I wish my Mom had done the opposite, and been a lot less involved. I largely grew in spite of her, and that growth was stunted. The problem is, she wanted to protect me both because I have autism and because she had an extremely abusive childhood, and in protecting me she actively prevented me from learning. Even when I was 17, I still had to come straight home from school every day, and when I got home I had to go to my room. I couldn’t hang out with people after school. I’d get in trouble just for walking home on a different route than normal if they found out (they’d sometimes take the car and check). I couldn’t even hang out with them. Within the house, I was largely expected to stay in my room and be quiet unless I wanted something specific. Most of my interactions with them were asking oermission for something or getting punished. We didn’t talk about our days or our problems or anything like that. I didn’t have chores because they didn’t trust me not to do them wrong. In general, if I tried something new and failed at first, that was a reason to forbid me from continuing that activity, not a time to dust me off and have me try again. If I needed help or support, I certainly wouldn’t ask my parents. I’d probably go to a teacher. The only outlet was going for walks or to the library, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to go to anyone’s house or meet anyone, or to listen to music while walking, and I had no allowance to spend. In school, my mother was very active in advocating special ed support for me, but at the same time she’d be petrified of me failing. I wasn’t allowed to take a foreign language as a result, and I was allowed to stop taking math after Algebra 1 and science after Biology (got a D, I think). Upon graduation, I didn’t have enough math, science, or language to even apply for a California university, and we promptly moved to Colorado. I was expected to get a job, but, since I’m autistic and never learned social skills or life skills or how to act in a job interview or find jobs, I naturally couldn’t get one. Which was used as justification to enforce the exact same rules as when I was under 18 (I was told that until I made money and paid rent, I was a child and would be treated accordingly). What saved me was getting away from them. Tried the Navy, the autism got me medically separated halfway through basic training. Not surprising, since I never learned coping strategies. Honestly, I wasn’t near mature enough for the military, and it showed. So I went to Job Corps, and the forest service took 15 months to teach me what my parents never did. They put a lot of pressure on me to continually improve, but in a much more constructive way than my parents. It wasn’t easy, but I survived it and came out with some self awareness, a set of coping strategies, and an understanding of how to act in a job interview and a workplace. Then my grandmother gave me a room for two years while I went to community college in California, and gave me freedom to go out and do things with my life. Turned out that what Job Corps was teaching stuck, because I got a job fast, kept it until I moved to a different city for university, and rapidly found another job that I still have.
Anyway, I primarily wish my mother had just backed off.
@Spaceship, thank you for sharing. Sounds like your parents were more controlling rather than pushing and kept you from realizing your potential. At least to me, your parents are worlds apart from those who believe their kids have enormous potential but lack self-discipline, motivation and/or maturity to challenge themselves.
On the other hand, please don’t be to hard on your parents - it’s a humongous pressure/responsibility to have a S/N child, a lot of parents end up overprotecting their kids, and sometimes you can’t blame them - when stakes are higher, people are bound to make more mistakes. The main thing is that your story has a very happy ending, or rather, middle
TypiCAmom, I’m a mom of three kids who all ended up at top schools, although only one ivy. I was also accelerated in school by several years so I have some specific insight there.
I would suggest you push that she take the strongest curricular choices in exactly two subjects-- math and English-- and then encourage your kids to follow their passion. A weakness in math or science will eventually limit opportunities and they are so foundational that they spill over. In other words, a kid who is weak at math will have trouble in science eventually and a kid who doesn’t learn to write well will struggle in humanities classes.
In an ideal world, all my kids would have made it through AP English and Calculus in high school.
Past that, I insisted on bio/ chem and physics and I also insisted on foreign language all the way through. But my kids all did their own thing: one did a career training program in high school, one took extra science, another took a number of arts classes, etc. However, they had the basics to get through the foundational courses in college and to change career interests, if they wished. I wasn’t that worried about grades. I wanted them to bring home As and Bs and nagged or sought tutors when a grade dipped below that.
And typiCAmom, my mom was wonderful but she wasn’t American and she pushed in all the wrong places. Like I said, I was several years accelerated. I happen to be very good at math naturally. However, my mom thought high school math was so ‘hard,’ that she didn’t want to ‘push’ me, lest my grades dip. Plus, there was a scheduling issue in the middle of high school and, instead of pushing that they find me a seat in the ‘filled’ math class, my mom let them drop me in the middle of the year and I had to repeat math, setting me a year behind. Yes, I regret that because math in college goes twice as fast and my teenage pride couldn’t deal with not being in the hard college math class so I never went as far in math as I should have and it was always a stumbling block. On the other hand, my non-American mom pushed me to take piano lessons and practice daily even though I really didn’t like it. Lesson of the story: choose your battles wisely. You don’t have to be a pushy mother to push. We all push and pull simply based on our values.
