Skip to main content

To a worm, anything above dirt level seems pretty lofty

I couldn’t resist posting this interesting little tidbit from a slate.com article that kind of sums up the impact parents can actually have on their child:

“… if live in a small city or town, or out in the country, you’re probably not. And the difference is information and your sense of the possible—what you know about, what you learn from the experiences of people around you. Hoxby followed up with an experiment in which she showed that just sending high school seniors 75 pages of information about selective schools could boost their admission rates from about 30 percent to 54 percent.”

The quote addresses the likelihood of someone applying to elite colleges and notes that the poor and especially those from outside big cities often don’t bother applying to those schools, despite the fact that colleges would often accept these types of applicants.  Push your kid into “Super Kindergarten” all you want; stress out about their college acceptances for 20 years and their employment for 30; the reality is that just giving them information about what they can do raises their likelihood of doing it by 24 percent.  This is why I counsel parents to relax, enjoy their kids and simply give them a world where anything and everything is possible.

Its all about the sense of possible you instill in your child.  Smart or of average intelligence, rich or poor, if your child thinks he can accomplish big things, he is more likely to try.  He might not succeed, but we all fail from time to time.  And then again, he just might succeed.  If you live an impoverished life in Podunk, USA, and surround yourself with people who think Podunk is the end-all and be-all, then your child probably going to apply to Podunk U, or nearby Backwoods U, and not Harvard.  Despite this, Harvard might be looking for just such a candidate.  But it can’t accept what those who don’t apply.

To bring this fully around back to the title:  This isn’t about pushing your child (worm) to Harvard, its about raising them in an atmosphere where going above ground and beyond is a possibility, even if it isn’t the road they eventually choose.

Some of this is genetics, I’m sure.  Worms like the dirt; there isn’t much for them above ground but being eaten by birds, baked in the sun or stepped on.  Some of us are risk taking, adventure seeking, positive people who would apply to Harvard and don’t mind taking on adventure, while some of us are genetically built to enjoy life in Podunk.  Nothing is wrong with either life, necessarily.  But if you are going to college, and can get a free ride to Harvard, I don’t know why you’d choose Podunk U over it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is Mocking Redheads Bullying? If Not, What Is?

Its Super Bowl time, and since my team didn't make it, I haven't been paying very close attention.  But I got to talking with Aaron Gouveia on Twitter after I noticed one of his tweets about how a redhead would never QB a team to said Super Bowl.  Essentially, Aaron was mocking redheads.  My team doesn't have a redheaded QB, so we are safe (for now!), but I mentioned to him that this might fall under the term of bullying.  Aaron, in case you don't know, is rightfully well known in the Daddy-bloggersphere for his excellent  Daddy Files blog.  Seriously, go read it now,  and follow @DaddyFiles on Twitter.  And before I really get going on this rant, let me say: I get it.  Even as great as Gouveia is, he probably can't hold candle to the prestige, money and social status of a Pro-Bowl NFL player like Andy Dalton.  Andy Dalton could never do another thing in the NFL and probably still have more name recognition, money and power than Gouveia ever will.  This isn't e

My Kids Believe Some Wild Things

First off, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. It is the holiday season, so this is going to be a quick and fun post. If you want something more serious, you can look my struggles with my daughter's self esteem  here , my blah attitude about the death of cursive here , and why I'm a very bad person here . All kids believe in some clearly wild ideas. Santa. The tooth fairy. Heck, some parents believe vaccines cause disease, so its hard to blame the kids. But mine might be taking it to new levels. For instance, my one son will repeatedly tell me how I'm the best Dad he knows. Its sweet. And gosh, its hard to deny. But I'm also pretty much the only Dad he knows. I guess his other point of reference is the Dad from Peppa Pig. Have you seen that guy? He's a half shaven, rotound pig with the manners you might expect of such a guy. Its a bit surprising he isn't usually adorned with a can of beer in his hand and food stains on his clothing. This suddenly sounds li

NIGHTMARE: Three Kids; One Invite

Its a triplet parents worst nightmare, really. I only have triplets, so most of what I;m about to say about singletons is conjecture and assumption, but here goes: I imagine that when you have three kids of different ages its easy when only one of them is invited to a birthday party. Any younger child is probably interested in where an older sibling is going, but is easily refocused. Older children probably just don't care what a younger child is doing, but to the extent they are invested, I'd think its easy to explain to them. After all, they are probably in different schools, or at least different grades. They have different teachers, different classmates, and while they may share some friends, those are largely different as well. Not so with triplets When you have three kids all the same age they attend the same  school; often in the same class (as ours do). So when only one of them receives an invite, as our daughter did, its hard not  to feel slighted. After all, t