Why have parents gone crazy in the last 10 years?

<p>@Momzie‌ LOL you just made my day with that post, too funny.</p>

<p>Yeah, I know parents in NYC who start the cutthroat stuff when their kids are toddlers, trying to make sure they get into a “good” preschool. I don’t know, do they have gold plated crayons? But I do think this hyper-aspirational group is a minority. Some people are just really competitive about everything, and their kids wind up being proxies for their own ambitions.</p>

<p>I think for a lot of parents though, there are legitimate concerns about financial aid prospects, and worry about the dismal sounding reports you keep hearing about the job market for recent grads. You don’t need to be a super tiger/helicopter type to want to make sure your kids are able to make the most of whatever opportunities you can reasonably find for them. “Reasonable” is the operative word there, haha.</p>

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<p>Speaking only for myself here, I’d say my kids have a lot to do with that. But I’m trying to get better. </p>

<p>Why don’t I get the same vibe from CC or at least not from the Parents Forum at all? I see predominantly parents here care about the cost of college very much, and almost always encourage students/families to be pragmatic and explore and take the college options that are most “cost effective”. I’ve seen posts questioning the value of the education from a prestigious and/or an expensive private school all the time, and I haven’t yet seen one post that says a college providing a full ride is “not good enough”. Maybe OP happens to be among a circle of people with higher concentration of type A’s IRL? Of course, CC is a place where you can find people with vast different values and circumstances, but I really don’t think one would get the general impression as OP’s from here. </p>

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People say this all the time and I don’t think it’s that easy…I didn’t apply to Ivy League schools because of the application fees and additional essays you have to write (a lot of colleges want “why us” essays, so you can’t just use essays you wrote for other schools). </p>

<p>^ *simply</p>

<p>There is a term called “Monster Parents” in some countries. They will go along with their kids even for a job interview.</p>

<p>My region has had a huge influx of Asian immigrants, who have brought with them a mentality that strives for the elite schools. Their kids work very hard, and take supplemental classes and tutoring sessions summers and weekends. The educational demands and offerings of our district have risen accordingly. These immigrant children brought the same dedication to their EC’s. Indeed, they start training at age 3 and practice hours and hours weekly. So the rest of us had to make a decision about whether or not we were going to play the same game, and to what extent. I know I really wanted to opt out of that game at first, but then had some experiences with my oldest similar to what momzie describes in her swim school anecdote. It became apparent to me that my kids simply wouldn’t even make it onto the schools teams, or into the school music groups and advanced academic classes if we didn’t up the ante of “craziness.” Indeed, my kids were often the only non-Asians in their honors and AP classes. The tennis, swimming, and golf teams are also predominantly Asian in our school… I am a pretty driven person, but the level of intensity I encountered in this region was a surprise, We had to adapt to it, or our kids would have been shut out of many opportunities they wanted. </p>

<p>^^maybe it has do with the CC neighborhood we’re in, cause the forums I read on this site have a lot of the types of folks the OP is talking about. I think this is an interesting topic. I think there are people who are elite school obsessed because those schools will provide the best and least expensive option for their education and that’s totally valid. Then there are those people whose cultural (foreign and domestic) norms demand this variety of success and that’s sad. Finally, there are the people who think these elite schools are tickets to a better life, and that’s wrong. Education is definitely the ticket,but it doesn’t have to be from elite school. I think the school you go to is a bit like the car you drive. The best ones reliably get you where you need to go without breaking the bank. There you are at a stoplight in your 4 year old Accord or Prius and a person pulls up next to you in a new BMW 750ix. Does any mature adult think anything more than “hey, cool car”? They don’t think that’s a super rich, super smart person who’s better than I am because they drive a better car. Elite schools are the BMW 750ix. They are just fancier ways to get you where you’re going, they don’t necessarily take you anywhere different. My kid goes to Harvard. I drive a 12 year old Jeep, but I can afford the BMW. </p>

<p>Interesting response, GFG. We actually had the opportunity to move out of the Northern Virginia craziness, we grabbed it and never looked back! Let them kill and eat each other, I say. Meanwhile, we will have dinner together every night and make time for our marriage and allow our kids to emerge from high school with hopefully most of their self-esteem intact.</p>

<p>People are much more invested in their kids. Maybe because they have fewer, maybe because of a cultural shift I am lucky enough to live in a mixed area in a big city in Texas where most kids are happy to go to state schools, so I am spared the worst of it, but we do have some crazy parents. (An earlier poster mentioned how it works in Texas. Good students to UT or A&M, less good to Tech. Here a kid will go to HYPMS, but will choose UT over anything else!) Our extreme parents come in two flavors: rich and striving and immigrant and striving. Sometimes there is overlap, but generally not. The rich parents shell out for the lessons and the SAT prep and the college counselors. The immigrants push their kids hard, to take the SAT five times but all with self study.</p>

<p>I do feel for teachers who are besieged by parents begging for a kid to make a higher grade or to be allowed extra credit. We have a couple of parents like that; the rich parents, not the immigrants. I think it was worse in elementary school when parents tried to get their kids in GT. </p>

<p>I am thinking it is going to get better soon since so much is being written about extreme parents. Some people will see themselves and back off. Other people, like teachers and admins, will turn against the pressure.</p>

