Thank you for posting this amazing article... Nickole and Wes Drake! A MUST QUICK READ FOR PARENTS.. Remember...EVERYONE AROUND YOU CAN FEEL YOUR STRESS, YOUR EXPECTATIONS, YOUR DISAPPOINTMENTS....ESPECIALLY YOUR KIDS. exerpt: as parents and kids vie for the chance to get into their first choice colleges. For some parents, college acceptance approaches the culmination of every single parenting choice ever made. It can seem the ultimate goal, the ROI of parenthood, the final gold award and the epitome of a parenting job well done. It feels like the end game for every AP class, honors class, volunteer opportunity, and sports involvement that you required of your child. This college acceptance looms as the justification for the hours upon hours of helping with homework, rewriting their essays, doing most of their science fair projects since sixth grade, hiring the most expensive college counselor, and pushing, pushing, pushing your kids to get the A at any cost. My child got into his first choice university will be worn proudly and loudly as a testament to how well you have done as mom and dad. What I have found in my 25 years in education is that as parents we are almost forced into this artificial race upon birthing our children. We start with our best intentions, of course. We want the best preschool, the best teachers, the best summer camps. Slowly, without our being aware of it, we are competing with our neighbors, our friends, our families. What started out as just wanting the best for our children, suddenly morphs into my child needs to be the best. So, what do we do as a result? We DO too much! And, we expect our kids to do too much. We start believing that we need to start the protracted process of getting our kids ready for college in elementary school. We begin having massive anxiety about college acceptance when our kids are in middle school. And by high school, oh boy, we get bat shit crazy! We lose our focus on our children and whats best for them and instead start seeing them as a reflection of us as parents. They must get into a great college or we have failed miserably at parenthood. What will our neighbors think? What will we say about our kids at dinner parties? Of course, we dont think we think these things, but I know they exist in some form in our heads! Our societal anxiety about this is, in my humble opinion, at an all-time high!
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 11:10:58 +0000
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