Reply to Thrivers (book), raising kids in a pressure cooker area

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Thrivers (book), raising kids in a pressure cooker area "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Has anyone read this book? It was recommended to me and some many of the descriptions of the kids remind me of kids in the DMV area.  Just reading DCUM is exhausting as a parent. The expectations on kids to be perfect at every turn.  Being good enough is no longer enough.  The kid must be in GT/AAP, excel in EC, start sports at a young age, take tons of APs. In a highly rated public or private school, not some mediocre school! And even with all of that, college admissions are crazy hard.   There was a much bigger margin of error when I was growing up.  Perfection was not an expectation.  According to the book’s author, something has to give because kids are experiencing record levels of depression and anxiety.  They have perfect applications and resumes but are miserable and can’t function in the real world. And it’s a fine line in this area between encouraging your kids to do well and being an overbearing parent who pushes a kid too hard.  Thoughts? Have you seen this? How do you handle it as a parent?[/quote]

This is why I'm moving out of the Wootton district.   My kid is just fine at school and activities, but he's not great.  He's not high achieving.  He's well rounded and average in many things.  And living in this culture is doing a number on him.   So I'm looking for something more reflective of regular American life.  He will do fine in life with a career, etc.  It just might take him a bit longer to get there.   But I need his mental health to be solid.

Thanks for brining the book to my attention. I will check it out. [/quote]

+1.  Left Wootton for the same reason.  Found that there was too much of a difference between our notion of childhood (and our parenting style) and our neighbors from Russia, Taiwan, South Korea, South Asia.  [/quote]

Well I'm a parent from Russia, and while I don't know exactly what you mean by the Russian notion of childhood, most of the Russian parents I know are doing what we're doing not necessarily because we want our kids ahead of the pack.  It's because we remember our own childhood and while we like this country, we are appalled by the elementary years education even in the better schools.  The utter lack of rigor, no homework, no textbooks, no system, no foundation set for the future, no classics, no foreign language, no algebra until god knows when, the complete absence of academic music schools, the amateurish quality of arts and music instruction...the list of goes.  So we have to compensate it with extracurriculars outside of school.  That's why we put our kids into RSMs, AoPSs, private music, ballet, what have you.  We don't want them to miss what we had, even in our restricted, poor, under-resourced but over-educated country.

In fact, while I don't exactly understand this decision, a Russian-American family we know is relocating to Moscow when their youngest hits 5.  They want the kids to have the benefit of rigorous, free schooling with cheap, high-quality extracurriculars. [/quote]

Do college acceptance trends say that all this is worth it?  Or you just want your kids to have a better foundation? [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics