Why are you guys so involved?

Parent Cafe
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<p>^^ Oh! Ha ha, what a stitch. I shouldn’t post lyrics to songs I can only vaguely remember. You should hear me try to sing songs out loud. My kids laugh about that all the time.</p>

<p>nightchef, I have no idea about “John’s thinking”, I can hardly ever remember who posted what. I think that’s probably healthier than remembering that you disagreed with something someone wrote on CC, so therefore you have to question EVERYthing they write.</p>

<p>So just because I am frittering away part of my day (worrying about my D’s transcript being sent), out of curiosity I had a look at what ‘limbwalker’ posted on E & P board.
How funny!! Good grief, he tried to get everyone all riled about about Affirmative Action! Heavens, hasn’t that topic been done to death on CC? And he was perturbed that no one responded. It reminded me of the Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — “come on, come on, are you scared? [his arm gets lopped off] It’s just a flesh wound.” But there you go, John has a right to rant about AA if he wants. So what.</p>

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<p>Yes, he has the “right.” As you see, no one’s shutting him down. But no one has the license to make assumptions about how particular invisible strangers on a discussion forum do and do not parent, based on forum participation, and then not expect a reaction to offensive assumptions.</p>

<p>“You guys” (thread title) is a large number, with an equally large variety of parenting styles.</p>

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<p>All right, epiphany, I’ll take that.<br>

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<p>Why not? What do you care about what ‘invisible strangers’ think about your parenting or any other thing? Seriously.</p>

<p>‘John’ may be thin-skinned. So what. Let him be. He may be wrong, he may be ranting, he may be unfair, he may be making ‘offensive assumptions’. Big deal. The whole world is full of such people.</p>

<p>I just am not sure how much good it does to scold anyone, or give the impression that on a forum as big as CC that “we are like a family” and if you disagree, there’s the door (I think someone on CC actually said that to me, haha). You disagree. That is your right. If someone is being offensive, the moderators will take care of it. Otherwise, <em>shrug</em>.</p>

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<p>On my way to the airport (1.5 hrs) I read the Texas State thread on my iPhone, which kept me quite entertained in the back seat. I am going to make some conclusions (or assumptions) as limbwalker did about me, and he got 3 out of 4 wrong, so I hope I could do better here. I am entitled to be un-PC because I a woman, minority, and over 40 (got all basis covered).</p>

<p>Limbwalker and his wife are fairly educated, but for some reason associate nice neighborhood, schools as pretentious. It appears financially they have options on where to live or where their kids could go to school, but they prefer a more diversified environment, or even a tougher environment for their kids. He feels to be a good parent means not to be a soft parent. He wants his kids to be able to tough it out rather than to find a solution out. To get ahead in life, it’s all about hard work, not prestige and connection. I would even venture to say that he thinks most middle class kids are spoiled and entitled. </p>

<p>Here we have limbwalker with a 17 year old daughter ranked 3 in her class with SAT 2100+, who doesn’t want to move too far away from home and would only be interested in a 2nd or 3rd tier school. Lets just leave prestige aside for a moment, what about wanting and having confidence in studying (competing) with kids who have equal or better academic achievements. Someone with stats like that could easily get some nice merit scholarship from many better schools(out of state) than the ones she is looking at now.</p>

<p>The question is why? Could I be un-PC to say if Limbwalker had exposed his daughter to some of those spoiled or entitled middle class kids, who wouldn’t think twice about traveling out of state or country to study, she would be thinking differently now? If limbwalker didn’t have such a negative view about some of those well to do people, then maybe his daughter would be more open about going out of her comfort zone? Our kids will usually take up our view or position even if we do not explicitly say it in front of them. If someone is a bigot, even if he is extremely PC in front of kids, his kids would usually have the same attitude. If a parent has a view that all top tier school kids are spoiled and entitled, and the kid has been brought up to not associate with kids like that, then tell me why a kid would want to go to a top tier academic school?</p>

<p>As we could see from limbwalker’s previous post, he made a generalization that I was white just because I appeared to be well to do (the fact my kids went to a private school). That maybe the case most of time in certain regions, but not so much in the NE. At my kids’ school, there are black kids whose parents are doctors and lawyers and they play harp/violin(such a upper class instruments) or play sports like fencing or squash, and there are black kids from inner city (Newark) who are there on scholarship. We have white family whose kids are on scholarship, but brilliant (smarter than those Asian kids). If you were to ask my kids, I don’t think they could generalize a race because they have met many who do not fit into any box. They didn’t get their PC view from going to an under funded public school.</p>

<p>It is all about education and exposure, isn’t it? More you travel, more people you meet, more you read, you come to realize that it is difficult to make generalization about people or situation. My involvement with my kids is to make sure they are not afraid to spread their wings to explore every corner of this world and meet as many different types of people as possible.</p>

<p>I hope this is un-PC enough for people.</p>

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<p>Speaking of baggage, I saw a cartoon in Barron’s the other week that made me laugh. </p>

<p>A man and a woman are talking at a party and she says to him, “I’ve got my emotional baggage down to a little carry-on.”</p>

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<p>Oldfort- Post of the Day. Thanks.</p>

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<p>Oldfort, that post (124) was food for thought for me in a big way as we’re grappling with the refusal to go too far by my daughter. I thank you.</p>

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<p>Oldfort - terrific post. We all bring our baggage with us as we parent. It’s important to be able to recognize that baggage and then be able to step back and ask “how is this baggage defining the decisions I make?” </p>

<p>Limbwalker seems to be able to do the former, but not the latter. And yes, Limbwalker, I am picking on you. It is the first time I have ever publicly challenged a poster. But you have picked on everyone in this forum and you have acted like you are taking the high ground by doing so.</p>

<p>We are all just a group of parents, who are trying to help our children navigate a difficult and complicated process. There is no need to beat people up and call them names just because they make different decisions than you do.</p>

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<p>Gee, thanks for giving me permission. The rest of your post implies I don’t have a “right” or shouldn’t disagree with an offense post or poster? (That I should “just leave.”) Well why don’t you “just leave”?</p>

<p>I get to post disagreement, within the TOS, whether you are discomforted by my exercising my “rights” or not. </p>

<p>The same thing could be said of limbwalker. He can also be “shown to the door” if/since he is irritated by the number of even marginally “involved” parents on CC. No one forced him to come to this discussion board, let alone to PF.</p>

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<p>Why am I so involved?</p>

<p>To be my daughter’s coach. College choice is a big decision with many ramifications, academically, socially, and financially. Trying to select the 8 - 10 possible schools that are the right “fit” out of 3,000 schools is not easy. Trying to do that while juggling multiple AP courses and time consuming EC’s is even harder.</p>

<p>Would my D. say that my research has helped her? Absolutely. She has come to me and thanked me for taking the time to help her sort this all out. Some of her friends have really struggled to put together the college list. And some of them have used their scarce time and money to apply to schools they won’t be able to afford (i.e. UC Berkeley, for an out of state student with a very low EFC).</p>

<p>Would I have been as involved if we didn’t need to consider financial aid and/or merit aid? Possibly not. But the decisions we make now (and it is WE, not she) will have ramifications to our family’s financial situation for years to come. We can’t sacrifice our retirement or shortchange her sister. So yes, it is a family decision.</p>

<p>In what other ways has my assistance helped? SAT’s for one. Thanks to other posters here on CC, I knew that it would be very useful to have the bulk of the testing out of the way before beginning senior year. I also helped her to coordinate college visits. She picked the schools and she emailed the professors to arrange to sit in on classes. I booked airline tickets and drove the rental car. We had a blast and we will always look back on those trips as one of the highlights of this process.</p>

<p>And yes, I also got a healthy dose of reality here on CC, learning that my high achieving student was not a “sure thing” at any top school. I showed her the stats, and talked to her about her goals (and yes, they were her goals, not mine). Together we figured out ways to strengthen her application. Because we started on this process early in her junior year, she had time on her side. But she was motivated and she worked hard to score well on her AP tests and to maintain a high GPA. </p>

<p>What was the outcome? She was accepted early decision to her top choice school, with a financial package that we can afford. Is she grateful? Absolutely. In fact, she is floating on air. </p>

<p>Could she have done it on her own? Maybe. But maybe not. Why should she have to do it on her own? I’m proud of the help I have offered. And so is she. She says we make a good team, and in the end it is her opinion that matters!</p>

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<p>What? epiphany, you completely misread my post in a totally hilarious way! :D</p>

<p>Thank you for the laugh though.</p>

<p>And all of you chiming in with oldfort, wowowowowow :smiley: Prove my point on the same page! What an incredible day on CC!!</p>

<p>Lissen, the little I saw of whatisface, limbwalker dude’s post on E & P board, I completely disagree with his politics, or whatever he was trying to say about Affirmative Action. Yes, I know I’m just an alpaca-sweater-wearing liberal. Anyhoo. I will defend ol’ limbwalker’s right to say whatever he wants without being shown the door. Nobody was telling you ‘there’s the door’ epiph! Read it carefully before your outrage-o-meter spins its little dial.</p>

