In Mclean, a crusade to get people to back off in the parenting arms race.


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Bowers, trim, fashionable and fiercely determined, stands in her kitchen early one morning making breakfast and explains that she isn’t fighting to let kids off the hook. “This movement is not about mediocrity,” she says. It’s about what she calls “authentic success.”

“Yes, M.I.T. is looking for a kid who’s taken 10 AP classes. If you’re a kid who has a passion for those subjects and is doing well, then that’s great,” Bowers says. “But if the kid is sleeping three hours a night in order to do that? Or gets to an Ivy League school and then commits suicide because they get their first B? Then that’s not okay. Our whole premise is: Are we really helping our kids be successful by pushing them so hard?”


EXACTLY.



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In a darkened McLean auditorium in November, California psychologist Madeline Levine, the author of “The Price of Privilege” — who was invited to speak to parents by the Safe Community Coalition, which also works in the growing authentic-success movement — had harsh words for a packed house. “A majority of your children are average,” she said, pausing as a chorus of sharp inhalations drain the air out of the room. “And guess what? So are you.”

Accepting that, she said, is the first step to ending what she calls a “mass delusion” in many privileged communities that every child must be destined for Harvard to ensure success.

What matters, she told parents, is spending time connecting with children, not yipping about homework or doing it for them. “Lawn-mower parents” mowing down all obstacles to smooth their child’s way only make it harder for those children to fail and learn to recover on their own. “It’s not about lowering the bar. It’s lowering the expectation that they be terrific at everything,” Levine said. “We’re not straight-A parents. Why should we demand that they be perfect all the time?”

WOW.

I'd like to applaud her for saying so. Truly.





Some of the comments on the article are downright scathing or heartbreaking, though. frown


I do think that there is a significant backlash that we as parents of HG+ kids wind up getting caught in. I have other parents asking me all. the. time what our "secret" is... and at the same time, my DD also has peers (and not a few teachers!) sneering and making unfathomably transparent attempts to "show her" that she's "not so smart."

Ick.



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.