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<p>Have any of you ever had the feeling that your parents’ “pushing” was more to make you into THEIR ideal of what you should be, rather than giving you the opportunity to develop into who YOU want to be?</p>
<p>So that’s why comunication is so important!
you really need to comunicate with them instead of hiding anything from them.
they’ll never know what you really want</p>
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<p>And? Isn’t all pushing done under the presumption that while the child should develop their own version, they are missing out on opportunities that they would later regret?</p>
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<p>I didn’t “care” about the first 10 years of my schooling. But I went anyways, 180 days a year. Followed directions and got excellent grades too! If that’s not subservience to my resume, then I don’t know what is. Oh, and I would much rather have stayed home and gotten “caught up in books”.</p>
<p>Every parent should volunteer in their kids’ schools to see this first hand. That is my first reaction. </p>
<p>My second reaction is that six different activities, four in a day, solely for the purpose of creating a resume for college is absurd. To be attractive for college, it is more important to be passionately involved in one or two things than it is to be spread thinly among many activities of only tangential interest and obvious tactical advantage.</p>
<p>I’m a parent and I have a different take or should I say, experience. It was only when I found CC 6 1/2 years ago, did I learn about this “race for college” and kids doing things to build the “resume.” That was not the experience my kids had and it was not the situation in our school or community (thankfully!). </p>
<p>Nonetheless, my two kids (one now a senior in college and one in her first year of grad school), were booked solid every afternoon, every evening and all weekend with their extracurricular activities. They also took the most rigorous curriculum offered and had between 3-5 hours of homework per night. Their lives were very very chockful from early in the AM (sometimes even meetings before school) until at least midnight, and then also on weekends. However, they did NONE of these activities to build the resume or to get into college (with the exception of doing well in academics which they like to do anyway, but did know that doing well academically would help with long term goals to go to college). I am convinced that if my kids never attended college, they would have done the same ECs with the same intensity anyway. Their ECs were lifelong pursuits (they had several) and were heavy duty time commitments. They loved these activities and were always taking on more and more but not to get into college but out of the sheer love of these activities. </p>
<p>In fact, they continued many of these activities once IN college, so these were not just to build a resume but they wanted to keep doing these activities out of interest. Once in college, their schedules continued to be very intense seven days per week. My D who is a senior in college is in a program that has classes ALL day and then she is in ECs until 11 PM at night and also on weekends. My other D who recently graduated college had ECs that sometimes started at 6:30 AM midweek at college and also late afternoons and then for a good portion of the year, had to be away all weekend every weekend for the EC. And she was involved in several at college. This is a lifestyle for some kids who are passionate about their interest areas and are driven and WANT to do these things, even though they have hardly any free time. It isn’t for a “race” to get into college or get into grad school, or some such. Now, one of my kids is in grad school and there are no longer ECs (she will miss these!) but her schedule at grad school is insane too…early AM through to 2 AM seven days a week at school. </p>
<p>It makes for a very busy and sometimes stressful life but they would not choose to do less. But they do these things out of interest and motivation and drive, and not as a “race” to get into college or something else. And so I see a difference between kids with stressful lives who feel they HAVE to do X activity to get into college or cause mom or dad are making them do it and kids who have been engaged in very busy lifestyles and activities for their whole lives because they love those endeavors.</p>
<p>Wow…as a parent I am really surprised to hear so many students say that their parents don’t know how much they are doing. When students are home, the parents can see them doing homework, and when the students are out of the house, don’t the parents ask about what they are up to? We always have actively communicated with our kids.
