When did your kids took academic matters on their hand?

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1

My wife and I are living in New Jersey but we are expats from an Eastern European country. Both of us come from difficult backgrounds and all our life both her and I had to take academic matters on our own hands.

For you to better understand, my mom didn’t go to school and she didn’t know how to read or write. My father dropped out of school in 2nd grade to help out my uncle. He knew how to read but couldn’t even write my name. I had to do everything on my own academically. This motivated me and I was able to graduate from the top college in my country. My wife’s parents were at least high school grads but they didn’t help my wife academically either. She also finished the top college and college was where we met.

We moved to USA in 2004 and our twin boys were born here in USA. They are now 10 years old and they are in 5th grade.They aren’t doing bad academically but that is due to my wife. We are getting ready to apply to Pingry and Newark academy for 6th grade admission but there is one thing that bothers me very much.

My sincere question is this. A lot of their academic success is due to my wife being on top of their homeworks and school works. I am a firm believer on allowing kids to desire success on their own. Pushing a kid for academic success is pretty wrong in my book. Any kid who don’t internalize the desire and depend on parental push eventually will fail the minute the parents aren’t in the picture anymore.

At the same time, I know both my wife and I are unique. How was it with your kids? Did they become responsible in middle school or did they show signs of responsibility in elementary school as well?

I really don’t want my wife to be involved with their school work much. Let them fail if they have to. Let them learn failure early in life so they get the valuable lesson of being responsible and being in charge of their own life and their success.

2

A few thoughts…

  • At 10 years, old, they are still fairly young. I don't know how involved your wife gets with their school work, but I think most parents are still in the "monitoring" (asking kids what work has to get done that night, if they've done it, maybe even checking over things) phase of parenting
  • I think that your wife being very involved/interested in your kids' academic performance up until now is a good thing...provided that she isn't doing the work for them. What she is doing (based on my own experience raising two kids who are now 16 and 18) is setting a sense of expectations. I think this is very valuable, and will serve your kids well into the future.
  • As for "when did my kids take academic matters into their own hands"...I'd say it started in middle school and as each went to boarding school for 9th grade, they took things over entirely. Because they had to. I did re-inject myself into the mix when it came time to look for colleges, but mostly from a "I've known you your entire life, and here are the schools I think you should explore" point of view, in addition to coordinating visits and paying for applications.
3

I believe there must be middle ground, and also it depends on kids.

Think this way: You are NOT a government official trying to sort out a few kids who have innate ability to succeed on their own, like you did. You are a father who want your kids to succeed in life with whatever talent and character they are born with.

In personal experience, my daughter, whom I believe is top 1 or 0.1% in terms of self organization and maturity needed some level of parental help in organization until 12. And the help wasn’t turned off at some random point. There has been constant training, allowance of small failures that did not affect final grade, monitoring, mentoring, advising, trusting, letting go slowly until I had my hands off.

There is a reason that we consider them a minor until they are 18 and even 21.

You were forced in to a situation and you survived. But many others probably didn’t. Do you want to push your lion cubs at a cliff and see if they survive like you did, when they don’t have to thanks to the support you never received but fortunately you can give to them?

Do you want them to have a chance to be a great person that made through all the difficult challenges that could have costed their happiness by bad luck, or do you want a safer and happier path for them?

4

Thanks @SevenDad . My wife isn’t doing their work for them. But she has to remind them many times it is time to do homework and she basically begs them so they do their home works. And this agitates me.

Thanks @SculptorDad . I want my cubs to have a better life than me. You make some great points. Thanks again for insightful post.

5

@ArdenNJ, I agree with you, especially your last few lines about failure. Failure is a great teacher and the stakes are quite low in 5th grade and this is the time to make mistakes and learn from them. It has been my experience that my perspective is unusual in the current environment but was quite common in the years I was growing up in the US. I don’t think this is at all like throwing lion cubs over the cliff, but rather teaching how to deal with failure, frustration, and challenges at home with support, rather than independently later. I teach in a professional school and see so many talented young adults who are unable to manage frustration or setbacks and I think these lessons are easier to learn at 10 than at 25 while already in the work world, or medical school, or graduate school.

