Pushing Your Kids to the Limit

Recently my friend Kim recommended a book to me called The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins. In the book, Robbins follows the secret lives of several high school students at Whitman High School in Washington, D.C. 

Robbins profiles the students’ lives as they race from extracurricular activities to SAT preparations, some performing under their parents’ watchful eyes while others are driven to achieve on their own. In each section, Robbins follows stories from the students’ experiences to highlight national trends in overly competitive high schools. 

Reading the book was entertaining, especially because Robbins details the kids’ lives so thoroughly that it is easy to feel very connected to them and hopeful for their plans as the book ends. However, Robbins brings out a few points that made me alert to the careful line we as parents walk when it comes to our children’s achievements. 

One strong argument that Robbins makes is that when parents invest in their child’s sports careers and push them incessantly to secure a college scholarship, most of us are better off putting our money in a college fund. Nationally speaking, Robbins writes that only 1.8 percent of high school varsity athletes land a sports scholarship at a Division I, II or III school. 

The book convinced me that unless we’re putting our kids in sports for the simple enjoyment of developing athletic skills and playing on a team, we might as well save our cash. As my young kids participated in their first ball team this year, I tried to reign in that natural mom impulse to look for athletic genius as my kids stepped up to the plate. Statistics say it’s probably not there. 

The book profiled one parent who perched on a chair outside her boys’ rooms while they did hour after hour of homework, with verbal and even sometimes physical abuse as the punishment for not following her strict regimen for schoolwork. While this is taking helicopter parenting to the extreme, it made me stop and think about the appropriate level of watchfulness and motivation that a mother should provide. 

The level of monitoring certainly changes as kids grow up. When they are young, we partner closely with their elementary teachers to help them get a good foundation. When she found that her daughter would be in a new school district next year for second grade, my friend Kim asked a Mehlville teacher to tutor her daughter in the new district’s specific math style so that her daughter could feel confident and start the school year doing her very best in math. 

However, as Kim and I have discussed, as our children enter junior high and high school, we hope that they will become responsible for navigating their own education. We expect that by the time they are in college, we are not having daily conversations to coach them through their studies. 

The book also caused me to think about some aspects of parenting that seem millions of years away. I wondered how I will handle a child that isn’t working to their full potential or doesn’t choose the college major that was originally their passion. Right now, when my 4-year-old regularly says with certainty that she will be an artist when she grows up, I am excited and can’t understand how a parent wouldn’t be thrilled. But if her art turns out to be a form that isn’t widely appreciated, it may be a struggle to prevent parental enthusiasm from wavering. 

There seems to be a fine line between supporting and encouraging our kids to excel and taking it to a level where it is evident that our own self-worth may be tied up in their achievements. Our lives, once we become parents, may be all about them, but their lives are certainly not going to be all about us.