19 Comments

As an Indian, the issue here isn't just economic inequality. It's what it takes to get to college. If getting into college only meant grades and SAT/other exam scores (as it does in India) that students take in their last year of high school, then there's no real incentive to forcing your kid into swimming lessons at age 4. It also shows a direct correlation between effort/knowledge/ability and getting into college, so there isn't as much uncertainty, and every activity doesn't become toxic with high competition. You can still play sports or learn an instrument for fun.

In the US, college admissions requires you to have some combination of volunteer experience, internships, excellence in sports, musical ability, along with great grades and SAT scores, as well as an insightful essay. To excel in sport/art, you end up needing to work on them from an early age so you get to compete in the leagues that allow you to display excellence. There's no room to just pursue an activity for fun. Every single activity a child does is looked through the lens of "does this help with college admissions?".

The origin of such policies is from wanting to keep Jews out of elite American universities, and now it's taken a life of its own as everyone tries to game it. Add legacy and affirmative action policies and I particularly find high school students in my Indian-American community most stressed about this all. Their parents wrote competitive exams with a 1% success rate and they still didn't find themselves as stressed as their kids. I know in China and South Korea (and to some extent in India), cram schools to prepare for these exams are considered an example of why kids can't be kids, but at the end of the day, the exam is just an exam and it doesn't matter if you've been preparing for 10 years or 1 year, you have the option to chill for most of your life and then cram for a year.

I blame the American college admissions process for all of this. I feel as an academic, you ought to need to analyze your own institution's admission policies and process to figure out how each aspect directly leads to children's childhoods being an unending exercise of box-ticking. This is actually something actionable - how would you design a college admission policy so kids who still have a childhood still have a decent chance of getting in?

Expand full comment

I think there is a false perception about how college admissions works. I highly recommend you learn about how students from the Sudbury Valley School make their way into college

Expand full comment

Can you tell me how it works? I do know Sudbury schools tend to be expensive and limited in location.

Expand full comment

Edit: I think we'd do best to talk outside of this comment thread, but here is what I wrote anyway.

Honestly, you should buy and read "Free at Last: the Sudbury Valley School" by Daniel Greenburg. But I will give you the gist of the college part.

This is me talking right now, but most colleges are just scanning to see who is most likely to become rich and/or famous. If they become rich maybe they leave money to the school, if they become famous then its free advertising.

This means that most colleges are just looking for real people. Somebody who has done some interesting varied stuff has the potential to become rich or famous. And this is what happens at the Sudbury Valley School: nobody tells you what to do all day. Any classes that get organized only do so in response to a critical demand from the students who want the class, otherwise everybody learns what they want, when they want to. Naturally, this leads frequently to a variety of experiences and expertise, especially of an unconventional nature. The graduates of Sudbury are thus highly interesting people from an unconventional background which by itself sets them apart from other applicants.

I would actually love the chance to talk to you more about this because when I saw that you were Indian American, I immediately thought of all the Indian's I knew in my life. I can only use the word colonized to describe the strict adherence to a script of success that the dominant society prescribes to those desiring lucrative subservience, like being a doctor or engineer. Engineers work either for government or they help make pre-existing capitalists more money.

You take one brief look at the educational structure of a place like Philips-Exeter, which is not a college, but a high school, and you realize quite quickly that the education the elites pay top dollar for looks almost nothing like conventional government schooling. But instead, with a very negative view of the broader society and of one's own kids, Indian parents aim straight for the middle, taking no pages from tales of greatness, and make the cold logical calculation of what degrees pay off the fastest. Some of those people I have met in college and as later adults and they are boring boring boring! And their views of the world suck.

Unconventional schooling has a long established history that is kept very secret. I'll let you figure out why that is

Expand full comment

I've been saying this for a long time. Want to improve quality of life for kids? Let them have more free play and less pressure? Then we need to decrease parental anxiety about their own furure so they can stop over worrying about their children's future. We need to create more time for parents to have free play. We need to level the playing field so parents don't fall into the trap of believing that pushing their kids is their only hope for a future without homelessness. We need parents to have a life with work and play time. One job, not three. Healthcare, a sense of safety about retirement, the occasional vacation, time for hobbies. Most people don't have that life. They work and work with little rest or play. Naturally they think they must "prepare" their kids for the endless scrabble.

