Of all the "weird" things we do as parents in euro/anglo nations, sleeping arrangements seems nowhere near the top.
IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid.
Edit - and this isn't really a western thing, "Tiger Mom" and similar probably pre-dates this behavior in the US.
Not so sure this is necessarily a western thing. When I was a kid in Germany in the 90ies, school started at 7:30, and ended at 13:00. Once a week you had afternoon school from 14:30 to 16:00, and my parents wanted me to have piano lessons once a week. But after 13:00, and on weekends, I was generally free to do whatever I wanted. I played computer games excessively and watched a lot of movies, of course, but I also explored the nearby forest, build tree houses, taught myself how to build a computer, BASIC, Delphi, HTML, CSS and JS, and drew a comic series with a friend (of course we were the only readers). Except for math, everything that helped my through university and my professional life so far I learned in this free time, just by playing.
I volunteer with a U.S. Scout troop. I see boys that don't know whether or not they can go on an activity/campout because they have to ask their parents if they're free that day/weekend. I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in. Most all of them just seem apathetic.
I'm sure their parents are trying to do what is best for their children, but it doesn't seem to be working.
I don’t know what it means for kids to be free nowadays. Free to visit a friend’s home seems like the only thing, because everything else is a home that’s an anonymous unit or a commercial establishment that’s gated by money.
It’s not like you’re releasing your child to be raised by the experiences of the village.
With that in mind, many parents are probably struggling to not have their kids consumed by the web during free time, esp during COVID lockdowns.
There are plenty of areas open to the public that are accessible to children: playgrounds, libraries, schoolyards, skateparks, large underused parking lots, malls, public pools. Some places have great nature nearby: beaches, creeks, rivers, hills, and mountains. Some of those are more dangerous than others, but they are all accessible if the parent allows it.
In the US, if the children in question are under 12 and going to any of those places unsupervised, they're likely to get the police and/or CPS called on them.
Sadly true. And part of the problem. There's now an expectation (at least in upper middle class areas) that kids be in formal, supervised activities 24/7.
I still remember growing up, playing around the neighborhood, and a parent would call out the front door "Danny, dinner time!" and all the kids would scatter to get home for dinner.
This upsets me a lot. I'm in my 30's and I was still allowed to ride bikes around the neighborhood, go to the store for snacks, etc. with my brother. I don't understand how kids can develop a sense of exploration without these opportunities. Hopefully it's still possible to develop it during the teen years.
It depends on where. A few years ago, I lived in a falling-down house in a family neighborhood of mainly immigrants. There was a school a few blocks away, and kids used to come hang out in our trees (I’m pretty sure they thought the place was abandoned) and occasionally set off fireworks by the creek we lived next to.
I wouldn’t have called the cops on them since they weren’t causing any real trouble, but if my neighbors did, no one ever came. There are bigger problems in that town (like the feral fucking dogs) that the cops refused to do anything about.
But honestly, most of the neighbors were familiar with each other and let their kids roam pretty free. It was nice to see that places like that still exist.
We raised my son in the DC suburbs (Herndon, VA). There is still a "town center" of sorts, with several parks nearby. So, free for him meant a combo of going to friends (mostly in the same large subdivision), getting to school on his own (bike, board, foot, bus), and running around after school (parks, downtown, whatever - I know a few of his common haunts, but didn't track his every waking moment).
it can be sort of futile. as a kid, you can argue, resist, or break the rules, but until you can support yourself financially, your parents get the final say on most important matters.
reminds me of my first meeting with my advisor at college to pick courses for freshman year. I came in with a few ideas for courses/majors that my dad thought were practical. my advisor picked up on this almost immediately and asked "okay, but what are you interested in?". we had a nice talk, but at the end I went back to picking from the list my dad approved of. my advisor was disappointed and insisted that I needed to chart my own path through college. my response: "yeah, but I need my dad to write the check".
There is truth to both. The problem with charting your own course as a kid is you often don't really know what is worth doing. "Underwater basket weaving" might be interesting, but it won't prepare you for any future. There are a lot of good choices though, you don't have to be a doctor just because your dad wants you to. And your dad might still be under the illusion that lawyer is a great paying job, when for the most part it isn't anymore (or maybe I'm wrong and it will go back to that? your guess is as good as mine).
