I have a friend whose son has been quite proud of himself for biking everywhere around Portland. The local newspaper ran a story about the phenomenon of young adults biking instead of driving, and featured him prominently. My friend thought it was hilarious, because her son never hesitated to borrow her car whenever he needed it! He finally gave in and bought a car once he got married and bought an affordable house in the boonies.
Son owns a car that sits in his apartment garage most of the time. We helped him get one when he needed it for his first post college job- taking the bus was impractical. He has changed jobs and cities and is now walking to work. Having a driver’s license and a car doesn’t mean you need to use them. There will never be more time than while living at home in HS to learn to drive.
Kids not rushing for their driver’s license the way my generation did (I’m in my mid-50’s) is a widespread phenomenon. My best guess is that the introduction of graduated licenses has a lot to do with it. When I was 17, I could drive somewhere with a car full of friends. A 17 year old in NYS ( and I think many other states) can’t do that now.
My son is in 9th grade, so I can’t claim to have gotten through this yet, but I do have a couple of reactions to the OP. If your daughter is that overwhelmed and exhausted in 8th grade, she’s doing too much. If you’re pushing her to all the advanced classes and EC’s, please stop. If she’s pushing herself, you can place limits. yes, you really can. My best friend recently put her foot down for her 9th grader and told her that she could not add another EC unless she dropped one. I say this as an absolute believer in the value and virtue of elite colleges full of smart kids - there are lots of good schools. There’s nothing wrong with working hard and being busy in high school. There is something wrong with being miserable, making yourself sick, rarely getting a decent night’s sleep and/or not having time for a social life, downtime and family life and responsibilities on a regular basis. And if that means she’s at USNWR’s 35th ranked LAC instead of Princeton, she will still go to school with smart people, get a good education, have fun and have a great life.
As for checking the portal every other day, you need to wean yourself off that for her sake. Your job for the next four years (among other things) is to send a kid out into the world who is competent, confident and independent. She needs to learn to keep track of her work herself. If she already is and you’re checking out of an abundance of caution, maybe ratchet down to once a week and keep reducing it. If you’re doing it because she lets things slip through the cracks because she’s just so busy she can’t keep up, it’s another sign she’s too busy. If you’re doing it because she’s not the best with organization and executive skills, you should be giving her or getting her the help she needs to learn to organize her own life. It’s ok if it takes her longer than other people to learn it and if you have to give her some extra support. Different kids have different challenges. But keep your eye on the goal: she goes to college and successfully manages her own life.
Breathe. It will be fine.
I believe that kids are not rushing out to get drivers licenses because they are not cut off from their friends like we were when we were younger. We had one phone line in our house with 5 kids. If I wanted to talk to my friends, I usually walked or biked over to their houses. Today’s kids stay in touch with their friends in other states or even countries without a second thought. Driving isn’t the big deal it once was.
As far as being a concierge parent, I believe that you are doing your kids no favors when you do everything for them. My daughter’s boyfriend is an RA at his university. Just last week, the kids in the suite next door flooded the place with bubbles by using liquid dish detergent in the dishwasher. If you think you are freeing your kids up to take care of more important tasks, just remember that when they get to college, they will have important tasks too. Life will go much more smoothly if they aren’t wasting time trying to get the stains out of their clothes because no one taught them to check their pockets for Chap Stick before putting things in the dryer.
^ life will go even more smoothly if you don’t think that laundry is a skill that takes years to perfect. Here’s what my daughter used having never gone near the washing machine at home. http://m.wikihow.com/Do-Laundry
The cost of auto insurance in my state is outrageous, so some parents here are in no rush for their kids to drive because that can mean they have to come up with an extra $1000-$2000 more a year, depending on gender. My older two learned to drive at the normal time, though I must confess I was secretly glad when D failed the first test since it meant 3 more months of lower rates. My third is a different kid who can’t multi-task as well, so driving has been put on the back burner until she gets through this hellish junior year of high school. She will certainly learn to drive before she goes off to college, but it won’t happen as early as it did for her siblings in part because our finances are depleted from the educations of the older two and now we need to save every penny for her college costs.
