This is so common and so true. It ends badly, IMO. So many of my kids’ friends have anxiety and other mental health issues. The parents are helicoptering these kids into their 20’s. Then the kid ends up in the basement and the parents wonder why.
Parents are also guilty in some cases of giving kids anything they want even if it doesn’t suit the parent. Kid ends up unable to have a loving relationship because they haven’t learned give and take.
Yes, it’s really sad. I think parents want their kids to be something they’re not. Be happy with the kid you have!
D got her Girl Scout Gold Award and she did it all on her own (well she did have a little help from H and I), but she was the only girl in her troop (her troop was pretty small) who did her Gold Award because SHE wanted to do it. The other girls were doing it because their moms made them and their moms did a lot of the work. Two of the girls seemed totally uninterested in the whole thing. D wanted to do it and I let her lead the way. If she hadn’t wanted to do it, oh well. I think it’s a nice accomplishment, but not the be all and the end all. I know one family who made all their kids go to Dartmouth. The parents had gone there and had met there. The kids were more then qualified to get in. The son happily went. The daughter didn’t want to go, but mom and dad said she had to. She did graduated, but hated it. She actually works alongside me now and still bashes Dartmouth and her parents to this day…I think her parents wanted their kids to have the same experience they did…that doesn’t work on every kid.
This is a huge accomplishment. I was a Scout leader for both my kids ( for 10 years each K-9). I even took them to Iceland and other places. It was like herding cats. The stories I can tell you about the parents would make you laugh and scream at the same time. We still laugh about some of the requests people made. Not surprisingly, parents who were low key but supportive had the best outcomes.
Kids do best when they follow their passions and dreams and keep reality in mind in terms of what they plan to do.
Thanks! D really enjoyed her years in Girl Scouts and she had a great troop leader! Wow, Iceland! That sounds really cool. I used to teach 8th grade and I was one of the teacher chaperones on the Washington DC trip several times, and it was definitely like herding cats! I was so glad when they decided to fly non-stop. It’s not fun to supervise 70 8th graders during a layover! That was the same year they decided to take a bus from the school to the airport instead of the having parents drop their kids off at the airport (that’s worse then herding cats).
Yes, being low key and supportive is way to go with parenting. That said, parents are entitled to do what they think is best!
I think the best parenting varies by the kid. Some kids are fine with a low key approach. Others need more supervision/guidance. And everywhere in-between. The trick is to vary your parent style based on what your kid needs best not necessarily how you are most comfortable being a parent.
I was a Cub scout leader for my son’s troop along with a friend of mine. We really had fun with the kids. When it was time for Boy Scouts my son joined a big troop but didn’t really like it. I of course kept pushing it and asking WHY he didn’t like it but finally he just said “I don’t need anybody else nagging at me to do things.” All I could do was laugh, agree with him and let him quit. Time to explore new interests.
As @leigh22 said above, it is all situational. I have two very different kids. I had fully saved for both of them in 529 plans. ShawSon is brilliant (not just a proud father speaking but his thesis advisor said it in a newspaper interview) and severely dyslexic. I used to say that if his IQ is at the 99.9th percentile, his level of drive was even further out in the tails of the distribution. He wanted to attend the Ivy that attended and loved and I told him it would be a terrible idea because there were unavoidable courses with 400 pages of reading a week. So, I guided him towards small LACs with minimal distribution requirements where the professors would realize quickly how bright he was. I was happy to pay full freight there for him. All has worked out exceedingly well.
My daughter is also quite bright, though not quite in the stratosphere with her brother (who loved his LAC but in a non-arrogant way observed that “there weren’t too many smart people there,” by which he meant people like him, though he found them in grad school). She didn’t really have a good sense of what she wanted to study or why (the only two subjects that she liked in high school were human biology and statistics). Perhaps because she followed her brother, she hated the whole holistic admissions process and decided to only apply in Canada (she’s a dual citizen) and when we visited, every school told us she would get in and the only question was how much scholarship money she would get. She picked one and the cost was almost zero for tuition, room and board. I was happy about that because she wasn’t really ready in some ways to fully apply herself (I had actually urged a gap year, which her brother had taken, but she declined). So $5K to $10K per year in costs.