I think there's a difference between a parent saying, "You should consider the economic ROI of what you choose to study, the risk of success/failure, and what life it could lead to" vs. "be a lawyer". If your kid really wants to act then they can go to LA and learn what the best way to do that is.
I think parents bias to being risk-adverse in advice for their kids because they only experience the downside risk and little of the upside from potentially riskier paths. I think a good parent would communicate some of this, but that's not a skill everyone has.
A lot parents just don't know that much and are over confident (like most people) even if their intentions for their kid are good. Others leverage their power over their kids to force them into certain paths which isn't great either.
Yeah, I think some people are clueless to this context.
Even in more direct ways.
I remember getting yelled at in middle school because I would show up late to early morning jazz band practices I had to be driven to. I was ready to go 40min before we had to be there. I can't make my mom get me there on time.
I know what they're parents are like during meetings and campouts. I have to manage them as much as I manage the boys. Some of them try to helicopter during meetings. There was one Scout that I've only seen smile when his dad wasn't around.
They don't seem to like the idea that Scouts is supposed to be youth-run/led and that it's okay to fail as long as they learn from it and improve. The parents just don't want them to fail or be uncomfortable at all (it's not always dry and warm outside).
Which seems the other side of helicopter parenting; kids don't get much of a say in deciding what they fill their free time with, so they don't develop an opinion in things like that.
Plus (and I'm going to sound old here, give me my cane so I can shake it), there's a lot more casual entertainment lying around the house nowadays to fill the voids in people's time. "doing nothing" is not much of a thing anymore, because people will casually browse their phone or turn on the TV or something. (I'm guilty of that as well).
In the previous generation, there would be a TV but not everything on there would catch the interest of everyone.
I wonder if browsing your phone is really much different from channel surfing. I suppose by sheer volume you never run out of "channels" on the internet.
My son (now 26) always had summers free at minimum. While he was younger, he did go to a YMCA outdoor "adventure" day camp at a nearby lake park. Once he was in middle school, he stayed home. Sports 2-3 seasons, but he got to pick which one he played and never the crazy travel league stuff. In high school, he was free to do what he wanted (football for 2 years, guitar all 4, and a mix of rec league basketball and volleyball when he felt like it). Always plenty of time to ride his bike, play at the park, run around with friends. Starting in middle school, he'd often disappear across town on bike of skateboard for hours at a time. School was 2.5 miles away and he often opted to ride his skateboard instead of the bus.
I see kids today where every free moment is booked with stuff. All in some sisyphean effort to get into Harvard or something. I mean, sure, I get a desire to go to a top name uni, but the changes of little Johnnie getting in, regardless of extra-curricular, is so small that all the effort seems mostly wasted to me. I "only" went to UVA and turned out fine, IMO, so maybe I'm biased. I dunno.
I don't disagree with your premise, I'm strongly against parents trying to game college admissions for their 13 year old. But getting into UVA is not easy at all. Especially out of state, the admit rate is like 15% - so while not as crazy as Harvard it's in line with a few of the Ivies.
IMO a lot of the admissions-centered thinking has propagated down the rankings further and further in recent years too. Anecdotally I've seen people over-scheduling their children for target schools in a tier below UVA. This attitude of course creates a terrible feedback cycle, as admissions gets more and more competitive. At some point I'd like to think the admit offices are sick of seeing so many prototypical candidates, but still you need to do something to stand out. Ideally the parent should advise the kid on this meta-info, without literally telling them what to pursue.
These days, there aren't many kids who only do Scouting...it's an over-scheduling comorbidity. For kids who resist over-scheduling, scouting seems to be one of the first things to go...because den and pack meetings are by and for adults, they never make it to a troop.
Or to put it another way, teenage apathy prevalence is probably pre-teen survivor bias.
I wonder what the rate of dropping out during Cub Scouts is vs Scouts BSA, vs how many don't cross over from Cubs to Scouts. The crossover happens around age 11, so I would imagine most of the dropouts happen later.
