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I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, str

I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth. I suppose in olden days of yore, labor was cheaper so people could afford some of the 1-1 instruction/tutoring/etc from the article. Nowadays, the more common approach is to hustle/coach your kid so they get into highly selective K-12 programs, and/or pay up for the highly selective private school flavor. You then put your kids in the same dozen or so box-ticking exercise extracurriculars that all your social group are doing to their kids. Little league baseball? LOL, that's for the poors. My kid does fencing. Camp? Sorry that's below my kid, he/she does summers abroad at Oxford. Summer job when they turn 16? My kid doesn't need the minimum wage cash, anyway they are staying with our friends in DC to volunteer at HQ of an NGO this summer. By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. The real shock comes when they are up against 100,000 similarly coached kids. The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Most of these kids are also so busy on their all-rounder resume building for 17 years, they have no career aspirations or idea what to do for a living..

alexchantavy 4y ago
I agree mostly with your post and wanted to ask about: > By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. How would the wealthy children in the olden days mentioned in this post be any different with handling adversity? How does one create an environment for their kids to learn independence, but also have academic rigor without being spoon fed and developing no deep curiosity/passion of their own?
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I think the wealthy children in olden days probably had stricter teachers who gave them plenty of adversity in real-time. However there were also fewer wealthy producing fewer of these children so there was less competition for schools and jobs. You now have a sort of college prep industrial complex and mass affluent feeding into the same small number of prestigious school seats.. and thus more disappointment. I got into schools with scholarship money 25 years ago with 1300 SAT and no resume that kids with 1550 can’t even get into now. It’s quite an arms race.
908B64B197 4y ago
> By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. They are also afraid of trying anything since anything where there's a possibility of failing scares them. That's partly, why MIT went pass-or-fail for the first year. > The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Especially when their achievements are diminished by factors outside of their control (like race).
sinenomine 4y ago
> I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth. The exceedingly rarely mentioned elephant in the room here is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. It works for all polygenically heritable traits, including height and the g-factor. To simplify it, first-generation children have to turn out more average than their parents, heredity-wise. And as their intelligence is often weaker than their parents', and our society hasn't really found any solid methods of raising it (the tutoring discussed in this thread helps surprisingly little in experiments), as you observe: > The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Of course the highly intelligent, professional parents notice this law and pattern as well - and in our history we very often see lesser children of greatest men and women. What real options do they see for themselves here? 1. They can go all in on test-prep and resume padding with the extracurriculars - this is common and unsophisticated path due to little available gain... 2. Or they might ensure they are influential enough, so their children get admitted into top universities by one of various legacy programs. As a bonus the parents might oversee the marriage preferences and ensure the children avoid the second regression to the mean by marrying within the self-selected group with similar heritage (not meant as a praise, but this behavior of self-selecting into a tribe associated with a profession became more common & obvious nowadays). 3. ... Or they might pursue such novel techniques as IVF with polygenic embryo selection to compensate for the expected decline. This already happens, with first children having been born.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I think the old way was in founding & operating durable businesses which could be handed down to average-enough offspring. Farms, factories, local trades, etc. You still see this in some private businesses like real estate. In conflict with this historical model is that most modern high paying jobs these days are high skill PMC which leaves the highly paid without ownership in any particular enterprise they can hand down.

alexchantavy 4y ago

I agree mostly with your post and wanted to ask about: > By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. How would the wealthy children in the olden days mentioned in this post be any different with handling adversity? How does one create an environment for their kids to learn independence, but also have academic rigor without being spoon fed and developing no deep curiosity/passion of their own?

steveBK123 4y ago
I think the wealthy children in olden days probably had stricter teachers who gave them plenty of adversity in real-time. However there were also fewer wealthy producing fewer of these children so there was less competition for schools and jobs. You now have a sort of college prep industrial complex and mass affluent feeding into the same small number of prestigious school seats.. and thus more disappointment. I got into schools with scholarship money 25 years ago with 1300 SAT and no resume that kids with 1550 can’t even get into now. It’s quite an arms race.

908B64B197 4y ago

> By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. They are also afraid of trying anything since anything where there's a possibility of failing scares them. That's partly, why MIT went pass-or-fail for the first year. > The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Especially when their achievements are diminished by factors outside of their control (like race).

sinenomine 4y ago

> I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth. The exceedingly rarely mentioned elephant in the room here is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean. It works for all polygenically heritable traits, including height and the g-factor. To simplify it, first-generation children have to turn out more average than their parents, heredity-wise. And as their intelligence is often weaker than their parents', and our society hasn't really found any solid methods of raising it (the tutoring discussed in this thread helps surprisingly little in experiments), as you observe: > The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Of course the highly intelligent, professional parents notice this law and pattern as well - and in our history we very often see lesser children of greatest men and women. What real options do they see for themselves here? 1. They can go all in on test-prep and resume padding with the extracurriculars - this is common and unsophisticated path due to little available gain... 2. Or they might ensure they are influential enough, so their children get admitted into top universities by one of various legacy programs. As a bonus the parents might oversee the marriage preferences and ensure the children avoid the second regression to the mean by marrying within the self-selected group with similar heritage (not meant as a praise, but this behavior of self-selecting into a tribe associated with a profession became more common & obvious nowadays). 3. ... Or they might pursue such novel techniques as IVF with polygenic embryo selection to compensate for the expected decline. This already happens, with first children having been born.

steveBK123 4y ago
I think the old way was in founding & operating durable businesses which could be handed down to average-enough offspring. Farms, factories, local trades, etc. You still see this in some private businesses like real estate. In conflict with this historical model is that most modern high paying jobs these days are high skill PMC which leaves the highly paid without ownership in any particular enterprise they can hand down.