That reminds me of the guy who outsourced his job to China. Though I think he was just lazy, not incapable: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693
If Lythcott-Haims and other deans of selective schools really value this, than I expect to see a section on the application soon that asks questions like “how many hours a week do you spend cleaning your room and other parts of your home/doing dishes/taking out the garbage, etc.? Do you know how to do your own laundry?” That could be pretty cool for that to be a prerequisite for college. Plus, it would give me more leverage. You want to go Tufts? You still got seven hours of chores left to do this month . . . Seems like it might be a better way to spend time in the high school years than taking prep courses and practice exams to increase SAT/ACT scores . . . Not that my kids did that, either . . .
A mom can dream . . .
I refuse to let my kid do chores at home. There will be enough time for it when work life will start.
Perfect/really good parent: Parent like me
Helicopter/tiger parent: Any parent who does more than I do
Uninvolved/clueless parent: Any parent who does less than I do
These are how I really hear parents use these terms.
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^^^^^^This…
Love that.
@GossamerWings ? Not sure I understand. Did the family hire someone to do part of the daughter’s job for her? Or to help her organize her time via spreadsheets? If the former, well, wow, I guess.
@Much2learn – too funny. I helicopter more than my own parents did – who of us raised in the 60’s/70’s doesn’t, lol? On CC,though, I am the uninvolved clueless one . . . if I were more savvy, my last child would have all her ducks in a row . . . why won’t the darn ducks form a row? But, if they did line up, I probably would think I was in category #1, perfect.
@ChangLa, you said, “I refuse to let my kid do chores at home. There will be enough time for it when work life will start.” — and how do you think he’ll suddenly know how to do them, when he hasn’t had practice as a kid doing them? You think all of a sudden he’ll want to do it when he hasn’t done them for so long?
Because chores like doing dishes and cleaning toilets do not require much, if any, training and practice. The idea that a normal kid, much less an elite school graduate, will have trouble doing them some day when he has to is ludicrous.
The Downside of Not Helicoptering
Stanford: “We’re looking for kids who have followed their passions…kids who have invented an antibiotic or discovered a galaxy.”
Parent: “Darn – Why didn’t we help our child get an internship with Stephen Hawking?”
@neuroticparent
Comment I overheard from high school senior who was a HYP (one of those) SCEA admit. “I can’t believe how many students pay a tutor, I have never hired a tutor for science or math.”
It turns out that this student has “never hired a tutor” because Dad has a physics Phd. for Cal on top of his Ivy league math/science undergrad. This student has “never hired a tutor” because Dad can help with all of it. lol
I really should have done a better job picking my parents. haha
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LOL. We have seen this situation as well.
Really? Tell that to the many women I know married to “elite school graduates” who haven’t touched a house cleaning implement their entire married lives. It’s not about the skill set involved; it’s about the acknowledgement that they’re not entitled to have others clean up after them.
I’m a very involved mom, though not really a hoverer. But I don’t believe that my measure of success as a parent is what college my son gets into. He should be self-sufficient, certainly, but I’d like him to be a good person and a good partner because, ultimately, I think that’s what will make him happy in the long run. He does housework, can cook to survive, manage his own money. We’re working on folding fitted sheets and pairing socks…
There are elements to both the discipline of doing it and the actual mechanics that kids should “learn” regardless of how smart they are.
^I agree, and it’s not just about the entitled attitude, it is the the habit of getting house chores done routinely, like brushing teeth. It should be part of developing good habits. I grew up not doing any chores. To this day, doing chores is a big deal to me. In college, I noticed some of my friends who grew up doing chores just did it without ceremony. Their life seemed easier.
Doing lots of chores as a child can have the opposite effect of causing someone to never want to do them again once he doesn’t have to. Personally, I spent many, many hours as a kid mowing our large yard, weeding, picking up sticks, raking and bagging leaves that I never wanted a big property as an adult unless we had the money to pay for a landscaping company. So now we have very small yard, lol. Judging by the people living around me, practically no one does their own yard work, so I don’t know what happened to all the chore training our generation got that has been lost.
I made them participate in house tasks because those are life skills. And when their friends visited for a weekend, they got the pleasure of a Saturday task as well, albeit simple and as much a matter of the bonds we have with not just our kids but their friends, too.
We don’t call any of it ‘chores,’ which reminds me of pioneer families.
Know what? Fussing about helping around the house-- if the parents do it all, everything, what then happens to them, their schedules, their jobs? Family is a team and should flow that way.
It’s hard to win points with limited personal anecdotes. Practically everyone living around me does their own yard work. Just the other day we were all chuckling about how our fathers made us do the yard work and now, here we are doing it willingly.
WOW
“penalizes a large school”? youre joking right. TCNJ gets penalized all the time , first due to the nature of a large amount of ED majors and the typical low income that field provides(even though they have the #1 or 2# department in the entire US) not to mention the large weighting given research instituions vs TCNJ focus on undergraduate work.
Come on apples to apples you know the truth.