Anecdotal observation from my child's experience is nearly everyone who dropped out dropped out as a cub scout. That was a very large fraction. Those who crossed over are typically Eagle Scouts. But for one of those kids, they were all highly scheduled. But for a different one, they were each complying with parental wishes.
My child was over Cub Scouts by Bears.
But more than a decade later, my grown-ass child hangs out with several of the Eagles. They are close friends.
How so? When my son was in scouts, it was a weekly meeting, usually after dinner (to avoid sports). Plus one optional weekend activity (camping, etc) per month (and these usually slowed between Nov-Mar because fewer people want to camp when it's freezing and wet).
Most actives do. Commitment is the way to win championships, so any one moment you are not practicing your sport is a chance to lose the award. That things can/should be fun is lost. Scouting is a bit better than sports, but they still want your life.
They don't. You can go to piano teacher once a week. You then train at home as a side hobby. You go to art lesson once or twice a week. You go to sport training 2-3 times a week and that can be it. There are plenty of clubs like that. They even have competitions one in a while - you won't be champion but you will compete against kids like you.
There are also super competitive clubs, but huge amount of them is not like that. My own kids go to clubs like that, my friends kid go to clubs like that. The teacher typically acts seriously and attempts to teach you what is possible during that time.
But scouting is whole another level, occupying afternooms, weekends and plus giving "homework" projects. The kids were either fully into it or left.
That was not my experience with Scouting as a youth. My troop was around 30 kids. It was one 90 minute meeting a week, one weekend campout a month, an annual food drive, and an every-other-month selling consessions at the church bingo game as a fundraiser for about 2 hours.
Pretty much everything else can be done at summer camp (1 week a summer) or maybe a merit badge fair on a Saturday once a year.
Sure, you might have to keep a log for a month of your chores, or do a home improvement project for the Family Life merit badge, but it never felt like a time sink as a kid, and didn't occupy all my afternoons. I essentially never had "homework" from Scouts.
Maybe some troops are really gung-ho, but there are plenty of troops that aren't. Troops are not allowed to set requirements that aren't in the Scout Handbook, if they are, there's the district, the council, and ultimately the national office that can put a stop to it or revoke the unit's charter.
I don't think attitudes to infant care translate in any way to how older kids or teenagers are treated in different cultures. I'm not a parent, but I was a child and teenager at some point, so I can say from personal experience that parents who are extremely present at a young age can actually give you more leeway later in life.
On a more general note, I can recommend Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday' - it covers similar topics to the bbc article and more.
That seems normal to me? I'm well-past the teenage years, and I wouldn't commit to a weekend activity without double-checking with the rest of my family first.
I think it's "normal" only in the sense that most everyone behaves this way today, but I don't think it should be that way.
By the time I was older in Scouts, my siblings were in college and my parent could drive me to wherever, or at least to the meeting place where I could carpool. The times when my parent wasn't available, I took the city bus.
I imagine if one of my siblings was was the same age and our parent could only drive one of us, the other would take the bus.
The first time I took the bus, my parent went with me to show me how, and then let me do it myself going forward.
I dont think the person you responded to was thinking about driving vs busses.
Basically, you are 16 and want to spend whole weekend out of house including during the night. Not doing it without parental permission seems normal to me.
Nor it seems new. My gradma or grandpa definitely could not just spend whole night and weekend away just by own decision. They would expect my parents to ask them for permission. I was expected the same.
Mine was default allow, his was default block. I had to inform, he had to get permission. Perhaps same result, but one feels more autonomous than the other.
From another one of my comments:
> I always just told my parent that I was doing something just so they knew where I was - not necessarily asking for permission, but that gave them the chance to veto it (which they only did one time as punishment when I got in trouble at school).
> I think that parents need to teach their kids how to be responsible and autonomous, and treat them like they are their own person
I dont think it necessary implies default block. It just implies you have to ask before comitting to activity. Whether the parents are more likely to say yes or no is orthogonal.