@2collegewego, thank you for your insight. I think my daughter will be ok on her own choosing hard classes, and yes, she too knows math and English are a must. I’m more worried about her SAT prep - since it’s not an actual class with a teacher, assignments, etc., she is probably not taking it as seriously and it’s hard for her to motivate herself - and again, it may be too early as everybody keeps saying. Btw, my non-American mom also wanted her granddaughter to take piano lessons and practice daily (maybe because she had no chance with me - I am completely tone-deaf), but I put my foot down and let my daughter stop when she wanted to. End result - she plays for her own pleasure 10-20 minutes a day 1-3 days a week or whenever she chooses, but she is the one initiating it without prompting and I know she truly enjoys it
@typiCAmom, your post made me smile. I didn’t push music either and one of my kids is a musician.
I wouldn’t worry about SAT. The ACT is widely accepted so a kid who doesn’t do well on one test still has options. My kid who was the best student ended up attending a school that was SAT optional. Another of my kids attended a college that allows applicants to submit a variety of testing: IB, AP, ACT, SAT or a combination of SAT IIs, I think. In other words, one exam isn’t the end all, be all. I think most gifted kids with a strong education will end up with some combination of strong test scores.
@2collegewego, frankly, I am more interested in PSAT/SAT/ACT results in a sense that they can lead to merit scholarships. But yes, in the end it will all work out one way or another.
A friend’s son once told him he should have been pushed harder. My friend said, I wanted to avoid years of shouting which would have accomplished nothing anyway.
The son had no answer to that: in fact, he loudly and rebelliously went against his parents from the time he was 12.
@marian, our older son hangs out with driven students who all got into top colleges. He just wasn’t interested in doing the work. He took the hardest math classes and did very well. However, he made a D in AP English (although he got a 4 on the exam) and also made a D in Sophomore English. He hasn’t liked high school, and nothing could have made him more motivated. He did well on the PSAT and SAT (he was a NMSF) and got into a decent but not elite college. He wasn’t motivated by his friends in the least. On the other hand, if he has friends in college who prefer partying to studying I don’t think he’ll be influenced by them either.
@mstomper, from what my daughter tells me, most of her friends aren’t very motivated to study hard, and thankfully it doesn’t affect my daughter much. Yes, I’d prefer a different crowd for her, but I won’t be choosing her friends
@katiamom, just curious, when did your friends’s son outgrow his teenage angst?
@typiCAmom – mid 20’s. He was always very independent, marched to his own drummer, etc. But in high school he was considered very promising. Near perfect SATs, some prestigious awards, etc. But at some point he began questioning everything, saying he didn’t want to “play the game,” become part of “the establishment” (by which he meant even going to college) and after graduation did… nothing. Instead, he got a menial job, moved out, read a lot. He did finally go back to school a couple year later - Reed - but it took him a while to finish. It was during his Reed years that he questioned his dad. He had apparently somewhat regretted not going to Yale, where he’d been accepted out of high school. His dad replied that, considering where the kid’s head was at the time, odds are he wouldn’t have lasted long at Yale.
I really think the kid was afraid of competing against his dad – who went to Harvard at 16 and had a Harvard PhD by the time he was 24. Tough act to follow, even tough no one expected (or even wanted) him to follow in his dad’s footsteps.
I know that I have often wished that I had waited a year or two to go to college, or paid a bit more attention in class! The difference in maturity between being a freshman and a junior in college was immense. Only now do I appreciate the many outstanding courses I could have taken, or that I did take but could have gotten more out of.
My parents undoubtedly knew this too but I wouldn’t have listened at the time…
@widgetmidget, I hear you. I still question if it was the right decision for my daughter to skip a grade, though at that moment in time it certainly looked like the right one. Ironically, with kid #2 we fell into the same trap, placing him in preschool that is not only nurturing, but very rigorous academically. The teacher said he’ll be bored to death in transitional kindergarten, so we decided on regular kindergarten, which will essentially let him skip a year. However, my plan is to take a year off after his 3rd grade, to let him catch up to his peers. Hope it works in his favor.
Not only do I wish my parents had pushed me, I wish they had not said “college is for suckers” so much.
I am probably guilty of pushing my kids too hard as a way of overcompensating. I’ve recently dialed it back; my junior decided to take AP Stats next year instead of AP Calc BC (she’s in AP Calc AB now), and I said “if that works for you, I’ll all for it.”
So I’m still a little pushy-when she mentioned skipping a math altogether her senior year I said I thought it might really be tough to jump back into math in college if she did so, and eventually she agreed, but I try to be mindful of where I came from and where she wants to go and not scramble it all together and give bad advice.
@MotherOfDragons,yes, it’s much easier when you come from culture that values education maybe even too highly… However, I recently spoke to a mom of my daughter’s ex-classmate, whose oldest son was a typical “golden boy” - very smart, tennis prodigy, etc. etc. I don’t know what happened, but she transferred him to a smaller HS with less challenging classes and just kept saying “I just want him to be happy, or at least content with his life”. Again, don’t know what happened and we are not close enough for me to pry.
@typiCAmom it may be the tennis-there’s a developmental tennis program near where I live where the elite kids are going, and a LOT of them are either homeschooled or on a very easy school track so they can devote all their time to improving their tennis skills and go to meets.
It is all about the tennis with them, and I find the culture a little mystifying (but probably no less mystifying than they find my academic obsessions).
