Why are so many Mumsnetters like this and how representative are they of parents in general?

[Ilvergate]

Why are many of the posters on here so well -informed and pushy about the educational system for the benefit of their kids? (Not necessarily a bad thing).

Ie they seem to know so much about Oxbridge from admissions details like what to prioritise and how to perform at interview; private vs grammar schools etc details; knowing about the best tutors for their kids; being well-informed about A-level choice and GCSE choice etc.

It’s almost like they went to Oxbridge themselves or work there!

I must admit I have grown to resent my parents because of this. Neither of them went to university; neither knew anything about A-levels/GCSEs in terms of being able to give me advice about which to choose or which university to apply for; neither could give any Oxbridgey advice to me; I went to a state school even though there was a local grammar school that was well-performing that I perhaps could have gained a place at but my parents were clueless about the 11+ etc.

Obviously they want/wanted the best for me but it has been more a case of me having to specifically ask them to get a private tutor if I needed one rather than them actively seeking one; or, if at the time of the 11+ I had been aware of it, it would have been a case of me telling them about it and asking them to help me acquire the tools to prepare for it rather than them guiding me.

I’m just wondering are the posters on here representative of the majority of parents in the country or are they just special? Were their parents the same for them or are they being different for the sake of their children?

You’re looking at a self selecting pool of people though. I don’t know anything about Oxbridge or 11+ or private school bursaries so I don’t post on those threads that talk about that. People who do know post on them, so it looks like “everyone” knows when really you’ve just walked into a room where people have and direct contact with Oxbridge or have researched about it and are sharing the things that they do know.

This.
People will offer to help with things they know something about.

I had my dc a long time ago, so I don't try and give advice on TTC or breastfeeding or how to make up bottles or weaning, as I don't have up to date knowledge.
There are some lovely experts over on the Education threads who know a lot about admissions and appeals for schools. People who haven't been involved in that don't tend to post there, so it would look, at surface level as though "everyone" knows about admissions and appeal.
Quite often there are threads about employment rights and especially maternity leave - I kind of suspect the people that reply, are people who have recently been through similar, or HR people, or employment lawyers or maybe Union reps. So, once again, the people posting on those threads, will be knowledgeable (on the whole!) about that subject.

Neither of my parents went to university. My dad left school at 14. They both saw education as the route to greater things - I was privately educated (but v much the poor kid) and encouraged to be a lawyer (as they have loads of money). My parents didn’t know all the stuff you describe but they bothered to find out. There was no grammar or good state where I lived so they did the best they could for me but in the end I had to work it out for myself. It’s easier than ever now to find out this stuff. ChatGPT will tell you or you can ask on a forum like this. My dc is applying for uni, I have been v invested in what they needs to do for a strong application. I’m not an expert in the field they want to study but the information is out there and freely available for everyone.

I was the first person in my family to go to university. My mum was obsessed with me taking french at gcse. My school didn't insist on pupils taking french or german at gcse. She tried to make me do german too but school intervened. I was crap at german and i probably would have failed it at gcse. I took history instead and i got a b. I took english lit at a level to please my mum. After the first year of my a levels i decided to stop been a people pleaser. I dropped english lit as i hated it. I don't regret upsetting my mum. If i had continued with english lit like my mum wanted i probably wouldn't have picked up a book again. Then i wouldn't have got far at university.

Such a good question. My mother was a pushy parent and I am too. Must be in the blood.

Did your parents then try to claim credit for you getting into Oxford and brag to others?

Good for them quite frankly. Can’t see why the problem is as long as their children are thriving. My mum would have loved me to have gone to Oxbridge but it wasn’t for me so I didn’t apply and she was fine with it. Same for my children now. Are they academic enough- yes but not sure it’s for them.

Bragging to who exactly?

The nearest school to where we live is a good one.

I grew up in a slum. The nearest school was notorious for fights, truancy and early pregnancies, had burnt-out staff, and never sent anyone on to university. Quite a few of my former classmates have done prison time for drug offences, and some are dead.

Yes, my siblings feel, as I do, that my parents were not suited to being parents. I’m the only one of us who has chosen to have a child.

It’s not our parents’ faults, obviously. Both came from deprived, dysfunctional backgrounds, lost one parent very young, had been taken out of school by the widowed parent very young, and had no idea how to cope with the world. We grew up with not enough food, space, clothes or attention. I was parenting them from an early age, helping them with firms, shopping etc, and giving them money from my first jobs.

It was an utterly miserable way to grow up.

@BananaPeels Often the dc do thrive but some don't & unfortunately that can be ignored/overlooked.

. . . . er, George Abaraonye anyone?

Juliette, is that you?
You accepted your place at Oxford then?

You will find there are posters with a great deal of knowledge on more or less every subject under the sun on Mumsnet if you ask the right questions/read the appropriate threads.

It's a huge sight with hundreds of thousands of members - if you can avoid the fake threads, troll threads and stupid question threads - you will find all sorts of useful information. It's what keeps me here.

My mother was a teenager when she had me and dropped out of high school. She stopped attending my parents evenings at some point mid secondary school.

I'm educated to a post graduate level, my own child has private tutoring for maths and is learning an instrument.

I think a lot of us seek to do better by our children than we experienced ourselves.

I really dislike the way people nowadays reflect on their upbringing and decide they are a victim of their parents who clearly parented in perfectly normal ways. It’s almost like people deliberately look for things to be angry at their parents about or to blame them for their own choices. I’m not talking about people that experienced actual abuse or neglect here. This trend of resenting your parents for not being perfect is kind of ridiculous.

