<p>How does one give up a promising career at age 46? You either have a career at that point or you don’t. Is there no possibility that Ms. Kumar cannot resume here career in a few years? Suppose her daughter(s) get into that top notch college and, after getting a degree opt to be a stay-at-home mom? THAT would be sacrificing a career for what Ms. Kumar deems the important task of “making sure my kids did well.”</p>
<p>'Why didn’t she quit her job when they were toddlers and set them up for success early on?"</p>
<p>Wow osdad, kind of a harsh critique about how to have successful kids. And here I thought my kids did great with me working. Wonder how that happened?</p>
<p>The problem I have with the article is the implied message that the college process and the junior and senior year of high school are so intense and overwhelming that a parent actually needs to approach managing it as a full-time job! This is nuts and it is this message that causes so much stress and angst among high school students and their parents. Yes, there is work to be done and yes, it is time consuming, but it should not be so huge as to require a full-time case manager. Obviously, this is a personal choice made by one family. I just hope people don’t read this and freak out.</p>
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<p>That is just rude and where is your judgement for the father who “didn’t care enough about his kids to stay at home?” </p>
<p>It’s also a good example of how mothers are always doing it wrong. When she worked for a paycheck, she didn’t care about her kids. Now that she’s home, it’s for the wrong reasons. </p>
<p>It’s tiring trying to keep up with all the ways we mothers are ruining our kids. My mother worked full time, so clearly she didn’t care enough. I was an at-home mom, so clearly I was over-involved. Above it all, our husbands were pretty much free from judgement because they are fathers. It’s maddening. Thank goodness I’ve developed the skill to not give a flip what others think of my parenting.</p>
<p>Maybe she couldn’t afford to stay at home when kids were younger because they couldn’t live on one paycheck.</p>
<p>I had an image, 30 years from now, of a middle-aged adult on a psychiatrist’s bench.
“I’m so angry that I never got into my dream school because my own mother refused to quit her job!”
And hearing that, the psychiatrist blanches and closes down her practice…to be with her kids…:p</p>
<p>Not passing judgement on anyone for anything - but I’d often thought of doing the same when my son was in his early teens and my son would always beg me not to do it. He thought I was enough of a helicopter mom without my not working and ruining it for him. Perhaps he was right. :)</p>
<p>…her kids, who when they’re middle-aged adults, will need a psychiatrist to deal with their hang-up over their mother making their college admissions process her new career.</p>
<p>Yeah, today my D accused me of getting the glory for her admissions success, and hinted that that was the motivation for me to support and help her as I have through her high school years. Sigh.</p>
<p>I’m with pugmadkate. We moms are always wrong.</p>
<p>GT Alum,</p>
<p>I didn’t say kids cannot become successful without a stay-at-home parent. (Heck, my Mom raised 3 successful sons as a single women in the 1960-70’s.) What I said was that perhaps if she had stayed home with them when they were young, her daughters wouldn’t need all that extra help now.</p>
<p>I once got a call from the school district. The Assistant Superintendent told me that a reporter wanted to speak to homeschooling parents for an article. I’ve been around homeschooling forums to have read stories about reporters that totally butchered what the parents told them in the interview. I’ve heard about reporters butchering what is said by those that they interviewed in other areas too. I just declined - that’s what I recommend to others if approached by the press.</p>
<p>You could wind up looking like the biggest fool depending on what they write about you; what they include and what they leave out.</p>
<p>paying3tuitions,</p>
<p>“psychiatrist’s bench”
I like that phrase.</p>
<p>Some of this could be cultural (article didn’t give any stats on these women) part of it might be a baby boomer’s vicarious enjoyment of the application process and the excitement of college (it was for me) and maybe part of it relates to better finaid. Can’t really say for sure.</p>
<p>Quitting work to “micromanage” a child’s education in hopes of increasing his/her shot at an elite school seems less drastic to me than quitting parenting altogether and sending a child to boarding school with the same main goal in mind…</p>
<p>“organizing AP homework assignments”? </p>
<p>That’s just over the line.</p>
<p>It’s personal business. I’ve known a large number of parents who are waaay over that line most of you have drawn, and their kids have graduated from some mighty selective colleges very successfully. The kids that seem to have the most issues are the ones whose parents are not knowledgeable or involved. In the small group of private school kids that I knew well from my sons, the parents were very much involved, and getting their kids into that small group of selective schools was very important to them. Now 4 years later, and 7 years later, the kids tend to be doing extremely well.</p>
