Parental pressure horror stories

Parents Forum
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<p>I notice, reading some of the threads, that when the state of college admissions in this country is called into question, some parents reply with something like "What's wrong with striving to excel?" Well, nothing, but it makes me think...I would imagine such parents are also going to expect their kids to "excel" in college. Also, I assume that many parents here are highly involved in their kids lives, have high expectations for their kids, and are sending their kids off to college in the fall. So I figured I'd post this.</p>

<p>I'm a rising senior at MIT, a difficult school with a very intelligent and motivated student body, and I've seen the damage done by well-meaning parents who wanted the best for their kids.</p>

<p>I know someone who, when she decided to switch her major from computer science to electrical engineering, was told by her parents that she was throwing her life away if she didn't major in computer science. She switched anyway. Her grades were passable but not great in both majors. There was a lot of fighting, and her parents yanked her tuition. She pleaded with MIT and documented her parents' treatment of her, so that she could be declared financially independent and her financial aid package could be increased to a point where she could make enough money to pay her own way. Her story has a happy ending - she's graduated and has a well-paying, technically challenging job, but it's obvious that what happened still hurts her.</p>

<p>I know someone whose parents pulled her tuition when she switched to a humanities major. They didn't tell her that they were going to do it until it came time to pay the bill for her next term. She works long hours and barely manages to make ends meet, and it's been terrible for her emotionally. She knows two other people on her old hall who had to drop out when they ended up in similar situations.</p>

<p>I know someone who became seriously ill and ended up in the hospital. Her parents came to visit her, and the first thing her dad said to her was that he expected her to get straight As.</p>

<p>When I was a sophomore, there was a freshman on my hall who used to have horrible fights over the phone with her parents about her grades. People in nearby rooms could hear her crying and screaming that they didn't understand what it was like at MIT, her classes were hard and she couldn't get top grades anymore. Before the end of her first term, she attempted suicide - I remember that we went en masse to visit her in the hospital and brought her chocolate. After she got out of the hospital, she left MIT and hasn't come back. The whole hall, especially the people who lived near her, felt terribly guilty about not having realized what she was going to do, not being able to stop her or help her.</p>

<p>I've known people who haven't spoken to their parents in years because of the academic pressure their parents put on them, and people who went through periods where they cried themselves to sleep every night. And these are just the people I know.</p>

<p>A certain amount of motivational pressure can be a good thing, but there's a point where it ceases to be a good thing. I worry that with college admissions, professional and grad schools, and the job market being so competitive, more and more bright kids are going to be damaged or destroyed by parents who only wanted them to succeed and be happy, and didn't know any way to help them achieve it other than pushing them harder.</p>

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<p>What sad stories. While they're not unique to MIT, I imagine there are more, and more extreme, such stories there than at most other institutions.</p>

<p>What's that expression someone on CC uses - that you have to love the kid you've got, not the one you wish you had? I've got to wonder at what point the child is successful enough to justify the damage done to the parent-child relationship in the name of "success."</p>

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<p>jessiehl:</p>

<p>Great post. Another point that some parents (and students) might not consider is that these bright, motivated kids had a major bar-level change when they went from a school for the general populace where they might have been in the upper, for example, 5% of that population to a school entirely composed of that top 5%. Half of that formerly top 5% will end up being in the bottom half of the new highly selective school. This doesn't mean the kid is any less bright or motivated than they were before - just that the bar has moved. </p>

<p>At the parent orientation of UCSD which is very selective, but not as selective as MIT or the ivies, the staff made sure to candidly inform the parents to not expect the straight A's they're used to due to this. They told the parents that it'll be eye-opening for the parents as well as the students and that the parents need to simply offer even more support for the student since the student can be emotionally impacted by this level change - especially at first and until they discover that it's really okay. I knew it would be like this before that orientation but it was interesting to see them confirm it. Note that this level change tends to be even more severe in the engineering field where grading is usually quite harsh and usually way more harsh than the rest of the school. Parents need to know that the student near the bottom at MIT (and other very selective colleges) would probably be the student near the top at many other colleges.</p>

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<p>my brother just told me about a news story he read of a kid who burned his house down because he was scared of telling his father his grades. how messed up is that? </p>

<p>my parents never put pressure on me academically... i can't even remember them ever asking me if i'd done my homework. i am completely self-motivated, which i think is better in the long run, but also very stress-inducing.</p>

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<p>My D. wanted to go to MIT. I asked her if she was willing to risk being average, because if she isn't I wonder if that kind of place is right for her. I wonder if that was a rotten thing to do, but I think some of these parents have tunnel vision--they only see their kid, and they don't see their kid as part of a larger environment.</p>

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<p>Wow that is SUCH a sad post!! I actually am seriously considering MIT because I love a competitive academic environment. I assumed that it was driven less by perfectionism/pressure and more by an inner drive to learn. Guess perfectionists and parental pressures are problems at both MIT and that other college across the river.</p>

