Madeleine Levine on successful parenting

“The cost of this relentless drive to perform at unrealistically high levels is a generation of kids who resemble nothing so much as trauma victims,” Levine writes. “They become preoccupied with events that have passed — obsessing endlessly on a possible wrong answer or a missed opportunity. They are anxious and depressed and often self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Sleep is difficult and they walk around in a fog of exhaustion. Other kids simply fold their cards and refuse to play.”

...as parents and as a society, we’ve reached a tipping point, in which the long-dawning awareness that there’s something not quite right about our parenting is strengthening into a real desire for change. Families, their fortunes tracking the larger economy that encouraged so much of their excess, are crashing after bubble years in which they spent their every penny, and then some, on cultivating competitive greatness in their kids. Now exhausted, often disenchanted and (conveniently enough) broke, they’re reconsidering whether the mad chase was worth all the resources that sustained it.

-NYT

Another best-selling child psychologist chimes in about the dangers of obsessive, hyper-expectations parenting leaving even "successful" kids feeling burnt out, worthless, and unable to cope with adult challenges. I guess it's natural, but privileged US parents seem more concerned with the external indicators of their kids' success vs. harder-to-measure internal. The guest likens it to building a house, but being more concerned about the home decor instead of making sure the structure can actually stand. They love their kids and want them to do well, but they're taking the wrong approach and doing a disservice instead (a common theme for America in recent years - we mean well but we end up making it worse). And at least Levine dares to ask the obvious root question: are you doing all this crap for your kids, or yourself?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/raising-successful-children.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general (seriously one of the best article's I've ever read, and not just because I'm in agreement with her - it's amazingly written)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/teach-your-children-well-by-madeline-levine.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201208071000

The 1% are outliers, and not something we should all aspire to (and clearly not something we will all achieve). Yes that life has a lot of benefits and opens many doors, but what does that person (and their loved ones) sacrifice, often permanently, in order to get there? To some it's worth it, and to others maybe not - especially since attainment is not guaranteed regardless of how much extracurriculars/tutoring you do, what your degree says, and how great you think you are. All parents think they and their kids are "above average", but of course that is impossible. Most of us and our kids will be sub-rich and "normal". There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you are at peace with yourself. Easier said than done I know, and I feel inadequate about my professional and personal development almost every day (sometime justified, sometime foolish based on dumb social influences). I just hope those feelings don't lead me to bad behaviors described by Levine. And I would say that my control-freak dad was edging towards being a helicopter parent ahead of his time, but not that I blame him for all my issues. It's not the "losers" who are messed up, but this world's value system and economics that are perverse in my view (yes a critic would say, "of course a loser would blame the system to explain his failure"). Winners love and praise the systems that enabled them to thrive (Romney), and the opposite for the losers. What does that say about the system? Clearly it works for some but not all, though hard to judge its merits since we haven't really experienced a viable alternative, because those who profit from the system will resist reforms.