DH putting too much pressure on DS’s education

[artylondon]

Good morning everyone - it’s my first time posting, looking for some advice.

My DH and I live in London with our lovely DS, 12.
Of course I’m biased, but I’m really proud of DS, who is a friendly, generally very happy nearly-teenager. He is bright and really articulate and engaged in conversation, but he has never been very focused at school or particularly interested with more fact-based subjects like Sciences & History. No learning difficulties, but he has always struggled with Maths particularly.

However…my DH has always been much more concerned by his academic record. He’s from a very posh, very high-achieving family, where everyone is Oxford-educated and went to the same very intense private schools. He thinks DS needs more focus / structure / tutoring to do well. This is particularly intense where we live (much more DH’s natural background) where a lot of parents pay for tutoring for exams and entrance to competitive schools. I’m sure Mnetters are familiar! It’s coming to a crux as DS moves to senior school next year.

DH’s family are also, I think, putting a lot of pressure on DH to do this and are paying for school fees. I obviously want a good life for DS too, but I think it’s fine for him to enjoy his strengths and just to get what he needs in school to live a full life when he is older.

I’m from a much more ordinary background and this feels ridiculous and too much pressure, but it feels incredibly normalised for people like DH.

My DH is otherwise close with DS and they have a really good relationship. This is the main point of tension.

Is your DH super successful -just wondering if the grand parents are paying the school fees?

I would choose his next school very carefully - is he looking to board?

There are many amazing schools that have incredible creative departments - hopefully those are on your short list.

Does your son engage with you when you talk about social/political issues? One of the reasons to study subjects like History or Science is so that you have a good grounding to be able to discuss and reason about those issues.

I used to be a tutor for kids about your son's age and I used to get them to do things like, say, design our own city but we have to think about how the plumbing will work! Should we just have open sewers in the street? Remember how we read about that in our history lesson? Why wouldn't we do that? Even though you think it would be funny, Jeremy... Yes that's right, germs, we learnt about bacteria in science last week didn't we?

I think my point is, is there some kind of tutoring which isn't hothouse exam prep style but does push your son a little more by meeting him at his level? I would also look into specifically a tutor (and school!) with a track record of engaging boys. It's fashionable to say boys and girls learn the same way but I see it's already being suggested that your happy middling boy who doesn't concentrate 100% at school might have SEN and, well, he might, but most schools are also really not designed for 12yo boys...

maybe SEN would explain less than top grades.

Yes, that's exactly what I was getting at. It's a product of his own upbringing which, again, is really sad to me. Your worth being so tightly linked to academic achievement & earning potential. I'd wager your comparatively humble background was more loving & emotionally supportive than his was.

No need to put your son through that too, there's a happy medium here you just need to be brave & assertive - they are not better than you & your input is not worth less than theirs just cos they can fund fancy things & throw money at tutors etc. Families like that can be intimidating AF!

Keep being grounded & being you - advocate for your arty son whilst impressing on him that it's important he's trying his best, not what the outcome is.

You may be OK if you come off the rails before uni, but not if you mess up uni. Quite rightly, you can't get loan after loan, but if you can afford a degree without a loan, arguably you have made a success of your life (or have rich parents)

Some interesting thoughts here to me. I went to a school where only top grades were good enough and although I was fine academically I'm not sure it was great for my worldview or sense of self esteem. I have quite a reasonable professional job which fits well round the children but doesn't pay very well. It's an arrangement that works for our family situation (zero family childcare help, rural area so not awash with in person jobs) but I have a lingering sense of failure that I'm not a prime minister/top neuroscientist/director of the RSC etc etc which I'm sure is partly to do with the school ethos of being top at everything....

Sorry if this comes across as rude- it’s not intended that way but just an observation. From your posts it sounds as though you’ve pursued a creative outlets full time (I.e you don’t have a career alongside those pursuits), that do not financially support the family. Everyone I know in a similar situation has come from or ended up in a financially privileged background by birth or marriage, where they don’t worry about whether their income from those creative pursuits is sufficient to feed and house themselves and their family.

But the person financing their life is often from the academic/ professional/ stable career family stock that you describe your DH being from. I will always side with your DH’s perhaps overly pressurised attitude to education over your completely relaxed attitude, as coming from an immigrant family )with no money, no connections, and no privilege) excellent academics meant freedom and opportunities, and was the closest thing we had to levelling the privilege gap for free.

It is a privilege to know the importance of education, and have the top tutors, schools and academic paths at your son’s disposal, yet despite this knowledge and options, choose not to encourage him to pursue academic success while in education. That means you’re not worried about the risk that the academic options you decline for him today, won’t put him at risk of living on the breadline in future .