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<p>Unfortunately, I've heard stories like these, too. It's not so much about the grades as about the switching of majors. And often, it involves immigrant families with parents who do not know much about the many different types of careers available out there and think only in terms of lawyers/doctors/engineers/computer scientists.</p>

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<p>jimbob:</p>

<p>If you're thinking of Harvard, please know that it is on the same side of the river. But perhaps you're think of BU?</p>

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<p>I don't know if you can generalize about it being immigrant families. I can think of some pretty horrific stories in our community. Parents who decide not only what school their child will go to, but what the kid should major in. One woman breathlessly announced that "we" had decided to major in economics...a year before her daughter was graduated from high school!</p>

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<p>I'm sure that there are parents of all stripes who put too much pressure on their children. The stories I am most familiar with are of parents of immigrants, and especially immigrants from Asia, who put pressure on their kids to go into premed, comp sci, engineering, economics, and, to a much lesser extent, law school.</p>

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<p>jimbob: In my experience, most people at MIT have an incredible inner drive to learn. That doesn't mean their parents are any less likely to pressure them. In fact, sometimes the conflict arises because the student has an inner drive for something different subject material than the parent wants them to study (as in the first two stories I mentioned).</p>

<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad: Oh yes. I'm probably in the bottom quarter of my class, grades-wise, so I definitely know what you're talking about. MIT is pretty upfront about the moving bar. And most students adjust to it surprisingly well, perhaps because Admissions selects for resilient students who can cope with setbacks. But for many parents, and some students, the problem is that they know intellectually about the moving bar, but they have trouble really integrating it emotionally, or they never really believed it would happen to their kid.</p>

<p>Mombot and marite: Yeah, everyone at MIT is familiar with Asian Parent Syndrome (or Indian Parent Syndrome), because the mentality tends to be pervasive among those groups (there's actually a counseling dean who specializes in counseling Asian-American students), but Mombot is right, it's not just Asian/Indian/immigrant families. Of the stories I told in the OP, none of them involved Asians, and only one (the first one) involved Indians. Of the rest, the suicidal girl was Hispanic, the rest are white, non-Hispanic, and American-born.</p>

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<p>I think it is important to make parents aware of the pressures they can exert on the lives of others. I have come across many assertive and demanding parents.
In fact, I'd like to add there are many parents who have spent their entire retirement fund on their children's or child's higher education with the expectation that their child will take care of them in their old age. I would never want to be in that dependant position.</p>

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<p>Is this really normal for Asian American parents, or have I been that cut off from the mainstream Asian American community for most of my life? (If this is the norm, then I'd rather be part of the fringe.)</p>

<p>According to CC, Asian American parents are Academic Performance Cult fascists who raise their kids with an iron fist and demand straight A's and every Honors/AP class known to the human race plus a few more. (I say that this is a stereotype. After all, many people in Idaho own guns but most aren't militia kooks. Not all Caucasians in the South wave Confederate flags and wear white-hooded outfits. And not everyone in Iowa raises hogs.) What are you all trying to do, convince me that my parents were born in outer space and not China?</p>

<p>Is the hardcore Academic Performance Cult worship so universal among Asian American families? There were plenty of times my parents (usually my mother) criticized me, but I can't remember any of the criticisms EVER being about grades, not even the time I got a D in gym in 3rd grade or my then-lowest GPAs ever in junior high school (3.0-3.6 in all but one quarter). They were always proud of my academic performance. They didn't even doubt me as an undergraduate student, when I developed a very blatantly shoddy attitude towards my studies. In fact, I was disappointed by their nonchalant attitude because I was in a rebellious mood for the first time ever in my life. (I'm surprised I graduated with my BSEE at UIUC with a GPA of 4.13 on a 5-point scale.)</p>

<p>Some background:
1. I graduated from high school 14 years ago. My parents were born in the 1930s in mainland China and left in the late 1940s. My father went to school in Taiwan and then in the USA. My mother moved to Hong Kong, then Australia, and then the USA.
2. I grew up in southwest suburban Chicago, where there were very few Asian Americans. Was my experience different because I was cut off from the mainstream Asian American culture during my day-to-day life? I know that Asian Americans are a much more significant percentage of the population in the major metropolitan areas of California and the east coast.
3. How much of all this is a function of the local culture? For all I know, the average Asian American who grew up in Arkansas only earned a C+ GPA, but Asian Americans in Arkansas aren't a significant percentage of any population and would thus be invisible in any survey or study.
4. I was the youngest of three, and I earned better grades than my older siblings (brother is 7 years older, sister is 10 years older). Maybe my parents were older and mellower by the time I reached school age, or maybe their expectations were based on my older siblings.</p>

<p>If I ever have kids and shove the Academic Performance Kool-Aid down their throats, PLEASE call the DCFS to take my kids away and send me on a hunting trip with Darth Cheney.</p>

