to be aghast at the effort my sister puts into her children's schoolwork

[parakeet]

My sister is a few years older than me, had children before me and in many ways she's been a bit of role model for me. Hers are now teenagers, and I would have thought they should be fairly independent by now. But with the 13-year-old she is in charge of what subject he's revising, how long he does, then she tests him at the end. Even the 15-year-old is monitored to ensure she does X amount of hours a day, plus instrument practice. They are both fairly bright, by the way, and at a private school.

I'm very curious to know if this is standard. And I'm really hoping it's not because I can't bear the thought of having to go through all this with mine in future. I can't understand it because our parents didn't treat me or my sister like this at all - we made our own decisions. She was a super swot, I was a last-minute crammer - our choice, and we both did OK.

I'm worried that when my children are at this stage, if I leave it up to them and they do badly, they'll hold it against me later. On the other hand, I CANNOT FACE going through the torture of GCSEs, A levels all over again, TWICE.

Oh and the reading diary they gave us at the start of the year has not got a single entry from me in it. I am sorry but I find it so utterly pointless.

He is only just five. They need to ease up. And he is doing brilliantly anyway, unlike his big bro who struggled enormously...they either are into it or they are not. I just refuse to pressure him into more than he is already coping with in 6 long hours at school, he has social and emotional adjustments to make all the time, that's enough surely.

DS is fundamentally less arsed than the DDs
i find that in school - a lot of DSs are less arsed than DDs. but of course there are always exceptions.

I do think my mother's competitive parenting attitude has sent me this way though...if we were not top, she was very anxious about that. We usually were top, though, and I never remember trying in primary school, it was all so so easy, and secondary was a huge shock and that was when I stopped trying at all. And eventually dropped out as it was no fun when the work was hard. Getting praise for no effort was all very well. Having to struggle with work? No thankyou!

My parents always said ' I Won't understand anyway so can't help'!

It irritated the hell out of me when I knew friends parents would help them with where to research, ideas, timetables

Yes I got excellent grades but only because I am self motivated. All of my siblings are not and I dont remember them ever studying at home, they all failed or got very low grades

I will Definatley help my children, education is a huge point in their life

I think you have to play it by ear and respond to what each of your children need. I was left to get on with it, did brilliantly at school and then crashed and burned at uni because I was lucky enough to be able to wing it at school and still excel, but degree level work required more diligence for me and I hadn't built up the skill set to study properly. Took me until my early-thirties to work that out, and I wish I had had a bit more support at Secondary level developing good habits. I know others who were a spoon fed a bit at school and home and they tended to badly too.

If academic achievement is important to you or your children, I suggest you start off providing a lot of support and expect to ramp down slowly until they're at A-level stage. What that entails at each age will depend on how well your DCs develop study skills for themselves (and how in-tune they are with your vision of their future!).

tw. tw's mum was a hippy type. wouldn't kick his arse. tw was very bright but encouraged to be a free spirit. he's now 28 and working in an amusement arcade. a less free-spirited mother would have made a doctor or lawyer of that boy. and he isn't relaxed or proud of it - i see him on the bus, we chat, he's always 'about to go back to college'. sad waste of an interesting, intelligent youth by a silly, self-centred mother who thought she knew better than the rest of the world.

another free-spirit, has to be left to express herself, parents wouldn't support the school, vastly intelligent but determined not to be seen as a geek - 14 and dropped out. this year. pregnant by a total loser. yeah, mummy and daddy, you did a great job. why did you let your daughter down so badly?

sorry, that's a rant and only tenously connected to the thread. but both those children were potential high-flyers ruined by their lazy, 'oh, they have to be free to make a choice' parents.

None of my contemporaries at Cambridge had been micromanaged by their parents to the extent described in the OP. None of them. I don't know about the other mothers in this thread who are advocating Not micromanaging but I am certainly not suggesting that my DCs should regard themselves as Free Spirits. Anything but, really. I encourage them to grow a backbone and accept responsibility for their own lives if they want to find success and happiness.

