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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m sending my youngest to college next year. He got into a good school early addmission and all of my kids  did well.  But as I look back on this parenting experience it occurs to me that the kids with the fanaticaly involved parents did the best - academically and  athletically.

When the kids were in early elementary school,  I remember shaking my head as my fellow parents talked about advanced  math tutoring for their kindergartener or plotting to get their second grader on the most competitive travel team.  At the time it seemed so silly to chart out the life of a kid who still needed naps. [b]However, looking at those kids now - those are the kids who are going on to play sports at top colleges.

My takeaway is that even if you are a committed free range parent - your kid is in a competitive environment competing for scarce opportunities to go to top schools and play for competitive  school teams.

I’m not unhappy about how my kids turned out or their experience in high School.  But I don’t think I realized the the decision not to push advanced math in grade school meant a  diminished opportunity to go to Tech or UMD.  I definitely didn’t realize that only doing town baseball (and not travel) meant that they wouldn’t make the highschool team.

It not like my kids were  slouches. They played on at least one rec team every season. Swim team in the summer and got good grades and scores on standardized tests.

But I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve pushed harder our results would’ve been much better.[/quote]

I mean, it's a little odd that you regard that as an envious accomplishment. I wouldn't wish that for my children in a million years. Being a college athlete would suck. The team owns you. It wouldn't be an authentic college experience. And, with the exception of a slice of football and basketball players, there's no meaningful career to go into in the sport afterwards.

Same for pushing math and STEM artificially. I mean, if your kid has natural aptitude, by all means, challenge them. But trying to engineer it or force a love for it in a kid who is inclined in the humanities is silly. And the joke's on them -- STEM careers aren't future proof and we're in the process of seeing a massive shakeout of disruption. On the flip side, kids with liberal arts degrees are going to be super high demand by employers, including tech employers, in the coming decades.

So, I'm with #teamadequateparenting. You got them launched. You did your job. Don't compare -- they may have gotten what they wanted, but it was likely a Faustian bargain.[/quote]

I was a college athlete at Amherst and I agree with this assessment about the team owning you. It can be very challenging and it is 1000x better than at a D1 school, especially if you play a winter sport (which spans three seasons). I also do not agree that parental involvement in everything creates better athletes or students. In my experience at elite schools and in elite sports truly superior talent is superior and parental involvement can enhance that but it can't create that. Athletically there is simply no way to fake talent. Academically a slew of tutors can help with homework and write papers but I found that peers who went through institutions like Horace Mann and Penn before we ended up at grad school together were either very smart - real intellectual animals - or were almost incapable of doing anything for themself. They really had no confidence in their own abilities and their confidence is paper thin. These kids are the kids who on paper look great but end stalling out post-grad school or post-college because they don't know how to navigate in a workplace. They are so used to having parents advocate for them and tutors think for them that they can't function without that level of scaffolding.

Supporting your children in their interests and where they need help academically is different from micromanaging their existence. The latter creates narcissistic people with paper thin egos who when they can no longer fail forward have breakdowns because they are entitled and have no idea who they are and what they want.[/quote]

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