Ask HN: How ambitious were your parents on you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How ambitious were your parents on you?

18 pointsfrozencell24 comments

Daniel Gross, former 18-something cofounder of Cue (bought by Apple) wrote [0] that the standard of what parents think for their kids is radically different giving location parameters meaning that roughly, parents in Africa unfortunately don't have the same ambition for their kids than in Palo Alto, CA.

[0] Daniel's blog: https://dcgross.com/posts

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Zero. Nada. None. Originally from India. Being the oldest/eldest son, family had the expectation of me joining the family business. More than my own efforts, I would say fate intervened and it turned out to be a different life. Basically we moved houses. Earlier my house was 1 minute walk from the business so I was always (told to be) there, from age 6 through 12, every single day. After the move and at age 12, it was not practical for me to go to business every day. The next 2 years after the move bumped me up from lower-middle of the class to the top of class in high school and that it made it easier to fight the study vs business battle.

I know friends who were class/school toppers who either chose differently (joined the family business by choice or pressure) or fate intervened (death in the family) and they had to get to work way too early and pretty much abandoned the option of a education based career.

Over a long run of decades, life is quite crazy. And in some places / circumstances, you do not get much of a choice. Life takes you places before you can think of what to do with it.

What kind of business was this?

Our family used to manufacture soap. But then the megacorps came and you know the small guys get killed. So around the time my switch happened, we switched to distribution and retail of hardware (related to water, not electronics). Basically 1 shop, then 3, my brothers still manage those including a workforce of 20-30 people (could be more, I do not dig into those unless I visit their office) of various profiles - sales, manual labor, back office.

Edited to add: So I have seen manufacture of soap, retail of soap, home-delivery of soap (not sure why but we used to do that for some areas), sourcing and distribution of water related hardware, and even done financial book-keeping for our business ... this was before computers, and was based on decent handwriting, decent arithmetic, and able to follow the directions (be able to transfer totals from one page to another with decent attention to details without messing it all up), and just be able to sit down and do the work. But that was in a different millennia :)

Thanks, family businesses are always interesting to learn about! But it's true that children should to be free to follow their own path if they prefer.

I am not so sure, any more. I see our family businesses at end of line not because we can not compete but because the children have so many other options. However, many of the options are superficially attractive and the reality is not so great. I got into computers/programming almost 35 years back in a decent university, but I see kids now getting into programming in tier 3 and 4 schools thinking they made their career. I see Canada offering almost free visas and permanent residency but there are no jobs for the ones at bottom. Eventually the youngsters at bottom of the food chain will figure something out, but they may be better off sticking to a business that works. And there are millions of them buying the glamour. We only know the story of the ones who make it to bay area (or its ilk).

Maybe I am presenting a one sided story, but that is just due to shortage of time. Maybe some other day if a topic comes up.

Zero. My parents taught me respect and frugality, but what to do with my life has always been my choice. I was never pressured to do anything.

Despite that I turned out to be ok, got a Computer Science bachelor and master in a really good university via scholarship thanks to good high school grades, immigrated by myself to the USA (San Francisco) from a Mediterranean European country, went through many immigration visas, green card and ultimately citizenship, got several jobs in tech and finance including a FAANG job where I’m currently making > $1M/year, and a very healthy investment portfolio setting me up for financial independence and early retirement (knock on wood).

My brother grew up in my same family, same values and is a lazy bum who in his mid 30s still hasn’t been able to hold a (low paying) job for more than a few months. I love him btw and I do not assume I live a better life than him, he is quite chill while I tend to be constantly stressed. He is a genuine good person.

So go figure if my parents’ approach to raising children was good or not.

> $1M/year at FAANG? What is your role/level? I assume that’s TC but still that’s high, congrats.

EDIT: skimmed your comment history, thanks for all the transparency!

I'm lucky to have grown up quite fortunate. My family was upper-middle class, living in a nice neighborhood in Canada. My parents' money came almost entirely from fortuitous (dare I say reckless) property investment. It worked out for them, but I don't believe it was the result of great ambition or wise decisions. They always encouraged me to do my best, but didn't push me much at all academically or in any extra-curricular sense. So far, things have gone great for me too, but I don't attribute much of my personal work ethic to them. I independently decided to pursue challenging work opportunities in the United States and enroll in graduate-level higher education to better myself.

Also zero. I'm a product of neglect - grew up in rural USA, overcrowded/inhabitable home, food scarcity, physical abuse. Many of my childhood peers are dead, incarcerated, or in the military.

My parents didn't go to college. I was vaguely encouraged to go, but mostly as the token smart child (which itself led to ridicule and isolation from my peer group). I had some teachers guide me into a "gifted" program, but this didn't result in much because the schools in my town had so few resources. My parents were never involved in my schooling/homework, and even actively discouraged some extracurriculars.

Any encouragement I did have seemed to be from antiquated notions of success. E.g. "you'll never become anything if you don't go to college". I think many of our parents genuinely don't understand the world today and, even if they have good intentions, can sabotage their children.