It's not true of course. The things kids most need to prepare for the future are mostly intangibles. A sense of self worth. An internal motivation to learn and grow. Open mindedness to learning new things. Curiosity. Caring. Emotional self awareness and empathy. The ability to set boundaries, meet their own needs, give to others. It's these capacities and others like them that allow a person to step into the future and learn whatever they need to learn.

Expand full comment

Regarding whether “good enough parents,” are much more concerned with their children’s present happiness than with their future, and this being a key to a happy, successful adulthood: I disagree.

I think there is likely too much concern now about the “present happiness” of children, too much checking in on how they feel about everything. I think this likely induces much more rumination in kids than was present in earlier “good enough parenting” generations.

Happiness is something that seems to be best achieved indirectly. Those most focused on their own happiness, don’t seem to be the happiest. They seem to be the most selfish. Some parents give their kids everything, toys, activities, (everything but boredom and risk) and then expect their kids to be happy. These parents aren’t the “good enough parents”, they are the “better than their parents” parents.

I think “good enough” parenting means taking a reasonable approach to both present and future happiness. This may be done by emphasizing moral/character, social education. My kids know that their careers are largely up to them, but that we expect them to be honest, kind, and brave in whatever situations they are in. If my kids are jerks, I’ll feel I failed as a parent. If they can’t be depended on by their employer or spouses, I’ll feel like I failed. But I don’t care about their salary, other than hoping that can live happily within their means. At the same time, they can and should be kind, honest, and dependable now. Like my wife and me, my kids aren’t perfect. But they are certainly “good enough”! If they only way you’ll feel like you did a good enough job as a parent is if your kids go to an Ivy+ or even your flagship state university, you probably aren’t very happy now and neither are your kids.

Expand full comment

I was born in the early 70s in London to immigrant parents. Although the early part of my childhood education centred around play by the early 80s and with more financial power, my parents saw education as a way to success. From then on, the focus was on academic success. I wonder, looking at the statistics, whether the immigrant family feels even more pressure on scheduling every minute of their child's life? My parents chose to move across continents for a better life, they did all they could to ensure that paid off.

As well as growing economic inequalities there are other factors that may have led to intensive parenting. Firstly, during my childhood, thankfully, there was increased child protection awareness. However, it has also led to perceiving the possibility of dangers everywhere, leading to less freedom for children. Secondly, when I was growing up in suburban London we would have been allowed to ride our bikes up and down our streets, but now, more vehicles and faster vehicles mean this has become more dangerous. Finally, I have learned that more than qualifications are needed for a successful career. The hidden curriculum in terms of cultural capital still works to keep the elite separated and in positions of power.

I am now an early childhood educator and have witnessed how the marketisation of the education system and the 'catch up' narrative have exacerbated parents' anxieties.

It is interesting to see the Scandinavian countries with the lowest income inequalities; they have also had the most democratic approaches to education in early childhood. I wonder if the lower income inequality comes from valuing the early years?

Expand full comment

I think maybe “hard work” is defined too narrowly here. I would absolutely encourage "hard work" as a value, just not mindless hard work--just the recognition that hard work is the only way to get really good at anything (and very often overshadows natural talent.) Very often there is drudgery to overcome--musicians may not enjoy learning scales or sight-reading, but they may enjoy being able to play an instrument really well and play a new song without much difficulty because they've practiced scales and sight-reading.

I think the issue is more with parental-imposed goals than the value of hard work per se (I think we should encourage children to take themselves seriously and work hard to meet their own goals.)

Expand full comment

I think with the election of Trump as the next President we will see the decline of the elites and their parenting style. This will benefit our children. Kids will learn from this election, that there has been a change of power from the elites to the average working class person.

Expand full comment

My thinking always orbits around how to fix it all. I tend to see this as a problem with capitalism, that is, the ones who own everything make all the decisions. Fighting with each other for the most favorable places within existing hierarchies does nothing except bolster the existing order.

I don't think there is much avoiding it, a great percentage of our people are little tyrants completely uninterested in the effects of their actions on society. There can be no replacing them if we can't break our egos enough to actually work collectively in opposition to them.

Expand full comment

As someone from a de jure socialist country, blaming ills on capitalism amuses me. Paint me a picture of how any of this is better under socialism.

