To worry I'm not pushy enough

[cherrycrumblecustard]

I had very pushy parents and I always vowed I wouldn't be the same, but I'm worried I might be setting my DC up to underachieve or fail.

I don't insist on homework being done, and I don't really ask/fuss about levels or anything like that. I guess that's okay for primary but should I try to get more involved as secondary looms closer?

Well cherry if you don't want to change anything, who on God's Green Earth start a thread saying you're worried?

Did you just want pats on the head from randomers on the internet? Yes, Op, homework is silly. Yes, OP, you're the bestest parent ever. Yes, OP, all these pushy parents are raising unhappy children.

That is not an exceptional parenting decision. Again there is your black and white dichotomy. As if parents who are by your definition 'pushy' stop loving them or telling them when they love them when they don't succeed. How absurd.

When kids do badly, you can be disappointed. You can say honestly 'you didn't work hard enough and I think you can do better. Try harder next time.' Or you can say 'I know you tried hard but is there anything you would do differently so your efforts matched your result?' That kind of gentle and constructive feedback has NOTHING to do with love. In fact NOT telling them that, not criticising them in a gentle loving way and opening them up to the possibility that they could be wrong/ they could do better has long term consequences. Which are AS damaging as the mother who hounded you.
You can't see that because you are slightly blinded by your own experience.

Haircut you know you're being quite rude to me. Because when I started the thread I didn't know if I was being unreasonable. But some of the responses have made me realise - no, that's not me, that's not how I do things.

Luchi I'd do all that. But then not go on about it.

I just don't see what I should really be doing that differently

Why are you worried enough to start a thread in aibu then? Clearly you know you are not doing something you should be.

Yes, I thought I was, but I don't think even if I wanted to change now I could.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has started a thread in a moment of doubting themselves and then sort of come round :)

It's very important not to have a knee jerk reaction to our own childhoods when making decisions on parenting

I couldnt agree more its hard of course as we are all our own childhoods and you see comments on here all the time " we just did what our parents did"

Esp over FC - " we never had him, it didn't hurt us" no separate evaluation of the situation at all - just trotting out the same.
I have friends DC who were never pushed their Proffesor DF said he was pushed and exams are meaningless but now he has DC who are deeply unhappy they were never helped to reach their potential.

We all must try and be as fluid as we can and treat our dc as individuals who will need totally different things to us, its hard, we all fall back into childhood ways but we need to look at it all objectively.

green with any luck your DC will be pretty self sufficient by then.

I found that mine were pretty good at keeping themselves motivated for the most part.
But they did need help juggling it all - as I say, these were the old style GCSEs though. DD had a shit load of exams and controlled assessments. DS less so because he did IGCSE.

Elf it is hard of course, but all we can do is try.

As I say, rigid thinking and actions rarely end well.

cherry not remotely rude.

So at secondary school, you are going to take no interest in their homework, not insist it is done, and pay no attention to what level they are at or whether they are achieving anything at school?

Good luck with that.

I'm not going to insist it's done, if they want to talk to me about it that's fine. Levels seem largely made up as they go along anyway. Thanks for your help :)

My parents were pushy, in that they had high expectations of me and academic success was prioritised in our house - I knew I could always get out of doing the washing up by saying I had homework to do! They didn't punish me or if I did badly or anything like that though.

Maybe it wouldn't have suited all children, but I thrived under the pressure, and I believe that my adult life has been better and easier because of my strong academic record. For example, I found it easy to get a good job after many years out of the workplace as a SAHM.

My primary age DC are bright kids, and I'd hate to see them wasting their potential.

However, at the end of the day there's no right answer to this. We all parent differently

"And they are then at an age to motivate themselves."

Ha ha ha ha. Wishful thinking. I suggest you look at the year 11 thread. You will find that not all year 11s are self motivated, conscientious and hard working. I had to push encourage DD a lot during GCSE revision.

You can't assume that your child is like you.

"They are also at one of the most complex human stages - physically and emotionally. They need lots of support."

