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<p>Some kids care more about academics than others? This hardly is newsworthy.</p>
<p>Why – did you think there was a formula for making your kid get a 4.0?</p>
<p>I know a dermatologist whose favorite literature growing up was Archie comics. She has cases of them to this day & her kids & nieces love them too! It doesn’t seem to have hampered her or any of them much :)</p>
<p>And I devoured Nancy Drew books. At the time, they were much disparaged by librarians and were not available in our public or school libraries. My mother, who had taught 1st grade, thought that reading was good. Period. And she bought book after book (hard cover) that I would read in one sitting. </p>
<p>My mother made many many mistakes, but this one she got right.</p>
<p>P.S. I don’t mean to hold myself up as a paradigm of success.</p>
<p>I’m a book lover myself, but there are also plenty of people who are successful who just aren’t big book readers either. Takes all kinds. Takes all kinds to define “success” too. Defining it as getting into a T10 college is meaningless. Some people must think that getting into a T10 college sets people up for lifelong success, when nothing could be further from the truth.</p>
<p>“No internet, TV, Starbucks, video games, iPods, rap music or cell phones. Our eldest one is at Stanford now.”</p>
<p>I surely don’t want a parent like this… The kid may be in Stanford but that doesn’t mean much.</p>
<p>All work and no play makes Stanford students dull boys.
Everything in moderation!</p>
<p>Despite high-fructose corn syrup and endless hours of Disney Channel, kid #1 is at one of them T10 schools. And we’re not rich. And I’m not well-educated myself. Sometimes you just get lucky.</p>
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<p>Hey, CountingDown, us too. It felt like a school lab or library. They worked from their textbooks sitting up, although novels were read in bed. </p>
<p>We put all the “hard” things in that room (bookbags, homework, shelf of school texts, calculators…). One computer for all 3 kids; 3 separate desks. Next door/the alleged dining room = mom and dad’s study (l computer, 2 desks). At PTA conferences, they’d ask, “do your kids have a good place to do their homework?” We just preened. </p>
<p>Their bedrooms were all “soft” and meant for dreaming. Stuffed animals (yes even the boys), clothing (on floor, oh well), and their share of family art or posters they wished to hang there. </p>
<p>It resembled “organization.” They never had to find books from under their underwear in the early morning light. At the sight of random socks or inside-out sweatshirts in the “kids’ study” someone would holler “traife!” and throw the misplaced garment speedily into that kid’s bedroom. </p>
<p>As for the group dynamic in the “kids’ study”, the older ones kept the brakes on the youngest, as they always believed he had more privileges than they (it’s true). Why should he have Facebook when they only had SimCity and Mavis The Typing Tutor at his age?</p>
<p>To accomplish this, until he was 12, the youngest had a faux-bedroom the size of Harry Potter’s closet. We had to give over one real kid’s bedroom to create “the kids’ study.” When the older 2 went off to college and we moved, finally the youngest got a normal sized bedroom, his first choice to make up for all the years of squish. Until then, he preferred to hang with his older sibs in the “kids study” whenever they were awake, which was all the time.</p>
<p>What kids eventually mature into depends a lot on their individual character and personality. Parents definitely play a major role in shaping their character, but to a much lesser extent in shaping their personality. What’s important is given their budding character and personality, how much we as parents can help in realizing their potential. I tend to see success as developing the talent and realizing the potential you have and use it to benefit humanity while being a loving, kind and trustworthy person. </p>
<p>College education is the formative part of their development. It is where most of them lock in on their fields of interest and start to realize their potential for the real world. Imho, higher ranked colleges, in general, provide higher quality resources and higher caliber peers to interact with. This should have a positive effect on their “realizing their potential” and “developing their talent”. After all, these are key reasons why they are higher ranked. </p>
<p>Of course, this effect is not exclusive to top colleges, but it gets weaker, in general, as you move further down the rank ladder. If your child is clear on what s/he wants to do, targeted search of a matching program is a lot more useful than blindly following published rankings. Even here, I suspect unless one has intimate knowledge or personal experience of the target program, most people would use some sort of specialized ranking as a guide to some extent.</p>
<p>What did I do right? Hmmm, I might have done the following, albeit not consistently. The list is not prioritized in any order.</p>
<p>1) Listen to them, I mean **really ** listen to them. They will not listen to you unless they believe you really care. Be there for them.</p>
<p>2) Reward honesty and good deed and good spirit as often as you can, less so on academic and athletic achievement, so they know what’s more important. (I’ve been guilty of reversing this order many times :() Tell them, especially boys, that the most courageous people are the most honest and loving people. Be honest even in the face of imminent punishment. This also means don’t blindly follow the majority.</p>
<p>3) Do not compare your kids with other kids and use that to drive your kids. It is okay to let them see what’s possible, but be careful not to make them see other kids as competitions all the time. Make sure they know how to collaborate with others.</p>
<p>4) Get them to read early and read in front of them often so they can see an example. Leave lots of quality books and periodicals around the house, especially the bathrooms.</p>
<p>5) Get them Lego or other building blocks to play with early. This really help them develop good spatial concept and make them handy (your present to their future spouses :))</p>
<p>6) Encourage them to ask questions and seek answers on their own. Try not to help them do things that they can do on their own.</p>