<p>me:

Do you see – I’m saying 'how much good does it do to scold anyone or give the impression that on a forum as big as CC…blah blah blah…that if you disagree, there’s the door.
<em>facepalm</em>
Oh forget it.
Peace, Love and Healing to all!</p>

<p>And now back to our regularly scheduled wondering why we guys are so involved…</p>

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<p>I had a father who had joined the Army at a very young age and his attitude essentially was “The best way you will learn is to figure it out yourself, so go do it and fall if necessary, and I will intercede only at the end.” Not right, not wrong, he was a product of his circumstances and I made mistakes, but in the end I am I am where I am and I will never know if I would have landed somewhere else, had he provided guidance when I needed it (I am not sure if he could have). No regrets about that.</p>

<p>Obviously, with my children, I do not think that they need to go to the pain I did, that I need to be supportive and helpful. I am also aware that they are individuals, some amount of pain and struggle on their part is necessary. In other words, there are stuff I could help them but are stuff they should do so themselves, but some I will not. Example: Applications are their applications and they need to take responsibility for the quality of the application, not mine. On the other hand, S (like many of us) tends to put of things to last moment and I do insist that he list all the activities (complete application, send score, gets transcripts, recommendation letters) make deadlines and stick to them i.e. certain life and organization skills that are necessary to success of the admission process but not directly related to admission decision. </p>

<p>I cannot run his life for him and there have places where he has missed deadlines (he missed a scholarship deadline for example) and I can scream and yell but it is too late now. It was a hard lesson for him. He cried the whole night when he realized that he had thrown away a chance and we will never know if he would have got it (it was very competitive) but now when I tell him that he needs to apply for a scholarship, he is a lot more attentive. </p>

<p>So there is a balance. I do not believe a total hands off attitude (by choice or by circumstances) is right, neither is the concept of “helicopter parents” during the admission process (not going into anything beyond that!!!). Every family needs to find a balance, some kids need help in one way, others in a different. My second child is different and I have to have a different approach when we get to his admissions processes.</p>

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<p>Great post, oldfort! But still a bit too ‘pc’ for me. Why on earth would anyone send their kids to a school where they would get a lesser education, or be less safe?? I think almost everyone in the world would want their children to be as confident and capable as possible-- so they can contribute more as adults, doing things to ensure better education, health, and safety for all-- and especially for those who have no better choice than a mediocre or downright bad school. Life has plenty of difficulty in store for everyone; no need to chase it down.</p>

<p>I’m going to make an assumption (likely wrong, but its kind of fun) that John grew up in a gated community. I can’t imagine why anyone would fixate on such a thing without some personal experience. I’ve only seen one gated community in the US in my life–though in Venezuela and Italy I’ve seen many. </p>

<p>I have a lot of sympathy for John’s D-- she’s young, she’s nervous about going far from home, and having been brought up by a [what’s a polite term for overbearing?] father who seems scornful toward education, she’s chosen a lesser school. But it’s her choice, and while I’d definitely look for some other options (UT-Austin?) that would satisfy her and give her more educational options, still, with those grades and scores, she’s going to find her way anywhere. Who knows, after a year close to home she may feel ready to spread her wings, and transfer to … Oxford!</p>

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<p>Many of us are on CC to purge our worries and anxieties so we don’t drive our children crazy! We think out loud on CC in order to sort through a complex situation with the help of advice from CCers, and then calmly and with greater confidence, we bring the percolated suggestion to our son or daugher. Actually, when I’m in a good emotional place, I find confrontational posters to be very helpful. They keep me honest with myself about my motives. But on some days, they make me more insecure and anxious about my abilities as a parent and my worth as a person. Then I take a break for a while to build my battered self back up again before posting. If I had friends or extended family members who cared one whit or knew anything about this process, I’d ask them instead. But I don’t. So, lots of CC posts can result in one morsel of advice to a child and do not equate with parental over-involvement, hand-holding, or debilitating helicoptering. As pointed out, this is a huge decision with huge financial implications, and responsible people try to amass as much wise counsel as possible before proceeding.</p>

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<p>Mazewander, I wonder if we have the same father…“what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” has always been one of his favorite lines. I think it is by pure luck that I am still alive. Which is also why I completely cherish and protect my children, who seem to be doing quite well because of (or perhaps in spite of) the overparenting. Like you, I am taking different approaches with each kid, and still treasure every minute.</p>

