What is the worst example of pushy parenting you have witnessed?
This question was inspired by WillWorkForChocolate’s recent question about allowing her daughters to skip their gymnastics class every once in a while and how some people think she is wrong for doing so.
I have worked in sporting environments for some years now and see lots of children of varying talents (some incredible, some not so much) play/train here. I often have to deal with parents who believe their children are more talented than they are and feel they should be in a “higher ability group” than the one they are currently in. Having to break it to the parents that their child is not as gifted as they believe is difficult but, for the child’s sake, we have to do it, politely, of course.
There are some parents that will push their children to do well, sometimes at the expense of the child’s health and happiness.
What is the most extreme example of pushy parenting you have witnessed? It doesn’t have to be in the sporting world.
Before anyone asks, I have seen Toddlers and Tiaras and it makes me cringe. However, I am after more personal accounts.
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When I was a teenager, I was very active in karate. There was one little girl, she was maybe 6, that had the pushiest parents I’ve ever seen. The little girl had been in karate since she was 4 and was there several nights a week. At one point, I was giving her private lessons, so I spent quite a bit of time with her. It wasn’t enough for her to just being doing it either, she had to be the best. When there were tournaments, they really pushed her and would get upset if she didn’t win. On the nights she wasn’t at karate, she had piano lessons, gymnastics, and swimming. All of that on top of school. She never talked about playing outside with her friends and I don’t think she ever did. It really seemed like every minute of her time outside of school was accounted for with one activity or another. She was started to get tired of karate and had mentioned several times that she didn’t want to be there and her parents never let her have a break. When I stopped going to karate, she was still there just as much as before, if not more.
There’s another mom at our gymnastics place who has her 13 year old daughter taking 12 hours of instruction per week. 12 hours! Monday through Thursday, 3 hours per day. How does that kid find time to do all her homework, eat dinner, wash her hair, and still have time to be a kid? That just seems pretty damn pushy to me.
@WillWorkForChocolate They don’t get to be “kids.” At least, not by your definition. Also, kids like this, according to my daughter, read text books for fun. She asked one of those high achieving boys what he did for fun, and that’s what he said.
My son’s piano teacher is constantly talking about a pair students who moved from Australia to take lessons with her. They are ages 7 and 9, siblings, and they practice five or six hours a day and are home schooled.
My son isn’t interested in doing that. I don’t want him to either. I think half an hour to 45 minutes a day of practicing is reasonable. He thinks that is too much, but given that I have to be with him that whole period of time, it’s time we get to work together. It’s not just making him do something that is hard for him. It is hard. But then, he always complains that everything is hard. The whole point is to learn that if you work each day, you will make hard things easy, over time.
I want him to learn piano because I think it is an important skill—as important as reading or math or anything else. It may be even more important, because music can give you a lot of joy throughout your life in ways that reading can not. It is, at least for me, a spiritual practice.
But I am glad that summer vacation is almost here, and we can stop working so hard for a couple of months.
On a similar theme to @WillWorkForChocolate, my daughters went to ballet classes with a little girl who did classical ballet two days a week, jazz on another day, tap dancing, singing, drama lessons on the other days. The kid had something on every day of the week. She also went to private school and had homework to do. The mother justified this with “oh but she loves it!” I am sure she did but I think as parents we have a duty of care to make sure our children have balance in their lives and that means time just to play and be kids.
@Leanne1986 I think so. He loves the fun stuff: jamming together or with other people. He’s good at it, too. It’s the preparation that he balks at. But I never wanted to work very hard when I was his age, either. I think that one of the major jobs for parents is to provide their children with structure and discipline. I also think that is not too popular in the United States, these days.
As a teen (junior year), one of my good friends died of an inoperable brain tumor. As to be expected, her best friend was completely devastated. This best friend had what we’d now call Tiger parents. They insisted she not miss any school except for the funeral…they almost didn’t allow her to go to the reception that followed.
She was expected to be in school the day of her bestie’s passing (most of us went home in a group when we received the news).
A few of the parents of other friends pooled money and had us all talk to a grief counselor a couple of times. The other parents encouraged us to all spend extra time with one another for the next few months. Parents planned groups get togethers and general ‘hang-out’ times at their homes.
The bestie was not permitted by her parents to take part in any of it. It broke our hearts because we all knew how much she was hurting and how badly she needed to let out her emotions.
This is a very touchy subject, I recently read about a couple who had a baby with a terminal illness. They made up a bucket list of the experiences they believed were essential for her age. One of the items was to taste a chocolate cupcake, and they gave her one. It looked to me like she hated it.
@YARNLADY I’m not sure that having your child taste chocolate cake is exactly pushy unless they really forced it on her. Parents give their kids new things to eat all the time, some they like, some they don’t.
I’ll take being tortured by chocolate any day!
I didn’t know about the tattooing – that’s downright disgusting.
OMG! I remember reading about them and thought the whole thing seemed off…that tat biz is BS. Who in their right mind does that to a baby?!
The fact that it’s fake means little to me. The photo ops were , IMO, out of control…as were the comments with the photos. Maybe that’s how they dealt with their own impending grief. The sucker and the cupcake were bizarre enough to me.
The baby died on April 30. I don’t begrudge them anything they did to raise awareness and money for SMA or to have memories with a dying baby. You never know until you walk in someone’s shoes. I would be the last to judge them.
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