@aardman i agree. There is a certain financial aspect I call it, to being an involved parent…college is outrageous and we are the ones paying for it. My D wants to go to school and major in a very competitive area. The schools are all expensive & people have said "well I am going to let my kid do all the work researching schools and looking up info and picking a school " with no intervention from themselves…what? I dont think so. My D has no clue about financial aspects or college and barely can keep her head above water at times with homework and the silly things they make them do and expect out of high school students , especially if your kid takes honors classes, AP , etc. They do not have time or the knowledge to make a financial decision…sorry that is my opinion. Of course my D will do all the applying and essays and making of lists for schools but I am doing a brunt of the beginning research. As for the article, I agree with some aspects of it. I see parents who are too involved. A LOT! I try to keep my involvement to a minimum with teachers and adults my child has to deal with. I also do not text my D constantly during school, etc. I know a LOT of parents who do this. I think it is a bad idea. I do get annoyed by the constant communication by phone/email that takes place all day…ugh it is so annoying! Constant discussion with kids about every little thing. I have an only child and I know I have done too much for her probably…it is hard to find a balance these days…
My children’s friends attending elite colleges are very bright. They also like being busy and involved. They may go without sleep to fit in everything they want to do, including academics. I say that’s fine, as long as the students do these things because they want to, not to please their parents.
I think warning signs of helicopter parenting can be things like not allowing a child to change an activity in high school, " she’s studied the piano for 8 years." “What will it look like to colleges?” In such a case, it might be more interesting for a college application for a student to say, “I studied piano for 8 years, but wanted to explore the use of music in theater. I composed the score for the YouTube video I made with friends in support of the ballot initiative to build a new school. You know, I think music can be very persuasive, although I made some beginners’ mistakes in this work” than to say, “I have studied piano for 10 years. Here are my medals.”
I suspect deans at highly competitive colleges do encounter students who achieved the goal of admission, but don’t yet have a plan for what to do next.
Strange, you can see the helicopter parents in the responses. The Dean’s input is welcome info.
TheGFG has interesting input, only issue is his perspective is from an extreme angle. Most kids are not attending schools where middle schoolers are taking APs. That in itself is a “problem”.
You act funny…My dad passed away, my mother dropped on High School.
Now, I need to act responsible for me, and I’m a “smart kid”…so, if it weren’t for me pushing my self and making decisions, Who would do the work?
Yeap, my father was exhausting when it came to study, grades, choices…he questionated even the format of my commas when I writed it, I really couldn’t take it, the result was that I only took school seriously when I looked at life by my self and while unbound to him.
If I could stand my father, we would have done realtively fine…Because, life happens into the real world, a place at where there is fail, incompetence and maturation.Effort may be vain, but if you don’t try you’ll never know, if you get tired you will drop, you will need to find balance and nobody else will do this for you.
For a kid It is as valuable as getting a job, kids need to turn into adults, specially when it comes to college, money and possibilities.
Nobody will make a kid like a Managing position, nobody will make a kid like the last place, the only person responsible for that is the kid, or the future adult, they need help, not delusion, they need strength, not to be left helpless and out of options because parents neglected their actual required pace.
As a teacher (both Honors and non-Honors) what I see is a pattern:
Selective College is hard to get into
GC reports, “Selective College is looking for rigor”
Kid interprets, “Rigor means taking hard classes,” and signs up.
Parent sees kid struggling because they’ve taken on too great a load, and does various responses, some of
which are helicopter-y like complaining to the school/teacher that the work is too hard/much, or “helping” overmuch.
In one case, a mother made one of the most ridiculous films I’ve ever seen (“Race to Nowhere”).
Some kids are in fact not cut out for the rigorous path (implying not a great fit for the elite colleges) - but too many
parents are only ok with someone ELSE’s kid “having to learn grit” and maybe taking a different approach,
as long as it isn’t their own kid. The very sad situation is that I have many, many extremely successful kids who don’t
take all Honors, but some of my higher strung kids in Honors, struggling, do not believe that this is possible.