Also, we are talking here about overnight camping. It is not the same out for few hours. 16 years old being expected to sleep at home by default does not strike me as overly controlling.
There is nothing new in that? When I was pre teen and teen, I definitely had to get parents permission for weekend campout. It seems to me normal that parent have a say in whether the non-adult child sleep at home. Plus there were weekend activities woth familly I was expected to participate in - trips, familly visits, grandpa birthsday, etc.
So I would ask. I mean, idea that 16-17 years old goes for campout without asking parents strikes me as wtf.
I don't know, my parents always asked me if I wanted to go to my Grandmother's house or other trips (I did).
I always just told my parent that I was doing something just so they knew where I was - not necessarily asking for permission, but that gave them the chance to veto it (which they only did one time as punishment when I got in trouble at school).
I think that parents need to teach their kids how to be responsible and autonomous, and treat them like they are their own person, because they need to be to have any chance at being successful.
"IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid."
It's a weird and tricky balance that one has to strike, in the US, in 2021 ...
On the one hand, I feel strongly that kids should have free time and energy to explore and experiment and I am reinforced daily in my instinct that a "bored" kid is just another 10 minutes away from doing something interesting and magical.
On the other hand, as my oldest children reach pre-teen age, and I pay more attention to their pre-teen peers, I find myself agreeing with the "idle hands are the devils playground" heuristic. I want my teenage children busy doing constructive and healthy things.
But it gets complicated ... you can't just plug your kid onto a age 12 or age 13 baseball or hockey team. Those kids have been playing the sport (and playing the sport together) since they were 4 or 5. Your kid will not make the team or will be conspicuously out of place. So if you've been free-ranging it for their first ten years you're going to need to get more creative as you transition to the teenage years...
I have seen things like mountain biking and BJJ be good options...
Yeah, totally agree on sports. But, that's part of the problem - kids specializing in a single sport before high school? That's bonkers to m.
When I was in school, very few kids specialized, even through high school. The top football players were also the best wrestlers or basketball players, and most also played baseball or track or lacrosse. Few of them did school basketball and then AAU the remainder of the year.
My son stuck to club/rec basketball (instead of the school team) and volleyball (school team, but mens volleyball prior to high school isn't really a thing in DC).
And, like you said, there's always cycling, martial arms, or track/field (typically takes all interested).
I also agree with keeping kids active/engaged. But, to me, that means supporting them as they pick their own activities, not scheduling every second of their non-school time.
Edit - many of the kids specializing before high school are pretty obviously NOT destined for scholarship athletics. There's really no point to it, IMO. I coached football and basketball for much of my son's youth. Of all the kids I coached, 1 went on to NCAA D1 sports (and that was to W&M, where he still had to meet stringent academic standards).
Exactly. I tried joining sports for the first time when I was 14 (around 15 years ago). And it was honestly a humiliating experience. I was so far behind the other kids in skill level it was just sad. And I was the ONLY one on the team that couldn't keep up. Everyone else had been practicing for 5-10 years.
You're a good parent to notice and think about these things.
I would suggest approaching this in two structured phases - "breadth" and "depth".
In the breadth phase, you instruct the kid to study the topic of interest at a distance, collect information, attend events casually and give some reports explaining what they like. Make the thing of "pursuing an interest" just a little bit academic and intentional on their part. With a lot of topics they'll have their fill and loosen their grip pretty quickly, and when that happens, allow them to go on to the next thing.
If they can't shut up about it, that's when you go towards the depth phase and push them towards a more intensive effort, to take the class, read the book, join the club. Set modest goals that still take a committment, and indicate that it's very likely that some kids will be ahead or pick up the material faster. They should still report how things go and get your feedback so that you can spot issues, or teach them how to seek out good feedback where you lack competence. But there's a definite thing here of getting them to see the struggle itself as something rewarding, not the outcome like "being the best" or "making a career". Because if they get a feel for that, they will reach adulthood with some sense of balance and intention to what they pursue and why and a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
In the west your children's days can be roughly just as busy but you if you're wealthy you can make it easier, basically.
