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I didn't realize it until I read this article, but this is what keeps me up at night and motivates me to spend so much time and effort on my children. Making su

I didn't realize it until I read this article, but this is what keeps me up at night and motivates me to spend so much time and effort on my children. Making sure my kids are successful adults and maintain the economic lifestyle my programming career currently affords them is why I send them to camps all summer long and martial arts classes in the afternoons to improve their focus. It's why my wife and I spent hours working on our son's application to the gifted program recently and stress them out over getting their homework done each night. The future feels uncertain and unstable. My kids need to be prepared for anything. Are we over-parenting? Absolutely. But if I let my kids go free-range and they have a hard time as adults, the same exact people who accuse us of over-parenting will be right there accusing us of under-parenting. The same childless people who sneer at us for keeping our kids challenged and engaged are the ones who sneer at us when we give the kids an hour of screen time at the end of the day or when one of our children has an age-appropriate temper-tantrum. We parents are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

rimliu 8y ago
I am not convinced that with this attitude your kids won’t have a harder time as adults.
- kleiba 8y ago
  I think you missed the <irony> tag in the OP.
  - deadmetheny 8y ago
    I'm not convinced it's actually supposed to be ironic.
    - brazzy 8y ago
      I'm not convinced everyone here is interpreting the double negatives the same way.
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  Why? I wish my parents would have been a little more hands on with a lot of this type of stuff.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - gumby 8y ago
    My kid used to say that until he got to college and realised that his classmates were comparatively less able to figure things out.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      Solid anecdata. My parents were fairly hands on, and I had a way easier time in college than most of my classmates.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    Every child is doomed to repeat the mistake of doing the opposite of the mistake they perceive their parents made with them.
    - onemorethrowa 8y ago
      So I'm following a more constructive approach: I take what I think went very well from how my parents raised me (which may not even have been conscious on their part). That the resulting parenting is in some ways almost the polar opposite of OP's approach does not mean that it's the better answer in general, though, but given that my child is likely to have inherited a significant share of my traits, it's probably the better answer for them.
    - frereubu 8y ago
      Or, as Philip Larkin jokingly had it: They f__k you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you. But they were f__ked up in their turn / By fools in old-style hats and coats, / Who half the time were soppy-stern / And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.
nicoburns 8y ago
> It's why my wife and I spent hours working on our son's application to the gifted program recently >My kids need to be prepared for anything. I think your overall approach sounds good. My only concern would to make sure that you're not doing everything for them. Because kids need to learn how to push and strive for stuff by themselves. You can't prepare your kid for everything...
theoh 8y ago
You shouldn't be worrying about future possible criticism. Claiming that, as parents, you are persecuted is not a good look, because parents aren't exactly an oppressed minority. Also this: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/mille...
gnarbarian 8y ago
Counterpoint: There's definitely an argument for letting kids figure some things out on their own. Giving them autonomy helps them mature faster in a number of ways. If your life is micro managed down to the minute you won't learn the self discipline to do things without an authority figure looming over you. Learning to solve disputes amicably between each other without requiring an authority figure is very important and helps kids make friends. Learning to test your own limits and push your own abilities in unsupervised activities will improve their confidence more than in a structured sanitized program where everyone gets participation trophies. Helicopter parents won't be around forever. I've seen many young adults completely melt down and go off the rails when they leave their home and go to college because they never learned real self discipline. They simply can't handle the vacuum that opens up in their lives without the micromanagement. Every kid is different though, some need more structure and some need more autonomy to mature into responsible adults.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  > Learning to solve disputes amicably between each other without requiring an authority figure is very important and helps kids make friends. Yes yes yes. When you fix everything for them, all they learn is "go talk to whoever is in power when I have a problem." They don't learn proper boundaries, how to negotiate, etc.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    On the other side of it, the 3 years older, 50 lbs heavier bully is just teaching them how to be afraid.
