sturdy human beings. I worry about all the hothouse flowers I read about on DCUM or the wealthy parents of varsity blues who couldn’t tell their fragile kids that they were not eligible to go to UCLA.