Agree that there are too many stressed out kids. Its fine to do curriculum planning and begin to engage in extra curriculars as she will find one or more that are meaningful to her. But agree, let her enjoy life.
When my oldest was Junior/Senior (in IB Program)…she was very busy so my younger DD and I helped pick up slack with household chores. I told my younger DD that when she is a Junior in HS I would do the same for her.
I would say that if your 8th/9th grader is so busy they don’t have time to help around the house, they are too busy. One of the thing you need to teach them is life skills…not only the skill (this is how you mop a floor), but that people who live together share the work.
Helicopter? Ha! My Great Mother-in-Law offered this advice when our children were very young: “Just bring them up alive.” Although in her generation that was the primary goal (they had few of the medicines that we now consider to be routine), we kind of adopted her broad strategy. Expose the kids to lots of opportunities to learn and explore. Let them find things that interest them.
Our #1 announced one day on the way to preschool, “Today I’m a numbers machine.” By the time I picked him up at 11:30, he was still counting, “Two thousand one hundred and fifty one, two thousand one hundred and fifty two…” He was fascinated with numbers then, and he’s fascinated with numbers now in his career. Of course that wasn’t his entire education; he’s also a good thinker and writer about other things. But we found ways to help him do the things that interested him. No helicoptering. That could produce tantrums.
Our #2 liked to draw. Blank sheets of paper, colored pencils or markers, and she would draw and draw. None of the numbers fascination of her older brother. But she was plenty smart enough in other areas. No helicoptering accepted. Just put tools and art supplies in front of her. Today, with a degree in industrial design and a career in sustainable design, she is what she decided to become.
I think that if a teen’s schedule is so stressful that s/he can’t manage to contribute chores to the household, then something should give. (And not the chores.) Maybe that kid won’t be at quite the same “level” of college competitiveness as others appear to be on CC. I would take a dim view of any teenager who was raised to be waited on because his or her precious schedule was so stressful.
My son does plenty of chores and is often responsible for his brothers as the default arrangement. He did not seem to suffer for it in the college admissions game.
As for the helicopter thing, there definitely seems to be a degree of oversight and monitoring that kids are subject to today that didn’t exist when I was growing up as a GenXer. I myself was kind of a screw-up in school, a classic underachiever, and my parents were frankly clueless about what was going on for me in school. When I talk to my husband, his parents were pretty hands-off too. I didn’t know anyone who had parents that were on top of all their assignments and keeping up with them grade-by-grade and quiz-by-quiz. But these days with things like parent portals, etc…I think there’s a natural tendency for parents to want to guide their kids away from the kinds of mistakes they themselves made, and now there are all these tools and technology that perhaps help them guide a little too much!
The existence of the parent portal gives me pause on a regular basis, I have to admit. Because I threw away so many golden opportunities, the temptation is definitely there to peek in and reassure myself that my D has a better head on her shoulders than I did (she does!) And then I think to myself: what are you doing? She’s done whatever work she’s done. Logging in and looking doesn’t change the result! And even if she did mess up on a test or whatever, so what? It doesn’t change who she is, and it doesn’t change how I feel about her. And then I don’t log in. And I let her live her life. But I totally see how the helicopter thing can happen when the tools make it so easy.
The way my D and I use the parent portal is this: about once a month we sit down together and check through it to make sure: a) D hasn’t let any assignments fall through the cracks without realizing it, and b) her teachers haven’t missed logging something or mis-entered a grade (which has happened). This seems to be a pretty good balance where D knows where she stands in all her classes (she usually already has a pretty good idea) but she doesn’t feel undue anxiety about it.
My moniker kind of describes my approach but it was hard earned. At first, I was told to be very hands-on, check the parent portal every day, see that she handed in homework, network with other parents and email teachers regularly (this didn’t happen). My relationship with my daughter tanked. Her grades were not what we expected. By winter of tenth grade, we both realized things had to change. I had to let go and she had to take on more responsibility. I let go of the evil parent portal. In fact, I changed the alerts from my email address to her email address and gave her full access to it. I never checked again. Best move I ever made. Ha. Like me, she hated getting those email alerts that she had a zero on an assignment. Unlike me, she could do something about it. Her attitude toward her schoolwork improved the next two years.
