A question for all the parents who made a conscientious decision to step back and let your kids figure out high school and college decisions all on their own, did they ever come back to you, maybe years down the road, and said “mom, why didn’t you push me harder to study more, do more sports and EC’s - I missed out on my dream college because I was just a kid and needed that”.
To explain my position better, I am not planning to stop being a parent and will make sure my daughter knows I am always there to help if she needs me. But I caught myself earlier telling her “you need to take the hardest math classes possible if you want to get into top schools.” Yes, she would probably ace those hardest math classes, but shouldn’t it be her decision to choose them? At the same time, I am not sure which classes would she pick on her own - maybe some easier ones for a chance with her friends. She’s 12 and right now desire to fit in is more that stand out and achieve your best.
So where is that line that separates involved parent from pushy parent and would she ever regret if I tell her she is mature enough to make decisions on what to study and how much?
I know I’m not a parent (I’m in senior year) but here’s my input
My parents never really pushed me at all academically; their attitude was very much “if you slack off, that’ll suck; if you work hard, great; it’s your life and you’ll deal with the consequences.” That worked for me because I practically live by that idea and I am very self-motivated, so despite my parents not even knowing how to access grades online, I have a 4.0 UW GPA, 4.5 W.
That said, the only thing I regret is them not pushing me a tad harder for testing. I got a 33 on the ACT but that was with virtually no studying, and sometimes I wonder what I could have done if I had really tried on that test (to be fair, that’s cause I was exhausted working 8-12 hours every night just doing homework).
I’d say encourage her to take harder classes, but don’t pressure her. Just make it clear that whatever she chooses, it will affect HER in the long run. It’s a little bit of pain for an easier/better lifetime, or at least a lot more choices. Good luck!
If this is a legit post and your child is only 12, you don’t really need to worry about it right now. She is in middle school and unless she is taking high school level courses that your local high school counts toward graduation requirements, it won’t matter. She should just be encouraged to do her best.
Agree, 12 is too early, unless this is about getting on the right track (eg, in some hs, level of 8th or 9th math pre-sets what you can take later.) Don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, but many of us distinguish between Mama or Papa Bear versus tiger parenting. We talk to them, explain choices, guide, without insisting.
I agree with @NorthernMom61 in that it’s too early to worry too much about the specific courses she’s taking now, but I don’t think it’s too early to be thinking about these things in general.
A friend of mine made a good point to me recently. I was worried about my 6th grader and his Social Studies teacher’s harsh grading and demanding workload. My friend is a teacher, and she said that she’d rather her daughter(my son’s classmate) deal with a harsh and demanding teacher in 6th grade when it doesn’t do any harm to her high school record, than deal with it in 9th grade when it can sink her chances of certain schools.
It makes sense. Better to let them get pushed hard in middle school even if it means lower grades. As long as the lower grades don’t ruin their confidence or their chances of getting into advanced classes.
I don’t think you should push a 12-year-old but I do think you should encourage her to get on the advanced math track unless you have reason to think it’s going to make her miserable or something. Why not? Shouldn’t she be challenged?
If the courses your daughter takes in middle school will set her academic track for high school–which I imagine they will–then you do need to insist. You say she has the ability to ace them, so it is in her best interest academically to do so. Often kids seldom see their middle school friends in high school anyway, due to the larger size of the school and greater assortment of classes from which to choose. Trying to preserve the current peer group is probably just postponing the inevitable shifting of her friend group. In high school the academic and extra-curricular divide widens, and your D will likely become friends with the kids on her intellectual/athletic/social/artistic level because the system will divide the students that way even if you don’t. Some girls will be chosen for the women’s choral ensemble, and some won’t. Some will be on the JV sports teams and some on varsity. Some will make the math team and some won’t, and so on.
Regrettably, once you start down an academic track the student is relatively stuck in it going forward, short of taking summer classes to advance or catch up. She and you may find putting her in summer school courses far pushier and controlling than just setting the best course from the start now.
I think a good motto at a young age is to preserve all her options for as long as possible. It sounds dire, but your decision now will affect her college options later. If as a senior she says, “I really like MIT,” it would be nice if you don’t have to break the news that she has no chance in the world of getting in because back in middle school she opted to stay with friends in a lower math group, which meant that in high school she was not eligible for any STEM AP’s.
In our public school system, a student is tracked coming out of 5th grade. That is when a student is placed in the compacted-3 years in 1- math class, which sets you up to to finish Honors Algebra and Honors Geometry before you leave middle school. This track allows a student to at least finish through AP Calc BC by senior year. In middle school, a student also starts a high school foreign language. In our high school, some students double the language requirement (by taking through the AP level of one, and several years of another).
