Most of the JD’s we know advise their children to do something else. Ditto for physicians, academics, and especially engineers. I suppose the grass is always greener…
Nonetheless it can be very difficult to go into a field at any level without access to someone who knows the ropes, aka all the unwritten rules for success that are not explicitly taught in a classroom.
We have two kids who are well into their 20s. They’re both college graduates, and they’re both doing well in the paths in life that they have chosen. I’m very happy for them.
But my husband isn’t happy.
My husband has a doctorate. Neither of our kids ever will. One dropped out of a doctoral program and the other has no interest. This feels wrong to my husband because it means that, at least in terms of education, his kids will never do as well as he did. I’m not sure whether he’s disappointed in our children or in us as parents, but he’s definitely disappointed.
I think his feelings are unfortunate, but I can see where they came from. There’s a feeling in our society – and I think it may be particularly strong among people who aren’t very far from their immigrant roots – that each generation should do better than the one that came before. What do you do when it doesn’t happen? How do you reconcile this cultural expectation with reality?
Let’s consider OP hypothetical from nature v nurture perspective. As to nature, maybe the parents with degrees from elite schools should consider that their genes when combined produced inferior offspring. As to nurture, maybe the same parents just did a lousy job at raising the kids as they were unable to instill in their kids the importance that attending elite schools is the end all and essential to happiness in life. Either way or in combination, I’d say the parents are cause of injecting these kids into the world. Maybe they should be forced to wear a scarlet “IP” with IP being incompetent parent. So that’s my answer to silly hypo.
Re: #19
For both the parents and the adult kids, is there an expectation that these adult kids will eventually no longer need financial support from the parents? Regardless of school and occupational prestige and the like, for many, it comes down to the adult kids no longer needing financial help from the parents, while the parents are able to keep their finances in good enough situation that they will not need financial help from the adult kids as they enter retirement.
Regardless of professional goals, students looking at various career directions need to check which ones are financially realistic given their spending habits. A student raised to be accustomed to a high income high spending lifestyle may find that many careers of interest are financially unrealistic if his/her spending habits depend on a high level of income.
I am not qualified to answer this post as I am successful without having any degrees from elite universities.
My bil is a very successful surgeon. He is also one of the most self motivated and competitive individuals that I’ve ever met. His kids who are college aged and older now are on a path where some are floundering, and none seem to be following the same path their father has.
To explain why would be speculation. None of the kids have inherited that very competitive personality. They are smart but seem content in ways their father never would be. Some of it is that the kids know there is a safety net. I do not think that the kids want a different lifestyle than the parents, in fact they seem very happy to let their parents fund their endeavors.
I think it’s hard for my bil and his wife to be more than indulgent friends to their kids. Over and over through the years, the kids have had no chores and no expectations of jobs or pulling any of their own weight in the family.
I won’t say that my parenting has been perfect, far from it I am sure. But because of our finances, our kids have always known that they were expected to work, in high school and in college. After college, my kids knew that they were expected to be self supporting. And they are. There is no way we will be sending checks to our adult children so they can have a life they can’t afford.
It’s hard for me not to be critical of my sil. My bil works many hours to earn the money he does. Instead of her being understanding that you have to work hard to make a lot of money, she is unhappy that she carries most of the load for being there day to day raising the kids. She loves the money, but abdicates the responsibility.
My bil seems to be unhappy now that his kids don’t appreciate his sacrifice or have his drive. It’s just dawning on him that his kids are going to be relying on his financial support for a long time.
This just sounds off to me. Many teachers manage to live on teacher salaries. Teachers I know who found they could not support their family of four or five switched to a more lucrative career path.
Maybe the parents need to just let go? There is no reason for the sons to try “their best” if the parents are propping them up financially.
Tallymom,
Do your HS’s teacher/sons really in truth need financial support? Are they asking for it? They need to learn to live within their means. There are many teachers who can survive perfectly well on their income. Now if these particular kids want to live a lifestyle that is perhaps excessive and not within their means and the parents are willing to foot that bill, that the parents choice. Are the parents wanting their kids to keep up some sort of appearances? Do they feel their kids have to live in a home or drive a car or wear clothes they really cant afford? OR are the sons perfectly content living a modest lifestyle?