D was not the high stat student. She made the conscious decision in ninth grade to get enough sleep every night - that year, she was in bed by 9pm. Over time, I came to realize that was the right decision for her. She took honors and AP classes and she was fine with not getting straight A’s. The good thing about getting B’s? The parent and child learned the world didn’t end if the child got an 87 or 82 or even (gasp) a 78. Both of us realized no one is perfect and the GPA isn’t a reflection of one’s character, morality, parenting or even accomplishment. It’s not even an accurate reflection of your final knowledge on the topic. It is a measure of your knowledge of the subject on a particular day and reflects what someone believes is important to know.
Surprisingly, it was work to consciously keep the pressure off the child in high school. There was competition among the kids, no matter what people say. Kids would humble brag how late they stayed up to finish a project or paper, creating an expectation that the “serious” student had to give up sleep because you failed if you got an 87 (this was a high school with about 85-90% white students and very very few Asian students, if we have to go there).
Now we knew there were students who could pull the A’s (half D’s cousins) with hard work but within a reasonable schedule. These were often very bright students who figured out an efficient study habit. That wasn’t my child and I saw (finally) there’s no point to try to make her into the image of one. Stress-wise, we discovered the truly exceptional student (the national and international olympiad type) was fine and students like my daughter were fine. But the overachievers, the very capable but not quite tippy top, were the ones who suffered. These were students who could fairly easily go to excellent colleges and universities, just maybe not the top ten. Unfortunately sometimes they saw the top schools as the only choices.
In the end, I realized my main objective was to produce a relatively happy confident person who took chances and wasn’t afraid to “fail”. My daughter recently run into a bump at college. By the time we talked, she had figured it out on her own (well, maybe with the help of her professor). She asked if I was upset. I said no, I ran into the same thing and she handled it fine.
If your child is spending hours on homework in eighth grade, hours on an EC with no downtime, I would adjust things for her. This will not be easy because of internal and external pressures to achieve. Oddly, today’s kids really need to learn how to do…nothing. Just breathe. Take a walk. Do something with absolutely no expectation of achievement or even success.
I love the term “concierge parent” and regrettably, I probably do more of this than I should. I don’t helicopter - haven’t laid eyes on my kids’ homework or tests in years - because I trust them to do the work and they do. The only time I hear the blades whirring gently is when there’s something high stakes with a deadline, like an application or SAT prep.
However…
D1 is a professional dancer and during performance season, there is no time for anything other than school, dance, homework, eat, sleep, repeat. So she gets a pass on school day chores and catches up on the weekend with folding her laundry, cleaning her room and the bathroom, and any other weekly obligations. I am willing to do this so she can get a reasonable amount of sleep and maintain her health and good spirits. During school breaks and vacations she does more.
She does know how to do basic things - driving, simple cooking, laundry, running the vacuum cleaner, etc.
For the OP, there are plenty of wonderful colleges and universities that would be happy to have your daughter. In the 8th grade, she shouldn’t have hours of homework and be tired and stressed. You can insist that she scale back. As there are no guarantees at the tippy top schools, it’s not worth it to have kids grind away relentlessly throughout middle school and high school, IMO. They’ll burn out before they ever step foot onto campus.
I think different kids benefit from different amounts and kinds of help and independence. I am a father who was and is very active in my kids’ lives and in their academics. My kids benefited from having to do much less around the house and developing life skills later in life. Others really would benefit from a strong sense of competence and self-reliance that my kids didn’t really have. So, judging where along the spectrum of self-sufficiency versus support depends upon the kid and probably also the adult involved.
Our son was truly gifted and had severe LDs and some health issues,. We took everything off his plate and he wasn’t strong in life skills. His room was a mess. He never made his bed. We were very concierge-y. He worked intensively, learned to read and especially to write while in HS (to get there, we needed to create a partial homeschooling plan), did very well in HS (no rankings but within the top 5) and remarkably well (given the LDs) on standardized tests.
