Overbearing parents

CNN: Moms quit jobs for their child's college dreams

This article talks about the apparently growing trend of successful career moms quitting their jobs so they can help their children get into the top colleges.  According to the reporter, it seems that a lot of these moms who have turned from their jobs to focusing on their child's college applications are women who have worked hard to get their own postgraduate degrees.

To me, this just seems to be one step further in this ridiculous helicopter parenting trend.  I can understand women quitting their jobs to raise a newborn baby until the child is old enough to go to school.  However, I cannot understand women quitting their jobs and focusing excessively on their children at a time when their children should be learning to become more independent.

Luckily for me, I missed out on helicopter parenting for the most part.  However, I did have my parents place excessive amounts of pressure on me to do well academically so that I could get into a decent college, especially since neither of my brothers expressed interest in going.  As the youngest, I became the sort of 'last chance' of having a college-educated child, and they would be damned if they didn't have a single child go.  So, everything fell to me as the youngest and highest-achieving child to succeed to the maximum.  Of course, as anyone who has too much pressure placed upon them can tell you, I cracked.  I rebelled.  I started doing bad in school, not because I couldn't handle the work, but because I didn't want to anymore.  I thought high school was stupid, and screw everybody and their expectations.

Due to my experiences, I can see nothing but bad come out of this.  Even if a child does respond to their parent's pressuring positively by exceding academic expectations, they may grow to resent you.  In my case, once I had signaled to my parents in high school that I was going to do what I thought was best for me, they relaxed a lot more when it came to changing career paths in college.  They're still a little uneasy at times, but at least now they understand that doing what makes me happy is better than having ridiculous expectations and forcing me to do something that I don't want to do.

These parents seriously trouble me.  They're not allowing their children to do anything for themselves, which is going to be seriously detrimental to them in the long run.  I had a professor in college comment on how she had a student's parent call because the student got a bad grade in her class.  The lesson of that story, she said, was that we have to be responsible for our own achievements.  No more relying on mommy and daddy to help us out when things go wrong.  Unfortunately, when parents get this overly involved in their children's lives, it doesn't help the children learn how to help themselves out.  Instead of creative thinking and finding solutions to problems (like my brothers and I were raised for the most part), incoming college students will do the only thing they know how to- cry to mom and dad.

Yes, I was never an all-star student grade-wise (although my high test grades always shocked teachers that were used to me pulling 70's and 80's in their classes).  Yes, I never applied to all the fancy Harvards and Yales.  However, I did get into every college that I did apply to, and what's more, I did it on my own.  I've had friends go to larger, more well-known schools, and a lot of them were miserable.  Name branding isn't everything, and it shouldn't be in education as well.  Parents need to let go of these ridiculously high expectations and let their children flourish on their own.  They never know- their child may just surprise them.