Going to say, those parents may be heaving a huge sigh of relief that their kids aren’t doing the AP march. My kids went to an independent school that struck a good academic/balance, and had great college admissions results. The part when you might get REALLY jealous is when your kid ends up at the same school their kid does. It isn’t ALL about academic striving.
So OP, I am sympathetic to the “comparison” talk. But your kid does NOT have to take the max number of APs. They can just take APs in the areas they are interested in (say they are a STEM kid, take APs in math & sciences, not in the rest). Good at humaities? Take the APUSH and lit APs, not the rest. They actually do not HAVE to be in the top 10% of their class. My D2 wasn’t in the top 10% of her class – got in everyplace she applied – UChicago, Swarthmore, Mudd, Carleton, and some schools with very good merit aid. This is a choice, just like there are choices for what HS your kid goes to (in many cases, I know not everyone has a choice, but if they don’t, the one choice isn’t usually a high powered go-go school, either). So @WorryHurry411, your kid does not have time because your kid and your family have made choices that limit their time outside the classroom for extra activities. No one is making you do it.
My sister is the ‘one upper’ in our family. Her son is the same age as my daughters and I learned a long time ago not to play her game. Her son walks on water but my kids aren’t good enough in anything they do. Her son and my daughter are both in engineering, but of course her son goes to a better school (the school I actually went to, so I agree it is a fine school), where the classes are a LOT harder and that’s why his grades aren’t as high as my daughter’s. They used the same calculus book, but her son’s D+ was much harder to earn than my daughter’s A. I only know the grades because she tells our mother everything, and my mother tells everyone everything. I try not to tell anything to either of them.
This competition has been going on forever, but I don’t play. My kids had harder beginnings than my nephew, the golden child, and from the beginning I couldn’t win the ‘meeting milestones’ of sitting up or walking contests, the who could read first contest, best at sports, etc. They are now all 20 years old and all can walk, talk, throw a ball, read, and are fairly pleasant people. My sister just can’t let D2, the engineer, win at anything. D1 doesn’t care about any of it and I think my sister gave up a long time ago trying to win against her because there is no competition if one side won’t play, but with D2 it is always about the competition, the win. Those two are at war.
@MotherOfDragons and @twoinanddone I can relate to the family competition. The good news is that now our kids are nearly adults, they know how to be proud of their own accomplishments without needing external props from my in-laws. After years of watching grown people demanding the spotlight for themselves and their children, D and S can spot shallowness and insecurity a mile away. Saved us a lot of drama in the teen years, although I still sometimes need to self-medicate to get through a full-blown family holiday with my mouth shut. :))
I think the OP is talking about how she feels when others blurt out their stats, classes, demonstrations of brilliance. Having a family privacy policy regarding your own information is great (we did the same thing), but it does nothing to help those all-too-human feelings of inadequacy or jealousy when you hear of others doing seemingly bigger and better things.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling and anyone who claims they haven’t felt a twinge now and then is probably not very self-aware or is lying.
When my D expressed some bitterness that Stanford had accepted a kid with lower SAT scores than hers, I replied, “Jealousy is a b—h of a mistress.” Now, whenever someone in the family is feeling envious or suffering from a self-comparison, he or she might say, “the old b----h is bothering me again.” It really does help to vent privately to people you trust!
^^I don’t know if I agree with that. I wish I had some things sometimes, and sometimes I feel wistful or sad about not having stuff-(I’d love to be able to afford an andalusian horse), but I don’t have negative feelings towards the people who do have those things.
So, in summary, the way to handle jealousy is to just not to have it in the first place. Since it is too late for me on that one OP I just figure I am human and humans get jealous occasionally, over different things and some more than others. So first I think you can forgive yourself for being human. Life is not fair and we all know that, but knowing it and being Ok with it when it comes to the most precious people in our lives, our children, is hard sometimes. It just is. And as one of my children is SN I have had an up close and personal relationship with jealousy for a long time. When I see the struggles she has and other kids, just by luck, don’t… yeah what sometimes happens inside of me is not pretty or nice. But is human.
