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?

Yes, money is important in the sense that everything costs money including outreach programs. But the point is personal or family money is not essential. You seemed to be conflating school funding and Government schemes with personal wealth of parents.

All of this can be seen playing out in the real world. If you look at doctors younger than 40, there is huge diversity. More women than men, a high proportion of BAME doctors, predominantly state educated etc. Long gone are the days when medicine was a white, upper middle class profession.

@Ineedanewsofa I think this is the crux, it's all about long term gain and looking to the future without instant gratification.

Tiger Mums. The youngsters in my family who look like they will be super high achievers could speak three languages fluently age 3. Mums language, Dads language, a mfl plus an amazing amount of bsl. They were already playing instruments, had attention spans of hours, learning maths equivalent to the year 7 curriculum and could also name pretty much every player in the premier league. Stay at home Mum was the driver of all this. The parents are clever enough but not amazing. Both have degrees, but Dad took several attempts to get there.

Those resources often come from huge personal sacrifices...such as six siblings, two parents and perhaps the odd uncle all working overtime to send a single son (the one with the most potential) to university in another Country.

Work ethic
Expectation
Luck
Money

I'm from a poor background and now equivalent of c suite director. This is what I see as the first generation who went to uni.

My parents were intelligent but not educated but they valued my education and were brilliant and encouraging of it. They instilled hard work, there is no substitute. If you want something you have to work hard and harder than anybody else.

The differences and advantages that my children have over my childhood are mainly expectation and opportunity. Money increases expectation and confidence. My children can ski, they play lots of sports and. we travel a lot - all of this was rare to me as we just didn't have the money. This does not make you successful but it means you can converse about lots of things and are confident in talking about such matters and seeing what is out there. Their worlds are bigger than mine was at their age and their expectation of their norm are set higher.

They expect to go university and higher education isn't a bonus for them. Their peer group will go too. They will have part time jobs but this will be for fun money not to pay debts and loans.
.

Luck - you still need a bit of luck to truly be a high achiever and money and the contacts that money brings can be integral to this 'luck'.

Money helps with all of the above - a lot!

What do you mean by high achieving, @Santatree?

I mean well educated, achievements in sports & music, high paying jobs with lifestyles that reflect this , live in desirable areas.. how do children grow up to achieve this & what is the secrets of these high achieving families?

That’s pretty vague, though. For some people those aren’t ‘achievements’, they’re just what you do. I can think of families I know where the parents are, say, medics or architects or lawyers who also play an instrument to a high level and hold records for ultramarathons or were the first to climb a particular route, and the children play tennis at county level, are in the NYO, get high grades at school and university, and go on to professions like those of their parents. That’s just the norm in those families.

A lot will depend on where your base level is.

On the other hand, poverty can be a great motivator. It’s what hot DH and me out of our original circumstances.

Success =

• Actively bring about positive change for communities, do things for others, not just yourself or your family
• Reduce inequalities
• Live a fulfilled life with work, housing, relationships and activities that suit your needs and personality
• Emotional regulation
• Eating well and keeping active
• Live as sustainably as possible without being holier than thou
• Access to good healthcare
• Have a good support network

But that's just the norm you say... surely there is some sort of methodology behind it. I
How can it become the norm for any who aspire to it?

in the high achieving families I know, there's a lot of money. Mostly inherited wealth.
So yeah, money.

@Santatree well you commit yourself and work at it. For tennis, music lessons and similar, you'll need to be able to afford training, lessons, kit instrument etc. Then you dedicate yourself to practising as hard as possible. Same for homework, do it early, diligently and revise, revise, revise. Read as mush as possible to be as educated as possible. Develop your critical thinking and find the best state schools for your kids as possible, move to an area with top schools, rent there if needed. You get there simply by doing it. Of course you need at least average intelligence and sufficient funds to make it all happen. Basically you have to be aspiration in your approach and ideally love what you're doing, otherwise it's a slog and not worth it.

I mean, some of it is luck. My sons are good academically, but rubbish at sport (not for want of enthusiasm!) and average at music - there's nothing that's going to change those - the talent just isn't there. I was the same - despite loving netball, I was never going to be on the team I just wasn't any good at it!, and I enjoyed my various instruments, but again, just didn't have much musical talent. However my academics were good, and I've got a nice comfortable life from that instead.

Whereas my eldest has a friend at school who's literally good at anything he touches - on the first team, high grade piano, always near the top of the class, and he's a lovely lad to boot!

II think that as PP have said, being willing to take some risks, and put yourself in the way of luck is important (if your starting from little), as is future planning, and being able to delay gratification (eg. being able to save, rather than spend every penny you have)

I would say a positive mindset and the emphasis on morals manners and education . Also bring organised and connected.

1. Health and reasonable cheerfulness
2. Financial stability, not necessary at a monied level at all
3. Work ethic and achievement praised, not obsessively
4. Children’s interests encouraged, not obsessively
5. Last but definitely not least - parents who don’t endlessly pull big housing/money/partner dramas.

A platform to launch doesn’t have to be very high off the ground but it does have to be solid.

Having said that, DM had long-lasting MH problems and DF was an alcoholic who gave up work in my teens. I got non-stop ructions but I liked books & reading so I did that.

My career (in books) was fuelled by that escape energy. Escape is a fantastic source of energy to achieve.

DP drain family resources over all four generations - with no return obviously. DB and I do ok but we’re much, much poorer than we should be, which probably counts as less achievement.

No methodology. Think about whatever is a norm in your family. It might be ‘leaving school as early as legally possible’ (it was in DH and my families before we stayed on and went to university), or it might be ‘men are in trades’ or ‘we tend to settle locally’ or whatever. The norm in those families is achieving highly at school and university, playing an instrument to a high level of skill, taking a sport seriously, and contemplating the types of careers you see your parents and relatives and friends doing.

DH and I broke the norm in our families because of there being grants and scholarships we were able to find out about, and because we knew we didn’t want lives like the adults around us — struggling on minimum wage jobs, working incredibly hard just to keep their heads above water.

Define high achieving.

Exactly. It’s what’s the norm in your family and circles. You get the odd outlier like Warm and my Dh but most kids will follow on with what they see parents and peers do as they feel comfortable.

Was saddened when I helped out at dds primary years ago that some of the girls already had a “not for the likes of us”
mentality. Their parents were waitresses and supermarket workers school wasn’t really valued.

It's a long time since I was at university. I went to a state school and went to do a Hunanities degree - no idea of what I wanted to do but I was the first person in the family to go to Uni. Ended up sharing with 3 girls who had gone to private schools - Doctor, architect and chemist art restoration. We were not even fed these ideas. So yes education. Also parental jobs inevitably bring in a wide network which can assist. Attitude is very important. Money talks.

Yes, my steepest learning curve at Oxford wasn’t academic, but discovering that not only that careers like opera director or dramaturge or ethno-musicologist or forensic archaeologist existed, but that people my age knew about them, knew people who did them, and were planning to do them themselves. I think I spent half of my first year thinking ‘But how did you know this was a thing???’

@warmfrongpond you are so right! Expectation of the norm matters so much.

Conversely when I was at uni I had to explain what free school meals were to a couple of students who had simply never considered there could be such a thing! Those type of conversations when you're 18 years of age are brilliant for realising expectations!

I went to Durham for my Masters. There was a girl on my course thought you the qualification for deprivation was if you’d ever been skiing before.