Some advantages from this approach that I’ve seen as my kids matured into high school – they are fearless. They stretch themselves and feel they can handle it and if they take on too much, they adjust on their own. They make decisions they are comfortable with on their own – they advocate for themselves now with teachers and work to get what they need on their own, whether that is a harder class. They pursue their own passions that have little input from me and choose different sports, instruments, clubs, activities, and hobbies. They are really comfortable with the effort they put into various activities and the consequences of those choices.

I’m not saying that kids with lots of supports along the way can’t develop similarly, but I think there is ample evidence that too much support limits the growth and confidence that come from making mistakes and navigating on your own. It’s a balance each family figures out differently, but my kids were completely responsible for their homework without supervision beginning in Kindergarten.

6

If my boys were left to their own devices, they would still be in diapers =))
One of my professors lamented “Soon, colleges will have potty training classes.” Lowered expectations these days.

Parenting is setting expectations and at times… a lot of … bribing, threatening, blackmailing… but maybe not begging. One of mine rebelled since 5th grade (no amount of bribing or threat will work on him) and the younger one still takes bribes in 10th grade. So each kid is different but if your kids are pushing back and starting to rebel, maybe it is time to let them be a little independent. Or change strategies so to speak. I think your wife did great thing helping them succeed so far. I would certainly ensure that they are in the right peer group, challenging classes, and environment that values hard work.

Having them learn from failure is difficult in middle school. There is no real consequence for academic failing. They may get moved to lower and lower classes, but there is no stigma (everyone learns at their own speed and that is okay here!) They may realize that they do not want to be in the standard classes and that they won’t be able to go to the colleges they wish but it will be in 10th or 11th grade that they realize this and it is probably 4-5 years too late.

I found middle school particulary hard especially public schools. Not only working hard (or being nerdy) dispised but also appearing cool and being accepted by peers most important. It is when kids start serious dating and try using substances/drugs. You and your wife should start mentally preparing for the adolescent issues.

7

I also came from uneducated parents who were very hands-off, both due to it being the 70s and because they didn’t know any different. I set the expectations for my kids from K on…homework first, fun second. Personally I don’t believe in begging or bribing but instead set the bar for them and then give them a helping hand if needed. Your kids need to have a clear idea of what you expect and the consequences (positive and negative) of same. You need to know what your kids are capable of, challenge them a little, help a little, but going into middle school years they should not be begged to do their homework (or anything else). Tell them what they need to do, expect them to do it, and then follow through.

7th grade is a killer…I had to pull my son from sports one season because he wouldn’t do his homework and that hurt (him and me lol) but the lesson was learned. Consequences. I didn’t deliver homework when he left it on the kitchen table. Natural consequences. You get the picture. The biggest problem I had was that sports coaches had a different idea of what was acceptable academically…I required honor roll (I knew his limitations and they were certainly within that scope), they required C- or better. I won that battle. He didn’t care at all about school but he lived and breathed football and baseball.

Remember too, each kid is different. With my D I had to disentangle her from her books because of anxiety. She is an over-achiever, Type A, kid. I literally had to forbid her from doing schoolwork for a few hours sometimes, just have fun.

Good luck, keep the faith :slight_smile:

8

Now, I also want to give kids these days some credit. The world has changed. It takes a lot more to reasonably successful now then before. They get majority of old academics. Some new academics. More sports and EC. It simply is harder than what we had.

9

You could mix some other tactics - father’s non-violent but firm demand, bribing with money or privilege, etc etc.

10

Lots of good advice above. I will say upfront that I don’t know how you force or mold or raise a child to be or do anything in particular. We set rules in our household that were non-negotiable and never once bribed, cajoled, or blackmailed. We’re the parents. Our kid did what was expected because there was no otherwise. On the other hand, we had a homework optional policy all his school years here and explained to both his elementary and middle school principal and teachers that we were “not In this together” like they wanted parents to be. If we had wanted to homeschool, we wouldn’t be sending him to them every day. We never saw much value in homework and explained to our son that it was up to him to determine how much, if any, he cared to do understanding that he would have to bear whatever consequences his teachers meted out for not doing it, but he would get no pushback from us. We valued family time over having our kid doing homework late into the evening. To this day, I have no idea how much he did or didn’t do. I never checked his backpack (fear of disease) or the school portal for his grades. His report cards were fine, which underscored our belief that us getting involved in the homework game was a waste of time.

