Is tiger parenting the norm among upper middle class parents?

Parents Forum
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That was already too long so I wanted to pause, but I had one more related thread to pull in.

All that I just described is not necessarily so bad, but I do worry about even that “good college to professional career” norm. Like, I think plenty of kids are smart, ambitious, and capable of a lot of success, but they don’t like school. And there are paths to happy and fulfilling lives available that don’t require you to just keep going to more and more school. And that sort of path may not end with the kid in the upper middle class according to that academic definition, but they could be well into the range where more income doesn’t really tend to lead to more family happiness anyway. So personally, I think it should be fine for many kids of professional parents to decide that their parents’ sort of path isn’t for them.

And so I ask myself as my S24 heads off to college, did we really do a good job making it clear to him he didn’t have to choose this as his next step if he didn’t want to? Does it even matter what else we did once we decided to send him to K-12 schools where that path is the norm? How free was he really to choose something else?

I don’t know, but nor do I have some sort of obvious solution to all this. We did what we could to communicate to our kids that they can choose their own path, but so much of the rest of what is going to influence their ambitions for themselves seems out of our control.

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This is so insightful and absolutely holds in my experience.

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Probably resonates more for people in the East, but just the other day I was munching on a very well-done Demon Deacon cookie (seriously a work of art) at a catered HS graduation party for the kid of a dual-professional couple. Very much a traditional US upper middle class moment right there.

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I think you could throw my Alma mater in there too, W&L. And in the NE places like Bowdoin and Hamilton. In the Catholic set, Villanova and BC.

Wake is the best example though.

Excellent schools but not really on the radar of the Ivy or bust crowd.

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It doesn’t. I believe Yale is need blind for admissions for all applicants. So admissions doesn’t even KNOW family income, financial need, or wealth or lack of wealth.

But back to tiger parenting…honestly, we Thumper parents expected our kids to do their best, but we didn’t have the time nor inclination to micromanage everything they did.

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Oh yeah, the Jesuit colleges are a whole other thing we could talk about. They are so plugged into the professional class in so many major US cities!

Not to be overly reductionist, but I think this sort of litmus test–describe in 100 characters or less why a professional class parent would happily send a kid to W&L, BC, or Wake Forest–isn’t just getting to tiger/non-tiger, it is often getting to how much multigenerational experience with the US higher education system the family might have. You don’t necessarily need to have been sending kids to US colleges like five generations back, but if at least the parents, and possibly the grandparents, went to US colleges and then on to US professional careers, that plus the experiences of all their peers are likely going to combine to a much richer sense of the different US college options available.

But I totally get why if you are outside this system, or relatively new to it, you may find all this bewildering.

Like, if you are not familiar with all this by experience, you might reasonably ask what are the best colleges in the US? And in fact in many countries, there would be more or less a consensus answer to that question.

But the answer you might get from these sorts of US families could be: “Well, it depends on A, B, C . . . X, Y, and Z.” And at least at first, that may not seem like a very helpful answer, maybe no help at all.

So someone else answers, “The Ivies.” Or, “The US News T5/T10/T20.” These may not be the same nuanced answers someone really experienced with the system would give, but they are simple and easy to understand answers, and in that sense may at least initially seem like more helpful answers.

All that said, there are many places, including here, which will help you turn the “it depends” sort of answer into an actual actionable application list. Again, not to be overly reductionist, but this is basically a lot of people with a lot of collective familiarity with the US higher education system willing to volunteer their time to help you better understand the many different options you could consider.

And sometimes this strikes some parents as an enormous relief, and they really embrace the concept of there being a lot of different options.

But then other parents (or kids with these parents) push back, don’t really want to hear about all this, they just want to know how to get into a “top” college. And I guess those are the true tigers.

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I post but I have never been compared to a tiger mom to my knowledge. I was thrilled with my S19s D minuses. :slight_smile:

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Mrs. Metawampe is a graduate of a very good Jesuit university that currently has a sub-20% acceptance rate. The summer before senior year, a foreign-born parent of one of our kid’s high school classmates pointedly asked her if the school was “any good” because the college advisor was encouraging the family to give it a look. It was clear to my wife that they felt this recommendation was insulting and that anything not in the top 15 of US News or outside of the Ivy League would be a huge disappointment. Their kid ended up at their safety, which the parents refused to even name when people at graduation events asked about college plans.

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There’s tiger parenting, and there’s parenting so your child has every advantage. To me, they are different things, but I think some posters are conflating them.

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Yep, and parenting so that your kid develops personal agency is not the same as micromanagement. The former is parenting to give your kid a true advantage — in all aspects of life.

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I’ve now seen two offer cycles while actively being involved in helping my S24, and I looked back at some prior offer cycles for various reasons. And this was one of the things that really leapt out at me. At our feederish HS full of upper middle class parents, there is SOOOOO much focus on making sure to have great Target options. Also on having good Likelies, but in the end the vast majority of kids who have a reasonable list who don’t get into a Reach still get into one or more Targets, as well as their Likelies.

And then they have choices, and they may well pick a Likely in some cases (like for financial reasons or they just end up liking it better). But they had choices!

Then I see all these kids/parents online doing the 19 reaches and 1 safety thing, and everyone is miserable when the kid only gets into the safety and they have no choice. And often the safety was not particularly well-chosen anyway. So avoidable!

I understand we’re not trying to fully discuss here whether tiger parenting overall is good or bad or mixed or whatever. But for me, if tiger parenting means not helping your kid carefully choose their Likelies and several Targets, indeed if you actively stand in the way of them doing that, that seems pretty bad! And that is definitely not the norm in my upper middle class circles.

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like #cinnamon1212 says, “Tiger Parenting” seems to mean different things to different people.

