The stress of college admissions leaves a lot of parents rewarding or punishing kids for all the wrong reasons.
Two days ago, I shared the link to "A Father’s Acceptance: His Son Won’t Be Following His Ivy Footsteps," an entry on the New York Times "The Choice" blog from a father who'd realized his son didn't have to go to an Ivy League school to make him proud.
Today, that blog ran a selection of readers' comments, many from parents, they've received in response to the entry. A lot of them were positive affirmations from parents who'd learned that their kids' GPAs and test scores didn't measure their worth as kids (or their parents' success at raising them). But a few were like this one:
Ugh. Attitudes like this are part of the problem. Your kid can be a unique snowflake and still get good grades. Kids are failing in school and at life because parents are lowering their expectations. This P.C. acceptance … is tiresome & fake. There is nothing wrong with expecting your kid to get all As, take honors and AP courses, top scores on SAT, and get into a top school. There is nothing wrong with being disappointed if your kid fails to accomplish these goals. It is your failure as a parent, too. Stop pretending you need to just accept your kid as is when s/he fails. Your kid can be an individual & still get top marks in school.
Parents, that is not someone you want at your next dinner party.
First, it's important to acknowledge that there are some kids who could do nothing but study and still not get straight A's in AP classes. There are some kids on whom you could spend a fortune for SAT tutors and they'd still never come close to the average score of the Stanford admits. Hard work can influence those things, but not every kid gets the genetic hand of cards to achieve those admissions-related results.
But more importantly, when did it become reasonable to expect kids to be great at everything? Do you know any adults who are great at everything? Why should we expect kids to be great at math, chemistry, English, Spanish, athletics, music, public speaking and leadership? The admissions process at highly selective colleges rewards the tiny percentage of students who somehow found the natural ability and work-ethic to achieve exceptional results. If any kid could do it based on hard work and high expectations alone, every high school senior class would have 75 valedictorians.
I'm not suggesting you should lavish praise on your student in every situation. If your student gets a D on his chemistry midterm because he blew off studying and just played video games until 2 a.m., I think a parent has a right to be disappointed. I think it would be appropriate to take away his video game privileges and tell him you weren't happy with his effort. It's OK to expect more than that from your student.
But if that same student tried his best and still didn't do well on the exam, praise the effort. Tell him you're proud of how hard he worked, and ask if there's anything you can do to help. High expectations for your kid are absolutely a good thing. But the expectations should be tied to the effort rather than the outcome.
Let your kids know that you expect them to put in a real effort to learn not because that's what it takes to get into Yale, but because education is important. Encourage their interests not because you heard Georgetown likes students who've shown leadership, but so you can help them find their natural talents and passions. Focus on the bigger picture.
There are only eight Ivy League schools, but there are hundreds and hundreds of different paths someone can take to be happy and successful.