@gardenstategal, Thanks for your wise advise.
Please don’t take this the wrong way at all @SculptorDad but I have to wonder based on your previous posts if your heavy involvement (i.e. helicopter-ness) in the application process “may” have lead some of the schools to believe that you were totally driving the bus (and being the bus monitor, mechanic, and so on). For one second, I would not doubt your daughter’s talent academically and otherwise, but I have to assume the admission officers have learned very well how evaluate students for fit.
It also saddens me a bit that it seems like you are sooooo uberfocused to reach some artificial finish line for your daughter (or is it for you?) that she (and you) are not seeing the forest for the trees. Life is long and there’s plenty of time for her to conquer whatever it is that piques her interest so why not let her simply coast for a year or two and find herself. This is the perfect opportunity to do that as she’s so advanced.
I agree very much.
The whole BS idea was to slow down and coast a bit. As challenging as it can be to some freshmen coming from middle schools, we don’t expect BS freshmen would burn so much midnight oil as she has done for last 2~3 years.
She has so heavily focused on art since she was a young child, but now wants to do something else as well with her life. She said she will use the high school years to explorer and find what that is while enjoying maximum interactions with age peers during her teen, instead of continuing early college route that many other homesschoolers around her has taken.
I don’t mean to pile on here, I really don’t, but I have to say that I was taken aback by the fact that you even knew that your daughter has enough college credits to take a correspondent law school program, take the bar exam, and start a solo practice at age 18. Even if you’re not suggesting she’d actually do that, why on earth would you even have bothered to figure all that out? I’ve been in the legal profession my whole adult life, and I can’t imagine anything that sounds like a less good idea. People who did very well at top law schools are struggling to find good jobs or make ends meet, hanging a shingle out as a sort of ‘Dougie Howser J.D.’ is preposterous.
And who would want to hire such an attorney?
Remember some good, general advice: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I have found that to apply in many situations.
No law firm. Hence solo. Many local ethnic clients can’t distinguish with Pacific Hawaii law school and some ABA schools.
@soxmom,
Before her Ceramics classmates who are adult professionals in medicine and business, as well as her art history professor convinced her to look into BS, she had long been adamant on becoming a professional artist who doesn’t teach, sell originals or take commercial projects. Part-time solo practice for bankruptcy, dui or immigration for local ethnic market was one way of supporting herself with minimal non-art side job hours for life. It was a very practical option due to our personal and family connections, as well as her ethnicity and bilingual ability.
We also looked into studying figure sculpting at a European atelier, but making portraits too felt like taking commercial projects for her.
@london203
I agree very much. It is a discarded option for now. She can probably goto a decent law school with heavy scholarship since she has great UG GPA and is naturally good with LSAT questions. That’s a better way if she later decides to become a lawyer. At the moment she is looking into other paths though.
I don’t think it’s useful to obsess over the past. The only thing I would observe is that admissions officers are looking for children who (in their judgement) will do well away from home at that point in their lives. They are not looking for the “best” students, nor for the student who will be the “best” adults.
Your daughter (from your description) is very academically advanced. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the boarding school experience (or any high school) will be easy for her. There are think tanks which have recommended accelerating prodigiously gifted children, rather than attempting to keep them on grade level.
It is hard to be adult in one aspect (academic achievement), while still being an adolescent. Boarding school admissions officers also have to think about how the students will fit together, whether they will coalesce as a group.
On the bright side, an offer of admission does mean that the admissions people at that school believe she can do well there. It would be most helpful (as LaxPrep suggested) for you to stop looking over your shoulder.
I give @SculptorDad a ton of credit for baring his soul on a lot of this stuff. A lot of parents on this site, almost by definition of showing up and engaging, are high achievers and want even higher achievement for their offspring. Many of us also probably do a good job of trying to fake “being more chill” about this stuff than @SculptorDad.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe it’s because our society discourages public admission of being less than 100% enthused with each outcome, maybe because we want to pretend, “Oh Jimmy just got into Andover, it was all him.” In our society, apparently it’s ok to be freakishly brilliant and talented, but perish the thought that anyone actually sees the sausage getting made. But I think by virtue of even being on this site, we know that at best, that’s not quite reality. There’s a lot ugliness and effort in making the sausage.
I think @SculptorDad has the cojones to actually come out and say it. I know that’s helped me.
I’m not suggesting any of anyone’s advice towards him is wrong–especially with regard to making sure his daughter’s long-term prognosis as a human is as good as possible–but this is a Dad who clearly gives an enormous amount of love and support to his kid and is going to miss the heck of not having her around and I think some of his post-game fretting is related to needing a new project!
Personally, I’m looking at building a canoe with my 8-year old.
^^ Well said.