What freaks me out is that I had the same exact upbringing as all of my siblings/peers, but turned out way different because of <unexplained??>. I disowned my family, moved to the big city, I'm in a loving long-term relationship and staring at a cool $1m+ in the bank. And I'm not even 30! I'm proud of me.

Using a throwaway acct. I like telling this story but it's a little too personal.

IMO this can go a bit more nuanced for better leverage than just general-ambition-leverage.

It's also the type & direction of ambition that matters, in combination with the child's personal direction of ambition x scaling-influence of the parent's ambition-direction.

A good example of direction would be inward vs. outward. Go make a splash in society! Just DO it!!! Outward-focused, a little bit more shallow at times because it's action & change that matters.

vs.

Look, it feels great to really go to work on yourself, become somebody you can be proud of based on how you respond to what life throws AT you. Inward-focused, a little bit more creepy at times because it's depth and development that matters.

Object focus vs. subject focus.

Then modify each by various aspects. Creativity, social roles, capacity for organization, health.

So just using that as an example, you have 8 types of ambition to refer to. Parents will then be caught generally focusing on one of those 8 types more than others IMO. It is usually their personal area of focus and strength.

If they don't see anything worrying in that ONE area they will generally not care too much--the kid will be alright in their eyes. When you meet people who are really similar to you in terms of strengths and gifts, you tend to breeze right by them, without noticing much.

(Camera then switches to a different household, where parents scream at a kid who's got it all backwards, in their mind)

My father had weird ambitions, like, I had to skip grades to show that I was more capable than the average kids of the same age. I never did. Or that I should beat the grades of his brother's kids, so he enrolled me in the same school.

That must have sucked. No pressure, just crush your cousins at life! :-/

I never heard anything more about it, or cared about it. My mom was apparently pissed that he enrolled me into that school, something about it being full of a particular class of people due to its geographical location (nothing to do with race - we were all the same race).

Originally from Pakistan, grew up in Middle East.

Of course, my parents wanted me to be a doctor. As a software engineer, I have disappointed them for a life. It doesn’t bother me anymore, they are from different generation where security especially financial security was hard.

There were other pressures too like as kids we were constantly reminded about our duties to take care of them when they are in their old age. And how we will never be able to take care of them because of our average grades, which means we won’t get decent jobs, which means we won’t have enough money to take care of them. I used to worry so much about that I never spent my pocket money. Still bitter about it.

They pressured us but never provided any support. Other kids who did good in the school had tutors, parents were very involved in their lives. My parents just yelled and said work harder.

Same with sports, never played cricket with us. Never even taught us how to play it. But expected 5-7 years olds to know how to play cricket when we met up with our cousins in Pakistan.

Not ambitious at all. When highschool was over, everything was along the lines of "do whatever you want, but move out by the time you're 18". It made for a really rocky adolescence period and my 20's, not knowing what I should be doing, scraping by for almost a decade, and then finding a true passion and having life take off for me (relatively speaking). It wasn't until that period where I realized that I also came from a very poor background. I mean, I knew that we where poor and lower class, but I never realized that we where that far down the ladder.

Wow, lots of people finding their passion or making a ton of money. When does that happen for me? Seems like that's pretty rare.

My parents didn't have specific ambitions for me. They didn't want me to be a doctor or a football player or whatever.

But they did want me to be... something. A person who studied hard. A person who had integrity in dealing with others. A person who wasn't getting in trouble. A person who was capable of doing a fair number of things. A person who understood money and handled it fairly wisely. Those were their ambitions for me.

Now that I think of it, that wasn't a bad set of ambitions to have for your kids...

My parents aimed for 1 level up from the opportunities they had. They didn't get a full education: finish highshcool or go to college. So that is what I did.

I like the Japanese view point - that you should hope for average children. That's what is statistically likely. Then we won't be disappointed.

My parents were somewhat promoting ambition but not crazy. Required me to get all As and Bs, promoted college, told me I need to get a $100k job out of college (10 years and an MS later I finally make it... in total comp anyways).

I was an All American athlete with a 3.5 GPA. I went to college on a full ride and graduated with a BA in History.

My parents never pushed me. Neither were phenomenal students nor athletes at all. They expected to me only to finish what I started.

Starting out after undergrad I made $27K and barely scraped by. Twenty years and a masters later, I make >200K and they still largely neutral about how I turned out.

—-

I have similar pressure levels and expectations for my kids. No sense in getting all fired up over it; they’ll be just fine.

Parents have high ambitions.

From India.

Parents are high achievers and rather wealthy.

Though I have a cushy job, I personally haven't reached upto my own expectations.

I suspect even my parents think I can do better though they never explicitly said that.

I have two older sisters — one of them was at FAANG in another country. The other is a doctor.

And I'm... a coder here :/

My ambition is FAANG or similar though.

I feel I'm wasting my life.

(FWIW, I went to college in USA).

TBH, it sounds like you're wasting your time thinking in categories that were imposed on you by others. Unless FAANGs are what you really after, you'll probably have a crisis when you get there. Better to skip it before you even start and instead think about what is important to you personally.

NA. Grew up as an orphan raised by the state. (Boys and girls town)

However, caretakers urged reading, so I read.

I’m still not a doctor and still hear about it, so - pretty ambitious.

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