Meanwhile, at every HS I’ve been associated with (three as a teacher, and one I attended) there are plenty of
parallel cases:
Selective College is hard to get into
GC reports, “Selective College is looking for rigor”
Kid interprets, “Rigor means taking hard classes,”
Parent sees kid totally succeeding because in fact Kid is capable and well-placed in those Honors classes and
whatever ECs, social life, etc.
…but not everyone has the 2nd kind of kid! A colleague of mine observed that the 1st kind of kid can sometimes
use time to make up for ability. And then we get the lack of sleep and so forth.
ETA: it does no one any good when parents convince their kids that only one particular elite path is worthwhile in life…
Oh here we go again with the same narrative of the obsessive, delusional parent who is either oblivious to his child’s ability or cannot accept the true nature of it.
How about possibility #3:
–Selective Colleges are increasingly harder to get into due to smaller world syndrome & internet, resulting in more applicants, including more international students who will pay in full
– Admissions officers themselves advise taking AP’s or your school’s rigorous classes and getting A’s in them
–Smart and ambitious kids understand that to mean “I have to take hard classes and get A’s”
–Schools report too many kids registering for their most rigorous classes. Regrettably, due to a crisis in teacher preparation levels, especially in STEM (ie. the brightest young people are not choosing secondary education as a career), high schools lack sufficiently educated staff to teach enough sections of advanced classes in order to accommodate greater enrollment. Nor could they pay high enough salaries to even attract those qualified teachers.
–Schools respond by instituting more and more prerequisites, and by making classes unreasonably tough so as to weed out all but the hardy who can survive on little sleep. That way, they save their necks because it’s the kids and parents opting out of the classes, rather than the school shutting them out due to lack of seats. After all, when they tried that, they made a LOT of parents really, really angry. Also, teachers who are not really capable of teaching higher level material, cope by having students learn more than ever at home on their own or from tutors, thereby adding to the study hours needed.
–Parent sees kid totally capable of succeeding based on intellect, but who now starts to flounder in the homework overload and sleep deprivation.
Summarized as: SCHOOLS ARE ASSIGNING FAR TOO MUCH HOMEWORK
Real life recent example of homework load for just one class. We have block scheduling, so classes meet every other day.
Monday: teacher hands out new novel, but spends classing wrapping up previous unit.
Wednesday: 2 essays due related to previous unit that were just assigned on Monday + plus test on that unit
Friday: 100 question nit-picky multiple choice test on novel kids just got on Monday
Monday: brief discussion of novel for part of period, then unrelated activity
Wednesday: 2 more essays due, + timed writing test on novel
This is not the worst of what we’ve seen by far, but it’s the easiest to write about.
@TheGFG Reading your posts make me incredibly thankful that we homeschool. No busy work. All courses are individually designed to challenge the student to high levels of mastery, but with appropriate workload. No bureaucracy about grade level based advancement: advancement is based on ability, not age or grade. Course selection is wide open. If they have a burning desire to learn more about a subject, we create a course around that interest.
Intellectual rigor without rigor mortis. 
When adcoms talk of rigor and a kid struggles with the high school load, maybe you reevaluate whether those colleges are the right targets. Nothing says the target colleges have to be that level of competition. The kid might suffer there, too, if the 4-year classroom demands are high.
I know we’ll argue in circles again, but it helps to control what you can. In real life, not everything has to be an “A” or about picking the highest apple on the tree. Maybe the kid likes the stretch, learns, is empowered, so takes the class, but get a B.
Someone earlier suggested anything short of perfection (the A, every piece of work done exactly right, etc,) is a zero. Not necessarily.
I am going to start a new CC thread for D: Colleges for the AP D student
@theGFG - I can’t speak to your experiences, but I can assure you that at my school and my kids’ school, we have excellent teachers and space in sections. Wouldn’t the fact that plenty of kids don’t find it impossible, suggest that you may be mistaken about your child’s ability?
Agree with @lookingforward also, how about reassessing the appropriate target schools? Do you plan to complain about homework in college also?
Really, a D student? Doesn’t that call for some parental reevaluation? See why this goes in circles?
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, were your homeschoolers on the equivalent of a block schedule, fewer courses at a time, but with correspondingly more focus?
@lookingforward We do a mixture of both.
