What's wrong with hothousing?

ThunderDad, it’s insulting to describe parents who don’t hot house their children as lazy parents.

You sound very smug about the achievements of your child. Perhaps with justification; I don’t know, but please don’t dismiss or denigrate those who choose a different route when raising their children .

Care, nurturing, love emotional investment, teaching by example, encouraging, giving opportunities for enrichment and investing time and energy in your children, is important. Pushing to the limit and limiting a balance of education and play, isn’t, in my view, the way to raise balanced and emotionally healthy individuals.

The thing about being against 'hothousing' is that it gives a very convenient excuse for parents to be pretty lazy parents. My wife and I have hot housed the hell out of our 2 year old and he has succeeded in:

1. Developing perfect pitch despite nobody in either parent's family having it.
2. Can count to 30 and count objects up to around 6 reliably.
3. Knows and can say absolutely every conceivable shape including things like dodecahedron and obelisk.
4. Can play the piano, like actually play it with two hands. Hot cross buns.

And he is incredibly happy and playful and loves learning. We've had to work our asses off to get this far and honestly I think its worth it. Hothousing after the age of 3 is probably not going to be so successful. Your cake is basically baked by that age anyway.

The only issue with hothousing to get into top schools is that your teen may want exact opposite.

Some kids thrive on it. There was a recent interesting thread on Asian parents & education. I'm my area some to do ot to get them past entrance exams & interviews

@justanotherdaduser there's also tiger mom, and helicopter parents

Hothousing = destroying a child's mental and spiritual wellbeing in the pursuit of higher academic outcomes than would be achieved by simply letting them pursue knowledge at a pace they can cope with. if you are just nurturing and encouraging your child's natural talent and curiosity it's not hothousing. I know adults who were hothoused as kids and are frankly totally screwed up because they learned very early on that they were only worthy of love, kindness or nice things in their life if they earned these things through perfect achievements.

The highly academic schools at the top of the league tables have a some proportion of children who are there from natural talent and are happiest learning at that pace, and some whose parents have drilled them into that situation.

in a gardening analogy, flowers grown in a garden will bloom brightly for longer than hothouse flowers which have been artificially forced to bloom bigger and brighter than they would have out of the hothouse. once in a bouquet a hothouse will often wilt much more quickly than their unhothoused cousins.

I think that it can be problematic when the child is unable to enjoy study for the intrinsic reward of academic achievement. Some children will struggle at university at the very point that they need to be independent. They have not learnt to prioritise their work themselves and they may have overachieved earlier which now means they are alone in a new environment with many distractions and without the tools to sit down and achieve for themselves. Other children of course love to learn for the sake of learning so spending a weekend enrichment learning something is their idea of fun anyway. You need to listen to your dd, let her find her own way, her own goals, but be there to cheer her on and support her in what she needs to do to get where she wants to go.

My experience is that mental health problems are rife in hothoused children, they fear not being perfect, they also may have ND traits which can make life harder (although also be of benefit in being focused, single-minded, talented in maths or whatever). One of my children went to a school notorious for hot-housing and it has delivered academically but not pastorally and there seem to be a lot of distressed teens from that school. My dd is fine now she's out of there, so I don't think it was her personality or intrinsic MH issues, I think the overfocus on academia was too much.

DD sounds like she could do was th some balance. She may well be up to the academic standards that hot housing (usually) demands. But she may need someone to tell her that it doesn't have to be now. That she's free to be who she wants to be and she can come back to stuff later.

Be the person to offer the balance.

I suspect, like many things, it’s about point of view.

I enrich
You tutor
She hothouses

I also think some parents underestimate the sheer appetite for learning, knowledge and conversation that some children have, and how they might want or even need it to feel happy and fulfilled, in the same way another child might need a lot of sport to keep them happy. If you don’t have a child like that, from the outside I suspect just responding to a child’s academic/ intellectual interests and needs can look like hothousing.

And of course, some parents do strongly encourage (or even enforce) academic interests and abilities, in a way which overrides the child’s own interests and preferences. That is what I would think of as hothousing.

Because there's more to life (growing up) than slogging it. Because if you do it to the wrong child the results can be disastrous. Because it doesn't automatically translate to well rounded happy adults. Or even academic success.

Because it implies an imbalance.

The implication is that it priorities results over wellbeing. Some people are cool with that, many are not.