- frereubu 8y ago
  > I've seen many young adults completely melt down and go off the rails when they leave their home and go to college because they never learned real self discipline. Absolutely. And it's not a new thing, just different reasons. My dad, who was born in the 1920s, came from a puritan Christian background (Plymouth Brethren). We asked a few friends of his to speak at his funeral, and one talked about how, when he got to university, he discovered he enjoyed alcoholic drinks. However, because control had always come from outside - The Church - he had no internal limits and would regularly drink until he passed out. Even in his later life my mum would need to tug his sleeve during parties when he was starting to go from merry to drunk. Having said that, it's very difficult to get the sweet spot between giving kids leeway and leaving them open to turning feral. A colleague's kid recently got drawn into a gang and was arrested for credit card fraud despite attentive parenting.
perfmode 8y ago
Good parenting should feel more like judo than boxing.
- Diederich 8y ago
  This is brilliant, thank you.
- aymeric 8y ago
  Can you expand a bit please? I feel there is some depth here, but I don't grasp it.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    > This is the core of the philosophy of judo. Do not waste! Do not waste your mental, physical and spiritual energy on things that do not accomplish your goals. In Judo we try not to waste our energy when trying to throw someone. There is a correct timing and position to executing a throwing technique. If done correctly, the technique will work with almost no strength…like a hot knife through butter. If done incorrectly, then you will find the technique difficult to accomplish and requires a tremendous amount of energy.
amvalo 8y ago
> My kids need to be prepared for anything. If by "anything" you mean "any upper middle class knowledge work career." Let them hang out with some poor kids and get into fights, then they'll really be prepared for anything.
newshorts 8y ago
Speaking as an over parented child I had a rough time self correcting in college. I have a brain that’s literally hardwired for anxiety and autonomy has driven many of my life decisions. As a new parent I plan to provide a healthy balance between experiences/activities and boredom/self direction.
cortesoft 8y ago
What makes you think that camps and classes are going to be what helps them be prepared for anything?
agumonkey 8y ago
I think over prepping is bad. It can be suffocating. I think kids needs a few key points at pivotal times, between these they'll probably hover around fine in the herd.
onemorethrowa 8y ago
I guess people are different, and my own experiences are by no means generally applicable, but if you had been my parent, I'm convinced that you had me done a massive disservice. I consider myself to be relatively successful, financially and otherwise. For example, I make significantly north of what you would consider a good salary even in the silicon valley (I do want to retire early), doing an interesting job that very few in the world have the opportunity to do, and have meaningful (and fun!) relationships to people. And I attribute a lot of this to the fact that I was able to be my own person and follow my own activities and passions in my childhood. My parents were fairly mundane German parents in that they did raise me, set limits, instilled morals, sent me to school and all that, so they were by no means anti-authoritative. But in my free time after school and on weekends for example, I was freely able to choose how to spend my own time. By that I don't mean that I was able to do whatever I want, but that, within the limits of what was considered acceptable behavior by my parents, I was pretty much completely free-ranging. On my own, I played inside and outside, I met with friends, sometimes I would just play video games for days, sometimes I would watch TV, and sometimes I would lock (not literally) myself in my room for days and tinker with computers or read technical stuff. I grew up discovering the world and having a great social life, with several deep-seated passions on top that shaped the life that I now have in my 30s. On the other hand, I saw plenty of people growing up for which it was painfully obvious that what they did was out of some sort of obligation instilled by their parents, and it really wasn't a guarantee for success. You are never going to outpace someone who does what they do because they really like to do it, and if you could, to what end? In my case, I am almost certain that your parenting would have make me hate the interests you force instead of thrive in them. But then I do realize that people are different. Some people, given the free time to do whatever they please, chose it to fill basically all of their life with World of Warcraft, so the correct answer for some person may not be the correct one for another one. In my case, though, I will take my childhood as a successful model and will make sure that while my child grows up to be a well-adjusted, moral and (sufficiently) disciplined person, they have the ability to grow into their own.
- onemorethrowa 8y ago