Because no one comes on here to post "I can't be arsed with my kids education because I am too busy watching daytime TV".

If they did you might find those posts outnumbered the posts of the people highly invested in their kids education.

Normal? No. You’re right that MN has a particular stream of people in this area. ‘Sharp elbows’ captures it. I come from an huge obsessively academic family who prioritise education over practically anything else. It looks slightly different in each bit of the family to us, but to others we probably all look identical. I think I was very chilled about ds’s education compared to the rest of my family, but that still translated into being in the local library with 6 week old ds reading about secondary school choices, working backwards from that to primary schools, and then asking at baby/toddler groups about the local options. I wasn’t happy with what I heard about the nearest primary, so I went there and applied to be one of the clerks of the governing body so I could find out more. This is minimally normal in my family. Most of us live where we live because of schools. My aunt was a teacher who went into educational publishing. When my parents weren’t happy with my primary, she tipped them off about another primary 7 miles away that was much better. My parents set up a complex series of lifts shared with friends’ parents who had similar views, and I went off to that school.

I have relatives who have researched every possible private school bursary option in the south of England; who have taken toddlers to music provision every week with a view to getting into choir schools at a discount aged 8. It goes on and university is certainly a highly expected outcome. If you look closely there is more variety than at first glance, but I’ve no doubt that we are outliers at least in the non-immigrant population. Trouble is, we see every day what doing this stuff achieves for us, but it’s hard to remember the decades of backup in doing it we have from our cultural capital.

I agree @MaturingCheeseball- the internet makes research much easier.
I did not go to school in this country and I’m a widow so when my kids reached the age of GCSEs it was totally new to me. But A levels are completely different and I had to learn about them fast (and I hate the system here - restrictive, unfair and not fit for purpose). My first child is not academic and went to a vocational college but my DD is and applied to Cambridge. Wanting to support both in their choices I learned as much as I could , partly from threads on MN.
My own parents were highly educated but had no idea about the system in the country we grew up in and I don’t recall them really guiding us much, though there (US) you take a wide variety of subjects until you leave high school so it wasn’t needed in terms of what subjects to take or revising for ‘do or die’ exams. So I don’t resent them not taking more of an active role.
My DH was the first in his family to go to uni and he just decided on his own - I don’t think his parents even knew where he applied. He went to Oxford. But I imagine the process was more straightforward 40 odd years ago.

Without going into Oxbridge details, surely
private vs grammar schools etc details; knowing about the best tutors for their kids; being well-informed about A-level choice and GCSE choice etc.

that's just being a parent?
Yes, pretty much all the parents I know are knowledgeable on the subject, they research and they made choices for little ones, and at least discuss with the older ones.

People research schools, catchment areas, and move accordingly when they can.

I am hoping it's only a minority who doesn't care about their kids, schools and education and have on interest on any of it.

why wouldn't you know about this? why wouldn't you care? That should be the weird thing, not the other way round.

I think most people are somewhere in the middle. I know people who learned all the tricks and tools and got their kids bursaries to elite schools, and parents who just send their kids to whatever school and don't place any stock in academics regardless of their children's strengths. Parents who enrol their children in 5 million extracurriculars and parents who let their kids sit on iPads.

I definitely want my kids to have the best start academically and to fulfil their potential but I'm not obsessive about it.

My parents were not interested in my education and actually tried to discourage me from doing A levels and going to university. It was quite hard having to navigate it all on my own, especially back in the 90s with no internet, so I wanted to be different for my children. At each stage they’ve reached, I have read up on things, asked others for advice etc, so that I have the knowledge to help them out. All of my friends have done the same. As we’ve gone through it, if I can help someone else out, I will share what I know. I have no idea whether it’s the norm, but it’s the parent I wanted to be.

I was so on my own. I wanted to go to university and my parents wanted it for me but they didn’t know anything about how to go about it. In the end it was up to me and some help from a wonderful woman at a women’s centre and I basically hustled my way onto a course as a mature student. I didn’t blame Mum and Dad - they were working class people of a generation where you didn’t go to university unless you were well into middle class territory

1. it is much easier to be an informed parent these days
2. confirmation bias. This is something of interest to you, so you notice these parents. There are just as many who are completely clueless about helping their child through the general university process at all if they even support attendance.

Both my parents left school at 14 but my DDad was adamant that we would all go to university. Obviously the system is very different now but I think that, because he broke through that expectation barrier and I went to uni, it was easier for me to advise my DD.
She also had very good advice from her grammar school and I think some schools invest more in it because having successful pupils adds to its reputation. Sadly, not all schools have this and it's down to that expectation barrier again.
I think there are also companies that will try to take advantage of the gap and will sell uni experiences. Sadly, I know someone who was misled in this way and it didn't help.

I’m not sure when you went to university @Ilvergate but what’s also changed is how interested parents are in the minutiae of their children’s lives. There was also high trust in schools and teachers. My parents and the parents of all around me with the exception of a very few who had tutors (which we all thought was very weird) just took the view that you send them to your nearest school which was bound to be good enough, and make them go in every day and then the teachers would do the rest. And if you should have been going to university then it would be sorted out largely by guidance from the teachers. That was very normal standard parenting then, parents micromanaging their 17 years olds applications to specific universities was absolutely not a thing.