I agree GetAHairCut, except DD wasn't as motivated as your offspring, and needed a lot of encouragement. She has really low self esteem as a result of being bullied and needed to stay at her school for 6th form. She needed the right results to do so, so not studying for her GCSEs was not an option.

"I'm not going to insist it's done, if they want to talk to me about it that's fine. Levels seem largely made up as they go along anyway."

So why did you start this thread then?

I've explained, if you read above.

Yes, you have. This voice telling you you should be doing more will get louder and louder, you know.

"This voice telling you you should be doing more will get louder and louder, you know"

I think you are right. I was never on at DD to do homework at primary school, but as she progressed through secondary school it became more and more important.

Education and the education system has changed a lot since I was at school. Due to ofsted reports and league tables schools are under a huge amount of pressure to get their students to reach their potential, and this involves doing homework and handing it in on time among other things.

nickname none of us can predict exactly how our DC will be/react in new situations.
External factors play a part ( as you've found).
The past is a good indicator of the future but only a fool relies on that.

I think there is an element of confusion between revision and homework. I fully concede that revision may be set as a homework, but really, it doesn't need to be explicitly stated. I'd happily help my DC revise for their exams, if I could, although sometimes it can cause more harm than good in a misguided 'trying to help' way. I'd bribe encourage them to attend any revision sessions offered by the school, make sure they'd had breakfast before their exams, those sorts of things.

I'm not a 'showing a total lack of interest' parent at all. But I had a father who used to punch the table and roar at me for not grasping a concept when I was four. My primary school teacher indicated my maths wasn't very good (it wasn't) and my life then had a private tutor in it and extra work on maths and my mum endlessly pestering the school for more work for me, more, more, more. She must have been a complete pain in the arse. In y7, I copied the maths paper of the girl sitting next to me and got in the top set. I carried on copying everybody throughout y7 and then someone twigged and moved me down a set. They rang my mum to tell me and honestly I am not joking my mum made a bigger drama about it than when I found out she had terminal cancer three years later. She made me sit down on the sofa and took my hands in hers and started SOBBING but not actually crying and then whispered 'you've been moved down a set in maths!' She smacked me and said she was ashamed of me and tried to get my dad to smack me but he refused. My brother also tried to hang himself by the fish pond when he was in year 8 as he got moved down TWO sets. The horror.

Of course, it was all totally counterproductive as I just learned to be sneaky and copy other girls' work, in maths and science, which were my weak points, when I was younger, so it looked like i was working very hard. Then as I got older and stroppier I just gave up. I used to spend maths lessons writing out song lyrics as I'd been moved back into the top set due to my mother making an almighty fuss just before I went into year 10 and I think once the GCSEs started it was easier to keep me there. The weird thing was I actually did well in my GCSEs, I needed quite a bit of help with maths because I missed so many basic concepts and I am still useless at retaining information and there's a lot of basic stuff I can't do. But I passed, and I got quite a few A*s.

I think I'll take some ideas from the thread, but I'm definitely not going to sit with my children, unless they ask me to, but I will ask if there's anything they aren't sure of I might be able to help with or ask their dad if it's maths as chances are I won't be able to remember!

There is an in between!

I was never "encouraged" to do homework, never "encouraged" to stick at anything . Parents took very little interest in my schooling or social activities.
So I scrapped by with Ds and Cs in my gcse's and quit college. I had no outside interests, my only after school activity was watching TV
......I never saw school as anything important and when it comes to doing any kind of training or qualification now I find it very hard to apply myself.

Ultimately you get to an age when school work is the child's responsibility but they need to be taught what a responsibility it is and why it's important. You are also teaching them life skills by getting them to apply themselves to something.
There's no need to be pushy or overbearing about it but to show no interest and just shrug off homework is irresponsible.

