To think that there is nothing wrong with being a "pushy" mum

[CliftonGirl]

Just that really. I used to be a "relaxed" mum with DS1 which I regret, but thankfully I switched to a "pushy" mode when he was in year four. As a result he moved from a bottom-middle set to a super selective grammar and doing brilliantly. I am very pushy with the younger DCs.

I've noticed a lot of people on mumsnet think that we are still in the 20th century and you can get to Oxbridge from a mediocre school without much effort. AIBU to think that the world is much more competitive now and there is no choice but to push DC to achieve?

Ps, English is not my first language, so please don't flame me for the spelling mistakes.

Interestingly, talking of books that get articles about them in Sunday Papers, Sheryl Sandberg argues in 'Leaning In' that girls do well at school because they are 'good' and try to tick all the right boxes because this is what the prevailing culture tells them to do, then fail in the work place, because, after all other skills (taking risks, taking on work that is beyond your current competence, talking confidently) are more important.

@merrymouse That's me to a T. I fail in all the soft skills I found.

poppyamex I hear that it's because rugby and football implies you are a team player and is competitive.

What do you mean, sink or swim?

I would like to think that i'm a very encouraging mum. Inside is a very very pushy mum but i do contain that.

We do lots of educational fun things, lots of reading, if they find something interesting we fully explore it.

They do get lots of down time, excercise, free play and i haven't forced music or dance on them yet

My parents did very little with us, that makes me really sad. We could all of achieved much more had they been interested in us.

I try to expose them to as much as possible from an early age. Violin is only a small part of it. I really think my approach is working and I do see results. No, I don't want them to grow up into professional musicians but I am trying to give them an opportunity to have a go at as many things as possible. The three year old is also having swimming lessons and football. He really enjoys all activities and get very excited when I tell him we are going to swim or play football. The middle sons are into
Rugby, the oldest is not sporty at all.

Swim = being able to push your way to the top standing on others' heads as you go, being perceived to be 'better' than everyone else because that is what matters.

Sink = being disadvantaged from the word go, through lack of nutrition/education/employment prospects/economic prospects etc and being the ones who are constantly being stamped on by the 'swimmer'

Did you mean winners and losers?

Seeker I mean you either compete with other pushy kids/parents or go with the flow.

My DH and I have tried to be pushy with DSD in the past, but she is not the type who can be pushed. Case in point: her school offered violin lessons one year, and we encouraged DSD to think about signing up, thinking all the while of the benefits she would get from music lessons in school. Being 6 at the time, and a thoroughly modern child raised on pop music, DSD didn't quite know what a violin was. So, we showed her some videos of people playing.

The kid literally shrank away from the YouTube, and whimpered, "I don't want to anymore, it looks too hard." No amount of backpedaling, re-encouragement, or softly-spoken words could change her mind. She wouldn't do it. Pants to violin.

We didn't get it for a long time. Both DH and I are the type of people who shine when we achieve something. Therefore, we got it into our heads that you must achieve something in order to shine. Through our mistakes with DSD, we've been learning that this attitude may be a little bit back-to-front.

I have my fingers crossed that DSD will find her voice as she grows up, and that she will learn to stand up straight and feel confident about her place in the world, and about what she can contribute to it. But she definitely won't get there with us trying to steer her - she seems to interpret it as a lack of faith in her abilities, and a lack of support.

What has worked a lot better for DSD is listening to what she is interested in or needs, and then responding that. That has ranged from signing her up for athletic activities (she has loads of energy and enjoys her sport), to getting her into Brownies (she gets lonely after school), to offering some support with her reading and phonics (she wants to be better at reading and for reading to be easier).

It's great that you think your approach is working, but can you also see that in different families with different children, other approaches are also very good?

I have no problem with your 3 year old playing the violin, but if my 3 year old spends her days outside getting muddy and drumming on tree trunks, can you not agree that neither of us are misguided, we are just different, and my child is as likely to have an academic career or invent the next iPhone equivalent as yours?

Merry, my point was that some people expect their kids to achieve top results without much input. Another point - you should expect more from your kids and not write them off as non academic at an early age. I don't have a problem with people choices at all, I do respect other parental approaches, as I said earlier I was a very relaxed mum with ds1, so I can see things from a different perspective.

You are more likely to have a good academic career or invent the next iphone with the soft skills. The ones PoppyAmex quoted from leaning in. Academia is not scientists working in a lab with a coat. (Talking from my own science research experience). It's more like Thomas Edison. He's a businessman. Same as if you want to be the next Steve Jobs.

cliftongirl I have never met anybody who expected their child to achieve high academic results without much input. I think people have different approaches to how they make that input though.

I have also never met a parent who 'wrote off' their child in RL. The only parents I have met who describe their children as 'non academic' (which is a label I don't like) have generally done so after putting a huge amount of input into their education.

(Input might look like giving a child learning opportunities though, and not paying much attention to jumping through hoops at school - as I said different approaches work for different families and children).

guinea for me, sink or swim simply expresses adequately how things are now in the UK.

It's all very very different to the last fifteen /twenty years. And whether we like it or not, it's the world our DC will inherit.

