Secrets behind the very high achieving of families you know?

[Santatree]

How come some families are so high achieving? Is it money? What way they parent? Private schools?

Education, education, education.

Proper engagement with schools, proper further education planning, proper career planning.

Were Kate & Pippa also top performers? I know they were both excellent at sport's.

I have worked therapeutically with lots of high achieving families and find that there are often hidden psychological costs. Oftentimes successful parents become blinkered and see academic and sporting 'success' as the be-all and end-all, and symbols of success (like beautiful homes, extravagant holidays, academic grades and trophies) become more important than the happiness of their children or marital contentment. In general, when you reach the higher echelons of success (and the related levels of money and status) it can feel like there is so much pressure to stay there, and for the children to supercede parents' in their achievements.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, in my experience, success is a double edged sword. I am aware that in my line of work I am likely to see the thin end of the wedge with regards to times when success has been harmful, but I'm not sure that I know any successful adults who have well rounded lives and solid emotional health.

This.

Encourage children to read. Ensure they have lots of books. Read to them in early years. Take an interest in their homework & school life.

Broaden their experiences as much as possible. Introduce them to different nationalities of food, cultures, theatre, music, arts.

Travel Physical activities

...I would also add that I know friends or colleagues who are, in my estimation, very successful people, who are acing it in their chosen fields. Probably the difference in their level of happiness is that they appear as humble / perhaps would not agree with others' perception of them as successful, and perhaps are more unassuming in their way of being, and dont pressure their children to follow in their footsteps etc.

I find it interesting that so many posters are saying private school. Maybe they're Tori bots or accountants pf struggling private schools 😆or perhaps it's the good old British class system. Private, or better still, public schools and then Oxbridge. However, those who inhabit this particular middle class sphere and end up not delivering on these snobbish familial and microcosmic expectations remain full of bitterness and self hate even if they are what most would consider successful. Offspring of successful middle class parents don't always follow their parents' trajectory at all, they can lack motivation and feel misunderstood with all the parental pushing.

The most successful children around us are actually from aspirational migrant families. At our local grammars it's 90%+ children with one or 2 parents born outside of the UK.

The seriously rich are often transnational global citizens taking on the top roles in the top firms. They don't go on about being successful though as to them it's just being, so a way of life.

It's also not really about hard work as such. It's about values and investing in the right activities. There are plenty of career opportunities in the job market. Those with confidence, interest, motivation, education and a open minded outlook will go and cease them.

In the UK it's a lack of general aspiration that keeps hold people back. Society here is still classist and there is a huge lack of equality and equity, this is only getting worse now.

@TeddysHeart, I think a significant minority of totally delusional Mners still think private education is a magic wand which will make their children confident, sporty, highly academic and financially successful.

I think academics is genetics, hard work, access to resources and good teaching, health and luck of fitting what can be examined easily. I do way worse if portfolio of evidence exercises than exams but exams are the main tools.

I think work is slightly different. I still think health and hard work are big factors but I also think luck and connections start to come in. Cohorts that graduate into a recession do worse as a cohort than those that graduate into a the start of a boom. (This is not every single individual just at a cohort level).

They are neurotypical. They are not burdened by the everyday provisions, executive dysfunction, sensory issues and other things that slow down productivity and human interaction. If they need to do something uncomfortable, like travelling to new places, meeting new people at events or public speaking, they simply get on with it. I say this as a ND parent myself because there is so much potential that gets lost in the muddle of being ND. No amount of money or academics can buffer the need for more rest time, sensory accommodations and overall slower pace of life required for ND families to live healthily.

If the parents or children ARE neurodivergent, they have managed to find a niche in society which fit perfectly with their special interest. This usually means becoming a renowned expert in their field or achieving massive success through talent in arts, music or sports.

In the UK it's a lack of general aspiration that keeps hold people back. Society here is still classist and there is a huge lack of equality and equity, this is only getting worse now.

Could you define "lack of aspiration?" @TeddysHeart

We need people to do all sorts of jobs, surely? Not everyone can be high flyers in the sense a lot of people here are talking about. The fact that so many are only talking about private education shows what a failure the state education system is at helping kids reach their potential, and most seem to get on in spite of school not because of it.

What holds us back in the UK is massive inequality, low wages for critical work and huge greed at the top end.

You can definitely do well in life with a state school education and I don’t think money is a major factor either.

In fact the people I know who are most ‘successful’ are from very ordinary backgrounds. They were often the first generation of their family to go to university. I’m talking doctors, dentists, lawyers with parents who were not educated themselves though supportive.

I am a teacher in one of the most deprived areas in the country and if I think of past pupils who have done well, including some who are famous and highly paid, they are all very clever and hardworking.

I stick with what I said earlier in the thread which is natural intelligence is the main factor along with a stable personality and stable home life, not necessarily privileged or well off.

Interesting points raised though.