  Oh, and just to drive the point home: My wife had a closer experience to what you describe, and "catching up" for a childhood and adolescence that she feels she never had is a significant part of our shared life (and it's a pretty big topic when it comes to parenting for her as well).
pastor_elm 8y ago
a gifted program only prepares them for being coddled.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Not necessarily, it may just prevent them from being bored. Though I’m prepared to think that’s less likely if the parents did the application.
elipsey 8y ago
I have a great deal of sympathy for that “damned if do, damned if you don’t” problem that really engaged parents describe, and I feel like I have observed this issue with an outsider perspective. My spouse and I live in SF now (I’m a programmer, she’s an engineer) but we’re not exactly from here in either the geographic or social-economic sense. She grew up in northern Idaho and Montana, I grew up in Alaska. Her parents were military and mine were sort of hippies, and we both had more or less what would now be considered a free-range childhood experience. I think I would have preferred to be raised the way you describe. I had some pretty seriously bad experiences and set backs that were probably unnecessary, and that I now understand many parents would have intervened to prevent. I would gladly trade being street smart in my twenties for having spent more of my life the way I get to spend it now. We were moderately more interventionist with my stepson, but he doesn’t want to be an engineer or an academic, and we’re not trying to make him. I think one of the toughest things about parenting late teens/young adults is that whatever experience or skills that I have don’t necessarily have any bearing on their preferences or goals. My parents didn’t really understand what I needed for my career because it wasn’t part of their experience, and I don’t assume I will understand how best to achieve the goals of young people interested in fields that aren’t like mine. I try to figure it out collaboratively, and often refer young people to others who are more experienced in the desired area. I hear people talking about class in this conversation, in the sense that people might need to be prepared for different things. The things is, you’re starting from where you are, not where someone else is. And who’s goal is it to be downwardly mobile? Who wants to spend their youth learning things the hard way by being isolated, unprepared, and having bad shit happen to them for no reason? A comment down thread remarked that if you “hang out with some poor kids and get into fights, then they'll really be prepared for anything.” This won’t prepare them for “anything”, it will prepare them for fighting with poor kids, and then probably being interfered with by the state. One of my favorite younger friends had an upbringing more the like the kind you have given your kids. He was home schooled, studied Jujitsu, went to U. Chicago, and last I heard from him, was working in fintech in New York. He once managed a fighting retreat from a gang-initiation/mugging in south Chicago. This after being home schooled in a small university town. That’s certainly better then I could have ever done, no thanks to my free range parenting. I sometimes have a sensation of class dysphoria. A construction boss once told me: “You’re kind of daydreamer. You should get a job using your mind.” It wasn’t a compliment, and that was my last day on the job. My parents (and most of my grandparents) were college educated professionals of the middle or upper-middle classes. I am now told I look like a convincingly San Francisco programmer shaped object, but I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. If I drink too much I get a Texas accent. I don’t complain about the cops anymore (my spouse told a black friend I don’t like to deal with cops, and the friend assumed I was black; I’m not). I had to ask what the foie gras was at the office Christmas party. I thought it was cheese. I have seen a lack of autonomy and initiative in some of the young people I have met here. My spouse recently supervised a high-school intern who had wealthy (even by valley standards, I believe) and very involved parents. She was congenial, intelligent and highly achieving but it seemed to me that she had a peculiar inability to consult her own genuine preferences, or synthesize her own opinions or plans. I find this condition rather alien, and I suspect that it is what people are concerned with when they complain about over parenting. I think it is possible and desirable to provide structure and generous assistance to young adults without telling them what to want out of life. Obviously, this is value statement, and I reservedly respect values differences in this area. The intern’s parents seemed to believe that there are better and worse life goals, and the the correct goals for their daughter to have were to attend an ivy, and then enter a class appropriate engineering or design career. It’s not at all clear to me that if that had done everything the same except for telling her what goals to have, that she would have more natural initiative. Maybe she would have, or maybe she’ll learn that after she already has high status college degree she doesn’t really want. In the worst case, is figuring that out when your 25 really so bad? I guess I’ll never know, but it sure sounds better then what I was doing at that age.
skookumchuck 8y ago
