Nope. That seems to cover it.
Which means, of course, that those of us who don't play the game via deliberately "opting out" yet still have kids that LOOK like those other kids...
wind up with kids that feel that they are probably just about "average" in every way.
That's an unfortunate thing. But in my mind, it's nowhere near as unfortunate as that kind of enmeshed, nitro-fueled hyper-parenting and the kind of anxiety and ennui that I see it producing in kids.
So if that means that choosing NOT to Tiger-parent means that my kid looks like every other Ivy applicant, rather than her "personal best" under this bizarre new system, I still think that I'm going to choose to allow her a real childhood. She puts plenty of pressure on herself without much help from us in this respect.
She also chooses to do certain kinds of community service all on her own. You know, because it makes her feel good to HELP OTHERS? (Unusual concept these days, I know...)
Yeah, I make her practice the piano. Thirty minutes a day, I mean. I also don't choose what she plays. She likes some pretty odd stuff, honestly. Right now she's into variations-- extemporaneously-- on Billy Joel and Elton John, with Gershwin and Grieg thrown in. That's fine. It's personal expression and it's really who she is.
That's me. Sometimes we doubt ourselves. After all, neither of us has an Ivy league pedigree. What if it really does matter as much as "The Machine" seems to want us to think??
Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about that one.
When you actually look hard at admission rates at elite colleges, they aren't THAT low, either. A lot of them admit fully 20-40% of applicants. It isn't as competitive as parents are sometimes being led to believe. I think a lot of this is parents being whipped into a competitive frenzy.
(As Jon has so brilliantly and playfully noted above.)