I am not sure that 12 year olds understand much about the future. Starting in 9th grade, I always tried to present my kids with the facts and encouraged them to leave their options open. By taking the most rigorous courses that their high school offered and working hard in them, they were keeping options open. My husband recently asked them (all three are now in college) if they were glad they took Honors Bio, AP World, etc. in 9th grade. They replied that they were because it allowed them to be where they are today and taught them how to study and manage their time. (They were also all 3 sport varsity athletes and two also were in the band/drama/choir).
This is a good post for me to answer because I was very laid back with my first, a graduating senior, and am more involved with my second, a freshman.
My first is someone who could not be pushed, so I doubt he’ll ever say this. I had always been laid back about grades (within reason) and choosing course levels, but was a bit of a nag about homework. We battled and battled about homework till eventually he promised to stay on top of it because he needed us to stop nagging him. He is so strong willed that that’s what we did. I don’t regret our stepping back, even though he could have done better with homework compliance, which would have helped with tests and quizzes, etc., etc. Nagging wasn’t working, and it was killing the peacefulness on the homefront.
What I do regret are not overriding his recommended math level for 9th grade and not sending him to a local math program that a lot of the Ivy admits at his high school attended (in my defense, I didn’t know about it till 11th grade when he complained that I hadn’t). Regarding the overrides, oldest was on the border between levels when recommmendations were made and the kids were told they shouldn’t take all the highest level classes because of workload considerations. That turned out to be a bunch of hooey, because in our school system, workload is more about the teacher than the “level”. And a lot of kids did take all the top level, which set them on a course to more achievement later in high school. As my first is interested in STEM, I think he would have been better served with higher level classes from the get-go. Instead, he had to jump a level junior year to get back on track to take Calc B/C, and junior and senior years were hard for him because he did less of the Algebra 2 book in 9th grade than he would have had he been in the top-level Algebra 2 book. The jump affected his grades, thus his gpa, and it is something we could have avoided had we known “how things really work” in our school system. (It’s not everything,though, see “homework compliance”, earlier.)
With my second, we advised her to take all top level classes so as not to burn any bridges track-wise and because of aforementioned randomness of workload. It’s working out fine for her, though going forward we’ll back off on the STEM levels because her interest is more in languages and art.
I would emphasize doing her best. It is more about giving her enough freedom to choose that she can see what happens when she studies hard vs when she does not. Much better for her to figure that out now than in HS. if the top courses have been recommended take most, for the challenge, but not necessarily all. Only you know how easily influenced your kid is by peers. You need to be the counterbalance. Put the facts in front of her but make it known what performance you expect and believe she is capable of.
If you are sure she will do well and if she is recommended for the higher track, I would have her take it. She is too young to make those decisions. It is better, IMHO, to try the higher track now and then decide to jump off then it is to not try and then have to get back on.
Some family friends didnt push their daughter. she took lots of fun classes in high school and she enjoyed. She was not offered a full-tutition scholarship to our state flagship even though she had a high ACT score; Her parents met with the scholarship/FA office to figure out why; and it was because her lack of hard classes.
i wouldnt pull my kid out of middle school to take extra classes, but if my kids qualify for the top tracking of classes, yes, they should take them. my daughters have liked being in the top math track. Friends change – and i wouldnt base class choices on their friends if they are not as advanced.
my dilemma is having a HS freshman take AP US History now offered in 9th. That seems so much for my kid . . .
just when i thought we had it figured out with the first 2, now we are starting over with the next 2.
I think that at 12 you should make sure she is taking the most rigorous courses she can handle. You are the adult and she is the child. At 12 you make the decisions. Of course you should get input from her but I wouldn’t let things like current friends be the decision maker regarding classes she takes. She should take what you think she should take.
Of course you should take the whole child into consideration when making your decision. Pushing her into classes where she has an unsustainable workload is not the best course of action. Take her entire life into consideration. Is she the type of person who needs downtime? Does she thrive on pressure? You know her better than we do. I have 2 who thrive on pressure and want to take the most challenging courses to be at the top of the world academically. I have another who can’t function in that world. I treated them differently and the older 2 wound up in schools that were perfect for them.
The oldest graduated from Case Western and he loved the competitive atmosphere there. The middle is more artistically oriented and is thriving at Belmont. They both had choices despite their different academic record. Oldest was top 5%, middle top 25% in high school. Oldest took 6 AP classes. Middle had only 4 plus lots of artsy electives. Their younger brother is the most academically oriented and will finish with 12 AP classes. I don’t push him. He pushes himself.
