<p>I agree with the suggestions of ECs that might interest her. My guess is ones which have other smart kids would work best. For my D it was mock trial. It forced her out of her comfort zone and taught her public speaking.</p>
<p>Her D needs to understand that a 4.0 is not necessary to get into a very good college (hence the Newport book I recommended up top). That might take some stress off her… Last year my D2 had a 3.7, no hook, and got into U of Chicago, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd, Carleton, and several slightly lower ranked schools with good merit aid offered at those.</p>
<p>
Inclined to agree.</p>
<p>psych and expat-I was thinking so too, unless it’s a problem with perfectionism. I have a friend who went back to school and reported on a regular basis her hours and hours of time spent on homework. She’d be near a breakdown over every test, which she would then ace. Now she’s working 16 hour days, not because that’s expected of her, but because she feels she has to get every last thing perfect. She knows it’s a problem and won’t get help, and it’s impacting her home life and her emotional health. </p>
<p>Before the OP moves her daughter into a more challenging program, she would best find out all the issues surrounding the D’s wanting to give up. It could be any number of things.</p>
<p>OP, do you have a baseline of how long other kids are taking with their homework?</p>
<p>If not, you really should network with other parents in the school parent group. Find out how your daughter’s hw time compares with the time spent by other students – both overall, and with comparable grades.</p>
<p>Not saying it’s the case w/ your D, but our (very intelligent) son took (and can still take) an inordinate amount of time with his homework. Subsequent testing showed that it’s part of his learning profile, and appropriate supports and accommodations had to be put in place.</p>
<p>Psych, actually, early on in the thread, I suggested either a more creative, non-graded school or a lower quality school. So I understand where you are coming from.</p>
<p>I know this sounds paradoxical, but my kids have done much better after going to a non-pressured public school (not great quality, not a lot of homework). I went to a high pressure private school, myself, and can really relate to this daughter. I made sure my kids went to an, um, relaxed school and had plenty of free time to do what really interested them outside of school. We never talked about grades or GPA’s (mostly because of my own trauma) and when they came home with report cards, I didn’t even look at them. I know they were working hard (or when they weren’t!), and when they were thriving (or not). I didn’t need to look at the grades).</p>
<p>Ironically, two of them ended up at Ivies, environments that I do not exactly cherish but my kids could handle them because they were not raised in a school system obsessed with stats, and where the whole person was valued, whether headed to a top college or for the workforce or to the military.</p>
<p>ps Despite my “stellar” academics, I was so burnt out that I didn’t go at all, at 18, something that could happen in this young woman’s situation.</p>
<p>I am not convinced a school change is needed. The kid is getting straight As – which she does NOT need to do. This is internal to the kid, sounds like a perfectionist streak to me. I don’t think the answer is an easier environment. I think the answer is getting her to realize that she doesn’t need to get a perfect A every time. Those people actually often make terrible employees once they get out of school, too… life does not require perfection, and knowing when “good enough” is reached is actually a very important skill.</p>
<p>My D had a melt down in sophomore year also. Hers was more that ‘social’ took over her life and she just started ignoring ‘academic’. That sophomore year ruined her GPA and she never recovered the GPA even though everything turned around junior year and she excelled from that point on.</p>
<p>“Sophomore year is hard. The kids are so insecure and can be “mean” to others to try and fit in. It can be very hurtful to the more sensitive kids. I find that Junior year is when the walls come down and students begin to actually “see” each other.”</p>
<p>I disagree with this. I’ve seen kids being mean to others and issues fitting in all the way from kindergarten. There are cliques even in elementary schools, and I know this sort of thing is going on in middle schools also. I think it would be a big mistake to brush this off as just a phase that will soon pass. It won’t magically get better. It sounds to me like the OP’s daughter is trying to fit in with a crowd that essentially isn’t her type, and simply hasn’t found the kids that will click with her. Maybe she does know who they are but is too shy or at this point scared of rejection to try to start a friendship. Maybe she thinks it’s too late to make new friends in high school, since groups do tend to form earlier on. Maybe she mistakenly thinks only the popular kids are worth being friends with.</p>
<p>And how can a kid have no interests? What has she been doing before she started high school?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I was, I believe, the first proponent on this thread of the “it may magically get better” theory. And it was always “it MAY magically get better”; I acknowledged then, and acknowledge now, that something more serious may be going on.</p>
<p>However, I can’t help myself pointing out that each and every one of the things that mathyone says it “sounds like” to her is precisely the sort of thing that DOES pretty much magically get better between 10th and 12th grade, without much more intervention than the occasional cup of hot cocoa and sympathetic ear.</p>
<p>In my experience as a parent, these social issues in high school are different from the related ones in elementary and middle school because kids are separating from their families more definitively and because the increased exposure to actual sexual activity, drugs, alcohol, and work raises the stakes considerably for all kids, including those whose participation in those sorts of activities is limited or nonexistent. </p>
<p>And – again in my experience – it is completely wrong to regard 9th-grade cliques as some immutable natural phenomenon. My daughter is nine years past high school, and with the benefit of hindsight I know pretty definitively who were her most important friends in high school. She was in a fairly well-defined clique from 8th-10th grades, and she is still in touch periodically with most of its members. But no one with whom she is really close now, or at any time since she left high school, was in that clique. The friends who have really affected her life were her friends later in high school. Several of them were her friends at a much younger age, too, but they were barely speaking to each other in 10th grade; her clear #1 closest high school friend is someone she hadn’t even met yet in 10th grade.</p>