Personally for me, I would always want to set up my kids academically, and give them a solid professional backup plan to their creative leanings, as I know what excelling academically has done for me and my family. For you, if you can afford a tutor your son likes for the core subjects then please make the effort to improve his understanding and grades in those areas. When he’s older he might resent that you didn’t push him to improve in such a key area. You’re the adult- you need to make that choice for him.

Your last point is so salient.

It's the equivalent of teaching someone to drive by just doing the test over & over & over. So they pass brilliantly, sure, but the moment they are on the road alone they don't actually have the ability to drive at all.

Your about to hit the teen years and all the developing an identity trickiness that your ds will have to go through....
Please please impress upon your dh that he needs somehow to let go of what ds should be, what his family want him to be and love him for who he really is. It's so so damaging to a young persons self esteem and relationship patterns to feel they aren't good enough in some way. No matter how hard your dh proffeses to care for ds if he's holding onto a fictional ideal of who he should be it will bleed through and your ds will pick up on this. He needs to talk through with someone and unpick done of this. Could you consider finding a suitably qualified couples therapist for a neutral space?

I will always side with your DH’s perhaps overly pressurised attitude to education over your completely relaxed attitude, as coming from an immigrant family )with no money, no connections, and no privilege) excellent academics meant freedom and opportunities, and was the closest thing we had to levelling the privilege gap for free.

I think you make good points, and I absolutely agree with your idea further down of encouraging a back-up plan. But a solid back-up plan doesn't have to mean (and may well, in the future, look less and less like) a six-figure career recruited for from the milkround (as we used to call it back in the day). For an artist, it may be teaching, or gallery/museum education, or art therapy, or any one of a number of related careers. In those sorts of fields (IMO and E) it's those with a sense of vocation/those who love what they do that do best.

I don't quite understand your argument. OP's son is not yet at uni, nowhere near one. And he has his entire life to figure out what he wants to do. You claimed in your post that school is his one and only chance to get right and I am saying it is not the case. He can take a different path and uni is always going to be available to him if and when he is ready. Even better, he can get a full maintenance loan as an adult and not worry about parental income.
If he gets pushed into academic route now when he has little desire, he is far more likely to fail at uni too.

Not everyone is academic. Your husband needs to understand this OP.

This 100%

He very well could go into the Arts safe in the knowledge he has your DH and his wider family’s finances to fall back on. Sounds harsh but that is the reality.
My friends who have music degrees love the jobs and vocations but it is easy to do so when their husbands have finance-based careers and entirely fund million pound house and multiple holidays.

Just keep his options open and support him in reaching his potential across all subjects, whatever that maybe.

I think this is an important point and as pp pointed out, this arrangement of "creative spouse/ money machine spouse" is quite gendered and the OP's DS will be on the wrong side of it. He's unlikely to make the deal his mother has. Children who grow up with wealth often don't fully appreciate that in order to maintain that lifestyle in adulthood, certain career choices will need to made, unless the bank of mum and dad is infinitely generous, which in many cases it's not, especially if it's felt that the children aren't doing much to fill their own coffers. Possibly the children don't care and are happy to have a lower standard of living than their parents but it can be quite a hard adjustment for many.

I'm saying it's really difficult and not to be entered in to lightly. You have managed it and are to be congratulated. But the options that were available 40 years ago aren't there now.

I think there is also an assumption in this thread that "creative" means "making art" which can be pretty gendered. I know a lot of boys and young men who express that creativity through for example engineering or entrepreneurship, building a business up from scratch, getting something off the ground. (Before anyone complains, yes of course girls can too, I'm a female engineer-turned-businesswoman, but that's how I met all these hundreds of men...!)

Point is - it's not "suited-up finance bro" or "sensitive-soul free-spirited artist", which is a very common gendered pairing among people I know but statistically probably not where OP's son will end up, so she shouldn't lean too far into that scenario and should see what she can do to prepare him for some of these other more common scenarios.

My parents did this with maths. I failed it 4 times before I was allowed to give it up. Repeating the exam definitely didn’t have the desired effect that my parents hoped for, because I was quite proud of the fact that my grade was worse the last time I failed it. I told everyone about it and wore it like a badge of honour much to the dismay of my school and family!

Yes, absolutely but engineering requires maths, physics.
Business requires maths but I am sure there will be many who can cite self taught success stories but these I suspect are relatively few in number and would be a lot easier to achieve with a sound foundation at school.

I think we are saying the same thing though.
OP and her DH are probably coming at the same issue from opposite ends and somewhere in between lies the answer for their son.

Yes I think we agree - my point is more "don't give your son the idea that if he does maths he'll end up in boring finance like daddy" when there are lots of interesting applications of maths that might be more interesting to him, and make sure his school/tutors are working to make those connections and possibilities clear for him!