The only thing I'm really jealous of from spending time around people who've grown up with more money is that, assuming your family are basically nice, it's much easier to brush over any cracks or for the children to mentally seperate themselves e.g. The house I grew up is fairly miniscule, the first thing I noticed visiting a large house was not only that they had (say) a music room [so separation] but also that the children could hide within the house outside of earshot of their parents.
Queue the Doctor / Lawyer married couple with 2.5 kids who vacation twice a year, lease German cars, and have positive net worth crying about 'only being middle class'.
Depends who you ask, or the context. Anecdotally, software developers, being more math-minded than average, tend to think of middle-class literally - the middle third or middle quintile of income distribution.
I agree. I was just pointing out that there is a portion of the HN readership that tends to use the strictly economic definition (rightly or wrongly). Also, the meaning has shifted over time.
As used in the early 1900s - I realize the term was coined even earlier than that - it referred to what today we'd likely call upper-middle-class (or if you're a fan of Engles, the bourgeoisie). White-collar, professional, well-educated, but not rich/powerful/nobility. It excluded almost the entirety of the working-class (even those who, by income, were well above poverty).
More recently, usage in the US has trended towards anybody above poverty but not quite rich (and choose your own definition of rich to suit your point). Which itself includes a massive span of incomes and lifestyles.
depends how you slice it. "have to work" is kind of a vague way to define class membership. someone with a $500k net worth doesn't "have to work" if they're content with living on $20k/year or so. of course, if you insist on sending your children to private school and taking them to europe every year, this is going to be unworkable.
most people tend to think what they have isn't quite enough, twice as much would be just right, and anything more than that is excessive.
Odds are good the couple you mention are in fact negative net worth, or close to it. They don't own the car. Every time their house goes up in value they refinance and take the cash out to pay for the vacation.
Generally those with a significant net worth live more modest lives - older cars (they might buy new, but that is because they know if they do the maintenance it will last for 15-20 years). The house might be nice for the neighborhood, but it won't be in the rich part of town. They might vacation twice a year, but they will be cheap vacations. The difference goes into funding their retirement plan, and some other savings.
Even with $600k to $800k ($4k to $6k per month loan payments) of student loans, they should be able to pull off a decent lifestyle and be positive net worth by their mid 40s.
Income doesn't equate to wealth. You have to look at the other side of the equation, outgo, to determine what someone's net worth is.
In addition to student loans, there's the house payment. People tend to buy a house based on what they can be approved for, not based off of a budget number they developed before talking to a bank. A 300k salary will get you pre-approved for a a lot of house in the US.
Docs and Lawyers also fall into the trap of buying practices, so that's another factor.
The biggest factor you're missing in your assumption, though, is that personal finance problems are largely behavioral. There's a parallel with personal health. The difference is that people know more about how to lose weight and be healthy - and still don't do it - then people who actually know how to make good financial decisions. Even those who know they shouldn't buy things they can't afford, routinely do so for whatever reason they have been told or have invented.
For what it's worth, the study by Ramsey Solutions says that the top 5 careers for becoming a millionaire are engineers, teachers, CPAs, attorneys, and management. While some of those are vague and capture a large range of professions, Docs are conspicuously missing.
This doesn't jive with any data or personal experience I have. The Ramsey Solutions study also seems like garbage, especially because it seems like their definition of millionaire is someone with $1M in a 401k.
But if you line up 100 teachers or CPAs and 100 doctors in the USA, you can sure as hell bet the doctors will be far wealthier than the teachers or CPAs.
It's a fact that US doctors, across the whole population of doctors, earn $200k+ per year, and outside of software engineers, I don't think any of the Ramsey careers earn anywhere near as much as a population (unless management includes high level execs in F500 companies?). Docs are conspicuously missing because Ramsey is trying to sell something to people with lower to moderate incomes/high debt, such as teachers/CPA/attorneys, etc and they're not targeting doctors. Doctors would never need the Ramsey website.
See the difference in advice on a website like whitecoatinvestor.com vs Ramsey.
As for assumptions about personal finance behaviors, I'm sure some doctors are bad at it, just like every other profession. But I would need some pretty firm evidence that doctors who are by any measure, very highly motivated and intelligent individuals, are somehow so poor at managing their finances that they squander $100k+ per year.