Whenever they are at a school function or other activity, we know where they are. We also typically know what assignments they have in classes, at least in terms of the major ones, because we enjoy reading their papers, discussing topics that interest them, etc. I think if there are parents who don’t know how much their kids are doing, then there should be more communication going on. Perhaps some of the students who feel the parents don’t realize the stress they are under could initiate more discussions.</p>
<p>For my son, who is more or less a perfectionist and tends to fill what could be free time with more work on trying to get things done even better, we try to get him to either do things more efficiently or just to back off a little bit so he can get a little more free time. Last night, a Sunday, he had been doiing school work most of the afternoon and evening. He came down to the family room at 10:30 to get a snack and said he was going back up to his room to work a while longer before bed. I said to him “you’ve been working most of the day…why not sit down with us and relax a little while and then just go to bed.” He said that sounded good, it hadn’t really occured to him to stop working.</p>
<p>I think if parents and kids can communicate more and really focus on what is important, it could help to relieve stress. And it is different for each student, even within each family. Our daughter did not push herself quite so hard and made time for her social network, to the extent that sometimes she needed a push. Our son sometimes needs to be told to pull back and make more time for himself. Families can be a strong source of support with more communication.</p>
<p>is it really worth doing all that stuff? i wonder if that girl ever gets to think about life or the purpose of life in general instead living everyday doing the same things like a robot. </p>
<p>i’m a senior now and so far i’ve been having a great year. soccer, a few clubs, good grades, and just relaxing. there is definitely a point of diminishing returns with all this “work” when it becomes so stressful that it’s not even worth it anymore. but i guess if you can enjoy doing all that stuff and stay healthy and level-headed then it’s fine…</p>
<p>soozievt:</p>
<p>But do you think your kids would have developed those interests in the first place if the “stressful race for college” hadn’t paved the way? </p>
<p>Lifelong pursuits, like almost anything, don’t happen serendipitously. Loads of good stuff in life - sports, music, languages - are extremely time-sensitive and thus achievement almost necessitates parental involvement. Studies done on in various arts implicate supportive parenting as much as talent in producing high performers. Why is parental involvement proliferating in certain fields? Perhaps economic growth provides leisure opportunities, global community = greater culture, whatever, but from my experience an enormous debt is owed to competitive college admissions - not only a direct causation where a 9 year old hockey player’s parents are speculating about potential scholarships (I’ve seen this), but also just a milieu that values performance, which is correlated with college admissions, which are correlated with status, etc. Now even when the parent is not directly involved: soozievt, do you think your kids would have delved into the same subjects with the same intensity if other kids weren’t doing it to get into college, the infrastructure wasn’t there to supply a college-driven society, etc?</p>
<p>Lifelong pursuits don’t happen in a resource vacuum. If these are activities done through the school, they obviously required a resource commitment by someone, whether you or the school or taxpayers. Sometimes burning passions can be ignited or doused with simple economics. Increase the supply and demand for violin lessons with a college admissions atmosphere and you’ll end up increasing the number of people with that lifelong hobby.</p>
<p>Damn, I wish I hadn’t wasted my time stuck in all my books. Now I feel it’s too late. I wish I had bought into the philistine game of “resume-padding”. Maybe I would have entered into a new field for all the wrong reasons. Maybe I would have learned to love it eventually. At worst, I would have left with something worthwhile anyways.</p>
<p>According to the article:
“I don’t get much sleep, but it’s worth it,” laughed Rodrigues, a junior honor student at the Academy of Our Lady of Mercy, Lauralton Hall, who has set her sights on Yale University. “Every little thing you do helps.” </p>
<p>–That last quote is the disturbing part. She doesn’t say that she is having a great time doing things she loves. </p>
<p>Another distressing quote:
“The college process has literally been tearing me up inside,” she [Lisa Kasiewicz] said, adding that she doesn’t usually eat during the day because there’s no time.</p>
<p>–Why? is it because she hasn’t found a passion nor the variety of colleges that could offer her the chance to pursue that passion?</p>
<p>And finally:
“I find when I have free time, I don’t know what to do,” she [Jenny Fitzmaurice] said.</p>
<p>–Read a book? Or take up a creative pursuit like cooking, sewing, knitting, electronics, woodworking, coin or stamp collecting, model trains, writing, painting . . . Oh, but these things don’t show up on a college application (unless you join a club, but then it isn’t a free time pursuit!).</p>
<p>Dave Berry, it is an old psychological fact that parents often try to develop their kids the way they wanted to be themselves… So yea, that is pretty annoying.
