<p>My kids have been blessed with summer jobs that were either within walking distance or reachable by bus. That’s helped foster a lot of independence.</p>
<p>The point of the example was not the car, it was the concept of a parent doing for a child what the child is mature enough and able to do for himself. This could be to save the student time or lighten his load in order to boost his achievement, it could be to coddle/helicopter, or it could just be mom or dad has always done it and doesn’t turn over the task when the kid is grown. Many parents still answer for their young adult, still handle all interactions with authorities, still make all phone calls for appointments and inquiries, etc. A friend recounted that at a college open house she attended with her son, it was the mothers who signed in for their children at the registration desks, and asked all the questions.</p>
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<p>I need to respond in detail but I have a rear rotor overhaul scheduled for today and the FAA won’t let me fly single rotor :D</p>
<p>I haven’t called any of DD1’s profs yet but have attended a couple of her semester reviews (they’re open to parents). i do provide advising (far better than the college does) and field calls or texts for all kinds of strange questions, from ‘is 22psi low for a tire’ to ‘how do you cut plexiglass’… </p>
<p>My luck will probably run out with DD2, she’s way too independent for any of this. But DD1 is not so I’m enjoying it while it lasts.</p>
<p>GFG, I understand your point and I actually don’t disagree with you… but I think to suspect all uber-achiever’s of having gotten there with a hand on the scale is unfair. There are parents who just don’t have the time or the availability to hustle their kids around town, and somehow the kids manage to book themselves with meaningful projects and activities. And there are other kids who are like sheep, who can’t move without a parent herding them and coaching them through pretty routine interactions. And there are kids whose parents believe that their job is to study, get good grades, and do impressive activities (and who can’t operate a vacuum cleaner), and other kids who have chores, can get dinner on the table once a week (even just mac and cheese and a salad) and still manage to be on task with a lot of “stuff”.</p>
<p>All I’m saying. Not everyone is being propelled.</p>
<p>I did not mean to make any generalizations. I was merely offering as a possible reason for the increased helicoptering the increasing expectations for high level achievement at a young age. The more ordinary good student is trying to keep up with the super-capable students like Blossom’s kids, but needs support to pull it off. My kids were able to handle the academics on their own, but I absolutely took care of menial things for them that other teenagers did for themselves, like make their breakfast and pack their gym and sports clothes.</p>
<p>That said, all high schools are different as far as the demands of EC’s and the homework expectations. But I can also tell you that there were peers of my kids who allegedly managed to do so much that it was hard to see how it was possible given what we knew about the workload and time commitments of those activities and classes. Even a genius needs a few hours to write a research paper and even the super athlete has to come to practice.</p>
<p>So, different families draw the lines differently- a point I think someone already made.</p>
<p>One of my kids got to college knowing how to make two dishes- mac and cheese and pancakes. And by graduation, that became three things with the addition of pasta with a jar of sauce thrown on top (my husband claims that’s mac and cheese but without the cheese; I say it’s a distinctive menu item on its own.) So even growing up in the same household, not every kid takes to every chore with gusto or even aptitude!</p>
<p>I should add that I’ve heard more confessions from parents lately about significant homework help, which I am taking as a possible indication that this is becoming more accepted and frequent. I started a CC thread about the issue in September. One woman told me she just spent 15 hours helping her D collect research information for an APUSH assignment. The assignment was overwhelming and D didn’t have the time to do it all. That’s 15 more hours the D has to be a superstar in EC’s or do better in other classes.</p>
<p>Quote: “One woman told me she just spent 15 hours helping her D collect research information for an APUSH assignment. The assignment was overwhelming and D didn’t have the time to do it all.”</p>
<p>^^^Wow, just wow! Except for the occasional question, I stopped helping my kids with homework in 2nd grade. My standard response was and is “I already went to school and did my homework, now it is your turn.” :)</p>
<p>^^^ Agreeing with you, Momofmusician17 - I always had the same response. I passed xyz! </p>
<p>I try very hard to NOT be a helicopter parent. My boys know I’m here if they need me and sometimes they do call/text to bounce something off me. But doing their homework? never! What’s the point?</p>
<p>In my experience, some of the problem is tied to the quality of education, or at least the philosophy behind the education. One thing that has changed in our high school is the understanding of what makes an honors class an honors class. It used to mean more rigorous material, taught at a faster pace, and perhaps introduced a year to two earlier than the normal course progression. Now it seems teachers think it means the student can teach himself a lot of material, and be capable of a great deal of extrapolation from the basic concepts taught in class to the much more complex ones that will be needed to do well on the assignments and tests. Consequently, parents have stepped in to bridge the gap. In the process, they sometimes overstep their bounds, IMO.</p>