I’m sure to some of my friends and family, we come off as being tiger parents. But I equate parenting to puppy training: if you don’t want your dog to pee and poop all over the house, there has to be some rules and expectation and be strict about it. Owners need to be consistent as to not confuse the dog. Reward and punishment? Yup, tiger parenting.

If we step back and think about it, parenting really is as simple as series of psychological manipulation on the child. Rewards and encouragement? Yup, Classical Conditioning that even lab rats figure out quick.

I think many people here on this forum are blessed with a kid (or kids) who is intelligent and motivated enough that we don’t have to resort to fear and punishment. Some of us grew up in the 70s and 80s when parents were more negative about accomplishments not being good enough (Like in the Joy Luck Club) to know now to avoid that with our kids.

We don’t give our kids participation trophies and we will vocally let them know when they failed to live up to their “own” potential. If that makes us Tiger parents, then so be it.

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There’s certainly a broad continuum, including parents who believe they are parenting to give their kids agency in life and who erroneously believe they aren’t tiger parents.

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Yep, this kid was only allowed to pay lip service to the advice for strong safety/likely and target options. There was one of each.

This student had a lot of parentally-imposed challenges. They had to apply for a bio sciences major and declare an interest in medicine, even though all their academic accolades and ECs were humanities focused. (I have heard that this student is no longer on a pre-med track in college, which seems like a personal win for them.)

Also, there was an insistence that the student take a very challenging biosciences class senior year, and that produced a singularly bad grade for the mid-year transcript. They were outright denied by their ED choice, but were ordered by the parents to then double down on “Ivy +” apps for RD.

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This is probably just complicating things further, but personally I think it can help to reflect on different understandings of a “good life”.

Historically, there have always been some people who have a pretty simple answer to that question. A good life is one in which you are rich and powerful and people envy you.

Then there have been other people who have argued no, that is not really the important stuff, the important stuff is being a good person and doing good things. And sometimes that means “good” only in some moral sense, but often these people have a broader idea of what it means such that it includes some sort of happiness, and health, and developing your interests and abilities, and so on.

And the lines can get blurry in practice, but at the core the question is how much does it matter whether you have a lot of wealth and power and the envy of others, versus being a person who is active in ways that are ethical and also make them happy and fulfilled. Like, a person of the second type can admit that sometimes wealth can help you develop more or do more, but then its value is as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Anyway, as I understand it, tiger parents often seem to fall more into the first category, to the point it is close to definitional, at least as applied to certain things.

But I don’t think that is it, there is also this idea that in order to be as rich and powerful and envied as possible as an adult, you must SACRIFICE as a kid. There must be long hours of unpleasant grinding of some sort, because that is going to be your edge, your willingness to sacrifice more than other normal, softer, kids.

Again, obviously this coming from the perspective of someone not particularly sympathetic to all that. But personally, I do think it helps distinguish between the parents who think some discipline and sometimes pushing and so on are necessary to help their kid develop into a happy, healthy, and fulfilled adult, and the parents who think if their kid is going to be richer and more powerful and more envied than softer kids, they need to sacrifice for it.

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Sadly this seems like sometimes the only big win available to some of these kids with really extreme parents. Like, do what you have to do to survive until you get to college, and then start making decisions your parents may not love, but where they are probably not going to just cut you off entirely as that might look even worse for them.

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YES.

When we’re only looking for the “best” colleges (even if not reducing them to a defunct magazine’s rankings), that still says something about our values and priorities.

When families/kids come on here and their kid has a 3.7 GPA and a 1300 SAT (i.e. well above average stats) and they’re not sure if they’re “good enough” to be on the forum? That tells you something about how others interpret the atmosphere here.

When families/kids come on here and bemoan a score that’s in the top 1% and planning on taking the test again (or debating the benefits of a retake), that says something about the posters.

I agree about the continuum. Just because one isn’t on the most extreme end of the continuum doesn’t mean that one isn’t on it at all.

Nobody is saying that being anywhere on the tiger parent continuum is a bad thing. But it is a thing for many posters here at CC.

I do think you are in the minority of parent posters on CC, though. :slight_smile:

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I really hate that some kids and parents feel that away, and I hate even more that I know I have contributed to that even though I don’t want to.

I will observe, though, that I think the dynamic here works best on all sides if a kid, or a parent of kid, comes here with such qualifications, expresses a budget and some possible interests and preferences, and then lets the community go to work coming up with ideas. I think it is a truly beautiful thing to watch what happens in threads like that.

Where it seems to me to most often go off the rails quickly is if a kid or parent starts with a question of a form, “These are the qualifications, are these good enough for [Ivies/T10s/T20s/whatever]?” Sometimes the honest answer is yes, but you should understand they are still reaches. And sometimes the honest answer is more that unless there is something truly extraordinary not yet mentioned, probably not.

And then immediately people will try to shift over to that other, better conversation, meaning, “But hey, look at all these other great options that would love those qualifications!” And yet I get why some people think there is a lot of negativity here, because there are some blunt things often said here–maybe true, but still not fun to hear. And they can kinda sound like just that, a statement of how you as a kid, or your kid if you are a parent, is not “good enough” for the same colleges some of our kids are attending.

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I agree with you.

Parents all say they want their kids to be happy. However, most are actually living their own void. It is not just with school, but also in sports.

Having been thru more schooling than most people I know, I like to think I have a good sense of what “education” is about and why it (by itself) is definitely not a benchmark for happiness or success.

Whenever I’m asked for advice from parents, I usually look at the kid. If there is a mismatch between what the parent is asking and the kid’s facial expression, I stop talking.

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Where we live, a lot of kids who are in the 10-20% class GPA/SAT (and can afford full pay) go to Tufts - a really good target/semi reach for excellent but not tippy top students.

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