The thing is, I don't see school as that important. Yes, qualifications are great but in all truth and honesty I know a lot of people with mediocre GCSEs who ultimately ended up doing very well for themselves, thank you very much. Probably a lot happier than me.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra just for you

cherry It sounds like your parents were way OTT. I can assure you that I am nothing like that. DD had a maths tutor for a few months in year 11 only because she had a crap maths teacher. She was in the top set, but struggled to keep up. She had the tutor so he could explain the concepts to her and she could "get" them at her own pace. As a result her marks shot up and she passed the mock with an A and was entered for iGCSE maths in the January, which she passed with an A.

It was simply a means to an end and was worth every penny. She did spend the Christmas holidays practising past papers nearly every day, but when it came to the exam she knew she has done well and completed the papers in well under the time allowed.

At GCSE level practising past papers is enormously helpful, not just for understanding what is required, but for time planning and organisation.

Please don't let your experience with your parents affect your children's education negatively.

"The thing is, I don't see school as that important. Yes, qualifications are great but in all truth and honesty I know a lot of people with mediocre GCSEs who ultimately ended up doing very well for themselves, thank you very much. Probably a lot happier than me."

Remember that your dc are not you: they are not the reverse of you either. They are completely different individuals living in a completely different era: you can't know what will be important to them either by looking at what was important to you or what was useless. All you can do is encourage them to enjoy working and not being over-fussy about the significance of every single little thing they do.

Your experience sounds absolutely horrendous but it has nothing to do with education. It is about your parents being abusive. Imagine they had been abusive about eating instead and hit you when you wouldn't eat your carrots. Would you draw the conclusion that food doesn't matter and allow your dc to live off hamburgers and swiss rolls to make up for what happened to you? Or would you say, "this is irrelevant, we're going to look at what might be a sensible option for you, now"?

My dh had very much the same attitude as you re GSCE's; he got into a top uni with some poor grades and minimal revision, so he imagined that was how it was.

Ds who tried a similar experiment last year has been refused to do any of the A-levels he wanted, indeed any academic A-levels at all, and is having to resit maths. And to crown this, there has just been an announcement that the career he wanted is going to become a degree programme. Of course he may be very happy doing something that does not require qualifications. But even he sees that it would have been better to have had more choice.

Cherry, it's clear you had an appalling upbringing which has left lasting consequences, and that your parents' abusive behaviour centred on education, which has left you deeply uneasy about school-related matters. But I do agree with others that you need to try to divorce your own past and related hangups (which we all have, in spades) from your attitude to your own children's education, or risk limiting their lives in serious ways.

The thing is, I don't see school as that important. Yes, qualifications are great but in all truth and honesty I know a lot of people with mediocre GCSEs who ultimately ended up doing very well for themselves, thank you very much. Probably a lot happier than me.

Here I think you are being defensive about what you see as your own educational shortcomings. It simply isn't true that school 'isn't that important'. The number of children for whom school is largely an irrelevance after basic literacy and numeracy because of, say, a particular talent or entrepreneurial ability, is vanishingly small, and when you say you know people with mediocre GCSE who are 'doing very well for themselves', what do you mean? How much they earn? That's hardly the only factor. If your children learn from their parents to regard school as unimportant, they are closing themselves off at a terribly young age from all kinds of careers and adult lives which require school and university qualifications. That may not be a path they want to take, but I don't think that it should be closed off from them before they're mature enough to have thought about what kinds of adult lives they want to have. Having a career you genuinely love is one of the major factors in adult happiness.

I'm saying this as someone with her own insecurities around her children's education - my parents weren't literate, and were never able to help with homework when I was little, and actively tried to encourage me to leave school early. A combination of flukes and stubbornness got me to university, and I ended up with multiple postgraduate degrees - but now that my son is at school, I have no experience of what is 'normal' as regards parental help and involvement.

Education clearly is important, I assume you have received medical care at some point in your life.

Whilst you don't always need good qualifications to do well, there is very little knowledge that wouldn't have a positive impact on your life. Even if that's 'just' being able to enjoy a book on a particular subject without having to put it down and look stuff up.

Knowledge is power. The more educated you are the less reliant you are on others.