In the case I’ve seen up close

Intelligence inherited from the maternal line
Excellent local state schools
Mental illness combined with neurodiversity (hyper focus)
Ruthlessness
Moral and ethical failings

A lot of this arising from parental neglect and a desire to escape harsh poverty conditions.

Genetics
Connections
Money
Bullying
Mental health issues
Manipulation
Abuse of power
Insecurity
Over emphasis on monetary success/achievement

I have to agree with this. I put my DS through private school and he's now 1st year university. We ended up going private due to ASD.

Anyway - private education is not a magic wand. In DS's year, there are loads of kids who just kind of existed in the school. Vaping, shagging, skipping class etc. Many have come out having failed Maths and/or English GCSE. Many had insufficient GCSE grades to proceed to any A Levels at all. I have several friends whose kids have graduated from university and the grads are doing bar work. You cannot just be rich and hand your child over to a private school and think it's all going to be OK. The teachers are overworked, frequently set cover lessons (which nobody seems to monitor at all) and generally don't have enough time to micromanage or even care about individual children. That is down to the parents. There is a lot of extracurricular stuff - sports etc. If your child does loads of that, then often they end up dropping some GCSE grades. The school won't have any kind of overview where they say, oh look you're spending too much time doing sports and not enough time on your work. They just sleepwalk into disaster.

You need a good work ethic. Work hard and consistently. There is no magic wand. Private schools don't do the work for you or buy you the grades. You have to work hard yourself, as my DS did. He came out with 9x9 at GCSE and I think that people just dismiss him as having bought the grades somehow. Utter fiction.

That is impressive. My grandad did similar from a similarly poor background. He was the eldest did well in a stem field and all his siblings went on to tertiary education. Quite a few were teachers, which was impressive from that start in life.

My DC are/were at Private school.
We are comfortable and there is a certain range of incomes at the school from Parents of teacher (50% discount) to local "known" names.
The one thing I have found with all the very wealthy families we know is that even if they themselves are successful there is family money there too.
Our families were not wealthy so we have had to achieve with no support and we are doing Ok but to be super rich round here is unusual unless its generational

Whilst I agree with this, I do think that attitudes to life are considerably influenced by financial constraints; and the adverse circumstances in which some people find themselves, through no fault of their own.

This

I’m talking doctors, dentists, lawyers with parents who were not educated themselves though supportive
Getting in medical or dentistry school involves a ticking box process that is almost 100% inevitable.

Applicants are normally supported through this process by their parents, schools or schemes supporting those from poorer families.

Without this support, only extremely mature and naturally resourceful young people will manage to glide through it.

Parents and schools who are able to provide guidance usually have the money to offer it. Similarly, these schemes only happen because of the additional funding they are given.

So I'd disagree that money has nothing to do with it. Whatever the source, without money, it's almost impossible to get into medical school.

I work with so many people who are ND. We are all experts in academic or technical fields. There is a huge variety of fields you can enter though. It’s not difficult to find a path if you have adults who tell you that finding a path is a necessity.

Regardless of brain orientation, it also helps to be surrounded by other children who are being fed the same messaging. Being surrounded by children who are on career paths, not just planning to find a job, makes a difference. School isn’t just about the teachers, it is about the classmates.

When people refer to something "requiring money" they 100% mean personal or family wealth. No one is talking about Government or charity funding when they talk about money in this context.

There were outreach programs helping young people from disadvantaged backgrounds get into medical school back when I was in school 20 years ago - this is nothing new. So for literally decades medicine has not been a career where having personal or family wealth is essential to getting in. I recall the programs from 20 years ago allowed poor students to get a place at some schools with much lower A level grades (something like BCC instead of AAB), I'm not sure what form the programs take these days.

Going back to the question in the OP, I think the key attribute is: never making excuses.

When people refer to something "requiring money" they 100% mean personal or family wealth. No one is talking about Government or charity funding when they talk about money in this context
The point remains if you ignore outreach scheme. Kids with educated parents, so more likely to earn well and send their kids to schools that are able to help aspiring high achieving kids going through the process have a significant higher chance to get in then those who don't, even when they are of equal intelligence.

Not sure about the hard work. It wasn't too difficult to get into Oxford or Cambridge without too much hard work when I did, in the 90s. It was easy to get a good 2.1 there while on drugs every day, too.

It might have changed since then, but the internet probably makes school work easier.

Kids with educated and well-earning or even moderately-earning parents would not have qualified for the schemes. The schemes target students from poor backgrounds, the first in their family to go to university etc. The assumption is that students with educated and non-poor parents would receive support from their family and didn't need a leg up.

Again, none of this is new. It's been going on for decades in respect of medicine and dentistry, and I'm sure other professions will have begun to do something similar in recent times.

Kids with educated and well-earning or even moderately-earning parents would not have qualified for the schemes
Forget the schemes, I shouldn't even have mentioned it. The point is still that children of parents who don't have an understanding of the process which is complex and tedious or don't have that support in school will find it much harder to get in.

The point of the conversation is whether money influences access to these very competitive fields. Yes, it does.