Hi OP

My first thought reading your posts is - if your son is at a prep, surely they are giving you a realistic steer as to which schools he is likely to get into and which would suit him?

Realistically, if the school are telling you he is on a trajectory for 5s and 6 / 7s at GCSE, he will simply not get into the London Day Schools - St Paul's, Latymer Upper, Kings Wimbledon, CLBS, Hampton, Highgate etc.

In these schools, virtually nobody gets a 6 at GCSE. It's like 95% 9-7 every year.

I think your husband may be labouring under a delusion that entry into these schools is on a par with when he was there, 20 or 30 years ago. I think he (and his family) need a reality check.

It makes no difference where his family may or may not have gone to school. There is nothing any prep school can do to 'get him in.' Those days are long gone.

Boys who sit for those type of schools are top of their primary or prep schools across the board. And even then, the majority will be rejected. The competition in London is like nowhere else and its insane.

If you go and look round the schools these days, you will see that the majority are children of European, Indian, Chinese or other non 100% British-born parents - all on trajectories for top grades.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but I've seen too many dads who assume their kids will go into the same schools they went to. But it's a different world now. It doesn't make one jot of difference as to where he thinks his son should go - it's all about where he will actually get in.

I know this because I have had 2 DC go through 2 of the super-selective day schools. I have another one who, like your DS, was in a trajectory for 5s, but she was / is highly creative. She had to travel quite far out of Central London to find a school she could get into a 11 plus (boarding was not something we would consider). She did end up with average grades. But - she went to art school, then uni and is now having an amazing time on a placement year in Japan. Her course has been just as exciting and celebrated as the other two who ended up at Oxbridge. I still have one to go.

If I were you, I'd have a reality check with your DH and make sure he's actually listening to the advice of the prep. There are schools that will get the best out of children who are more 'average' in terms of academic profile, but still enable them to shine in other areas. Don't let your DH insist on your DS sitting exams for schools he won't get into ( even with intensive tutoring) simply because he himself went there. The prep will likely refuse to write him a reference anyway if they don't support the application. Find a more all-rounder school and let your son flourish in his own way. As long as he's happy, he'll do great. Good luck!

I don’t think low level tutoring for a term to brush up will do any harm, but trying to squeeze him into a school where he is not academically suited would be pretty miserable. Seek your prep school’s advice.

I kind of have a DS who was in a similar situation.

My exH's family were all engineering/physics/stem heavy.

My DS when younger wanted to be a medic. He took a levels in bio chem and maths. He nearly failed his English (we had to get a tutor in) and didn't do MFL at all. He went to a senior school (not London) known for developing the whole child and he really enjoyed it - running, rowing, etc etc.

He didn't get any offers for medicine and then changed his mind and decided he wanted to do music. We'd always been a musical family but my ExH saw it as a degree that would lead to low paid jobs and was horrified and wanted him to do science. The rows were horrendous.

My ExH's family although engineering/physicsy were not rich and my ExH did a degree in computer science and then went into finance and got properly rich. He was very upset that DS didn't seem to value money as much as he did.

Long story short DS did a music degree with performance. He's now a year post graduate and is teaching his instrument two days a week in a school and applying for post grad. I have given him significant financial support though.

One strong theory is that children who show a skill are encouraged - they like the praise, all their activities gifts hobbies etc veer that direction so they improve and then everyone’s super pleased how ‘talented’ they are

your ds is still young!! There’s loads of time for interests to shift and adapt but both parents have to be willing for that to happen. I’d defy any child not to have an interest in science after going to natural history museum or eureka!!
Haven’t finished thread yet but one way in is also to connect hobbies and connect something he’s finding challenging to something he loves. Could dh research the intersection of (for example) maths and art? Loads of scope there to explore together and it would make maths really meaningful to your ds which creates value. As you’ve said elsewhere maybe also the business aspects; be open about what your dh has contributed to your business as (I’m assuming) as result of a different focus on his education and how complementary those skills are

I'm not entirely convinced about being able to encourage interests. I really love animals and we took one of ours to a major zoo as a toddler and he still had absolutely zero interest in animals... His favourite thing was a tractor in an empty enclosure that was being rebuilt. The other child was just interested in any living thing from an early age...

Hello, thank you again for your really helpful messages ! It’s just been a very busy day yesterday, but I’m hoping to reply this evening :-)

Hello, I just wanted to do a quick update. I did talk with DH about all of this and he agrees that he needs to relax a bit. He felt under a lot of pressure to achieve, and doesn’t want to pass this on to our son in the same way. We’re going to look for Maths tutors who will work more effectively with our DS as well.
I really appreciate the broader conversation on here, which I hope other people will find interesting too. And that it’s fine being married to someone with a different upbringing & ideas - it just takes a bit longer to work things out!