<p>7) Establish a good work/study ethic early. Teach them to be responsible people. Hold them accountable to their promises. See to it that they keep their rooms clean and make their beds. Little things matter mightily.</p>
<p>8) Take them out of house often, so they can see the real world for themselves. Take them to places where they can see how good people can be in various endeavors. It humbles them and let them see what’s possible. </p>
<p>9) Expose them to a variety of activities (without straining family resource), and observe what they like and what they have a knack for, then fuel that interest.</p>
<p>10) Teach them to lead without authority. Again, people turn to honest and caring folks, when they really need an opinion. Encourage your child to be in a position to help others, without taking credit.</p>
<p>11) For those who still have a spouse around, love your spouse with all your heart. Your kids will benefit immensely in your loving relationship.</p>
<p>12) Constantly tell them how precious they are to you. They are worth more than the whole world to you just the way they are. Tell them you love them unconditionally. Try to have everyone at the dinner table every night if possible. Play games with them often, and not just video games :).</p>
<p>I’ll have to remember to yell “traife!” in the computer room. Dirty socks would be a good place to start! </p>
<p>We all read ourselves to sleep in this house, so there was never a need or desire for TVs or computers in the bedrooms (including ours). That’s also why we have not gone wireless!</p>
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<p>LOL! But yikes, our entire house needs to be rekashered! :D</p>
<p>Translation for all to share the joke: “traife” implies: “unclean” or in the wrong place.</p>
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<p>Presumably your DS is now an advanced student (almost certain).</p>
<p>I have been a CC reader and never joined in…this discussion just made me register and jump in to add my comments. Interesting thread and I loved reading the comments from Oldbatesiedoc and TheGFG…very, very true.</p>
<p>My two cents:</p>
<p>Some parents seems to measure their parenting success as a first step based on the college or major chosen and which college they end up…</p>
<p>The second measure is by the continued success in college and ability to move on to a better status after…</p>
<p>and then, how well they get settled in life and so on…</p>
<p>Life is a long haul…and there is nothing wrong in taking pride at the achievement at each step…so, getting into a top school if that was someone’s measure of success and their child got in…great…</p>
<p>The danger with this thinking is this…if your child does not get in to a top college…and that was your measure, you are really damaging the next step for your child. These children along with their parents sometimes walk through life going through a negative feeling that they failed. The psychological implications are many.</p>
<p>There are wonderful institutions in this country. We are gifted. But what they do when they get to college without all that parent/shadowing sets their future. I have seen Harvard/Columbia alumni attend colleges for continued programs at colleges way lower in the rank…I have also seen children who attended college ranked 44 or 55 attend a Masters program at the so called “Top 10”. </p>
<p>What is needed to raise a child (not just to get into the Top 10…but someone who can create or invent or save the world?). Just what Oldbatesiedoc and Thegfg said… a household where people care for each other, set disciplines, teach their children to live and let live and yes, work hard to learn ( I mean inculcate the love of learning…not forced…motivated), respect authority however, question and develop their curiosity…compete yet be co-operative…</p>
<p>Oh and I loved reading what Paperchase pop commented as well…very inspiring…</p>
<p>Slithey Tove – our house needs to be rekashered, too…I hear a blowtorch is good for that! :)</p>
<p>N.B. One way to make an oven kosher (by “kashering it”) is to clean it out very thoroughly with a blowtorch. There is a fine guy at our synagogue who performs this task every year before Passover. We all know to respect him! :)</p>
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<p>Well, in May he will graduate from CMU with a CS degree although he is not being recruited by Sega. I’m glad he waited to switch to Mario; otherwise his whole vocabulary would have been, “That’s a me, Mario!”. For Halloween he had been Sonic (store bought; all the rest were handmade), Tails, Knuckles, Earthworm Jim, and Ash from Pokemon.</p>
<p>In one word: READ!
My parents took me to the library ALL the time. Of course, you can’t really force a kid to love reading, but the opportunity should be there.</p>
<p>Genes have a huge part in it too. My biological mother graduated from Yale summa cum laude and is now a partner in one of the largest law firms in the world. I was adopted, however, so our backgrounds varied considerably. My birth mom lived in one of the most affluent communities in the U.S. and attended a fancy private school. I grew up in a lower upper class/upper middle class family and attended a public school (one of the best in the state, but public nonetheless). I believe that my academic strengths can be attributed to nature whereas nurture (my adoptive parents’ support) led to my academic success.</p>
<p>In other words, talent=genes and achievement=nurture. It <em>WAY</em> oversimplifies things, but it puts some things into context. Also, nurture doesn’t always include copious amounts of money, just the right support.</p>
<p>um, just from kids I know, asking parents what <em>they</em> did right is really generalizing the whole thing - a thousand parents could take their kids to the library, read books to them daily, do math problems with them, and most likely only a couple, if any, would turn out to be a genius.
a girl I know (goes to MIT) had very supportive parents, but her motivation came from within. she designed and executed a grad student level research project as an 8th grader - completely by herself. her parents knew nothing about the field she did her work in. they did all the “right” things, but try it on almost every other child and the results would be no where the same.</p>
<p>"Many of them married to another student and form a family with two Push here Dummies. "</p>
<p>What is a “Push here Dummie”</p>