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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was friends with someone who did part-time work at one of the competitive (but not big three) schools in MoCo. She ended up leaving because she said the kids were so stressed out and fearful of anything short of perfection. She was a high achiever herself and from a highly competitive public school in the Northeast. She thought it was not the DMV but more the times. [/quote]

It’s definitely the times. I live elsewhere and am involved in independent school leadership. We hear parents during  admissions season say they want a supportive community, a low-pressure school focused on individuals, not achievement, and a place where their child is valued for who they are. And these parents genuinely want this- it’s not fake. But once their child is in school the script flips and they want to know why we aren’t testing, why exmissions weren’t “better”, comparisons to other area schools, and explanations for why their 2nd grader is doing pre-calc.

[b]It is ALL fear and insecurity and it comes from parents who don’t actually know their own values and what they hold important. They are scared to be in touch with or even discuss what they’re trying to get out of in life, and they fall back on the safety of external validation and “achievement” once their children are old enough to be compared to others or have to compete for resources.[/b]

It’s probably the biggest problem facing schools, parents, and kids.[b] And I have no idea how it can get fixed because so few people dare to walk away from the game- and those that do are often so privileged that they are actually the ones running the game and making the rules.[/b][/quote]

I think you ended up inadvertently nailing the point here --[/quote]

But this definitely isn't the case in this day and age. The external markers of adulthood -- buying a house in a good pyramid, saving for your kids' college while also paying for daycare, medical expenses, and retirement, have all gotten incredibly expensive. Income inequality is at an all-time high.

To survive in this world, kids need to be at the top of their game economically. And that means that they have to CRUSH IT in their schoolwork and ECs in high school, get accepted into a reputable college (not necessarily an elite one, but at the very least a solid school like VA Tech), and major in CS or Finance or do pre-med.

After college graduation, young adults these days MUST go into tech or finance or into med school (with hopes of matching into a lucrative speciality, not something like pediatrics) if they want to be UMC (not rich, just comfortable) in this day and age. 
 [/quote]

DP.  Fwiw, this is incorrect.  Income inequality is at an all time high but that's a red herring.  Aside from the 0.0001%, the MC is shrinking because the UMC/UC is increasing.  The size of the LC is not growing, the MC are moving up.  Gen Z has figured out that a college degree is not worth it for many people and companies/employers are dropping these requirements.  While doctors and lawyers can be lucrative stable careers (or not), there are plenty of other avenues to UMC/UC lives for our kids.

It may be hard to see in the Bay Area, and it may be hard to see in the DMV, but we don't need to fight over Ivy/top tier schools for our kids.  The pressure and insecurity is false.  [/quote]

PP here. No, you’re totally wrong. There are NOT a lot of other avenues to the UMC for kids these days except for tech, finance, medicine, consulting, or corporate law. And where you go to college matters — full stop.

You seem like a deluded privileged person. You’re probably in the first or third category of what the PP described:

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Independent school OP. I was thinking about this thread last night and going back to the original question and the idea of privilege and attitude about achievement/outcome and how those two things interact. Privilege seems to inform how the people who have it behave, but everyone is driven by how secure they feel in their place in society, so I think the quest for security is more of a common denominator in our specific community.

Our school families can be divided into four types. Imagine a graph with security on one axis and desire for achievement on the other- our families would be arrayed in 4 quadrants on this graph:

1) lower security, content attitude about outcome: these families are rare- they often grew up near our school when the city was more affordable and low-key and were able to fairly easily access competitive high schools and elite colleges when admissions were less difficult. They might have inherited a house and have a stable professional career, but they’re not tech millionaires. They recognize their relative privilege and know the odds of their children following in their footsteps is unlikely because of increased competition and demand for housing, elite schools, etc. but that they’ll have the security and status they’ve inherited, so they focus on other things.

2) higher security, striving: these parents are 1st generation kids of professional-class immigrants or they’re the 1st generation in their family to have the resources to have their child in private school. Their cultural values or anxiety about replicating their generation’s success mean that they want their child to be high-achieving and in a high-achieving environment and they want visible success.

3) higher security, content attitude about outcome: these parents are so rich that they don’t need to worry about their kids’ external achievements and can guide them towards following their passions, or they went through the tiger parent/high achievement gauntlet and don’t want their kids to experience the same thing for diminishing returns in a more competitive world.

4) lower security, striving: This group is divided but they all want high achievement from their kids and measurable results at their school. They might come from middle class backgrounds and be rich now, but feel anxiety about their social status and where they fit into their neighborhood or a private school community. They always want more. Or they might be recent immigrants who don’t have extensive networks or material wealth and rightly see their children’s achievements as a valuable future resource that will provide security.

The families in groups 1 and 3 have the highest social status at our school and they’re the ones everyone wants to be like, probably because they are confident and relaxed. But in reality, the anxieties of groups 2 and 4 are louder and what teachers and the administration have to respond to.
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