Reply to Being average when you know they can do better

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am not a teacher, but I married into a family full of teachers.  My in-laws have always spoken, at length, about many of their observations.  One that they've mentioned over the years is how, sometimes, when you have two superstar parents, you end up with with a meh kid, or even a dumb kid.  They attribute this to a few different things:

- Parents over scheduling and helicoptering because there's a lot of pressure on superstar parents to produce a superstar kid. This isn't child-led and leaves the children with little opportunity to build confidence in themselves and find things at which they are good.  This can also lead to a sort of quiet rebellion on the part of the kid, on some level.  I'll bet you give a lot of attention to your kids for NOT excelling.  On some level, they know this gets a rise out of you.  If a parent isn't possible to please, why bother?

- Parents being more focused on their careers than on developing their child academically.  Frankly, your kids might think you both work all the damn time, and they might have opinions about that.  High pressure careers come with stress.  You're very quick to assume that your kids see your work ethic as noble, and you seem confused as to why they don't want to emulate you.

- Parents conceiving with sub-optimal genetic material, since they're older. Superstars rarely crank out kids in their reproductive prime. They're still in school, getting established, making a name for themselves. Their egg and sperm might be able to get the job done (with or without assistance), but still isn't at its prime.  This might not apply to your case, since you said your kids are talented.  However, by your own admission your kids don't have much to show for their supposedly high level of talent.  Have you considered that they might just be talented only in your eyes?  Who knows?  They might actually not be as smart as you think.

- Children spending a disproportionate amount of time in their early years with people who aren't as intelligent as the parents.

- Parents' high ability to farm out basic household tasks to outside support, which they need to do in order to save their sanity.  This leave leaves the kids with minimal real world responsibilities beyond school/sports/whatever.  This is a big one.  In some of these households, there are many people waiting on the kids (often indirectly, so they parents don't think it is a problem).  The result is that the kids don't have to take really any degree of responsibility for steering the family ship.  If you have a lawn guy, your kids don't have to mow the lawn in the hot summer.  They also don't learn that manual labor is tough, and that a great white collar job might be a ticket out of a lifestyle where you have to do crap like that.  If you have a house cleaner, your kids probably don't know that toilets really start to smell and that they need to be scrubbed thoroughly.  If you've got a meal prep service, or you get a lot of takeout from Whole Foods, Larlo never learns that meal prep can take all day on Sunday, and that it cuts into other things he'd rather be doing.  My in laws have found that career oriented, "power couple" type households with robust help can often churn out shockingly incapable kids, because the damn kids have never had to troubleshoot anything, screw in a light bulb, and so on.

Your kids probably have absolutely no idea what is involved in the responsibilities of day to day life, or just how much money is involved in running a household such as yours.  Good luck to them.  There are many partners at my husband's firm who had ONE successful parent (one partner's Mom had a job at Lehman, another partner had a Dad was a partner at another firm, and so on).  However most of them had an at home parent, or at least someone who was very part time and added some balance to the household.  Believe me, there is no balance in households like yours.  And the sad thing is that you probably think you set it up perfectly.  ("Hey! If I just outsource as much as possible, we will have tons of time for family!!")  You can't spend all day grinding away, come home to a hot meal prepared by Esmeralda, have all house and lawn work done by someone else, and expect your kids to have a damn clue.  You just cant.[/quote]

NP here.  This post makes some good points.  However, I think the PP is conflating the OP's situation with the situation of a hard-charging career mom.  From OP's post, I could not tell whether OP was a working mom or a stay-at-home mom.  Plenty of SAHM's are very high achievers and very self-disciplined, at least the ones I know in Bethesda.

Nevertheless, PP makes some good points.  I will say that some of those points hit too close to home, and that I don't necessarily agree with them.  My DH and I both work full-time for a variety of reasons.  We went to top schools but chose more family-friendly jobs.  We have 3 kids and therefore have household help at this stage in life (cleaning once a week, and an after-school babysitter who prepares weekday meals).  However, I wouldn't characterize my kids as clueless.  We live in a modest house with old cars, in part because paying for this household help (a sanity saver for us) means we don't have the money to live in a better house or driver better cars.

As a kid, my mom had to ramp up her career when my dad's job had some setbacks, and we also had weekly cleaning and help with meals.  I don't consider myself clueless either.  
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