Rather, I would focus on a narrow range of activities, such as only math, reading and outdoors activity (sports / outdoors organization like scouts). The rest of their time would be up to them. If they wish to enroll in more activities, and your income so permits, then so be it. If they wish to meet with friends, then so be it.
Too many upper-middle class parents attempt to raise renaissance children, and I've found that most of my peers never really reach anywhere with their rennaisance skills. Their piano is whatever. Their kung fu is whatever. Their Chinese is whatever. Their art is whatever.
Yes, art, music, dance, foreign language school, martial arts, crafts, etc, can all be interesting. But there's also opportunity cost. When you're learning Chinese you're not learning math. When you're learning math you're not hanging out with friends.
In sum: Don't make a renaissance child. Focus on a few things and give the rest of the time to your children, preferably for outdoors or social time.
The place I think people get crushed is when kids are the smartest person in their class in high school at the top and then arriving at an Ivy League college are of average ability in comparison. Their self esteem is propped by being the best at academic subjects while their peers excel in sports or in a social hierarchy. All of a sudden, they are not the smartest kid in the class.
My parents were so upset when I decided I didn't want to go to college out of high school. I was doing minipreps, isolating DNA, PCR chain reaction, and making gels, in my dad's genetics laboratory at an Ivy League school which is basically cooking. I liked cooking so much I decided to be a chef. That is when the yelling and screaming started. I should have stayed in the career closet.
The worst part was after 8 years and a successful career cooking with my parents accepting my choice I decided I wanted to do other stuff. Now my parents were upset at me again and refused to pay for school. Really? We are going to start this again?
So from a practical standpoint cash flow is a consideration. From a dependency standpoint isn't eight years long enough for you to mature beyond financial and emotional dependency?
Not to imply a parent is obligated to pay, but parents aren't really obligated to pay when their kid is 18 either. It shouldn't affect retirement savings, unless spending increased in the intervening years and ate into the investment they had planned to make in their offspring.
Even though we have saved for my youngest to go to college we are expecting her to apply for many merit scholarships and we expect her to help with some expenses using summer internship earnings. The more she contributes the better her chance for ownership over the college outcome.
In the case described, I somewhat question the motives, since (s)he described "screaming and yelling" over the choice of a different career, which seems to imply they sought a degree of control over his/her future. Keep in mind both were Ivy League PhD's. So perhaps they didn't see it as money set aside as an investment, but more as something they'd donate with conditions. Not wanting to pay could also be a way of punishing their children for not pursuing the career paths they'd wanted.
The problem in this case, imo, is that there wasn't an understanding between them about whether paying for college would still be an option in the future. Since that's an attitude that will differ from family to family, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think a given family would need to work it out for themselves ahead of time.
>Some might have alternatively chosen to invest the money in their children another way, like using it to start a business or starting a stock/bonds portfolio.
I strongly support this for families where this works out. There is never one model fits all.
I don't see parenting as providing your kids with everything. I see it as provide your kids with the tools they need to be successful in life. Sometimes the hard way is the better way.
When a child is ~26 then hopefully they can be on their own.
I'm not sure how you can judge me self centered when I provided for the education of one child already and am ready for the 2nd one. I was pointing out that there are many dimensions of being a parent and providing for college.
After reaching adulthood you should be taking financial responsibility for yourself, rather than demanding to be bankrolled by your family.
What is wrong with waiting until I was 26 to start college? I was not ready for college right out of high school.
That is the hardest thing for me right now, I'm not 21 anymore and I still have to pay the dues in a new career. After years of being at the top of a hierarchy mostly because of hard work a some natural talent, I now find myself at a bottom of a different hierarchy.
As somebody who never had a career subventionned by anybody, I am shocked by your attitude!
Instead none of that knowledge or relationship skills are taught in schools. Instead they teach mostly useless technical skills, harass kids in physical education, allow a small percentage participation in sports, give a little information about having sex... and send them on their merry way to trial and error.
Society priories are as screwed as they were in religious-based ideologies. Instead of it being about God it is now all about production and consumption. Not how to know what you want out of life and how to get it.
Many people who are on the accelerated path end up losers in the game of life just as many who get their own their own time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working:_People_Talk_About_Wha...
Let them play, but--and this is key--play with them, and notice what they like playing with. Learn what their dream is, because that's the best thing to be successful at.
Haven't read it, but the author taught a class I attended and it was great fun.
1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or
2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.
Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.
Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.
Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.
I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.
A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.
Also, I want to know, what are the best modern examples of enclaves? Are they all bespoke? Some likeminded parents getting together? Something more formulaic that has actually scaled out without becoming a self-parody or a lifestyle brand?
To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.
"Provocative"? No, I think there needs to be an element of bad faith or inauthenticity. 'Actual' trolls are supposed to be malicious creatures.
> homeschooling
I wouldn't call that scalable, it only worked for me because I was already coding by the time I convinced my parents to let me do my own thing. Though maybe there is an advanced body of theory I'm not aware of.
Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.
As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.
Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?
I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.