<p>My mother was crazy 40 years ago!</p>

<p>I love reading these posts! My DS and I live in a very rural area in western Kentucky. To say the school system is lacking is the understatement of the year. He has received virtually no assistance from his guidance counselors over the years and I, his mother, have an associate’s degree from a 2 year college…despite all that he managed to qualify as a NMS and is now headed to UK as a Patterson scholar and we both are beyond thrilled. My question is why do so many kids apply to these Ivy League schools and pay these application fees? My son applied to two schools. UK and Centre. We did not pay one dime for application fees. He applied at UK during their annual Collegian day and the application fee was waived. Centre’s was free. These Ivy League schools are getting milllions of dollars from the application fees alone! Call me bitter; call me dumb; call me anything you like; but I was NOT going to give Harvard, Yale, etc. my hard earned money to tell my son he is not good enough for their school. I don’t want to crash anyone’s dreams…but is there anything wrong with reality?</p>

<p>@kyproud‌
It’s all relative. For some upper middle class families that are barely qualified for need-based aid but are not “rich” enough to afford the full pay COA, what’s $100+ worth of application fee compared to $10,000/year worth of financial aid the HYPS would give if their kids got accepted.</p>

<p>I’m a parent who’s daughter applied to HYPS because we know that they give better FA package compared to the other Top schools. Unfortunately, she wasn’t lucky enough to get in to HYPS. She got in to another Ivy, but didn’t get any FA from that school.</p>

<p>I would imagine the internet has accelerated the madness.</p>

<p>There have always been nut cases who thought that they were inherently smarter, more able, and more deserving than everyone else. In recent decades, this has been augmented by the unprecedented prosperity in the US. By that I mean that people have fallen into the obverse mode of the old New Yorker cartoon showing two vested, cigar smoking, brandy sipping tycoons in a NY mens club room. The caption was "What I want to know is…if we’re so rich, why aren’t we smart? " So todays parent says to himself…“I’m rich (relatively), so that proves I’m smart (which I always thought was so anyway).”</p>

<p>What follows is a resentment towards everyone in their past who didn’t properly recognize this fact. Teachers and administrators are ranked #1 on this list, and the parents are determined to “stand up” for their kids so that the kids aren’t “overlooked” the way the parents feel that they were. Coaches and everyone else who makes decisions about the kids are also on the list. Finally, the SAT and any objective measure that doesn’t “properly rank” their child needs to be purged.</p>

<p>Mix all this together with the fact that some studies show that up to 5% of the population are paranoids to some degree, and throw in the political fodder fed to the masses on nightly news that the world is rigged against them and you get a mix that leads to insecure and aggressive parents. This is all on top of our natural instincts as parents to want the best for our kids, and our counterproductive desire to protect them from failure.</p>

<p>My 2 cents on the reasons for this stuff. </p>

<p>The cost of college has made a huge difference, I agree. A lot of local private schools enjoyed getting regional applicants, many of whom would pick the school, just as they would pick private k-12 over public, appreciating the locale in that it gave their kids a not so steep cliff to jump, going away to college. But when Local PRivate College now costs $50-60K a year, one starts looking more carefully. I know a lot of parents who would drain their accounts, cash in their pensions to send a kid to HPY. But Local Private College had better come up with the money or it isn’t in the picture. </p>

<p>I thought this would happen some years ago, and it is, but much slower and in a spottier way than I had expected. The top school prices have spiraled way out there and the other schools have followed suit, with the trickle down effect and it’s really a maybe as to how much of a discount to get.</p>

<p>The common app is great in that it has opened the possibilities of the top schools, applying to more schools to more kids, but it has also resulted in a much lower accept rate to the most selective schools. </p>

<p>All of this causes pressures and stress.</p>

<p>@2018dad
There is no way I could afford HYPS even if they gave my son half tuition! Centre offered him their Colonel scholarship which was around 19,000/year. COA is around 46,000/year. That’s 27,000 a year he would have to borrow. My son has aspirations of becoming a physician and I know that med school is pricey and scholarships are few and far between. Hopefully, if all goes as planned, he will graduate UK debt free whereas if he went to Centre he would be graduating with a little over 100,000 in debt before he started med school! Even if he had that kind of money at his disposal; he would not pay that much for school. He’s too cheap, (like his mom!) He does realize he will likely go into debt for med school though. Anyways; it’s always fun to see how the other side lives!</p>

<p>HY&P offer fantastic financial aid. An accpted student from a family making 60K or less will be awarded free tuition and room and board. Airfare, winter coat, computer, and summer abroad programs are also available to low-income students. If one has a tip-top student, applications to HYP are the best investments.</p>

<p>Momzie and GFG,</p>

<p>Interesting posts and I could relate, even though my child has no longer be in the secondary school (already graduated from college.)</p>

<p>When DS was in high school, he was likely the only “academically advanced” kid who decided to not be in the IB program. (Actually it was our decision back then and he followed our advice. He himself actually regretted slightly in his senior years because he could not be with his friends as often.)</p>

<p>The “rat race” in our suburban public high school was so intense that many parents and their children would think they are not competitive enough if they do not receive that the IB diploma, even if they take more than 10 AP classes in high school.</p>

<p>Since DS turned out to be a “success” in the end (he won one of the “lotteries” ) in the eyes of many of these parents who try hard to make their own offsprings succeed, we were asked by many families whether their children should skip the IB program. Our advice to them was always that their children could decide this by themselves and they do not have to if they prefer to do something else (especially during summer break). Not a single child from these families chooses to not be in the IB program after their parents talked to us about this.</p>

<p>We also chose to not participate the “Duke Talent Search” by skipping the SAT test in the middle school, just because there was a time conflict between that SAT test and his EC. We just believe he does not have to prepare and take the SAT test in middle school. </p>

<p>(DS did start his EC starting about 5 yo though. Without that EC, he would have a hard time to compete with his peers in high school. This was crucial for him to “win the lottery” in the college admission.)</p>

<p>Even though DS was pretty good academically (considering his 2300+ SAT and his high school graduation rank) and in his EC in high school, we always told him that it is perfectly OK to be good enough.</p>