Hand-holding

Parent Cafe
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<p>@ everyone: I am glad this conversation flourished and I am able to hear from each of you.</p>

<p>Yes, provided that I ever decide to replicate, I will want to help my spawn as much as possible in the college process. I believe one of the main driving factors in even having children is to do better then your parents. To succeed where they failed.</p>

<p>Still, I envy your kids, although it’s true that it does me no good. Part of this thread’s purpose is to help me understand and sympathize with everyone around me who their car, bills, and anything else taken care of by mommy and daddy, and still have the nerve to complain about how hard coursework is when I work 40 hours a week and still flirt with homelessness occasionally. I want to slap them, to shake them, tell them how lucky they are to not have to get a job at 16 and figure everything out on their own, and to shut the hell up and realize how fortunate they are.</p>

<p>So pretty much, it’s a twisted dichotomy of envy and contempt that I will get over eventually, with the help of your input. </p>

<p>All that being said, I work in a technical field, and come across many recent CS grads who have been helped similarly to your own kids. With a few exceptions, they somehow retain the idea that someone is going to ‘help’ them as well on the job, and they at some point come to a painful realization that the world doesn’t work that way. I feel sorry for them in a way, but I also feel that if they had to work for something on their own sometime, they would understand the world is not they fairytale they were raised in - that they themselves must take initiative to run their own lives, that success is directly proportional to how much effort you put into a goal. I can’t help but see that this type of attitude stems from the environment they were raised it. Still, it is to be noted that a minority of these hires actually fail, about 60% succeed in the company.</p>

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<p>There are some kids of parents on CC who work for most everything they have. My son’s been working since he was 13 playing violin, teaching violin, and tutoring in math. He has a savings; we don’t. We are a moderate middle income family-blue collar-and I find it a privilege to help my son navigate the college admissions process.</p>

23

<p>Be careful about assuming cause and effect here. I know in some ways it feels better to come up with a simplistic story about categories of people, but we really often have very little information to go on. </p>

<p>I teach college kids. Many sound like the frustrating ones you see at work! I can only imagine how annoying it is to you when its annoying to me as a professor. But I’m not sure the differentiating factor is simply parental involvement or income levels. Both in the classroom and in my personal life (kids at our kids highschool, children of our friends, neighbors)…I can see just as many very well off kids who have had a lot of help along the way, who are tremendously responsible, driven, take tons of initiative, are very mature and independent when it comes to how hard they work in class, the volunteer work they do, the research they conduct, the jobs and opportunities they find. And I see kids, who have limited resources and little parental input (often because the parents aren’t educated themselves), who are not driven, like to cut corners, really don’t care much about working hard in my class, and who are not particularly mature or responsible. </p>

<p>I know this violates the stereotypes that are reinforced by our culture, and makes it more complicated to understand and predict (so in a sense it’s more frustrating) when you can neatly place people into stereotypes, but few things are this simplistic.</p>