It's not enough that you've got to be filling out preschool applications before your morning sickness ends. No, if you want your kid to not suck succeed in life, it's all about college. And parents are shelling out $40,000 or more to hire a coach to get their kid into the right college.
The secret? It's all about branding.
A savvy coach can assess your kid's interests, help him build an impressive resume and high school class load, and hone and fine-tune him into becoming everything he can be, and more.
I completely relate to the incredible pressure that begins in middle school to get your kid in the right "track" so they can be positioned into taking the right classes in high school and pulling the grades necessary and having the right summer job and volunteering for the right causes. Just reading this Business Week article caused me to hyperventilate a little: I have a kid who just started middle school; he's in 6th grade and I'm already thinking of what he'll be doing in high school and beyond.
But what happened to letting kids be kids? About letting them stumble a little along the way, helping them up afterward of course, but learning to make decisions? About trying on different things to see what they really like to do? Choosing a college major was painful for me at 17; does a kid really know what he wants to do for the rest of his life at, say, 12, so he'll be okay with the branding and the honing and the fine-tuning? Or are most kids simply going to go along with whatever someone tells them, and then wake up one morning fifteen years later to find out they really didn't want that MBA after all?
Are we putting too much pressure on our kids, and adding to that with these ridiculous coaches?
Frankly, I'm a bit torn on this one. I have a smart kid. He'll probably do well at whatever he chooses, and I'd like to support that, encourage his interests and help him build his potential. We're already talking about him skipping a grade next year. I'm a parent like all of you, and as a parent I want my kid to be happy and do well at whatever he chooses, and help him get there. But where do I draw the line? I haven't got an extra $40K to blow on a coach, fortunately, but plenty of helicopterish parents will likely get themselves even deeper into debt to do what they think is best for their kids.
We talk about slowing down as adults, parents, and families. We talk about building priorities and letting go of things that don't matter. We talk about focusing on what's really important in our lives. I think we should start with our kids, so maybe they don't have to go through the same sort of introspective, life-altering process that we did.