This whole initial premise (OP) smacks of parents imposing their expectations on their kids and being disappointed in their kids if they don’t do what mommy and daddy want them to do. Its pretty apparent that it rubs me the wrong way. If the son/teachers are parents have several kids and perhaps one or more has special needs, and the teacher/parents income, despite all efforts to scrimp and save, is not sufficient to cover the costs of healthcare for a special needs child or something, then of course helping them out is a wonderful gesture. If on the other hand the teachers want to live in a high cost neighborhood and drive an expensive car, then no. Thats inappropriate to support. If they want to live a modest lifestyle and the parents are uncomfortable with the appearance of that, IMO thats problematic too.
And I am not PG, but sorry, OP, I will say what you don’t want to hear. Sometimes our kids choose and take their own paths to their success. And they may not take a direct path. But that’s ok. We should support the effort, not necessarily just the immediate outcome. Both DH and I have advanced degrees. Neither of our kids do, and I suspect they never will. Are we disappointed ? Heck no. In fact, they seem to be on a path to be more successful in their careers and financial choices than we are. No complaints.
Maybe it was a lot easier to get into Yale and the likes years ago.
I could judge my kids, but I’d have to admit that I couldn’t afford to pay for the schools I went to for them. My brother was just teasing my daughter yesterday that if only she’d gone to XXX she’d have married a wealthy man and been set for life. Well, I couldn’t afford XXX and she didn’t want to go there anyway. Other daughter goes to a perfectly fine school but when she mentions it everyone sighs because it is lower ranked. We don’t care. She wouldn’t be any smarter if she went to a top 15 school.
Yes, drgoogle. Thats a given.
I feel sorry for kids who aren’t allowed to chart their own paths and are in competition with their parents.
Luckily, I think that is an extreme minority of families. Fwiw, I only know one family whose parents pressured their kids to go into their expected field/school/whatever. The rest, including many highly educated and successful, support their kids as individual beings, not extensions of themselves.
@jym626, I certainly don’t think that children should automatically “do what Mommy and Daddy want them to do”. That’s not the topic here at all.
The topic is how do high-achieving parents feel when their kids don’t achieve.
For example, the Columbia MBA/Cornell JD couple in my first post? One child didn’t even attend a year of college and, for a job, rakes leaves part-time, and thus depends on the parents, at age 35, for full financial support.
That’s the situation I’m talking about; not one when the kids don’t follow the parents’ career or academic paths precisely.
And no, @PizzaMom, I am NOT saying that an Ivy League graduate degree is a prerequisite to success, or that working on Wall Street is the only measure of success. That’s your standard response, but that’s not the topic here.
Why do you care so much?
It doesn’t have to be educational credentials.
You say you are successful. Maybe you mean that you have professional accomplishments that you’re proud of. Maybe you’ve climbed high on a career ladder. Maybe you earn an impressive amount of money. Whatever your criteria, it’s great that you are successful by your own standards, @gettingschooled.
What if your kids are not as successful by the same standards? How would you feel?
But why does level of success need to be the metric? Maybe @gettingschooled is successful because he or she truly loves what they are doing. Then the lesson would be do what you enjoy, follow your instincts, not match your parent’s income level or level of success
Happyalumnus,
Maybe the kid raking leaves is doing all he is capable of doing. OTOH, if mommy and daddy didnt try when raising him to instill in him a work ethic or to take responsibility/ownership for his life and cleaned up all his messes without his having to take responsibility or personal ownership, thats different.
When you are dealing with people who are at the top 1% or so of their academic and career successes, the rest of the 99% of the world will fall below them.
If you see the examples in the original post, they refer to schools ranked lower than 100 as being non-achieving. Other than the drop out and the lawyer who has been dis-barred, the only problem with the other kids in that post is their lack of an elite education which the OP defines as attending a top 100 school.
OP has subsequently revised lack of achievement as adults who cannot support themselves. That is a whole other question completely unrelated to which college one attends and more about work ethic and resourcefulness.
I would be disappointed in my kids if they didn’t work or try as hard me, that’s the bottom line for me. I worked very hard and provided well for my kids when they were growing up. I would expect them to work just as hard to provide for their kids (my grandchildren) someday. I worked over 60 hrs/week since I graduated from college, and if I needed to take on another job to provide for them I would have.
Have you been in the sun too long today, and seeing spots before your eyes? You keep speaking to a poster (its pizzagirl, not pizzamom) who isn’t even posting here. Might be more prudent to read the responses that are actually in the thread. Personally, I feel sorry for parents who think their kid will automatically take over the business after their degree from Wharton or will have the next partner track at The Firm after graduating from Big Name law school.