Sometimes it helps me when it happens to think about the much bigger problems other people are dealing with, or their kids are dealing with… For me personally, thinking about mothers in Syria will often give me the reality jolt I need. But sometimes that just makes me feel ungrateful jerk on top of being a jealous jerk. So it is sort of hit and miss in terms of effectiveness.
Sometimes what helps me the most is to talk to my husband or a close friend about those feelings honestly, just getting negative things out helps me let them go sometimes. Sometimes I find humor helpful, of the dark self-deprecating kind, but only with my husband because he gets me and he always laughs, which is nice. Anyway, I hope you are feeling better. Jealousy sucks. It feels bad and it makes you feel bad about yourself. It hurts relationships. It isn’t rational or reasonable or right maybe, but it is understandable and human, so good for you for tackling it head on!
Once your kids hit 30 or so and you start to see the “sorting stick” which is life… a lot of the jealous stuff just dissipates like so much smoke.
The golden kid in HS- mental illness struck in college, and he now works at Staples in the kind of low stress/easy-peasy environment he needs in order to be stable. The athletic and gorgeous girl in HS- on her second husband after a “starter marriage” and a career that got put on hold while she dealt with the turmoil in her personal life.
I’m a lot happier since I’ve accepted that my children are just average students, average people. They are snowflakes to me, each very special, but to others they are just snow that piles up and needs to be shoveled and pushed out of the way. No one is taking their spots, there is plenty of room for everyone to go to college, there are things they do better than others and things they struggle with.
I would say that jealousy is a choice. So you can choose to feel jealous, or choose not to feel jealous, so it’s never too late to decide how you want to feel about a situation.
I’m not quite sure I understand the jealousy, if you and your child feel you have made the best choices for you as far as which high school to attend? You have chosen the harder school because you think you child is getting a better education there and the hard work will pay off, I gather? Would you or your child be happier if your child went to the other (seemingly easier) school? If yes, than maybe you should think about switching schools. If the answer is no, then I think maybe you really aren’t all that jealous. It’s all about choices. We all have different things that trigger our jealousy buttons. Evidently some here don’t get jealous at all. I’m jealous of that!
Professionally, I’m used to keeping secrets. When my son entered the admission cycle, I told him to never reveal his scores to anyone. When he got into 2 of his reach schools, we invited his closest friends and our carpool team for a pizza party the next night. Everyone came. (He left after junior year, so was not in competition with any friends).
The next year, I was happy to help his friend with selecting and applying to an ED school. By then, I was an active reader of CC and had learned so much.
^With the pizza party, weren’t his friends applying to colleges all the same and may have not gotten in where they wanted even if it was not in competition for the same spots? No awkwardness?
So the OP’s kid is having a more academically intense experience than some friends in other, easier schools. I don’t see where jealousy comes in. The OP’s kid will be better prepared for the tests and for college work. If the OP’s kid wants to spend less time on schoolwork, choose less demanding classes. OP, I think it might help to think about the many kids who don’t have the opportunities your child does to put this into some perspective. You are making a choice. Too many kids don’t have one.
My son applied as a junior, actually, 1 day before winter vacation. He got into trouble for taking too many classes at the local U. His GC suggested he apply to college, and she’d help get his records together. We were up until 2:00 am that nite, trying to select colleges, print out forms for LORs, etc. gosh, we made mistakes. A favorite teacher said there was no way she could write a LOR overnight.
His best friend decided this was “cool”, and applied to the flagship only. A younger friend liked this idea, and he had a year to get organized. He applied ED.
I have one friend who is very distrustful of everyone, she is immediately skeptic of anyone who asks a question about her kid’s education. Frankly, most people ask to make small talk or to learn about admission process. Funny thing is that her kids are very good students but people just assume that they are mediocre. No, she is just a scared person who is constantly worried about evil eye.
“I would say that jealousy is a choice. So you can choose to feel jealous, or choose not to feel jealous, so it’s never too late to decide how you want to feel about a situation.”
I think it is really wonderful that you can choose how you feel. But not all of us are so lucky. Some of us have the feelings first and the choice is about how to respond/deal with them.