If any of my DCs wanted to show me their revision time table for comment I'd be happy to look at it and say what I thought. But draw it up for them? Honestly, if any of them asked me to do that for them I'd be ashamed because it would mean that I'd completely failed them. It may be that I place an extra emphasis on trying to learn self help skills for organisation early, since I and the girls are all very dyspraxic and this is the only way they will be able to function at all in the world (after all I might be dead tomorrow, who knows). But even if they and I weren't dyspraxic I would still think there was something fundamentally wrong with a young person who wasn't prepared to draw up their own revision timetable.

meta I'm sure you're right, but nothings makes my teeth itch more than wasting talent.

My neice is very bright but lazy. More interested in Facebook and TOWIE than her school work. Her Mum just leaves her to it. And it's such a shame. I can see exactly what's going to happen....

I'm just not convinced I could butt out. She's 13. She can't possibly have enough forsight to see the impact this will have on her life in the long term. The doors she is closing.

If she came and lived with me, I'd soon whip her into shape .

I think that's the fine line though. I don't help as such, but I am there, I encourage, I want them to do well, and I provide the means for them to do so. I like them to be in the same room as me whilst they do their homework, that means I am on hand if they get stuck, or need encouragement.

But I don't go as far as interfering or hothousing. Pushing too far has a counteractive effect ime.

Them/her. DD1 has just finished school, and I'm still a bit confuddled.

I talked DSS1 through what the guiding principles of a revision timetable might be, and what it might look like, before his recent revision/bac exam stint - he instigated the chat and I was very happy to share my ideas and experience with him. But it went no further than that.

He did revise, a lot, and seemed pretty pleased with the outcome. The results aren't for another ten days though, so we will see then!

Lovebunny I really feel that your post needs to be backed up by some evidence that their parents' attitude in this respect alone was responsible for these children's lack of what could be described as career success.

you seem to be correlating a particular attitude with an outcome that is almost inevitable. I have known plenty of more laid back parents whose children went on to be very successful indeed.

Oh yes....and I failed to achieve what I possibly ought to have achieved, having been in the top something like 2% academically in the country, winning county wide maths award at 11, being grade 8 standard violin at 13...etc etc. I do not have a career.
I dropped out in the sixth form after taking 9 GCSEs and getting A-C in all, including maths a year early...this wasn't to do with not being pushed. I had been pushed and pushed by my school, not my parents but my teachers, and I was fed up with it.
I was depressed, unable to cope socially and academically and it all fell apart.
Nothing to do with not being pushed; perhaps rather the opposite.
My fragile mind could not handle the incredible pressure that was put on me to succeed and perform and excel.

It can really go both ways. And there are always other factors.

If you want to call it wasted talent, I won't argue. Even now under any sort of pressure to perform I will crumble. It has had a lasting and devastating impact.

You have to be careful how you handle a child who has potential, in order not to destroy that potential with an insistence on achieving more than that child is capable of mentally and emotionally.

Nothing brave about it all at word, just a sense that I can't effectively force the pace and may do more harm than good. It's quite a delicate balance; it's entirely possible with this DS that I'm not getting it right. All I know is that he pulled himself up sufficiently just ahead of GCSEs to get respectable results and has relaxed again this year, getting irritable (very) when I mention work. Fortunately he has a three year Sixth Form and so has a little extra time in hand. Ultimately though, the choice is his.

I probably don't tick the hippy box either, though I do believe there's some merit in children having some freedom to develop the way their nature takes them rather than being crushed into a pre-conceived mould from above.

Like Emilie, I've seen parental pressure have disastrous results. A school friend who's mother nag, nag, nagged right the way through school, got her Classics scholarship to Oxford, went wild with boys and drugs then crashed and burned.

I let mine get on with it. The most I ever did was, in the run up to exams, make sure they were eating and sleeping OK, and put my head round the door now and then to check they were looking at books and not Ps3.

and they have done very well.