<p>Point taken osdad. It certainly does make sense to put time into the earlier years. Like RocketLouise at an earlier post, I just don’t get this micromanagement of a kid’s life. I don’t ask about homework, see test grades or progress reports and let them manage their own time. I have no idea when (other than soon) AP tests are. They study or don’t study for AP and SAT’s. Despite hands off approach, S is a freshman at UNC and D is valedictorian of her class of 500 and a NMS. I can’t imagine the kid that would put up with all this. Aren’t we supposed to raise self-sufficient kids? Both kids made some deadline and content mistakes on their college apps and missed out on some opportunities. I just figured those opportunities weren’t important enough to them as they had plent of others.</p>
<p>One point I don’t think has been considered (if it has then I apologize) is that often times things are exaggerated, and points distorted, to make a writers point more valid. Look how over the top this mom is! The writer had to make sure it was worlds different that what the reader would accept as ‘normal’. Perhaps the mother in the story did leave her career to be with her children during their teen years. Perhaps she did help her child set up a system to organize their assignments. This could be as simple as the dry erase board that I put in my son’s room this year to help him keep track of due dates (at his request). We have to allow for the fact that writers, even journalists, put in the facts that help to show the story they are telling. Maybe the children are pretty goal oriented. Maybe they complained one too many times that their mother was just never around. This wouldn’t help move the story in the direction the writer wanted us to go.</p>
<p>For those that don’t know when tests are due, what homework is done, etc., I have one of those students too. I don’t know when all tests are but I do know the personalities of the teachers and the ‘climate’ of the class. My son tells me the funniest things that go on in class. I stay plugged in. I also have one that needed help learning to organize. We had everything color coordinated. Science binders were black from 7th grade on. It worked for him. I have another that lies somewhere in between. I just ask what’s going on in the classes and remind them to check the computer for assignments. It’s wonderful to step back and let your kids blossom, rise to the top, and rock the academic world. Not every student is like that. There is a happy medium in there and every student is different.</p>
<p>My son’s close friend in high school was truly over the top about her kids’ college prospects. She was truly a living caricature. Her oldest daughter did not get accepted to any of her first round choices despite heavy handed intervention and ended up having to scrape for a left over spot with late admissions. However, mom was back in the game the following year with transfer papers since the girl had good grades, and got her daughter in one of the schools that initially rejected her. </p>
<p>She was even more crazy with her son. Still both kids have graduated from top tier schools now and are doing well. Her third is in a school that mom hand picked and worked towards for years before she applied. As crazy as this mom is, her methods worked.</p>
<p>I couldn’t, so shouldn’t and wouldn’t be that way. Not that it would have even worked with my knucklehead kids. They had their own ideas about where they wanted to go to school and what they wanted in a college, and though were lazy about the apps and needed constant prodding, pushing, nagging, threatening, owned their application processes, making their own mistakes. If there is anything that can be said about their processes, it’s that they did each step on their own even though it was often with a firm foot on their butts. They picked their paths. But things did not work out so glowingly for them. They did make foolish decisions, and paid dearly for them. I truly think that if they had gone the way I would have preferred, my older ones would have been better off, but they could not swallow drinking another’s broth. But they do fully realize that they picked their own stuff. I don’t know how those kids whose parents picked their paths would have taken it , if things did not work out.</p>
<p>This thread has been quite the eye-opener to me. I was unaware that parental efforts shepherding a child to adulthood ended at age eight (or ten or twelve or whatever).</p>
<p>I do agree that some parental efforts are over the top … like sending a child to private high school. Waste of money … in addition to depriving the student of his/her opportunity to excel in a public HS (with no assistance from adults naturally).</p>
<p>How is this any different than some parents spending thousands to hire professional college admissions counselors? I find it more than just a little entertaining that some folks will criticize women for spending too much time with their children. It is a mom’s choice to work inside the home or out in the marketplace.</p>