House prices are ridiculous and mortgages hard to come by. Deposits of 20% are a usual request.
Rent is sky high, and housing benefit is being eroded.
Social housing is scarce and the stock is decreasing all the time.

So being able to swim, means being ale to have a reasonably nice home. Sink means not be able to access one!

Penisons are now de rigour. The state pension will be eroded to nothing, and our DC will need a very big pot if they ever want to retire.

So swim means being able to retire at a reasonable age. Sink means working til they drop!

Child care costs continue to rise whilst wages slump/stagnate. Only those in decent incomes can access good quality child care. Those who cannot afford it either have no DC or quit work.

So swim means being able to afford a family and sink means not being able toa fford one.

We're not talking a swanky existence here. We're talking about our DC having a home a family and being able to retire! Before we even get started on the erosion of the NHS or the possibility of tax rocketing!

The future looks very bleak for those not in well paid jobs. So you can't fault people for wanting their DC to get them, can you?

I also think that while exams are often necessary hoops that make life easier in the l

Long run, I would hate to give my children the impression that their life is limited to working for somebody else who has the power to set the criteria to decide whether they are failures or successes. If everyone thought like this the human race would have died out long ago.

merry that's true, DH and I are both successfully self employed.

However we both required a lot of social and cultural capital to get where we are and that was more easily facilitated by being well educated as well.

Also, being self employed can be hairy. It's a jolly good idea to have somehting to fall back on, I think. And that somehting might very well require qualifications.

I do wish people would stop talking as if the's no middl ground between hot housing a 3 year old and allowing your child to drop all their GCSEs and take a BTEc level 3 in leisure andtourism and then be outraged wine they don't get into Cambridge!

It's perfectly possible to have a high archiving child and to have high expectations without being a Tiger Mother.

seeker it depends on the onlooker.

I'm sure many a MNer would consider you decidely pushy with leanings towards the tiger ...

I wonder how much of the desire to push comes form our own personal circumstances and experience. Watching my nephew's experiences on finishing university last year his experience seems very similar to mine 20 years ago, as I too graduated in the middle of an unexpected recession, and only got a decent job almost a year down the line after a fairly soul destroying search. So I don't see things as being radially different now.

But as a family we are somewhat insulated from wordfactory's 'failure' scenario. I don't envision anyone in my family being homeless or unable to start a family (perhaps not entirely when they want). This is as true for my wealthy family as dh's much poorer one, although for very different reasons. I also don't expect to retire early because in my family most people have loved their jobs and kept going from choice (my grandfather was lecturing within months of his death for example).

So I don't look at the world in front of my children as scary, but as full of opportunity. For me the only real 'failure' is if they are unhappy and unfulfilled, and I see my contemporaries who were very pushed as being both.

I'm also not at all keep on the idea of pushing children too early not doing things they are not prepared for. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that countries that start formal education much later than the UK have as good or higher educational attainment (also of course those that push rote learning and high pressure can be highly successful). But as I have one very late starter of course I'm inclined to think that way, each of us bring our own experiences to the table which of course affects our viewpoints.

In the past 100 years there have been 2 world wars, various deadly outbreaks of disease, the end of heavy industry and various other ups and downs. Looking at the lives of their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grand parents i am not feeling too badly about the world my children will inherit.

Nobody is sending them down a mine and nobody is bombing them, and nobody can legally discriminate against them because of their sex, sexuality or race. If it is difficult for them to get together the deposit to buy a house, well atleast they don't have to worry about polio. I am raising adults, not children. Passing exams will make life easier, but it won't safeguard them against life.

I'm sorry but it is complete crap to just assume that everyone has the potential to be amazing at maths, english etc if they are pushed. Sure they can be better than they would without help and I would support and help my dc as much as I could with this but not everyone can be wonderful at everything.

If that was the case then your dc would no longer be above average they would just be average.

I am so glad that OP, niceguy and a few others dc are high flyers because it would be truly awful if one of your dc couldn't physically do better than a B/C in maths. How horrendous is your attitude that they are seen as failing if they get a B.

And as for an early start, I started teaching my DD to read very early due to the fact that she is so like me and I was reading before I was three. She is 9 now and although she can read, she is not the best at it. She has extra tuition at school and I do lots of work with her at home, visit the library and have a vast amount of books at home. It hasn't made a big difference at all.

You only have these big ideals because fortunately your dc match up to them.

nooka I had a very different experience.

I left univeristy (debt free), walked into a well paid job, bought a flat on 100% mortgage even though I'd been a work four weeks !

So very very different now!!!

That said, I'm not frightened of the future. Just realistic. And our financial situation means my DC will never have to go without anyhting to be honest. But I don't want them to have to rely on is as adults. Where's the pride in that?

"I'm sure many a MNer would consider you decidely pushy with leanings towards the tiger ..."

Wordfactory- as you know, both my children, particularly one of then, would probably be in different "places" now if that were true!

Yes. Sometimes I reflect that my father had a bit of a charmed entry into the word of work given that he got a third (although it was from Oxford) and yet had five or six interviews and several job offers from fairly prestigious companies. But he also grew up during the war, was bombed and rehomed, separated from his father for several years, experienced rationing and had to serve two years of national service before going to university. So perhaps not really that easy after all.