> It's why my wife and I spent hours working on our son's application to the gifted program Wow. My parents never bothered with any of that. I did all the college applications myself, my parents never even reviewed them. (went Ivy league)
- wjamesg 8y ago
  What is the purpose of your statement? Who said anything about college?
wonderwonder 8y ago
I actually just had a conversation with my wife over whether we were over protective. my kids are 7 and under and I don't let them ride bikes on the street without me. Other kids in the neighborhood zoom around all day long without helmets on bikes and scooters and are fine to this point. Many of their parents are also... not great. We agreed that we are probably over protective and that may have a slightly negative effect in regards to their independence but I could never forgive myself if they went out without me one day and did not come back, or got hit by a car.
- asdff 8y ago
  There were a couple families on my street with kids who disappeared to who knows where when the bank foreclosed their homes, yet these kids were some of my good friends and I had a blast hanging out at their houses. At a certain age, you don't pick up on class, especially if you have kids your age. Accidents can happen at any time, you know. Knowing how I was as a kid, seeing those kids ride freely would only breed contempt. When I was able to ride my bike well, my dad printed out a street map of our town to give to me and I explored the shit out of everywhere that I could. Naturally, the first thing I did was ride to the municipal pool across town, but it turns out you can't go very far very quickly on a single speed kids bike. That 10-minute car ride to the pool must have been close to an hour on my bike, so I never really rode that far again!
analog31 8y ago
>>> We parents are damned if we do and damned if we don't. This pressure has always been present, especially for moms. Today it's magnified by social media. If you admit to any uncertainty or weakness, you will be attacked. As a result, people go overboard in the other direction, showing off their perfection and the accomplishments of their (always) gifted children. This in turn makes the rest of us feel like we're failures. But oddly enough the pressure is inconsistent. If someone's kid flunks out of college or can't get a good job, it's attributed to "bad parenting." But when a bunch of CEO's trigger an economic meltdown, nobody mentions the possibility of "bad parenting."
sjg007 8y ago
Under-parenting is definitely a thing.
asdff 8y ago
Overparenting got me pretty upset with my parents as I got older. My time got so structured and I was shuttled about so much that I felt like I couldn't breathe as I had no personal time and therefore no real agency. When I was home I withdrew to my room and shut the door, as I felt like those few hours at home in my room was the only time I had to myself. I stayed up late, extending those precious hours, and got little sleep as a result. Yet that private time was also to be booked for homework technically, and that suffered as well as it competed with my actual personal interests. I think good parenting is just stability during the early years, and honest advice for the last few. Beyond the top 10 schools in the country, having decent enough grades and ACT should get you into a pretty decent college to start a pretty good career. By college, you certainly understand what is at stake if you get all Cs versus all As, because you are surrounded by peers and the only way to compete with them is through your own agency and discipline, that's something that took me a while to learn and my grades suffered initially.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Martial arts is not as good as unstructured play for executive function/focus. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-love-wisdom/201508/unstructured-play-and-childrens-development https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-love-wisdom/2015... > Our findings offer support for a relationship between the time children spend in less-structured and structured activities and the development of self-directed executive function. When considering our entire participant sample, children who spent more time in less-structured activities displayed better self-directed control, even after controlling for age, verbal ability, and household income. By contrast, children who spent more time in structured activities exhibited poorer self-directed EF, controlling for the same factors. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200301/the-overbooked-child https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200301/the-overb... > "Middle-class children in America are so overscheduled that they have almost no 'nothing time.' They have no time to call on their own resources and be creative. Creativity is making something out of nothing, and it takes time for that to happen," says Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., a developmental and clinical psychologist and professor at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. "In our efforts to produce Renaissance children who are competitive in all areas, we squelch creativity." > Early-childhood-education specialist Peggy Patten, M.A., agrees and notes that children today have many wonderful opportunities, but they need time to explore things in depth. When they are involved in too many different things, they sacrifice breadth for depth.