She was admitted to the faculty of science, where she could study biology (or stats). At orientation, she met a girl who was going to study nursing and my daughter called and asked how we would feel about her shifting to nursing. She thought it was not learning for learning’s sake, which didn’t motivate her, and it was human biology and it was people-friendly (she is seriously social, warm, and charming). We said OK, but they wouldn’t let her transfer so af the end of the semester she applied and was admitted to an accelerated BSN/MSN program, and would become a Family Nurse Practitioner in 4.5 years (5 years less her first semester’s credits from Canada). For that, I was happy to pay full freight.
This is so true. I would have expected myself to drive my D more, but I found myself telling her to stress less, don’t over commit, she doesn’t need 20 out of 20 every time….this is the opposite of what I needed, because I never stressed out over school and basically underachieved. I could have used some management, which ironically, my D does do with me now.
This goes back about a dozen years ago. Close family friends of ours are deciding on their third kid. The first two kids were both attending the two top public colleges in-state. The third child was an exceptional student.
The decision for their third child was between an almost total free ride to a top 100 in-state public school vs. about 50k a year for Penn. To make a long story short, she went to Penn. Eight years later, she gets a call from two Wharton grads launching a start-up. They were looking for someone with her degree in science and got her name from someone else who knew her at Penn.
She became the fourth employee in this health care start-up that blew up during the pandemic—recently cashed in for millions. She will tell you no way she would have had the opportunity without Penn.
True, but my niece went to a well ranked public school. Graduated with a science degree and has had 2 jobs which she left after a while (bored, not as well paid), and then got hired for a start up with a very high salary. So you aren’t doomed if you lack connections.
Most of the undergraduates who worked in my wife’s lab in a mid-ranked public university ended up working in top tech companies. Their placement rates and their salaries were comparable to those of students from the same backgrounds who attended expensive private colleges which were much more highly ranked.
Then there are the students who did PhDs in her lab, most of whom did the undergraduate degrees in what people here would consider “lower tier” colleges. They are all either working for enormous salaries for top financial companies and top tech companies, running their own successful start-ups, or having very high level jobs at government companies.
In most cases, people who are looking to recruit somebody with 8 years of experience for their startup will be looking at what that person has done in their 8 years of professional careers, not which college they attended. I mean, if I wanted somebody who is successful in software development, I will look for somebody who has been successful in developing software which is similar to what I need, not somebody who attended MIT 8 years ago.
Moreover, the vast majority of UPenn graduates who get opportunities that are worth an extra $200,000 are generally people whose family can afford $200,000 extra.
Of course, there is a difference between paying $200,000 for a business degree from Wharton versus a business degree from a solid university, and paying $200,000 for a psychology degree from UPenn and attending, say, U Iowa for free.
In this case, this family did not end up regretting paying up for a dream school. It was not easy for them to afford to do it at the time and took on debt to do so.
I think networking goes a long way. Penn is the top feeder school for Goldman, Morgan, and Citi. There are a lot of VC dollars controlled by Penn graduates. Specifically, with start-ups, the vast majority of founders come from the top Universities. Where Funded Founders Went To School
The old saying, “Who you know.”
How does that study define “Founders”? Is it one founder or anyone on the team of founders?
According to what I can tell, it does not specify.
so we sent our D to her dream school worth that $260k , and from an ROI standpoint, is definitely worth it. She is ready to start her 3rd year at her 1st job ( which I think she never would have landed this early in her career if not for her dream school – it’s in finance, buy side). At age 23 ( graduated 2 yrs ago ) , she makes about $200K, and is likely to increase again in the next year or two. And she has two classmates from her batch( same school ) that is on the exact same path.
For us it’s not about ROI. Financially, we are making it work, though it means sacrificing in some areas and budgeting. We won’t be looking at whether her school results in higher pay in order to measure whether it was worth it. We’ll ask ourselves — did she thrive, did she enjoy the four years of her life there, did she succeed mentally and academically. If yes, it will have been worth it.