If you are minted....

[FeralBeryl]

*What is your/ partner's career or job?
*
Not a TAAT more a TIBAT (inspired by a thread)

Someone has a monthly take home pay of £11k
Not going to lie, I fully intend to suddenly obtain the necessary qualifications overnight for whatever it is. sure there'll be an online course....

I know there will have been a great deal of sacrifice, no work home balance etc. I'm not wanting to judge at all-I'm enthralled

Please.

Writing in French is a nightmare, especially as Bobo say if you are not in a bilingual environment where it's seen as the norm to learn to write in your second language.

What I am finding fascinating is that I am actually doing what Bobo and Queen mention with my dcs even though we are on a much lower salary. (I'm thinking 'opportunity hoarding' there but also language, family organisation etc...).
I'm not sure what it makes me though...

Possibly Bobo. I am the sort of saddo who did an OU Arts degree when my kids were small because I felt like my brain was turning to mush (STEM degree originally).

Tinkly my mum has done that too when I left to go to Uni. She decided that it was the best time to start a new degree (whilst work full time still!).
She hasnt stopped. Not in a 'formal education' way but she is constantly reading on all subjects. Her current interest is the creating of the world, the bigbang etc.. and that's from someone who has/had no initial training in science at all.

You still have plenty of time for that :)

I'm afraid I don't have any good ideas for your DD, QueenJuggler. I'm sure camp is a good idea though I would tend towards France rather than Canada. Have you got those "Chouette" workbooks for practicing the
French primary curriculum? They are cheap and effective.

Scared it makes you invested in your DCs future - which might well be construed as opportunity hoarding.

It's important for us because of DH's extended French family - we want her to be able to enjoy her time with them when we get together (not as often as any of us would like). Plus I'm a complete dunce at languages - I've never ever managed to get past basic conversational or functional business stage, no matter how hard I tried.

I'm convinced that there are some neural pathways that are opened up by language acquisition in multiple forms/roots at an early age - and if you don't open those pathways then, you're doomed to be forever a language dunce like me (disclaimer, I have no neuroscience qualifications or knowledge at all, so this might be utter tosh!)

Bobochic we have Chouette, and use them a lot.

Canada was a rubbish idea - I was just swayed by the prospect of endless horse-riding amongst what looks like a gazillion acres of forest. I doubt it will do anything at all for her language acquisition!

It does highlight one thing for me though.
To get that sort of lifestyle, you can earn a lot of money but also pay a lot to have some help at home, right clothes and whatnot.
Or you can earn less money but have less outgoings and acheive a similar lifestyle.

This is something Ive actually looked at carefully.
Looking at outgoings in that way can give surprising insights, such as going to work to xx place not earning you any money at all despite the number of hours put in (Im thinking cost of transport, clothes, lunch bought there, childcare obvioulsy etc etc).

YY to some summer camps. They are hard to find though...

I feel I really ought to be able to recommend some sort of fantastic residential colonie de vacances for your DD, QueenJuggler, but the truth is that I am very wary of French-run residentials and my DD goes everywhere but France for summer camp. Does your DD ever go to stay with her French relatives on her own? Some sort of day camp might be all right.

God! Me and DP bring home 17 grand a year between us. You peopel are really lucky ...maybe us one day eh...

Scared this is very true indeed.

My mistake was choosing an industry where remaining mid-level isn't an option. You either keep swimming or you sink. There are always younger, fresher, newer thinkers coming out of grad schools all over the world to unseat the mid-level earners in our industry. It's only by getting to the top that you secure your place.

Would I advise my DD to choose such a career? Possibly. Possibly not. It isn't a bad life at all, it's a very enjoyable one if you like the work and like continuous learning. But it is a little exhausting at times.

ScaredFuture99 - I very much agree that going to work can be terribly expensive. And there are very interesting trade-offs to be made if you have the time to work them out. We moved recently and, while our housing costs have risen, our transport and food costs have dropped dramatically. We also gain huge amounts of time by living so centrally and this time is available to work.

Bobo my French MIL and all my DHs French relatives say exactly the same thing about French-run residentials!

Perhaps I just need to step away from the idea of camp entirely and pack her off to stay with some of her cousins for the some of the summer. She'd love it, I'm sure. Camp for me was a real experience when I was her age, though, and I would like her to have that same opportunity. Maybe camp for sports and family for language is the right way to go.

Goodness me, I have a whole new respect for the effort my DM must have put into raising us. It is far harder to organise all these things than I ever imagined possible!

If the opportunity is there I think cousins and some sort of activity course - riding/sailing/tennis/surfing - would be a good option to try at least once. You might also get a tutor to give your DD some private lessons to help with her writing - French summer holidays are quite long and lots of holiday locations will have teachers or students advertising lessons in the local boulangerie.