rimliu 8y ago

I am not convinced that with this attitude your kids won’t have a harder time as adults.

kleiba 8y ago
I think you missed the <irony> tag in the OP.
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  I'm not convinced it's actually supposed to be ironic.
  - brazzy 8y ago
    I'm not convinced everyone here is interpreting the double negatives the same way.
Taylor_OD 8y ago
Why? I wish my parents would have been a little more hands on with a lot of this type of stuff.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- gumby 8y ago
  My kid used to say that until he got to college and realised that his classmates were comparatively less able to figure things out.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    Solid anecdata. My parents were fairly hands on, and I had a way easier time in college than most of my classmates.
- perfmode 8y ago
  Every child is doomed to repeat the mistake of doing the opposite of the mistake they perceive their parents made with them.
  - onemorethrowa 8y ago
    So I'm following a more constructive approach: I take what I think went very well from how my parents raised me (which may not even have been conscious on their part). That the resulting parenting is in some ways almost the polar opposite of OP's approach does not mean that it's the better answer in general, though, but given that my child is likely to have inherited a significant share of my traits, it's probably the better answer for them.
  - frereubu 8y ago
    Or, as Philip Larkin jokingly had it: They f__k you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you. But they were f__ked up in their turn / By fools in old-style hats and coats, / Who half the time were soppy-stern / And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.

nicoburns 8y ago

> It's why my wife and I spent hours working on our son's application to the gifted program recently >My kids need to be prepared for anything. I think your overall approach sounds good. My only concern would to make sure that you're not doing everything for them. Because kids need to learn how to push and strive for stuff by themselves. You can't prepare your kid for everything...

theoh 8y ago

You shouldn't be worrying about future possible criticism. Claiming that, as parents, you are persecuted is not a good look, because parents aren't exactly an oppressed minority. Also this: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/mille...

gnarbarian 8y ago

Counterpoint: There's definitely an argument for letting kids figure some things out on their own. Giving them autonomy helps them mature faster in a number of ways. If your life is micro managed down to the minute you won't learn the self discipline to do things without an authority figure looming over you. Learning to solve disputes amicably between each other without requiring an authority figure is very important and helps kids make friends. Learning to test your own limits and push your own abilities in unsupervised activities will improve their confidence more than in a structured sanitized program where everyone gets participation trophies. Helicopter parents won't be around forever. I've seen many young adults completely melt down and go off the rails when they leave their home and go to college because they never learned real self discipline. They simply can't handle the vacuum that opens up in their lives without the micromanagement. Every kid is different though, some need more structure and some need more autonomy to mature into responsible adults.

Domenic_S 8y ago
> Learning to solve disputes amicably between each other without requiring an authority figure is very important and helps kids make friends. Yes yes yes. When you fix everything for them, all they learn is "go talk to whoever is in power when I have a problem." They don't learn proper boundaries, how to negotiate, etc.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  On the other side of it, the 3 years older, 50 lbs heavier bully is just teaching them how to be afraid.
frereubu 8y ago
> I've seen many young adults completely melt down and go off the rails when they leave their home and go to college because they never learned real self discipline. Absolutely. And it's not a new thing, just different reasons. My dad, who was born in the 1920s, came from a puritan Christian background (Plymouth Brethren). We asked a few friends of his to speak at his funeral, and one talked about how, when he got to university, he discovered he enjoyed alcoholic drinks. However, because control had always come from outside - The Church - he had no internal limits and would regularly drink until he passed out. Even in his later life my mum would need to tug his sleeve during parties when he was starting to go from merry to drunk. Having said that, it's very difficult to get the sweet spot between giving kids leeway and leaving them open to turning feral. A colleague's kid recently got drawn into a gang and was arrested for credit card fraud despite attentive parenting.

perfmode 8y ago

Good parenting should feel more like judo than boxing.

