> When I became a parent, I felt the wonder and uncertainty that accompany the awesome responsibility of fatherhood. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: The childhood I devise for my two young daughters will look nothing like mine. They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.
I wonder if that does your kids or anyone else a favor. As someone in position similar to the author, I've chosen to Tiger parent my kids. As my Asian immigrant parents understood: money is really important. It matters so much that financial stress is a leading cause of divorce and people die because they don't have the money for proper healthcare. I don't want my kids to suffer for lack of money. Nor do I want them to feel like they can have their cake and eat it too because they can depend on their parents' money.
There's also a question of whether it helps anyone else. Our world is facing immense challenges. Many of the things cans we've been kicking down the road for these past decades are going to pile up on the generation to come. Their generation needs people slaving away in labs or in front of computers. That need might be existential. Your kids shouldn't get a pass on that just because they are privileged and their parents were well-off enough that they could be comfortable without necessarily striving.
> There's also a question of whether it helps anyone else. Our world is facing immense challenges. Many of the things cans we've been kicking down the road for these past decades are going to pile up on the generation to come. Their generation needs people slaving away in labs or in front of computers. That need might be existential. Your kids shouldn't get a pass on that just because they are privileged and their parents were well-off enough that they could be comfortable without necessarily striving.
IMHO that's overfitting, what worked for our parent might or might not work for us. I believe cultivating the right mindset, having the children think for themselves instead of forcing them to follow our footsteps, is the best way to prepare them for the uncertainty of the future.
There is a spectrum, of course. But at the end of the day, you have concrete choices to make. When picking classes for my five year old daughter's summer school, I can check the box for "Disney Princess" dancing or "Little Engineers."
You'd be better off taking such "arbeit vs. spiel" branches and flipping a coin to choose between them.
That way when your daughter is grown she is more likely to have a balanced set of experiences.
Also, at worst you'd become known as "that quirky parent who flips coins to choose between things." Whereas if you keep insisting on activities that sound like they'll increase her later earning potential, you will at worst create a nice size resentment in your daughter as she figures out what you're doing.
If I had asked her (this was last year), she would've chosen Princess dance. But I didn't (because she's five and what does she know) and signed her up for Little Engineers (and Little Chemist and the math classes, etc.) and she loved it. This year, I signed her up for Princess Dance the first week, then Little Engineers one of the other weeks. She enjoyed Princess dance, but asked if I had signed her up for Little Engineers because she was looking forward to that.
I wonder if that does your kids or anyone else a favor. As someone in position similar to the author, I've chosen to Tiger parent my kids. As my Asian immigrant parents understood: money is really important. It matters so much that financial stress is a leading cause of divorce and people die because they don't have the money for proper healthcare. I don't want my kids to suffer for lack of money. Nor do I want them to feel like they can have their cake and eat it too because they can depend on their parents' money.
There's also a question of whether it helps anyone else. Our world is facing immense challenges. Many of the things cans we've been kicking down the road for these past decades are going to pile up on the generation to come. Their generation needs people slaving away in labs or in front of computers. That need might be existential. Your kids shouldn't get a pass on that just because they are privileged and their parents were well-off enough that they could be comfortable without necessarily striving.