Published on 12, July, 2020
My parents were the opposite of so called ‘tiger parents’. The type of parents who throw a hissy fit if their child fails to come 1st in every class. My parents were very indifferent when my academic performance nose dived around the age of 9.5. It’s hard to tell which is worst ‘tiger parents’ or parents like mine were.
It should’ve been a red flag to investigate what was going on, as my intelligence level was significantly above my academic performance. Executive functioning becomes increasingly important when it comes to how well a person does academically. It being a better indicator of academic performance than IQ in school age children.
Mine wasn’t,and still isn’t, good. That's not at all surprising given there's never been any help and support for it.
TheCatWoman said:If you came from a working class family then nobody really cared
Yup, that was my family. They couldn't understand why I didn't want to spend my life working in a shop or hairdressing or having babies (with or without being married). I wanted to get out and experience the world, learn lots of things, move away from home. That was kick-started when I went to uni.
Mine weren't pushy academically, but they have been personally, and not in a way that has had a positive impact.
My parents were both very intelligent , but for differing reasons chose to not go to university. My father was from a lower middle class background. He got a scholarship to King Edward's Birmingham . My mother was raised from the age of 7 by her mother. Her mother had worked as a nurse. My parents met while working at the Foreign office. They weren't the kind of parents who thought girls were just baby making fodder. Out of my brother,sister, and me, my sister is the one who's done best in life. The only one who's got anywhere near job wise to how my father did. She's the only one of us with a degree.
I don't think Tiger Parenting is a good thing, but nor is the opposite, I think in the UK attitudes to education are very class based. If you came from a working class family then nobody really cared, I feel that for me and my contemporaries our life paths were decided for us by schools from an early age, I don't think I was ever given an IQ test at school, but then I was a girl so my future was to be decorative for my future husband and pop out babies. At secondary school, some teachers said there was no point in teaching girls as we'd all go off and have babies.
My parents would show concern if my school report wasn't good enough, but I think that was more that they were concerned about "what the neighbours would think" than any concern for my future. My cousin, who's 10 years older than me, wasn't allowed to go to grammar school or to study A levels, because my uncle and grandfather decided, that "they would become not good enough for him if he was educated". One of the first things my Dad said to me when I told him I was going to uni in my 40's, was 'don't get to clever or no man will want you'.
Many girls were failed at the 11+ to keep up the fiction of boys being more intelligent, this disadvantaged whole cohorts of women and probably working class boys too. Many parents were very basically educated especially if they'd grown during the war, they didn't understand what their children were being taught or why, you went to school, left and went into the same or similar job as your parents. If you didn't do so well at school then you swept floors etc, mechanisation has revealed the weaknesses in our education system and how people were educated for the local industries in your town, whether that was mining, ship building, or factory.
Learning difficulties didn't exist when I was at school, you were clever, could do better, or thick.
I am sorry that your parents were indifferent.
Mine weren't pushy, but also weren't indifferent either. They knew there were subjects that I really struggled with, and subjects that I was reasonably OK with. As long as I worked to the best of my abilities, got my homework done, and didn't end up in trouble at school, they were fine.
Whilst they had encouraged me to learn to read at a very young age, I think it was fairly obvious to my parents that although I read books aimed at much older children, and seemed mature for my age, I was never going to be a Grade A student and savant.