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<p>My husband once asked. “What if what doesn’t kill you maims you?” I always thought that was a very sensible question. I also thought that if I raised my D with compassion she would become compassionate…seems to be true. I think compassion makes people strong-- the sense of being part of a community that cares.</p>

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Of course they would. But there is more than one kind of confidence, and more than one kind of capability. Also, I think it’s crucial to distinguish between elementary school and high school, because I think differences in academic quality are larger and more consequential at the high school level, and also because safety is generally not as serious an issue at the elementary level–at least not in Boston, except for those elementary schools that are located in a violent area (which is true of only a few schools). Our school was about six blocks from our house, in a mixed-race, working-class area of Boston which many suburbanites would probably avoid driving through, but which is actually pretty quiet and safe. Our son never witnessed any serious violence or reported feeling himself to be in danger in his entire seven years of going to that school. </p>

<p>On the positive side, what he got out of the experience was not only a pretty good education–at least, he placed in the 98th percentile among Boston students on the ISEE in his sixth-grade year, so it can’t have been that bad–but an exposure to kids of many different ethnicities, classes and cultural/language backgrounds. As I recall, his classes in that school were about 1/4 to 1/3 white kids, the rest being Vietnamese, African-American, and various flavors of Caribbean and Cape Verdean islanders. </p>

<p>Why is this important? Because for the rest of his life, he will (a) have some vague idea what it is like to be part of an ethnic minority, and (b) have a kind of simple, unselfconscious comfort with people of other races that I, with my upbringing in a lily-white rural New Jersey town in the 1960s, have never had and will never have if I live to be a hundred. I can’t place a dollar value on these things, but I think their value is huge, and he would not have gotten them at a private school. And they are forms of “capability and confidence” that I am glad we were able to provide him.</p>

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<p>Just remember that there are many private schools which are a lot more diverse, ethnically, economically, racially, than many publics – at least some in suburbia which include highly homogeneous student bodies. That was definitely true of my two D’s private h.s. experience vs. that of friends at suburban publics.</p>

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<p>^^ Exactly correct, epiphany. We tried the local public elementary school when oldest was young. In kindegarten he was attacked on the bus, the kid next to him in class had a psychotic episode, and they found a syringe on the playground. Philosophically I am a believer in public shcools. However, the safety of my kids is more important, and one year was enough for us. Moved him to a religious private school (which wouldnt have been my first choice but we didnt make that decision until the end of his kindergarten year-- too late for most of the private schools). We ultimately moved just a few miles away, to the top school district in the state, but the kids were happy with their school and friends, so we let it be, and when it came time to make a change (school only goes to a certain grade) we included them in the decision making, an ultimately chose a very ethnically diverse school 30 miles away. They learned a lot (including how to drive on a very crazy-crowded highway in rush hour traffic).</p>

<p>As for being involved in the college search (not the college selection-- thats theirs) its FUN, it goves an opportunity to share/spend time with our kids, etc. It has, however, backfired b/c at times ite esay to spend too much time on the cumputer than with them, during the precious limited time that they are home!!</p>

<p>And as for blowhards, sometimes I wonder if it serves to compensate for underlying feelings of insecurity. Some stand on the shoulders of giants, others try to knock others down so they are the only one standing. Different strokes for different folks. My guess about LW (combined in part with what he has shared) is that he grew up in a rough-and tumble environment but probably found something (sport, perhaps) that he was able to use as his ticket out of poverty. Used it, got an education, married young, had a couple of kids and found a secure government job (he already said this part) and the rest is history. But just because he had it tough growing up and suceeded doesn’t mean his kids have to follow the same path. JMO.</p>

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<p>Personally, I think it’s a little weird how involved some parents are too. My dad went to cooking school in england and my mom went to a trade school. so im basically the first in the family to have this experience. i’ve done absolutely everything on my own. i started in the beginning of my junior year and i’ve done research and i’ve learned a lot. my mom is excited for me and my college experiences, but she hasnt helped me with a lot because she doesnt know too much.</p>

<p>for the parents that do everything for their kids: STOP! your child is going to be living on their own soon. they need to know how to deal with things. they will have to live an adult life. if they get a bad grade, they cant ask mommy to go talk to their teacher. they need to know how to be financially and socially responsible for themselves. its okay to be excited for your son or daughter, but the most you should be doing is steering them in the right direction. you cant fill out their applications for them. just take them on college trips to visit and help them financially if you’re able. that should be the extent of your help. the students should be the ones setting up interviews, filling out applications, writing essays and learning how to manage time. it’s part of becoming a responsible adult.</p>