I share this because it is a different point of view yet our kid turned out OK. We have been very, very hands off (I often thought about teaching him to change his own diapers), and I think, for our son, that was part of what made him self-reliant. I suppose it could have gone the other way just as easily, so perhaps this only worked because he was genetically wired to be independent. I’ll never know.

I don’t know how to advise you, but I lean toward those who say don’t be afraid to let go of the bicycle seat; at ten years old, it’s a short fall. You will not know how self-directed your daughter can be until you and your wife step out of the way long enough for her to right her own wobble. Or fall. It’s OK to fall. The stakes are low right now. Take advantage of that.

11

This is such an interesting question, and one I have though about more than occasionally!

We pretty much stepped out of the way in the fourth grade, believing that it’s better to fall on your face and knock out your baby teeth than to lose the permanent ones. At that point, we also coached DS on how to handle issues with teachers but refused to do it for him. He got very good grades but in all fairness, he went to a public school that in spite of its good reputation, celebrated mediocrity. In other words, the bar was pretty low. So to be fair, we were able to pursue our hands-off policy without the consequences of having DS demoted to lower classes and without any of those dreaded black marks on his “permanent record”. I do not know that we could have been so passive had the consequences been more severe.

We did not check whether his homework was getting done (although when we heard that it was not and that he had been hiding that fact from us – something that happened in both 5th and 6th grades), we used it as an opportunity to talk about why his strategy might not be a good one. (This list, btw, included the fact that he ended up having to do the work anyway and we still found out about the delinquency, but he had spent a miserable week worrying about what would happen when his delinquency was discovered by us.) . And in DS’ defense, he felt that because he was doing fine in school without us looking over his should or managing “study hall” at home, he had “earned” this lack of supervision. He did, under this regime, choose to do as little as necessary for a good grade rather than strive for excellence. When one teacher commented that he could put more effort into homework rather than doing it simply to get it done, his response was “getting it done is why you do it.” While I realize that there’s a lesson in here about doing things well, to the best of our ability, yada yada, I also recognize that his approach may be much better for one’s mental health, so while I offered opinions, I let him do it his way.

Now, having said this, when DS got to the high school level, I wondered if we hadn’t done him a bit of a disservice by not instituting a better study “habit” because at that age, it’s very difficult to intervene as a parent. When the quantity and difficulty of the work ramped up, the practice of lying on his bed reading, playing with this phone, procrastinating, etc. was a real liability. Nobody develops discipline and great habits overnight, so I started having that “oh, I should have set this up differently when he was younger” thought. Coulda shoulda. Too late.

His junior year, in particular, was particularly tough, and I felt some regret at this point for not have established better habits earlier because as we all know from CC, junior year is an important one to college admissions. While he did ultimately get his act together (although the mess on his desk and in his backpack looked like a superfund site) and got into his first choice school, I felt pretty conflicted about my decision to be so laissez faire through most of junior and senior year, when there was little I could do.

Now, with hindsight, I think I would set up the framework (time, space, quiet, regular organization of notes, review) much earlier so that when the age forced disengagement, my child would have habits that served him well. But as with all things, it depends on who your kids are, who you are, and how the system you’re using is working for you. One thing that you might want to do is take a look at the book “That Crumpled piece of paper was due last week”. It had some good strategies in it that seemed effective without having to bribe, cajole, or crack the whip.

12

^^ I agree that it gets harder with the almighty rebellious teenage emotions.

When dd was 9 yo, she would agree to spend 45 minutes each per day on a online science course and a math textbook. Two months later, I would find that they are done without a day missing. Starting at 11, it all changed. she first brought up her having problem with controlling procrastination. I was shocked because I had thought she would never waste a minute of her life. It got gradually worse over the next two years. But she has learned to live with it and controlling it with both self imposed system and asking for parental help when needed. It’s like living with a disability or addiction. Can be very hard at the age.