You have to help your child find her sweet spot but at 12 you should be leading that search.
Pushy mom here. I had to push, because I have a shy kid who would never have done anything if I hadn’t pushed her. Now that she is a senior in HS, I don’t push that much anymore. In her case, she needed a kick up the backside, because she wouldn’t speak up when she needed to, etc… I am proud of her though. Maybe she grew up, maybe she got tired of the pushing and knew she had to do,it herself, who knows. Nowadays, she is mostly good about advocating for herself and doing what needs to be done. I think I didn’t feel too badly about pushing her, becasue the one aspect she never needed pushing on was doing well in school. She has always been motivated in that regard.
I pushed to get my older son skipped a grade in math in middle school. If I had it to do again I’d push for a double skip, but it would have been more trouble for commuting. In the end two other parents followed my lead and a couple of other kids took math in summer school to catch up with him, so there was a cohort of kids taking Linear Algebra as seniors.
Younger so occasionally says things like “You should have had me visit Yale early in high school. If I’d known how nice it was, I would have worked harder.” I’m not convinced he would have, but he got into good schools even with less than perfect grades. He was Mr. Stubborn. I did push for him to take Honors Chem in 9th grade (he’d missed the placement by getting an 89 not a 90 in biology). It worked out poorly - he ended up in a class of sophomores with a lousy teacher, who apparently treated the two freshmen in her class quite poorly. The other class that was all freshmen had a good experience. But that was a unique experience. One of the few really bad teachers we ran into in the high school.
My D was motivated by her peers who were all on the high-achieving track. In fact, she fell behind them in math in middle school, and she herself insisted on taking a summer online course so that she could start high school at the same level as them. (They were all a year ahead of the norm for their grade in school).
I avoided all talk of college when my kids were in middle school. I had confidence that they were outstanding and would someday get into a great school appropriate for them, but it wasn’t something that seemed worth worrying about in middle school. Most of my time and energy was spent trying to get the school system to support them academically and encouraging/supporting their various EC’s to help them develop their interests, meet like-minded friends, and have good experiences exploring the world.
So I don’t think you or your child should be looking at this in terms of getting into college. I think that mindset is pretty harmful because it sets up expectations that could cause her a lot of stress over the years and could also ultimately lead to a lot of disappointment and bitterness if the child is pressured into doing things with the justification or goal of college admittance and then that admittance doesn’t happen. Your daughter shouldn’t take the highest math track that she is capable of doing well in because it will look good to colleges. She should take the highest math track she is capable of doing well in because both of you should want her to get the best education she can and spend her time well rather than wasting it in classes that are too easy for her.
She can eat lunch and be in other classes with those friends. I think it’s also true that many kids will make new friends in high school–my sophomore still loves most of her middle school friends, but she seems more interested in her new friends that are in her EC’s and have more interests in common with her.
Honestly, even a lot of “encouragement” and “suggesting” is interpreted as pushing by your child.
Agree with everyone who’s telling you not to try to groom your 12 year old. College 6 years away. College is only 4 years. Imagine spending so much time focusing on a period of your life that is really a blip on the radar screen. That is so much pressure to put on a kid.
Kids react differently to being pushed and part of what you should do depends on the personality of the kid involved. My D, who is currently a senior, has complained that I didn’t push her hard enough. She regrets some of the course levels she was in, believes she could have done harder math, and should have had a couple more AP’s. But at the time we were making the decision we were trying to challenge her but not push her so hard that it would be too much. Some times its hard to tell where the line is and you can only see it in hindsight. She also suffered from being the oldest and therefore having parents who didn’t understand the system. I would have made different choices if I knew then what I know now. But in the end, I really don’t think it made much of a difference. She got accepted at all the schools she applied to. I don’t think she would have applied to more selective schools even if she had gone with more rigorous courses. It all worked out.
Now I have a S who is a freshman. He reacts very differently to pressure and with him I can only gently suggest his path. If we push too hard, he pushes back. He has made some choices that I disagree with, but it is his life.
My answer is it depends. And for middle school, just emphasizing doing your best in the appropriate level class is ok. But by the time freshman year rolls around, it depends on what your kid needs. My son needed a little pushing to encourage his confidence that he could handle the AP classes etc. He took over from there. My DD was totally self motivated and kept me at arms length throughout high school and as we finish up college admissions, that too. My overriding message to both kids from day one was to pick the most rigorous classes in areas of interest that they could handle and still have some fun. It gives you more choices during college admissions. I don’t think picking classes for social reasons is a good idea - just my opinion.