<p>Those high school years are very dynamic years. I laugh when parents confidently describe their 9th graders’ career plans, but the kids’ social profiles are no less contingent.</p>
<p>@ JHS: what would it take for you to conclude that, hey, things do not seem to be magically getting better for a child, the parents may need to actively intervene?</p>
<p>Folks, the OP hasn’t been here since post #24! I think she got her answers a few days ago.</p>
<p>ADad: Great question, since in my case we DID intervene, with some of the same radical suggestions people made here, including changing schools and psychiatric care. None of that actually did any harm, but none of it did any good either. (Except for finding a great math tutor – that really did help.)</p>
<p>If I were the OP, I would probably try to get some sort of mental health evaluation, but I would be very slow to pursue any of the more radical solutions proposed.</p>
<p>And, Bigdaddy88: So what? This is a discussion, not a supermarket check-out line.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t yank her out of school either, but neither would I pat her on the head and say it will all be better next year because those kids will change and they will start to seek out your company. In my opinion this is extremely unlikely. Maybe it’s just my own experience, but both my kids suffered considerably from cliques in elementary school. Those kids never did seek out their company. And my kids’ friends have been fairly stable since middle school. I didn’t see or hear anything about social group upheaval when kids got to junior year. </p>
<p>"I’m confused by all the posts suggesting that the OP’s D go to a more difficult high school (or immediately to college) when the OP reports that she is spending hours and hours on homework each night. To me, that doesn’t read as a kid who is not challenged but rather as one who may be over her head academically. "</p>
<p>I think it should be clear to the OP if her daughter is working so hard because she simply wants A’s and has to struggle to get them, or if her daughter is working so hard because of perfectionism. In the latter case, every point off may be a blow to her self-esteem, even if it’s clearly not going to matter for her grade. Being graded on a 100% scale would not be good for such a kid (as opposed to A, B, C where it may be easier to coax her to let go of the perfectionism since a 95 and a 100 will be the same in the end.) Spending excessive time on what she considers to be busywork sounds more like perfectionism to me. If she understands the material really well, she probably only needs a high B average on these busywork assignments to still get an A with her great test grades, but it doesn’t sound like she’d be willing to hand in that kind of work.</p>
<p>JHS, I do agree that there are normal developmental issues. 10th grade does seem to be a rough time for lots of kids. We call it the “Sophomore slump” in our area.</p>
<p>It all takes knowing who your kid is and their history. For us, we knew that 10th grade (age 14 for my DD) was serious trouble because we’d been there before when she was in kindergarten and in a poor academic fit. Her responses were almost identical and while aggravated by puberty certainly, were atypical of puberty in itself. </p>
<p>You know how message boards are. You are given this little snapshot of a situation. When you post “oh, it’s the age and everything will be fine” you are often presented with an updated post with information outside the realm of normal. If you post of an unusual cause or situation with similar results, you will inevitably be marked as an alarmest for jumping too a “radical” conclusion. No one can really win.</p>
<p>Agree about the message board issue. We don’t know OP or the daughter, so we fill in the blanks. Some of us see pathology, some see a normal phase. But we do give OP a wide rage of advice to choose from!</p>
<p>I thought we were just talking. I didn’t realize it was about anyone winning.</p>
<p>I got sucked into this thread because I remembered how panicked I felt in late 2004 and early 2005. I had just taken a big risk with a job change, my wife had an opportunity she had been trying to get for 20 years, but that also entailed personal and financial risk, and now the wheels were coming off our perfect child! Among our close friends, we had the oldest kids, and in any event our close friends were all sort of helicopter-ish to begin with. No one told us we didn’t have to worry quite so much.</p>
<p>"I’m confused by all the posts suggesting that the OP’s D go to a more difficult high school (or immediately to college) when the OP reports that she is spending hours and hours on homework each night. To me, that doesn’t read as a kid who is not challenged but rather as one who may be over her head academically. "</p>
<p>There are different types of “hours and hours” of homework. It’s up to the parent who knows the situation to determine whether the homework is appropriate and their child is over-their-head or whether the homework is inappropriate and their child is spending hours doing laborious and pointless busy work.</p>
<p>For my child, it was clear that the 4-5 hours of homework she was doing a night was pointless when she, frustrated, stopped doing the work and yet continued to ace all her tests and get top scores on her essays. Her grades dropped because in high school, homework is still a big chunk of your grade. However, there was no question that she was mastering the material, even to her teachers. We moved her to a program where she takes most of her classes at the college and this works well for her. Grades are all on tests and papers. She does do additional study when she feels she needs it for mastery but she’s no long micro-managed in her studying. She doesn’t have to write copious amounts of notes on the reading each night to be turned in like she did in high school.</p>
<p>All anyone can do is share their story and the OP’s determine what is relevant to their own situation and what is not.</p>
<p>JHS, haha, “nobody wins” is just an expression. I think you know that but just in case, the point is, on message boards you will always be presented with a wide range of responses and it’s up to the individual to figure out what is relevant to your own situation and what isn’t. It does little good to dismiss the experiences of others because it was THEIR experience and who knows what the OP will find useful. All you can do is present your own and hope it’s helpful.</p>