13

“I don’t know how you force or mold or raise a child to be or do anything in particular”

@ChoatieMom: For a small fee, I would be willing to share my patented Asian Panda-Dad mind-control techniques.

Speaking of transitions to various stages of schooling…back in the Dark Ages when I went to Penn, I definitely noticed that my friends who attended BS were much better at time management than I was…blocking out parts of their day to go to the library, etc. I had hoped a similar thing would happen with my own BS kids, and so far that has been the case, with 7D1 reporting that she seems much more prepared and on top of her workload than many of her peers.

I think the “enforced study hall” at many BS (especially for underclassmen) is a good thing.

14

I agree very much and daughter agrees it too. She didn’t needed it at 9 but now she needs it at 13. The daily set routine also readies the brain for the session. I think I could benefit from it too.

Human will power is, usually, very energy consuming and weak on the long term. The trick is building a habit so that you don’t need to exert the will power to do things that should be done regularly.

If fact, one of the reason that my wife loved the BS idea was that she was tired of reminding daughter like OP’s wife does, and hoped that the mob psychology would do it for her - daughter would just do it because everybody is doing it.

15

I had parents that never looked over my work or even forced me to do it. They didn’t care so I didn’t do it and I didn’t care. I can remember in 4th grade having an awakening on award day(that was before everyone got an award). I wanted an award too. I had never received an award for anything. In 5th grade, I got my first award “Most Improved Student”. By 7th grade, I was top of my class. I think somewhere within me, I had to want it for myself. So I did what I needed to do.

My kids are a different story. I have had to be like your wife and constantly check to make sure homework was done. My oldest son has ADHD but he is smart. His middle school years were a constant reminder to do homework and turn it in. This year is his first year of boarding school and also his first year of not having me to constantly remind him to do his work. I was worried but he is doing fine. I check his grades and there are a couple assignments not handed in but he will figure it out. Somewhere you have to let them fall. Although I wish I had let go sooner, he is adjusting fine and will find his way.

16

From first to third grade my son cared nothing about grades and homework. When we realized he was going to struggle in math we sent him to a math camp after 3rd grade. For some reason that summer it clicked with him the importance of school. From 4th grade on we never really had to check his work or remind him to do it.

With that said, he never really had to put in more than 30-45 minutes in completing all his homework nightly and finished middle school ranked second in his class. Now that he’s at BS he’s finding the mandatory 2 hour study time isn’t always enough. His response to me, is ‘I get it now, I’ve got to put the time in’. He thought BS would be as easy as middle school and realizes it isn’t. As his advisor stated, they’ll stumble but eventually they walk and then they run. I’ve resisted the urge to strangle him or reach out to his teachers, I’m letting him figure it out on this BS journey.

17

But letting it go to a bs is very different from to a day school. :slight_smile:

18

@SculptorDad I agree with you on this. Maybe I stated it wrong. I’m not completely wiping my hands of involvement, but I realize I’m not there day to day to supervise him. I speak with his advisor weekly and with him almost daily. I know when he’s not telling me the entire story and I listen and give him advise when asked. But I always know what’s going on with him.

19

@southernboyzmama , I totally understand. In fact, with teenage thing, I am not ready to let go my dd, at this moment, to a day school as I did last semester, or years ago. Things always change.

But bs is a much safer, controlled environment that also promote independence. Probably why both our kids are in a bs now. I talk to my dd every other dd but not about her grade. I just ask if classes are fine and manageable. She tells me about her decisions on class changings - dropping art and lowering Spanish level to manage them, but not for my approval. We talk about her new friends, politics and stuffs as if we are friends and not parent-child.

20

“I speak with his advisor weekly”

I’m impressed and surprised at the same time. Are these conversations initiated by you, @southernboyzmama or by the advisor? I never had that frequent interactions with my kids’ advisors, accept for during the season when one advisor was also kid’s coach so we saw advisor/coach at games but even then it was just chatty stuff.

Do others interact with advisors frequently?