...take unofficial AP courses over the summer, so that a course load of 5-6 AP courses during the school year will be more manageable -- they will have already seen some of the material.
Our children are in Russian School of Math so they can get an "edge" in math. My eldest son, a rising 8th grader, has taken two AOPS courses in Python programming and will take more programming classes before high school. In high school he will have an edge over students for which AP Computer Science is their first programming experience. I don't think we are doing anything wrong.
Five or six AP courses sounds like a recipe for sleep deprivation and non-stop studying. As for the summer courses, the volume of homework in the AP classes is a large part of the sleep deprivation, and a summer course won't make that go away.
But what strikes me even more is the idea that some parents are driving their children so as to give them an "edge." To me, this is a clear statement about the creation of a success machine over the development of a person with a meaningful education and the perspective to use it for the greater good. Though I suppose that the greater good is probably not a factor in the thinking of many of our society's hothousing snowplow parents as they shove their children through the right AP classes, the right major at the colleges, and the right jobs. The goal is not to help a person develop into a thinking adult, but a success machine who, externally anyway, has done everything "right" while he complies so as to get paid. Never mind how many of these people are withering inside. No, just push that unhappy thought away.
Thus, the summer or enrichment class isn't chosen as a way for to develop the child's mind or his inner self, but to give him an edge in a competition that has a large element of artificiality at its roots, anyway. Having an actual summer job (like a camp leader) is viewed as a negative because...well, I'm not sure, really, having been afraid to probe this particular boogie man of parental insecurity and my very uncomfortable fear that it has something to do with economic status.