Diederich 8y ago
This is brilliant, thank you.
aymeric 8y ago
Can you expand a bit please? I feel there is some depth here, but I don't grasp it.
- perfmode 8y ago
  > This is the core of the philosophy of judo. Do not waste! Do not waste your mental, physical and spiritual energy on things that do not accomplish your goals. In Judo we try not to waste our energy when trying to throw someone. There is a correct timing and position to executing a throwing technique. If done correctly, the technique will work with almost no strength…like a hot knife through butter. If done incorrectly, then you will find the technique difficult to accomplish and requires a tremendous amount of energy.

amvalo 8y ago

> My kids need to be prepared for anything. If by "anything" you mean "any upper middle class knowledge work career." Let them hang out with some poor kids and get into fights, then they'll really be prepared for anything.

newshorts 8y ago

Speaking as an over parented child I had a rough time self correcting in college. I have a brain that’s literally hardwired for anxiety and autonomy has driven many of my life decisions. As a new parent I plan to provide a healthy balance between experiences/activities and boredom/self direction.

cortesoft 8y ago

What makes you think that camps and classes are going to be what helps them be prepared for anything?

agumonkey 8y ago

I think over prepping is bad. It can be suffocating. I think kids needs a few key points at pivotal times, between these they'll probably hover around fine in the herd.

onemorethrowa 8y ago

I guess people are different, and my own experiences are by no means generally applicable, but if you had been my parent, I'm convinced that you had me done a massive disservice. I consider myself to be relatively successful, financially and otherwise. For example, I make significantly north of what you would consider a good salary even in the silicon valley (I do want to retire early), doing an interesting job that very few in the world have the opportunity to do, and have meaningful (and fun!) relationships to people. And I attribute a lot of this to the fact that I was able to be my own person and follow my own activities and passions in my childhood. My parents were fairly mundane German parents in that they did raise me, set limits, instilled morals, sent me to school and all that, so they were by no means anti-authoritative. But in my free time after school and on weekends for example, I was freely able to choose how to spend my own time. By that I don't mean that I was able to do whatever I want, but that, within the limits of what was considered acceptable behavior by my parents, I was pretty much completely free-ranging. On my own, I played inside and outside, I met with friends, sometimes I would just play video games for days, sometimes I would watch TV, and sometimes I would lock (not literally) myself in my room for days and tinker with computers or read technical stuff. I grew up discovering the world and having a great social life, with several deep-seated passions on top that shaped the life that I now have in my 30s. On the other hand, I saw plenty of people growing up for which it was painfully obvious that what they did was out of some sort of obligation instilled by their parents, and it really wasn't a guarantee for success. You are never going to outpace someone who does what they do because they really like to do it, and if you could, to what end? In my case, I am almost certain that your parenting would have make me hate the interests you force instead of thrive in them. But then I do realize that people are different. Some people, given the free time to do whatever they please, chose it to fill basically all of their life with World of Warcraft, so the correct answer for some person may not be the correct one for another one. In my case, though, I will take my childhood as a successful model and will make sure that while my child grows up to be a well-adjusted, moral and (sufficiently) disciplined person, they have the ability to grow into their own.

onemorethrowa 8y ago
Oh, and just to drive the point home: My wife had a closer experience to what you describe, and "catching up" for a childhood and adolescence that she feels she never had is a significant part of our shared life (and it's a pretty big topic when it comes to parenting for her as well).

pastor_elm 8y ago

a gifted program only prepares them for being coddled.