You asked how it has worked out. He got into elite schools and went to one. I doubt he ever made his bed and don’t want to think too hard about how often he did his wash. His room was a mess. We were somewhat concierge-y in college too. But, he graduated summa cum laude with a triple major from an elite college, had two jobs as research assistants in two departments while in college, joined the debate team (to work on his speech delay), played intramural sports, started a company while he was in college. He worked at his company for 1.5 years and then headed west to grad school where he is getting an MS in data science/computational and mathematical engineering (fields he didn’t study in college) and an MBA. I’d say he is in the best school in the world for his interests. He’ll probably start another company pretty soon. He’s making money creating risk-free arbitrages in political prediction markets as a hobby. Guess what: he’s still messy and makes his bed only when royalty visits his dorm but now leads friends on backpacking trips in Yosemite. But, he has a lovely, hyper-organized GF who at the moment seems happy to organize around him. And, most important, in addition to being a leader (lots of kids want to work for him), he is a mensch (defined in some online dictionary as “a person of integrity and honor” but I think of as meaning a fundamentally good human being) who goes out of his way to help friends in need.
ShawD had major medical problems as a kid and also had less severe LDs. She was very anxious in school all the way through HS. She had more life skills but was also messy. We were a little less concierge-y with her, but her room was and is a mess. At times, we gave her a budget for shopping and for decorating her room. She did well in HS – top quartile at a prestigious private HS – but not as well as ShawSon. She was scared of competition while ShawSon loves it. She started school in Canada to avoid the stress of college application process that had a significant percentage of her senior class on anti-depressants. She has had jobs since second semester of freshman year, is quite responsible about money (she asked me if mint.com was secure enough to use to help her with budgeting). She graduated from college in 3.5 years – she also graduated summa cum laude with a 3.95 GPA – and is in the last semester of a master’s program to be a Nurse Practitioner. Her room is still messy and she doesn’t make her bed or have a drivers license drive (this due to the early medical problems, but she should be able to drive). She works more than 20 hours a week and is on call on certain evenings and weekends for medical problems. She is working on managing money, is extremely responsible about life and is also a mensch.
I have seen other kids whose parents required life skills. My brother-in-law moved for a year from his wife and three daughters to see if a different location would be better for his work. It did and then they moved. In that year, the two older daughters really stepped up. They made their own meals and cooked for the family, took care of their much younger sister, did the laundry, helped guide the nanny who took care of the youngest child, etc. This would have been very tough for my son to do and likely hard for my daughter to do while doing well in school, but has not phased my two older nieces. I think they will always benefit from this sense of skill and self-reliance.
So, the key question is what the kid needs and can benefit from.
I tend to be a believer in moderation. I don’t take many hard lines.
I do the concierge thing in some ways, but when my kids are less busy or taking a break from homework, they take a turn and help out around the house. They are the primary dog watchers when they are home unless they both have huge assignments or tests the next day (that’s rare). We feel it’s fair.
I do the helicopter thing in some ways too. If they ask me to edit their essays, I do. If they are stuck on a math problem, I help (ok, full disclosure is I mostly help by completely doing it wrong but almost always my wrong ways breaks through their blocks and they figure out what they were doing wrong. I can’t explain the phenomenon but it’s real, lol). Heck, my 6th grader recently brought home a friend’s essay for me to edit because the teacher had been doing so for students but ran out of time and the friend apparently didn’t have a parent who was “good at that at all.” The funniest part was I didn’t even have to edit my own kid’s essay that time since she had already had the teacher look over it. I check the parent portal multiple times a day, no shame. My kids don’t have many opportunities to do so while at school and like me to tell them grades ASAP (like as soon as they get in the car, sometimes they even text at lunch and ask). They especially like to know low grades from me before getting blindsided in class. It helps their anxiety and takes me seconds to look at.