<p>For example, D will be given analysis questions for the novel they’re reading which contain terms the students have not been taught this year, or seen in previous years either. Sometimes they are easy enough ideas to understand, and there’s no problem. But there are other instances when the term represents a complex concept which requires some additional background knowledge of other genres or texts, and it may be obscure enough that neither I (who took lots of college lit. classes) nor my elite-college educated children (who also took lit classes) have ever heard of it. So before answering the question, D must first grasp the meaning of the term. A recent one had a definition online that referred to the TV character Colombo. Like D has ever watched Colombo! Anyway, then D must determine how the concept applies to a certain chapter of the novel. But lo and behold, she can’t even find an instance of it in the chapter in which the teacher said it was to be found. She calls me. I get involved to look at the term and the novel, and I can’t find an example of it either. And so then it’s back to the drawing board to look up more discussions of the term because obviously we haven’t understood it. And so on…</p>
<p>GFG, I really appreciate your comments on this. It is hard to believe some of the resumes of students on this site (so many charities founded! so much important research being conducted and published by 16 year olds!). The kids I know who end up on the elite-college track are by and large groomed from a very early age, and given every possible advantage over their peers. (As an aside, this is why some of us roll our eyes over the “rarefied air” that supposedly exists at some schools–we know it’s not simply a matter of superior intellect or other talents.)</p>
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<p>It’s a luxury to have a mom who can drive you to lessons that start across town at 3:30 or 4 pm (meaning, in most cases, mom doesn’t have a full-time job).</p>
<p>Just saw an article about a French mom who put on lots of makeup and teen clothes and tried to take the baccalaureate exam for her D.</p>
<p>I love the tugboat analogy. Wish I could be a good tugboat captain but I am ever so tired by now. I would have liked to have been in that helicopter a lot more too, but too many kids, not enough energy. I just couldn’t do it.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that unless there are some good stats on all of this, it’s all anecdotal. My oldest is in his 30s now so the chickens have come home to roost on parenting (if it has much bearing on how kids turn out ) for those young adults that I watched grow up and watched how their parents were involved. I wanted to be a lot more involved than I was but could not due to personal limitations, too many kids, some crises, and there was always that part of me that felt it was right, but I was conflicted. I think I would have been hovering right with the most involved ones, if I could have. So I kind of was hoping, that maybe the hovering would have been a bad thing, and that my kids forced to do more would be more on their own two feet. Nope. Not thaat way at all. Not even close, and I wish it were. Because I am a bit jealous.</p>
<p>GFG: Link, please!</p>
<p>[Exam</a> Protector Recognized French Mother As Impostor | Today News Gazette](<a href=“HugeDomains.com”>HugeDomains.com)</p>
<p>I hope this does not count as a blog and isn’t considered in violation of the TOS. It’s from today.</p>
<p>“It’s a luxury to have a mom who can drive you to lessons that start across town at 3:30 or 4 pm (meaning, in most cases, mom doesn’t have a full-time job).”</p>
<p>Completely agree. It’s also a luxury for kid to have own car and drive himself. </p>
<p>Fwiw, Sally, my kids weren’t “prepped”. They each had unique ECs, but they didn’t start charities or do research in a lab. We did look into opportunities at Fermilab and Argonne, but they would have required her own car and that wasn’t happening. I think all this lab stuff is the province of highly privileged kids.</p>
<p>I wasn’t talking about your kids, PG. Or GFG’s. A lot of the exceptional-sounding ECs seem to be the province of kids who are either very privileged or who have fortunate connections (or both). Where I live there are a lot of kids who get internships at biotech companies because their parents work there, or who get to participate in academic research projects because their mom or dad is a professor at the university.</p>
<p>As for the car, yes–freedom is a luxury. But sometimes kids are given cars (or have to buy them with their own earnings) because they are shuttling younger siblings, driving to work, or because there is no way they could get anywhere without one.</p>
<p>I think it is an unfair precedence the schools set when they expect the parents to come in on the interviews. So far, every school except one expected the parents to stay and interview also. One time, I did not stay, not realizing it was expected. This was a top 10 school. Apparently, the interviewer had expected me to be there and seemed to think it was just wrong that the parents were not there. So if the schools want parents to stop hovering, then the schools should not start the whole admission process expecting the parents to hover.</p>