Aeolun 8y ago
Not necessarily, it may just prevent them from being bored. Though I’m prepared to think that’s less likely if the parents did the application.

elipsey 8y ago

I have a great deal of sympathy for that “damned if do, damned if you don’t” problem that really engaged parents describe, and I feel like I have observed this issue with an outsider perspective. My spouse and I live in SF now (I’m a programmer, she’s an engineer) but we’re not exactly from here in either the geographic or social-economic sense. She grew up in northern Idaho and Montana, I grew up in Alaska. Her parents were military and mine were sort of hippies, and we both had more or less what would now be considered a free-range childhood experience. I think I would have preferred to be raised the way you describe. I had some pretty seriously bad experiences and set backs that were probably unnecessary, and that I now understand many parents would have intervened to prevent. I would gladly trade being street smart in my twenties for having spent more of my life the way I get to spend it now. We were moderately more interventionist with my stepson, but he doesn’t want to be an engineer or an academic, and we’re not trying to make him. I think one of the toughest things about parenting late teens/young adults is that whatever experience or skills that I have don’t necessarily have any bearing on their preferences or goals. My parents didn’t really understand what I needed for my career because it wasn’t part of their experience, and I don’t assume I will understand how best to achieve the goals of young people interested in fields that aren’t like mine. I try to figure it out collaboratively, and often refer young people to others who are more experienced in the desired area. I hear people talking about class in this conversation, in the sense that people might need to be prepared for different things. The things is, you’re starting from where you are, not where someone else is. And who’s goal is it to be downwardly mobile? Who wants to spend their youth learning things the hard way by being isolated, unprepared, and having bad shit happen to them for no reason? A comment down thread remarked that if you “hang out with some poor kids and get into fights, then they'll really be prepared for anything.” This won’t prepare them for “anything”, it will prepare them for fighting with poor kids, and then probably being interfered with by the state. One of my favorite younger friends had an upbringing more the like the kind you have given your kids. He was home schooled, studied Jujitsu, went to U. Chicago, and last I heard from him, was working in fintech in New York. He once managed a fighting retreat from a gang-initiation/mugging in south Chicago. This after being home schooled in a small university town. That’s certainly better then I could have ever done, no thanks to my free range parenting. I sometimes have a sensation of class dysphoria. A construction boss once told me: “You’re kind of daydreamer. You should get a job using your mind.” It wasn’t a compliment, and that was my last day on the job. My parents (and most of my grandparents) were college educated professionals of the middle or upper-middle classes. I am now told I look like a convincingly San Francisco programmer shaped object, but I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. If I drink too much I get a Texas accent. I don’t complain about the cops anymore (my spouse told a black friend I don’t like to deal with cops, and the friend assumed I was black; I’m not). I had to ask what the foie gras was at the office Christmas party. I thought it was cheese. I have seen a lack of autonomy and initiative in some of the young people I have met here. My spouse recently supervised a high-school intern who had wealthy (even by valley standards, I believe) and very involved parents. She was congenial, intelligent and highly achieving but it seemed to me that she had a peculiar inability to consult her own genuine preferences, or synthesize her own opinions or plans. I find this condition rather alien, and I suspect that it is what people are concerned with when they complain about over parenting. I think it is possible and desirable to provide structure and generous assistance to young adults without telling them what to want out of life. Obviously, this is value statement, and I reservedly respect values differences in this area. The intern’s parents seemed to believe that there are better and worse life goals, and the the correct goals for their daughter to have were to attend an ivy, and then enter a class appropriate engineering or design career. It’s not at all clear to me that if that had done everything the same except for telling her what goals to have, that she would have more natural initiative. Maybe she would have, or maybe she’ll learn that after she already has high status college degree she doesn’t really want. In the worst case, is figuring that out when your 25 really so bad? I guess I’ll never know, but it sure sounds better then what I was doing at that age.