I am behind in the make-up thing as well. I started wearing make-up regularly after turning 45. Well, actually I still don’t do it regularly.
I watched youtube videos to learn a couple things. I don’t have middle school girlfriends to teach me a thing or two.
Those middle schoolers in the neighborhood can really do arts with make-up. I am pretty sure I can never reach that level of “maturity” even after 20 years of (insincere) practice.
It seemed makeup is just a form of art. We paid for materials and classes (at a cosmetics shop rather than art studio) and she practices diligently. 
Makeup classes? That you pay for? Oh well, there is certainly more that that in today’s world to boggle my mind. I
@Mr.Wendal I like your post. There is some truth to the sausage making but I don’t think it is much more than 70% of gifted students. I know some really academically advanced children that are driving the bus and not their parents.
I really like “the chill” comment.
I think I get @SculptorDad in many aspects: as the parent of a precocious child he wants the world for her. Push push push. He wouldn’t be able to push push push if she wasn’t talented and somewhat uniquely capable of what she has accomplished at a young age. If she didn’t have her many talents there would be no reason to “push”. We have a somewhat similar situation. I think that individual success and the markers for success are actually pretty conventional. @SculptorDad s daughter is not conventional. Its hard to package that. Separately, we live in an era (I love “the Jerry Maguire” speech-mission statement…LOL) of gruesome greed and competition. Everything is about money and success. Many kid’s definitions of success are simply to be rich or famous. No longer do kids say I want to be a teacher or a lawyer --they want to be Mark Zuckerberg or a hedge fund manager. I think many parents simply feel that if they (our kids) aren’t succeeding RIGHT NOW, then they will never catch up…On this board the demograhics are probably pretty skewed to high achieving, intelligent parents…so even while we can say relax let them be kids, let them drive the bus and so on, most of us aren’t like that and neither are our kids. I am generalizing a bit. So back to maturity: we all know that the mental development between two kids of the same age and gender can be a lifetime in the real world. Extrapolate that to 6 months, a year, two years and add in gender and other factors and it can be monumental. We see it in the sports/college recruiting game: early developers play like adults versus the later bloomers but it can be crushing to the late bloomers. Sadly the pressure to succeed early is everywhere. School, sports etc. So pardon the ramble but I think sometimes the path is the path…man plans and god laughs and all that…she will be fine @SculptorDad. They say everything happens for a reason…
I have push push pushed my daughter until about 2~3 years ago, because I had believed that realizing her potential was my sacred duty as her homeschooling teacher/parent. Success, rich and fame would be nice, but honestly she was so young they weren’t an immediate goal.
I started to feel that my belief was silly a few years ago, and started to think more on her short term happiness as well as long term happiness because life is short and we will all be dead in the long term anyway.
I still hope that she will be rich enough to enjoy what the world offers. I wants her to live in relative comfort, own a home and be able to afford occasional cultural travels to European countries. But I fail to see how more money than that can bring more happiness with the price she would have to pay. At the moment she wants to try business/corporate world when grown up and I want her to be successful, so that she can have fulfilling feeling and enjoy the moment, not to become rich beyond what she needs.
It so happened that putting her into a community college had an effect of her being pushed beyond what I have imagined by grading system itself. Our decision for her going to a boarding school was to have more relaxed, fun and exploring teenage, which I believe now is equally important to being a happy and successful adult. Achieving less, being a kid and all that.
And for being famous, I now see that as completely useless in her being happy and therefore I don’t want it for her, although I used to see that as necessary when she was planning to become a professional sculptor so that she could afford her own profession.
My daughter’s academic/artistic talent and emotional maturity makes me a very lucky parent and I realize that always. I am not naive to believe that I would have taken the same philosophy in success if she was academically struggling and just living comfortably with moderately successful life would be a big challenge. Her talents used to allow me to push push push her, and now perhaps they allow me to be laid back because I am confident that she will be fine after all.
Being laid back means not pushing her. But I still enjoy being involved and using my life experience to help her in finding opportunities and such. For example, we discussed her next Summer plan and came up with several good ideas. 4 weeks Spanish immersion at Caxton college in Spain is on her top list at the moment.
https://www.caxtoncollege.com/es/cursos-de-verano/intensivo-de-espanol/internado.html#
Forgot the main point; The reason we tried for “top” boarding schools was that I believed that she would have a better fit and enjoy it better, and mostly not because of better connections and college prospect they might or might not give.
I maybe naive, but I still think that she wouldn’t have been too stressed academically at top boarding schools so I don’t see it was push for the success. More like it was her who wanted to try top boarding schools for apparent better extra curricular opportunities, and I pushing myself to be a better help in that but ultimately becoming less successful than I hoped.
But successful enough and satisfied as she is going to a very good boarding school, much better than what we initially wanted in the beginning of our search, after all.