And the other part is that all this ivy-mania simply forces students to do ‘more EC’s’ to look more rounded etc., rather discouraging them from actually doing what they want to.</p>
<p>To all parents –</p>
<p>Firstly, please note that my following comments are by no means personal; I think it is somewhat universal and is by no means the parents fault. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is just my experience, but as adolescents get closer to college, we taste freedom and want more of it. I am absolutely positive that both of my parents would say that they stay in constant communication with me (they are both shrinks after all). And while they have a certain amount of knowledge of what I do and my state of being, a part of me goes out of my way to create a bit of distance between myself and them because I don’t want them knowing absolutely every little thing that goes on in my life.</p>
<p>Sure, my parents know that I’m going to a “friends”. But I don’t tell them every time I leave to get some lunch at a nearby restaurant or what have you… </p>
<p>And while my parents know that I am challenged by work, all they see is my stress. I say, mom, I was up til 3 last night, and she looks shocked. However, I’m up past 1 almost every night and my parents are unaware. And while my parents see me “working”, they don’t have any (ANY) idea of what is going on in my social life. And it’s not for lack of trying on their part - I just feel that it’s healthy to be in control of my own life and make my own decisions, and part of that involves keeping a (healthy) amount of distance between myself and them.</p>
<p>The biggest thing, though, is that parents (in my experience) have little to no actual idea of what I do at school. They know I’m an IB diploma candidate, and what classes I’m taking, but that’s about where it ends. They have no knowledge of the amount I do to help my teachers, or the test prep I do during lunch, or what I do in class to prepare for the following class.</p>
<p>And while I’m sure that their imaginations fill in some of the answers, I am certain that I for one do far more than they think I do.</p>
<p>Again, I don’t mean any of this personally - I feel strongly that this is the case with many students/parents. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing either; it really upsets me when my parents want to talk about my day. I’m happy to tell them if I did well on a test or something, but to be honest, I don’t think they really want to know the minor subtleties, so I only give the notable events.</p>
<p>And on the college note - I may not have done my ECs for college. I certainly didn’t with Tennis, which is my most notable EC. But it is certainly an incentive on the really bad days where I think, “why am I doing this? Today really sucked. I should just quit.” Sure, it’s irrational to just think about quitting because of one bad day. But the voice that says “colleges will see a lack of consistency within my involvement in ECs” is definitely prevalent in quieting the discouraged portions of my mind.</p>
<p>Just my 2 cents.</p>
<p>Most of the people that I knew at MIT (many of whom also got into other very prestigious schools) did activities that they enjoyed in high school, rather than padding their resumes with laundry lists. Most of them had pretty reasonable high school lives, and were generally not overwhelmed. Apparently, such an attitude does not prevent one from getting into top schools.</p>
<p>Yes, and in addition to AP classes, extracurriculars, and all that other work, some of us work for 20-30 hours a week during the school year.</p>
<p>Yeah, my parents don’t really get it either. My mom doesn’t understand that teachers ACTUALLY assign that amount of work, and that I have to stay up late if I want to do the things I enjoy as well as schoolwork (like music, tennis, a few other clubs, etc). She seems to think that if I’m up past 7 doing HW, it’s because I didn’t manage my time well.
But, basically, that article = me. But hey, we’ll all have something to be proud of when we’re done, right?</p>
<p>I’m sorry Sabster, but I would not be proud of a child who did not know what to do with his or her free time like one of the kids in the article, nor of a child who chose activities for the look of them rather than for the pleasure those activities could bring.</p>
<p>Reading stuff like this makes me despair of ever getting in anywhere good- I optimistically set my heart on top schools but now I’m afraid I won’t get into any of them and will end up going to my state’s school, which I hate. I decided my list of schools before I read enough about my competition… And no one ever told me what I’d need to be competitive.</p>
<p>I stay up til one every night, and my mom thinks that I am just surfing the internet and thus yells at me whenever she can. I did everything because I loved it, and then I did extra well on my ACT, which were competitive enough for Harvard and the Ivies. I’ve been happy doing everything, but I just wished my parents would’ve been more understanading, less assuming, and less interferrent.</p>
<p>And when I become a parent, I will let my son do whatever he wants, something I never had the luxury of. My ideal son can be whoever he wants :)</p>
<p>Ah, Mrs. Weasley, good point; I guess the article’s not entirely me (maybe I should read a little more carefully next time… =P). I agree that someone who becomes a college admissions machine isn’t exactly worthy of praise… I was more talking about being proud of overall accomplishments - which would include still being a normal, well-adjusted person who can comprehend the idea of “fun.”</p>
<p>That is so me. I do a few EC’s not like a groccery list, but fair enough, including Tech Crew for theater, Alpine Skiing, and music. These actually consume my life. During the Fall and Spring, I do not get home until 5pmish. Then I spend about 4 hours doing homework in-between there, while having to eat, and attend some other small EC activity during the evening… Boy Scouts, lessons… etc.</p>
<p>Then during winter, skiing, I leave directly from school and do not get back until 9pm. Then I have a good 3 hour SHORT list of things to do. That does not include study time for tests, get prepared, etc… just homework alone…</p>
<p>Thank god they canceled it today cause of weather… I’ve been doing HW for like 2 hours and am not halfway done.</p>
<p>My parents, and most, do not appreciate how much sheer work we do, and manage with…</p>
<p>Yup, this is me. basically. Huge load of AP classes with sports, academic/court teams, and tons of clubs. its definitely hectic.</p>