I think my DH didn't get the message about spending a lot on clothes. He wears Next Black or navy jeans and a Thomas Pink shirt day in and day out. He won't even buy ad event watch as he says he will get bored of it. To look at him nothing would suggest he's well off. Maybe because he works in IT the clothes aren't so important. I have some nice bits though, a luxury watch, diamond earrings, a big engagement ring and nice handbags but I kind of ruin it by dressing head to toe in Primark unless it's a special occasion.

Yes it dies depend a lot of which industry you are working in.

My DH is French and I would no more send my DC to a French colonie de vacances than I would send them to prison. Just sayin'!

IME high-flying women are attracted to those sectors where dressing up is part of the role.

Indeed, Afflicting

Re learning French grammar for writing etc, do either of you use the Saturday French schools which ar run for bilingual children, following the French curriculum? I'm in the Home Counties and have a couple of French friends - one used to take her children around 40 mins away to one on a Saturday morning and then set up a local one - only children with at least one native speaker parent can go and they have a great chance to mix with other French speaking children, as well as boosting their grammar hugely. Not easy though....3 hours on a Saturday, plus weekly homework.....but for my French friends for whom the development of their children's French to the level of a French education, it seems vital and is a real example of opportunity hoarding, if you like. I just can't remember what those schools are called, but I know they are accredited by some kind of French authority.

Love the phrase 'opportunity hoarding' by the way. It's the kind of thing some sharp elbowed middle class mums are good at, as well as the wealthy. I think too, of the people arranging fantastic work experience for their kids, volunteering experiences in this country and abroad, cookery courses in France, art appreciation fortnight in Italy, summer long exchanges to wherever........it reminds me of what a Grand Tour of Europe or Finishing school was supposed to achieve in the past. The thing is, some of the recipients of these wonderful opportunities are barely pleased to be doing the things, would rather lie in bed and go on social media etc....parents can do so much, but the kids needs that spark of interest and desire to really make the most of that.....and I guess opportunity helps to foster that, but there has to be something to work with in the first place. Guess that sometimes the children of the minted are a bit of disappointment to their parents (in the nicest possible way ...of course they love them) when they lack the drive and ambition that made the parents minted. Yes, those kids will have had great opportunities and doors opened, and yes th will probably get a good education and help with buying a house and inherit lots at some point, but unless they too have some drive, they probably won't be as rich as their parents.

The French CNED Saturday schools are really not "opportunity hoarding". To accuse parents who want to pass on their mother-tongue of denying opportunities to others (which is what "hoarding" means) for their own advantage is plain wrong.

Opportunity hoarding is a partner at McKinsey giving work experience to his school friend's student DC in return for his school friend giving work experience at Goldman Sachs to his DC.

I intended no kind of criticism at all, but was trying to be helpful, in response to the discussion about opportunities to improve writing.

And I don't take the phrase quite as narrowly as you do. I see it as seizing all of the opportunities which are available, which are limited in supply, so by seizing them others can't. Actually the French schools, in only being open to children with a French parent, surely are more opportunity hoarding than many things which are open to all who can manage to access them. This isn't a criticism - I can see why such classes are held only for children of native speakers. Isn't much opportunity 'hoarded' simply by virtue that it is extremely expensive to access much of it - so only small numbers can afford it. Yes, it can be parents doing fellow parents favours in return for similar, but that seems a very narrow definition.

I think it is very important to distinguish between "opportunity hoarding" and "education". It's all too easy to reduce extra curricular opportunities to "unfair advantage" and that opens the floodgates to egalitarianism,

Learning a second MT is a huge amount of work and incurs massive opportunity costs, over years.

I don't fully understand what you mean. I can see that for children of French parents, learning French formally, including the grammar for writing so that can later take French qualification if desired (which is what my 2 French friends hope their children will do, as well as taking English qualifications) isn't appropriate for pretty much all English children. I applaud their dedication to doing it and acknowledge that not all bilingual families do this.

What do you mean by 'reducing extra curricular opportunities to unfair advantage which opens the floodgates to egalitarianism'? (Especially the last part)

I'm not really making a judgement about giving children opportunities. Many many of the opportunities which the wealthy (and perhaps the not so wealthy) give their children are great things in lots of ways. They enrich children's lives, open their eyes to new things and opportunities, can give them a passion for something new, or a foot in the door to perhaps a school or university or job or social situation - the opportunities are clearly more than just extra curricular activities which are given....and are great. Surely there's no denying that some people can provide more of this stuff for their children than others......I'm not making a judgement about that to say it is fair or unfair, just a fact.

Key thing I don't understand from your post is the connection to egalitarianism. Opportunity hoarding is surely an attempt (however unwitting...although sometimes pretty conscious) to PREVENT egalitarianism and to boost the opportunities for ones own children.

Anyway, not quite the focus of the thread and I absolutely wasn't looking for a row about it, just trying to mention one route to French writing grammar that might not have been considered.

Basically, "opportunity hoarding" doesn't/shouldn't have the broader definition you were giving it upthread. If every opportunity that is not open to all and sundry gets decried as unfair or elitist (other, more popular terms for opportunity hoarding), there will always be those who wish to deny them to everyone.