Well, their definition of a millionaire is someone with a net worth of greater than a million dollars. That's also my working definition of a millionaire, and I thought was the definition of a millionaire.
Can you provide your definition so that I can frame your comments with it?
Sorry, I should have said the metric of a millionaire as defined buy $1M in a 401k is not saying much.
Having $1M after decades of working at or near retirement age is the bare minimum one needs for a “decent” retirement if they want to continue their lifestyle. I know 90% of Americans don’t come close to it, but if you want security of quality of life and not worry about medical expenses, $1M will not go far in many of the places in the US that are popular.
On the other hand, when I’m putting together a real estate deal and I need a few hundred thousand dollars, I have many doctors I can call who might be able to pony up, but no teacher is going to be able to come up with that kind of investment. I know a couple of outlier engineers and CPAs who can come up with that that, but nowhere near the amount of doctors, especially as a percentage of all engineers and CPAs.
It’s just crazy to me to hear of the profession where all members are higher earners that are at $200k on the low end be put in the same bucket as teachers whose median might be $60k to $80k, in high cost of living areas.
Some doctors can get the several hundred thousand dollars, but many of them fall for scam investments and lose it all in them. Teachers are more likely be investing in safer things than a real estate deal. An index fund (or similar) will give you more diversity for the same investment and so is a lot safer, it won't grow as fast in the best case, but it won't drop nearly as far in the worst case. (I recommend target date retirement funds these days for even better diversity).
Not that real estate is a bad investment, but a single high value deal has no diversity and so it a bad investment. If you are putting several hundred thousand into a single investment your net worth really should be closer to ten million than one.
Note that I said some doctors above. If only 1% of doctors are good with money/investments, that is a lot of doctors, and they will in general have more money than any teacher.
At the amount doctors make they can pay that off in a few years. Student loans are [can be] big for doctors, but they are only a couple years after tax income even at the most expensive schools.
But not for doctors. The lower end of the household income range I listed is achievable by doctors alone. I would also presume doctors are more often than not marrying lawyers on the higher end of the income scale.
Bottom line, based on numerous personal experiences and pay data, I do not expect lawyer/doctor families to have the quality of life the person I was responding to claim they have, on average.
You are confusing quality of life with money saved for a rainy day. So long as the income holds out they are not much different, but when bad times come one is in trouble
How is flying first class to your cruise ship where you have to most expensive cabin (complete with a full size grand piano) a higher quality of life than a week camping in a nearby state park? The first vacation will set you back at least $20,000, the second $300.
If you are asking about the difference between $10k and $20k that is a big difference. If you are asking about $60k vs $600k, the difference is not nearly as big even though the first is double, with the second is 10x.
My coworker did this with her son. She was spread thin with afterschool programs, sports, projects and so on. Well, the kid got into Caltech. Where he'll probably meet amazing people and receive an excellent education. So maybe it worked? How many YC founders had this overbooked childhood? I'd guess over 70%.
But did the overbooked childhood enable that, or was the kid destined for a top-notch uni regardless?
The students gaining admissions to top unis are largely self-motivated, extremely smart, and would have chosen high-quality activities on their own.
Looking back at my own childhood, I chose my sports, music, and other activities. My parents enabled them, but never forced me into them. Would forcing me to play an additional sport, or forcing me to attend after-school tutoring made the difference between UVA and Harvard? I doubt it. And what did attending UVA instead of Harvard cost me? Hard to say for sure, but I'm inclined to say "not much" as I'm happily upper-middle-class as it is.
And considering my high school peers who did attend Ivies and similar, most of them either smarter or harder working than me.
I have the same experience; I think what school you get to attend is just the happy byproduct arising from your internal combination of intelligence, self-motivation, and emotional resilience (mostly! I am speaking in generalities).
I remember reading a study about this exact topic and it turns out name brand has little to do with career success in meritocratic career paths - i.e., upper-middle white collar professionals such as engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.