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<p>I once talked to a Vietnamese student whose parents had been part of the first group of refugees to be resettled in the US. He said that in his community, the students were divided among the vals and sals on the one hand and the slackers (he called them gang members wannabes because they had the attittude but it was mostly show) on the other. There was nothing in between. So you could read tabout all these incredible high achievers one day and the next, you could be reading about the other type of kids causing trouble. At top colleges, you tend to see the high achievers who try to pay back their parents for the sacrifices they made for their education by immigrating to the US and taking up jobs that are below what they could have had if they had stayed in their home country.<br>
Whether implicit or explicit, the pressure is enormous. If they are the older children, they are told that not only do they have to think about their parents, but they have to be role models for their younger siblings as well. </p>

<p>Of course, not all immigrant parents are like that and not all Asian parents are like that. But as Jessie suggested, it is a visible enough phenomenon for it to merit a special dean at MIT.
But think about it, which countries produced authors of books such as A Chinese Girl at Harvard? A Korean girl at Harvard? and Kayvaa Wiswanathan's large advanced was predicated on the assumption that her book would sell well in India.</p>

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<p>There are financial as well as academic issues involved and parents do have a right to expect reasonable diligence on the part of the student. Straight A's or the like is an unreasonable expectation at the top schools. A 1.5 is equally unreasonable. In trying to balance expectations with reasonable performance we limited our pressure to the following two questions:
1. Are you willing to have to work hard to be in the middle of your class academically or would you prefer to be near the top of your class?
2. Are you willing to put forth the effort to maintain a reasonable GPA or would you prefer to enjoy more outside interests?
The honest answer to these two questions are critical to student and parent happiness. In the end this came down to two choices, expensive top school vs. large scholarship at a less competitive school. I am happy DD , after thoughtful review chose MIT. Our pressure will be limited to reminding her of her choice. The key issue is it was her choice not ours.</p>

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<p>I married a man from India, so I've had some firsthand experience raising kids with an Asian parent. I think I've tempered some of his over-achieving qualities (he being the most competitive person I've ever met) and perhaps our kids have had a nice combination of parenting styles. </p>

<p>The population density of India and the East Asian countries contributes to the competitiveness of the educational systems -- and to the task of finding a good job afterward. I have many stories--here are a few. My husband went to Catholic schools because his Hindu parents considered them the best. All students were given a class ranking each year, and he can remember his rank (and the ranks of many others) each year back to kindergarten. Admission to the Indian Institute of Technology was based entirely on one's score on the admissions exam. Something like 200,000 students took the test for 1,200 openings, and one's score determined placement among five campuses throughout the country and access to various majors. </p>

<p>Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s, when his brother was raising two sons in India. Population was much higher and competition even greater by then. Each year the boys' school expelled the lowest ten percent of students, regardless whether these were good, fair or poor students. </p>

<p>My husband struggled to understand why it was a good idea to hold our kids back from kindergarten when each missed the Sept. 1 birthday deadline by a few weeks. In his experience in India, the oldest one in the class was generally considered a "dummy." He struggled when our son announced that he didn't want to study engineering (but he's okay now; our son will start college this fall, perhaps majoring in hotel administration). He understands intellectually that there are far more opportunities here in America, but his incredibly Darwinian upbringing and education sometimes get in the way.</p>

<p>I fully and completely understand why Indians who come to this country are so very well-prepared to hit the ground running and achieve professional and material succes! In reality, it IS becoming more competitive here in the U.S., and the way any parent reacts to that reflects the reality he/she faced growing up.</p>

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<p>I'm sorry, I know you aren't going to like this response. My first thoughts were would you like some cheese with this wine? </p>

<p>The easiest way to minimize parent involvement in your education is simply don't use their money. I don't have alot of empathy for a college student whose education is being funded by their parents complaining about the parents active involvement. </p>

<p>Simply tell the parents the thousands they set aside or went into debt to provide isn't needed for college. Instead they can use it for retirement. </p>

<p>I know a few years back when we were invited to a Stanford presentation for prospective students, the first three faculty speakers only talked about how they changed students minds about their majors. At what was 37,000 a year at the time, that was a big turn off to me. Why should I committ six figures to an uncertainty? Couldn't the kid change majors five or six times at a state school for about $100,000 less? Why would I committ that kind of money for an experience that leaves my kid with a slightly above poverty level job? </p>

<p>I do have an opinion for my kids college experience as far as careers go, find something you will enjoy and not go hungry or be outsourced in middle age. I don't know if that is as hard core as some parents, but I do also qualify it with my kids this way... The day you tell me "dad, I've got it, your money's no good here.... " is the day our relationship changes for the good and they don't "have" to listen to advice again.</p>

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<p>Oh Opie, for some reason I assumed parents were supposed to support their kids' choices (made with reason), not throw money at them when the kid's choice pleased them</p>

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<p>SuNa:
Check your Private Messages box, when you have a chance.</p>

<p>...we now return to our regular programming...</p>

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<p>JIMBOB really? </p>

<p>What little money I have wouldn't travel that far when I choose to throw it. :) Although coins do fly farther than bills.</p>