My older is in 9th and is a high ability kid. We’ll see what happens with colleges. I’m honestly not worried much (costs are the only thing that worry me a bit). I mostly joined CC to make sure her course selections were keeping doors open, and stayed because there is lots of good opinions and advice here. The best thing I’ve learned is that there are so many options and always an alternative.
Of course we parent them. It’s our role. I think that, in general, when we talk about letting them manage their own lives, we forget the many ways we do influence them and the structure we set.
I wasn’t focused on when they left for college as much as when they finished college, having life sills and making mostly wise choices, being confident enough to go after what they wanted, whatever that turned out to be. And how to manage risk, avoid or get out of a spot. The forest, not the trees. But we set the framework way back when they were little kids. They were expected to help around the house, age appropriate, respect their school demands, and all sorts of etceteras. As well as enjoy, have friend time, and grow to be their own selves.
It’s true they learn a lot on the web. We could start a thread on how our kids surprised us. One of mine bought a crock pot. “You know how to use a crock pot?” I looked it up.
Re the Parent Portal: I think it depends on the kid. I rarely checked for my D, who was an excellent student. She was also a talker, so she’d let me know if she did especially well (or not as well as expected) on something. Two years later, when my son was a freshman in HS, l checked once a week or so, but used the info to ask questions: “Saw you did well on the History test; what countries are you studying next?” or as gentle reminders, “Saw you’re reading Lord of the Flies. How’s that coming?” He was generally a B student, and that was fine as he is not as intellectually gifted or as disciplined a student as his sister.
His sophomore year, I checked the portal sporadically. Bs and Cs, but he had a couple of rigorous classes, and I let things slide because I wanted him to take ownership of his academics. So I was unaware that his grades plummeted 3rd quarter (when baseball season started). I didn’t find out until he was academically ineligible to play for two weeks. He knew he was in trouble, and had gone to his guidance counselor for advice, but it was too late in the marking period to salvage things. The consequences were severe, as the hit to his GPA will make college admissions more of a challenge than it should be. In hindsight, I pulled back too far for MY 15-year-old (YMMV–in fact, I hope it does). On the brighter side, I guess that was his wake-up call, as he has pulled his grades up to As and high Bs. I check at least weekly but try to confine my comments to things like, “I see you have a group project in English. How’s that going?”
I cannot see my D’s college grades, and that’s fine with me. I know I will have to trust S to handle it himself in college, but I wish I’d monitored him more closely at 15.
I was reminded tangentially, by this thread, of how annoyed I get each year to see the winter email from athletic coaches at the school where I teach: they tell families not to ask their student athletes to help shovel snow in case of tiring out or injuring the athlete ahead of practice/events. I think that is chutzpah to the point of insanity. Really? A child’s play-time activity outweighs what could be real safety/legality concerns for their family’s snow removal?
I think that there has to be priority-setting, and a family needs to be careful that children’s activities or “obligations” are not getting in the way of the overall structure and goals for the family. In the professional dancer case above, that could be a reasonable set-up, also presuming that the dancer’s salary goes back into the family that is jumping in to do all of her chores during performance season.
I would not like one of my sons to be a boyfriend/husband to someone who was accustomed to being waited on hand and foot just because of a big deadline coming up at work.
Something else to think about is that stresses of various sorts keep coming up through life, and certainly academic stress continues in college. If you are a student who is only managing to appear “elite” because of excessive time and energy drains to the point of not participating in family life, then what happens when you win the brass ring and go to Harvard? Your staff of parental servants follow you there? Unlikely; your roommate will be picking up a lot of slack, probably resentfully - or you might not do so well in a school that you only got into by essentially faking what you would be capable of in a more balanced life.
@LuckyCharms913 - The parent portal also depends on the parent 
I was turning into a nagging parent who only focused on the problems. (I so admire you for having a different outlook and approach). I had to stop looking at the portal. My husband still had access to the parent portal because he was more laidback when it came to grades and seeing them on the portal. As for your son, I think what happened was actually good for him. He learned his limits. Yes, it may affect his college list a bit (but it may not) but better now than in college.
My D’s school also has a student portal. Yours? She obsessively checks her grades through the iphone app.