@TheGFG, I think your kids’ school sounds nuts. But some of us simply haven’t had that kind of experience, even in schools that have a lot of homework (like my kids’ IB program). I think you may be suffering from being in an outlier on the spectrum we’re talking about.
Every admissions officer I ever heard explicitly said, we don’t expect you to take every AP offered, or all the APs that fit in your schedule. Take the ones that interest you and you will do well in.
I will admit a Vassar AO in answer to the question “Is it better to get a B in an AP class or an A in a regular class?” winced and said, “It’s better to get an A in the AP class.” That’s when she went on to say. Don’t take every AP because it’s there. They want to know that you are capable of doing college level work, but not the 6 to 8 courses that are common in high school schedules. You take fewer courses at a time in college. It’s no wonder many kids can’t manage an all AP schedule.
And yes, I do think GFG’s school is an outlier.
This issue isn’t a new one as it existed when I attended a NYC STEM-centered public magnet HS around 2 decades ago in the early-mid-'90s. It was one of the reasons why they instituted the following policies which were arguably overkill in the other direction:
- One must have at least a 90/100 not only in the field(i.e. math, Social Sciences, natural sciences), but also as one's cumulative GPA to be allowed to take AP courses. This policy ended up shutting out many students who could have taken APs in their strong subjects and excel. Especially considering the regular courses are accelerated to the point many students had no issues self-studying AP exams for a few weeks/months and scoring 4s and 5s.
- If one opts to take more than a certain number of APs within a given semester/year, the student must sign an agreement that he/she CANNOT DROP ANY OF THEM if he/she finds the work/rigor/pacing too demanding later on. If one's not sure, the common advice is to decline the "AP overloading". This deterred some students while others who should have reconsidered didn't and ended up regretting it once the admins pointed to the contract they signed understanding the conditions to overload on APs and effectively told them "tough cookies" when they asked about dropping one or more AP courses.
TheGFG’s school is an outlier, probably, but it is by no means unique.
When one talks about “load,” I think it is important to distinguish genuine intellectual challenges from excessive demands for production.
In the category of genuine intellectual challenges at the high school level, I might put:
Changing variables of integration in a sensible way, and understanding related rates problems, in Calc BC.
Wrapping one’s head around the controversy about the National Bank, involving Nicholas Biddle.
Having at least a vague idea what is going on in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Translating challenging literature in another language into English.
In the category of excessive demands for production:
Requirements for written work and/or construction projects that tie students up for many hours weekly. These may have serious intellectual content, or not.
If a student has struggles of the first type, then that might indicate that the student will not do well in a challenging college environment.
If a student has struggles of the second type, in my view that fact says nothing about how well the student will be able to cope with a challenging college environment.
In my experience and the experiences of my family members, college courses have heavier demands for reading and understanding material, figuring things out on one’s own, and solving truly challenging problems. They may have heavier demands for extended papers, or an undergrad thesis, at some point.
What college courses generally do not involve: 2" binders (or more) of the student’s graded “work product” per course, per semester. The latter may be involved in high school, but few colleges feature this. If your local high school does not have this kind of production load, you and your children are lucky. Some places do have this.
Students going to Top 20 schools are all outliers, regardless of where they go to high school. Looking at the list of college acceptances from one of the threads is remarkable to me, coming from a top 300 high school, so yes, adcoms do know the best high schools and seem to accept 30! people to very selective schools.
If your child cannot keep up with classmates … maybe they aren’t in the same caliper and it is easier health and family wise to be say top 30 of your HS and not try to compete with the top 10. Some of the top 10 kids are really exceptional, but if they aren’t keeping you out of the flagship or top 60 school your child is sort of suited for, why do you really care ?
Actually, if your child can get a B in an AP class and enjoys it, it is obviously a better choice than boredom and an A in a lower level class. And those top achieving peers are a great influence on your child. I remember well some of the really high achievers in my HS, I worked as hard as they did, learned most of my engineering freshman classes in HS, and yes, they have gone on to really high positions in life. And I have done well too. Didn’t get into Princeton, but that really didn’t matter much in the long run.
I don’t think any of these people are going to be waitlisted at Rutgers either …
Like, Q. But in addition to extended papers, short turnarounds, too. And a full semester/trimester load.
I found the binder thing was about organizational skills. YMMV.