I guess my conclusion is to be aware of your child's personality. If they aspire to be an engineer, they could probably go anywhere, even gasp Virginia Tech and do fine. However if they aspire to be a politician, then they'd probably be best served to attend the highest grade institution they can so they can be socialized into that in-group.
Well, I believe that some minimal pushing is necessary. Like you can’t be motivated in a topic you don’t even know exists, so if nothing else, giving a broad view of the “palette” is the task of a parent. And of course as you write, enabling said activites.
Also, I do find it bad when parents push their child from an overly young age into some specific thing, but at the same time the reality is, that both physical and mental development improvements in such a young age have a really profound effect. So looking at a 5 years old play the violin is sad in one way, but at the same time at his/her teenage years he/she can choose (at least hopefully) to continue the efforts and with an inner motivation he/she can have a bright future, much more than only starting it at 10+ years old.
As someone who went to Caltech I assure you Caltech faculty care very little about the name on the undergrad programs of their grad students. I.E. the value proposition of a Caltech undergrad education barring a few IMO cases (which Harvard tends to grab) is doubtful
FYI (and not sure if this requires a karma threshold) if you click the timestamp on a comment you'll get a "vouch" option that you can use to resurrect non-problematic comments from banned people.
I think your guess would be wrong, but I also don't think overbooking is a problem.
As a child who had lots of free time due to living in a place with a lack of structured activities for kids, I really envy kids who can take advantage of such resources enough to have a packed daily schedule.
It's not so much that kids shouldn't have structured activities; it's that these activities shouldn't be thrust upon them by parents.
Yeah, the smaller the kid, the more direction they're going to need. But a 5th grader should be able to pick their activities within reason.
I mentioned it in another thread, but when I was coaching youth sports, I saw two huge (IMO) problems... first, kids specializing at a young age - 5th and 6th graders playing a single sport 9+ months of the year (vs mixing it up). Related to that was a disturbing frequency of overuse injuries in younger athletes. Baseball players coming back from summer with stress fractures in their spines from too much pitching practice and things like that.
And also a whole lot of straight-A students being forced to attend extra-curricular tutoring. I'm sure in some regions, it might be necessary to learn advanced subjects, but Fairfax County schools have robust GT/AP/honors programs and allow dual enrollment at the local community college - very few kids are running out of available maths classes, etc.
And with a robust state college system (UVA, W&M, VT, GMU, JMU, and on and on), the "penalty" for not getting into Stanford isn't much (for the majority of subjects).
Anyways, all anecdotal, but of my son's peers, the kids with the overbooked schedules didn't really go to colleges any more prestigious than anybody else. Most just ended up at one of the several excellent state colleges.
Best decision my parents made for me when I was kid: no extra activities after school, no summer camps, no music lessons, etc, no soccer teams, etc.
I did have "unofficial summer camps", I did play some music instruments (without teachers), I did play a lot of soccer (without teams, just in the street)... I (and the kids in my neighbourhood) did all of these without adults.
Did you not have any desire to do these things? This strikes me as an odd "rule" to have since a lot of people genuinely enjoy these activities. Playing football in high school was one of my favorite parts of the time period, and going to a summer camp legitimately changed my life path. I think these things can be extremely good if the child wants to participate.
I couldnt imagine not letting my own child not do these things if they wanted to.
Yeah me too! I had the occasional swimming lesson once per week or something but other than that, if the weather was good, you'd find me and all the neighborhood kids running around playing tag or riding our bikes everywhere. I grew up at a co-op so all of the houses were close together and there were a lot of families and other kids my age.
I think the number one thing you can do for your kid is to live in a neighborhood with lots of other kids.
I went to art class once a week because I liked it, but stopped at a young age when I didn't se any classes in the course catalog that I was interested in. The only summer camp I did was one week a summer with Scouts.
I'm guessing "summer camp" for most other kids is of a longer duration?
I'd argue that romanticizing children's free time is more weird and more western than anything else. My free time as a kid usually just involved being bored and lonely while watching TV or playing video games.
IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid.
Edit - and this isn't really a western thing, "Tiger Mom" and similar probably pre-dates this behavior in the US.