skookumchuck 8y ago

> It's why my wife and I spent hours working on our son's application to the gifted program Wow. My parents never bothered with any of that. I did all the college applications myself, my parents never even reviewed them. (went Ivy league)

wjamesg 8y ago
What is the purpose of your statement? Who said anything about college?

wonderwonder 8y ago

I actually just had a conversation with my wife over whether we were over protective. my kids are 7 and under and I don't let them ride bikes on the street without me. Other kids in the neighborhood zoom around all day long without helmets on bikes and scooters and are fine to this point. Many of their parents are also... not great. We agreed that we are probably over protective and that may have a slightly negative effect in regards to their independence but I could never forgive myself if they went out without me one day and did not come back, or got hit by a car.

asdff 8y ago
There were a couple families on my street with kids who disappeared to who knows where when the bank foreclosed their homes, yet these kids were some of my good friends and I had a blast hanging out at their houses. At a certain age, you don't pick up on class, especially if you have kids your age. Accidents can happen at any time, you know. Knowing how I was as a kid, seeing those kids ride freely would only breed contempt. When I was able to ride my bike well, my dad printed out a street map of our town to give to me and I explored the shit out of everywhere that I could. Naturally, the first thing I did was ride to the municipal pool across town, but it turns out you can't go very far very quickly on a single speed kids bike. That 10-minute car ride to the pool must have been close to an hour on my bike, so I never really rode that far again!

analog31 8y ago

>>> We parents are damned if we do and damned if we don't. This pressure has always been present, especially for moms. Today it's magnified by social media. If you admit to any uncertainty or weakness, you will be attacked. As a result, people go overboard in the other direction, showing off their perfection and the accomplishments of their (always) gifted children. This in turn makes the rest of us feel like we're failures. But oddly enough the pressure is inconsistent. If someone's kid flunks out of college or can't get a good job, it's attributed to "bad parenting." But when a bunch of CEO's trigger an economic meltdown, nobody mentions the possibility of "bad parenting."

sjg007 8y ago

Under-parenting is definitely a thing.

asdff 8y ago

Overparenting got me pretty upset with my parents as I got older. My time got so structured and I was shuttled about so much that I felt like I couldn't breathe as I had no personal time and therefore no real agency. When I was home I withdrew to my room and shut the door, as I felt like those few hours at home in my room was the only time I had to myself. I stayed up late, extending those precious hours, and got little sleep as a result. Yet that private time was also to be booked for homework technically, and that suffered as well as it competed with my actual personal interests. I think good parenting is just stability during the early years, and honest advice for the last few. Beyond the top 10 schools in the country, having decent enough grades and ACT should get you into a pretty decent college to start a pretty good career. By college, you certainly understand what is at stake if you get all Cs versus all As, because you are surrounded by peers and the only way to compete with them is through your own agency and discipline, that's something that took me a while to learn and my grades suffered initially.

barry-cotter 8y ago

Martial arts is not as good as unstructured play for executive function/focus. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-love-wisdom/201508/unstructured-play-and-childrens-development https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-love-wisdom/2015... > Our findings offer support for a relationship between the time children spend in less-structured and structured activities and the development of self-directed executive function. When considering our entire participant sample, children who spent more time in less-structured activities displayed better self-directed control, even after controlling for age, verbal ability, and household income. By contrast, children who spent more time in structured activities exhibited poorer self-directed EF, controlling for the same factors. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200301/the-overbooked-child https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200301/the-overb... > "Middle-class children in America are so overscheduled that they have almost no 'nothing time.' They have no time to call on their own resources and be creative. Creativity is making something out of nothing, and it takes time for that to happen," says Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., a developmental and clinical psychologist and professor at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. "In our efforts to produce Renaissance children who are competitive in all areas, we squelch creativity." > Early-childhood-education specialist Peggy Patten, M.A., agrees and notes that children today have many wonderful opportunities, but they need time to explore things in depth. When they are involved in too many different things, they sacrifice breadth for depth.