Maturity - in and out

I think I get @SculptorDad in many aspects: as the parent of a precocious child he wants the world for her. Push push push. He wouldn’t be able to push push push if she wasn’t talented and somewhat uniquely capable of what she has accomplished at a young age. If she didn’t have her many talents there would be no reason to “push”. We have a somewhat similar situation. I think that individual success and the markers for success are actually pretty conventional. @SculptorDad s daughter is not conventional. Its hard to package that. Separately, we live in an era (I love “the Jerry Maguire” speech-mission statement…LOL) of gruesome greed and competition. Everything is about money and success. Many kid’s definitions of success are simply to be rich or famous. No longer do kids say I want to be a teacher or a lawyer --they want to be Mark Zuckerberg or a hedge fund manager. I think many parents simply feel that if they (our kids) aren’t succeeding RIGHT NOW, then they will never catch up…On this board the demograhics are probably pretty skewed to high achieving, intelligent parents…so even while we can say relax let them be kids, let them drive the bus and so on, most of us aren’t like that and neither are our kids. I am generalizing a bit. So back to maturity: we all know that the mental development between two kids of the same age and gender can be a lifetime in the real world. Extrapolate that to 6 months, a year, two years and add in gender and other factors and it can be monumental. We see it in the sports/college recruiting game: early developers play like adults versus the later bloomers but it can be crushing to the late bloomers. Sadly the pressure to succeed early is everywhere. School, sports etc. So pardon the ramble but I think sometimes the path is the path…man plans and god laughs and all that…she will be fine @SculptorDad. They say everything happens for a reason…