Expand full comment

To clarify, when I say "capitalism" I am referring to the decision making hierarchy, where the ones who have the capital make all the decisions.

If we were to work together and make decisions together, we would need to get over our egos. As it is right now, the ones with the biggest egos seek and often find the most power, i.e. decision making power.

Expand full comment

I was born in 1985, and I can relate to the resume building of childhood. That's what my parents believed would give us (my brother and I) a successful life. There was no negotiation college was a must, and everything we did was to build our resume. We joined organizations that would build our resume all through middle and high school years. We are now parenting our 3 young kids completely different, college is optional and they must work a job out of high school. I'm not sure "how" they will get into college 6/7 years from now but that's definitely not the end goal in life.

Expand full comment

I grew up in the 60’s when my father with a vocational hs degree worked at GM and earned enough to support a family of 10 comfortably. We all went to college, and have achieved success as far as health, happiness and enough money to live comfortably. My parenting became intensive when I feared our daughter’s creative skills were greater than her practical ones. And it did not serve her well; she became anxious and not well in high school. When competition drives parents to pressure children, the greatest loss is the relationship between the parent and child. The child feels unsupported and unloved. Too big a price to pay. Btw she is doing well now, giving her young sons a play-based early childhood curriculum.

Expand full comment

I see a grain of truth in this, but to me it seems that feeling pressure to help your child succeed and be better than the others is a good thing. This bears out in a lot of ways when looking at income and wealth in the US vs much of the rest of the world. The question I have, and the primary reason I find this substack valuable, is: are our methods of attempting to do this actually working? Are they helpful, or are they counter-productive? I work in higher education and see a cohort of mentally fragile young people who haven't learned how to navigate conflict whatsoever, and that certainly isn't creating the next generation of greatness pushing society forward. I'd love to read more exploration on parenting styles vs actual success in life (both material and psychological).

Expand full comment

There is a clear US biased view here… but I think the relationship is quite clear. The question is: is this always bad? Not sure… I’m Argentinian raised by a poor family, and while I was allowed to play and spend time outside doing sports (I really like it and my mum did a lot of efforts to allow me to do that and to learn English - which I didn’t like) she always told me that education was the only way to exit poverty. I heard her and saw my parents sacrifice. I study hard, I become an assistant in the university in Buenos Aires while working in a bank, I studied Italian, got an scholarship, did a master in Turin and then got a well paid job in London. I now can support my parents (which is life saving for them) and I’m able to have a beautiful house outside Madrid and send my two kids to a Waldorf school (which is not cheap). If my mother would not have been a bit insistent in her plead of “study to get a better life” I would not be here.

Expand full comment

But she never deprive me to play, I started to study English at 12yo and did part time jobs while studying in the university. This make me think that probably you have better changes to move up the social hierarchy if you live in Buenos Aires than if you are born poor in the US as in my home country the best university is public (totally free). So parents might be much more obsessed in the US for that reason…

Expand full comment

I think this is definitely accurate. There is also a surprising variation amongst educated people of different financial states. My daughter attends a private school and I volunteer and occasionally work there so I have various conversations with teachers there. My household is in an upper class financial bracket and our daughter has a robust college fund. I don’t worry about elementary school extracurriculars for her- she doesn’t have any interest in it and I’m not a big fan of encouraging “competition” behavior. The teachers who are also parents are flummoxed by the fact that I don’t care about sports. I get it- they are paid so poorly that they have to push their kids to get scholarships. Recently some of their children have had to go into the military or trades because they couldn’t afford college- on has to hope rather than believe that they will quickly raise their funds and go on to college to get an actual EDUCATION rather than job training.

Expand full comment

Thankyou Dr Gray, you continue to enlighten us.

On the child’s present happiness and needs, yes I agree should meet them where they’re at and enrich their experiences in the ‘moment’ rather than impose our adult long term perspectives of ‘working hard’ earlier and earlier. I remember listening in on a classroom discussion on maths, the curious kids were asking ‘why do we need to know this?’ The teacher defensively replied ‘You’re going to need to pay bills and rent one day’. As if that helped the poor kids engage in the moment 🙈 A lot to do .

I also tried providing a ‘permissive’ sporting environment with lots of free play and peer learning, but most parents didn’t see the value, only the few who were attuned to their child’s present happiness 🙏

Expand full comment