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Parents I think I dislike very strongly
Sep. 2nd, 2024 01:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly1. Dear Care and Feeding,
I have a 12-year-old who lives for choir and musical theater. She’s been taking piano lessons for four years and has never really been into it the way she is into singing.
She loves to play the piano, but she hates having to practice. I want her to keep taking piano lessons, because 1) It’s such a good companion to the choir stuff (if she decides to do music for a living, she’ll have a head start with already knowing piano and being able to read music—something they don’t study in her choir) 2) we have asked both our kids to pick and stick with a musical instrument and an organized sport or physical activity, and she has no interest in another instrument (or a sport for what it’s worth); 3) we believe strongly in the benefits of musicianship and of needing to practice and work at something. It also bothers me that her main argument for quitting piano is that her teacher makes her keep her fingernails shorter than she’d like them to be. I’m sure there are other reasons, but she’s a tween and that’s all she’s said out loud. In pretty much every other extracurricular, we’ve let the kids choose whether to participate and how much. Am I making my kid miserable because I regret quitting piano as a child? Is it reasonable to ask that the kids play music whether they want to or not?
—To Quit or Not to Quit
( Read more... )
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2. Dear Care and Feeding,
We have an 8-year-old daughter, “Jess,” who does a lot of extracurricular activities. She loves what she does, tries hard, and is relatively successful at them (she represented her school for athletics, she plays the piano well, she’s at the top of her class academically, and she has won a couple of local dance competitions). We have always encouraged her to try different things and will support her as long as she puts in lots of effort (never a problem). Jess has a close friend at school, “Mia,” who has quite a few overlapping activities. Mia’s parents’ motivations are quite different from ours.
They are highly competitive and have openly said that they are pushing Mia into all of these activities to get scholarships. Mia has an elaborate schedule for study, sport, and practice of instruments. There is a strong emphasis on coming in first in everything, and unfortunately, since our daughters share so many activities, Jess seems to have become a benchmark for Mia. When we socialize with the parents, they are incredibly supportive of Jess, always mentioning how well she performed and complimenting her work ethic, etc. It does come across as a little disingenuous, and they seem to be fishing for “tricks”—how we get Jess to study and train—but at least it is positive feedback in front of Jess. Unfortunately, Mia doesn’t have much of a social filter yet, and the messages she must be getting at home have turned her into the very definition of a bad sport. When Mia wins something, she will go on and on about how she is much better than Jess at whatever they were doing. When Jess wins something, she gets a breakdown analysis about why Mia “actually won” or “should have won” and Mia makes it clear Jess wasn’t really deserving of the win. This often comes with a blow-by-blow account about how their family had gone over video footage to determine that Mia was actually better. This has escalated in the last six months, and now we’re at the point that, after competitions that Mia has not even entered, she will provide commentary about how Jess did not deserve to win. To top it off, she has started to exclude Jess from social groups, and she has begun bullying Jess when she does well at something at school.
Jess would be happy to cut ties with Mia, although she is concerned about the social implications at school. She has voiced her sadness about how her friend does not support her and seems jealous all the time. What I want to know is this: Do we leave it at that? Helping her/supporting her in distancing herself from Mia, acknowledging that this is a toxic friendship, and moving on? Or should we talk to Mia’s parents about her behavior? If I were them, I would be horrified by what my daughter was saying and doing. She is certainly revealing a lot more than is probably intended from family discussions. I’d love to let them know exactly what Mia has been saying, and I wonder if we could mitigate the behavior with a little bit of parental intervention. I would hope that maybe we could at least limit the extent to which Mia excludes Jess at school. So should I say something? If so, what? I have no idea how to tell them that I know about all the negative things they have been saying behind our backs.
—Not That Competitive
( Read more... )
I have a 12-year-old who lives for choir and musical theater. She’s been taking piano lessons for four years and has never really been into it the way she is into singing.
She loves to play the piano, but she hates having to practice. I want her to keep taking piano lessons, because 1) It’s such a good companion to the choir stuff (if she decides to do music for a living, she’ll have a head start with already knowing piano and being able to read music—something they don’t study in her choir) 2) we have asked both our kids to pick and stick with a musical instrument and an organized sport or physical activity, and she has no interest in another instrument (or a sport for what it’s worth); 3) we believe strongly in the benefits of musicianship and of needing to practice and work at something. It also bothers me that her main argument for quitting piano is that her teacher makes her keep her fingernails shorter than she’d like them to be. I’m sure there are other reasons, but she’s a tween and that’s all she’s said out loud. In pretty much every other extracurricular, we’ve let the kids choose whether to participate and how much. Am I making my kid miserable because I regret quitting piano as a child? Is it reasonable to ask that the kids play music whether they want to or not?
—To Quit or Not to Quit
( Read more... )
2. Dear Care and Feeding,
We have an 8-year-old daughter, “Jess,” who does a lot of extracurricular activities. She loves what she does, tries hard, and is relatively successful at them (she represented her school for athletics, she plays the piano well, she’s at the top of her class academically, and she has won a couple of local dance competitions). We have always encouraged her to try different things and will support her as long as she puts in lots of effort (never a problem). Jess has a close friend at school, “Mia,” who has quite a few overlapping activities. Mia’s parents’ motivations are quite different from ours.
They are highly competitive and have openly said that they are pushing Mia into all of these activities to get scholarships. Mia has an elaborate schedule for study, sport, and practice of instruments. There is a strong emphasis on coming in first in everything, and unfortunately, since our daughters share so many activities, Jess seems to have become a benchmark for Mia. When we socialize with the parents, they are incredibly supportive of Jess, always mentioning how well she performed and complimenting her work ethic, etc. It does come across as a little disingenuous, and they seem to be fishing for “tricks”—how we get Jess to study and train—but at least it is positive feedback in front of Jess. Unfortunately, Mia doesn’t have much of a social filter yet, and the messages she must be getting at home have turned her into the very definition of a bad sport. When Mia wins something, she will go on and on about how she is much better than Jess at whatever they were doing. When Jess wins something, she gets a breakdown analysis about why Mia “actually won” or “should have won” and Mia makes it clear Jess wasn’t really deserving of the win. This often comes with a blow-by-blow account about how their family had gone over video footage to determine that Mia was actually better. This has escalated in the last six months, and now we’re at the point that, after competitions that Mia has not even entered, she will provide commentary about how Jess did not deserve to win. To top it off, she has started to exclude Jess from social groups, and she has begun bullying Jess when she does well at something at school.
Jess would be happy to cut ties with Mia, although she is concerned about the social implications at school. She has voiced her sadness about how her friend does not support her and seems jealous all the time. What I want to know is this: Do we leave it at that? Helping her/supporting her in distancing herself from Mia, acknowledging that this is a toxic friendship, and moving on? Or should we talk to Mia’s parents about her behavior? If I were them, I would be horrified by what my daughter was saying and doing. She is certainly revealing a lot more than is probably intended from family discussions. I’d love to let them know exactly what Mia has been saying, and I wonder if we could mitigate the behavior with a little bit of parental intervention. I would hope that maybe we could at least limit the extent to which Mia excludes Jess at school. So should I say something? If so, what? I have no idea how to tell them that I know about all the negative things they have been saying behind our backs.
—Not That Competitive
( Read more... )