I get your point. However, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a non-college grad having a better financial outcome than a grad. It’s about the dynamics of the economy and choices. Also, as another pointed out, there’s much more than money to professional success and satisfaction.
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Of course they deal with the boss’ ego (whether kissing or not), producing reports AND dealing with groupthink-- albeit of a different variety.
You own a small electrical contracting firm- you are working alongside and on behalf of a large national construction company. You don’t get to tell them “I don’t update the weekly project status report because I don’t work for you”. Reality- you don’t update the status report, your contract is terminated and you go back to helping homeowners install an outlet in the master bathroom (the difference between a $100K job and a $225.00 job). You own a small plumbing business- you don’t set up an entirely new procurement system so that you can work with large hotel chains or retailer who want to monitor the flow of supplies in real time? You are off the approved vendor list.
It’s not fair to young people to sugar coat the realities of owning or working for a small business, whether it’s vocational or other. Unless you want to be sending out invoices by carrier pigeons, you are going to be dealing with the same technology, financing, operational issues as a big corporation- just with fewer zeroes.
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Isn’t a large part of this based on parental occupational and SES background? I.e. kids with college educated parents working in “college” occupations tend to be pushed to college, regardless of interest, ability, and motivation, while kids with less educated parents working in “non-college” occupations are much less likely to be pushed to college, regardless of interest, ability, and motivation.
Parent money also matters in terms of setting up opportunities in K-12 and post-secondary education and training – if your parents do not have money, your educational opportunities are more likely to be limited. Parent connections can also matter (e.g. legacy status at colleges, connections into the skilled trades, knowing people in business, etc.).
I agree paperwork reduction is NOT something I normally associate with owning a small business.
I do think there are other things, though, that some people find appealing.
I think there is a lot of this, but at least anecdotally, I have also seen parents who do not have college degrees pushing very hard for their kids to get college degrees. Probably not so much the parents who were successful in trades and such, however.
Generally, I think if the parents are happy with how their lives worked out, they are more likely to encourage their kids to follow the same sort of path as they did. Indeed, my ongoing concern is we actually don’t have to do anything consciously to make that happen–just by being role models that is likely to be a factor.
Conversely, parents who are not happy with how their lives worked out may be more likely to push their kids to do something different, and in some cases that may be college.
And actually, I do think there are at least a few parents around who do not value their four-year degrees and wish they had done something different after HS. Probably not a particularly big category but I could imagine some of those parents maybe being more actively skeptical of automatically going to a four-year college as a next step.
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Owning a business without having enormous motivation to push yourself is a recipe for financial disaster. The criticism of tiger parenting is that the parents are providing the push not the kids. Indeed, if the kids were enormously motivated in the first place, there wouldn’t be any need for tiger parenting.
The more likely non-college outcome for kids who are not self-motivated, is working an hourly paid job in retail or other service industries.
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We’re getting way off the initial subject, but it is interesting.
Of course there are challenges and frustrations with any business. My point centers on the true criticality of tasks and projects. Accommodating a customer’s accounting system is reasonable; after all, any organization’s goal is to take away customer pain and make the buying process (in this case, selling a service) as seamless as possible. As a business owner, you can determine the financial payback or lack thereof and ultimately make a decision. What I’m getting at is the usually inevitable unproductive interactions and tasks that aren’t (or at least only tangentially) connected to business outcomes. In my view, such work is far less satisfying than wrestling with substantive challenges that have meaningful consequences.
Tiger parenting may also occur when the parents’ motivation is different from the kid’s motivation (i.e. kid wants to do X but the parent forces the kid to do Y and does not allow X).
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To that end, let’s return to topic, please
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Of course. With increasing autonomy is increasing professional responsibility.
I agree, I have had families over the years where arguments arise during teen checkups about pushing the kids into medicine or engineering and it is made clear that no other field will be tolerated by the parent. It is sad. Some change their tune when they realize the kid’s passion/strength lies elsewhere, but this may not happen until college. There are also the ones who demand referrals for educational testing and are sure there has to be something “wrong” when the kid does not get into the top math group in middle school.
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Be careful using the term tiger parenting. Tiger parenting has been linked to numerous mental health issues in children and has pretty negative long-term outcomes. So please, hopefully it is not the norm.
Korea is scary! My D22 is currently tutoring a 15 yo Korean student attending an international school in Korea. My D says that her student studies all day during her summer break because her mother has lined up multiple tutors for her and her student wants to cover the entire syllabus for the upcoming school year during the summer.
I suggested that my D22 tell her student that you don’t need to race ahead but my D said the anxiety and ambition of her student is probably fueled by everyone in Korean going 200%.
Sounds like Bay Area to me.
Maybe not quite as bad as the Bay Area, although I did have similar thoughts recently when I was out walking my dog on a beautiful, sunny summer afternoon as we passed by the local Mathnasium which was filled to capacity with kids doing math worksheets. Sigh.
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A couple of (somewhat contradictory) comments.
First, no self-respecting tiger parent would put their kids into Mathnasium, because it’s too low a level. In the Bay Area, the true tiger parents would be using either AlphaStar Academy, or AoPS Academy in Santa Clara, Mountain View, or Fremont. Those are the programs that are known to get results.
Second, for the kids that truly love math, spending time doing math is a joy, not a punishment. It’s no different than kids who want to spend time doing piano, or football, or fencing.
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We do not have these where we live. Just Mathnasium in our small town. (We are not in the South Bay.)
I looked in the window. I didn’t see much joy. They looked pretty miserable. Of course, that glimpse could have been deceiving. But they did not look happy to be there. And even if they generally love math, I do hope they are able to get some fresh air and sunshine during their summer break along with some time to just be kids. Some were quite young.
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Could be kids whose strongest and most interested in academic subject is something other than math, but who have tiger parents who favor math over whatever subject the kid is strongest and most interested in.
Students with very high levels of academic strength and interest in math will not need a tiger parent to push them in math.
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Yes, this is VERY common in our school district. The level of math class a student takes here is basically viewed as a proxy for intelligence. If you take Math 1/2, for example, rather than Math 1, you are considered one of the “smart” kids, no matter what your strengths are in other areas. Math level is how kids are often categorized in our district. So I can imagine a tiger parent would certainly want their child to excel in math, whether or not the child was interested. You aren’t seen as one of the “smart kids” without math acceleration. There is prestige in your math level.
(Ironically, the math department at our single high school is not great, so even kids who are strong in math often end up struggling and needing outside tutoring in order to keep up because while the expectations are high, the teaching level often doesn’t match. There is a lot of pressure and it’s considered somewhat embarrassing to have to drop down to the “normal” level if you were initially accelerated).
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It would not be surprising if this was somewhat common, since these forums have plenty of stories of students on the +2 math track (to reach calculus in 11th grade) struggling as they get to higher levels of high school math (precalculus or calculus), suggesting overly aggressive middle school math acceleration of students who are good but not great in math. Also, many high schools decelerate the +2 students with the two year calculus AB followed by BC sequence, which makes no sense if the students in the +2 math track were those who were properly placed in it.
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And I imagine those parents who want to ensure that their students either get on the accelerated track or stay on the accelerated track while maintaining excellent grades might enroll their kids in a program like Mathnasium over summer, whether or not the kids wanted that. No tiger parent would want their kid in “normal” math, imo.
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