stress from parents

[kasia]

what do your parents expect out of you? are you able to meet their expectations? are their expectations, in your opinion, reasonable or unreasonably high? how do they react if you cannot meet their expectations? how do they react when you can? do they provide incentives for you to do well? do they bribe you with money? (heh. my grandparents did.)

[deez nuts]

I didn't meet my parent's expectations. But, hey it's my life.

[tapestrybabe]

you see, the problem that i experience from my parents is NOT enough pressure. It's your life, do what you want to do... la di da da... so like yeah... it was my full decision to apply to grad school.... and its like this... i have no idea what i'm doing here now!!! At the moment i'm just going with the flow of things. And its like this... sometimes i wish my parents... instead of saying... its really all up to you... I wish they would say something more like... yeah, go for it.. thats what you should do,... or say no... dont do this, but how about doing this instead... like receiving a little more guidence from them... when it comes to trying to find direction in my directionless life at the moment.... rather than their all out general statement of oh well, its your life, your choice...and what not...

[Saiko]

I'll just say that I'm the black sheep of the family. And I like it.

[karizma]

>> not having parents has allowed me to make a lot of choices myself... i admit many choices ive made pertaining to school are mistakes and now i suffer the repercussions...but it is a good learning experience...having no ones expectations to live up to is detrimental because theres really no goals to meet...nothing really to achieve...id really like it if someone set some limits for me to break...but i cringe as i hear my friends complain about parents who nag about A minuses when they shouldve gotten an A or A+...and gripe about how they're neighbor's daughter's cousin-in-law's son got into harvard and all they got into was berkeley =/

[SunWuKong]

i think my parents expected me to go to college, but they never verbalized it because i myself always just assumed that i would, and i did. and they never verbalized that they wanted me to get good grades because i guess that was assumed too. they were just happy that i did go to college and got a good paying job afterwards because they've only graduated from highschool and have had to claw out a living all their lives. hell my father got kicked out of 4 different schools during his highschool years for being such a bad kid.

[artsfartsyjanet]

it doesn't matter b/c it's a double edged sword for me. If i don't do well, I'm never good enough. If I do well, there's still some stupid flaw that they'll try to find and say, "i'm not good enough." So, my philosophy is... I don't care what they think because I've surpassed their education level. I'm on my own. :blink:

[SunWuKong]

Originally posted by artsfartsyjanet@Sep 12 2002, 12:40 AM
it doesn't matter b/c it's a double edged sword for me. If i don't do well, I'm never good enough. If I do well, there's still some stupid flaw that they'll try to find and say, "i'm not good enough." So, my philosophy is... I don't care what they think because I've surpassed their education level. I'm on my own. :blink:
i think many asian kids have this problem with their parents that nothing is good enough for them. but as i understand it, they only want you to be the best. they're not telling you that you're "bad". they're telling you that you should do even better next time.

[artsfartsyjanet]

Originally posted by SunWuKung@Sep 12 2002, 02:21 AM
Originally posted by artsfartsyjanet@Sep 12 2002, 12:40 AM
it doesn't matter b/c it's a double edged sword for me. If i don't do well, I'm never good enough. If I do well, there's still some stupid flaw that they'll try to find and say, "i'm not good enough." So, my philosophy is... I don't care what they think because I've surpassed their education level. I'm on my own. :blink:
i think many asian kids have this problem with their parents that nothing is good enough for them. but as i understand it, they only want you to be the best. they're not telling you that you're "bad". they're telling you that you should do even better next time.
Well, I don't really appreciate that kind of authoritarian upbringing.... I don't blame them completely b/c it's pretty much etched in stone how they want to raise me, but I can choose whether to let their words make or break me. So, I lead my own life. They lead theirs ( but THINK they still have authority over my actions). I lived in my own house for over 6 years, and it's been great. I need that space from them before I engage in any intercultural communication....



<!--EDIT|artsfartsyjanet|Sep 12 2002, 07:42 AM-->

[kasia]

Originally posted by karizma@Sep 12 2002, 03:49 AM
>> not having parents has allowed me to make a lot of choices myself... i admit many choices ive made pertaining to school are mistakes and now i suffer the repercussions...but it is a good learning experience...having no ones expectations to live up to is detrimental because theres really no goals to meet...nothing really to achieve...id really like it if someone set some limits for me to break...but i cringe as i hear my friends complain about parents who nag about A minuses when they shouldve gotten an A or A+...and gripe about how they're neighbor's daughter's cousin-in-law's son got into harvard and all they got into was berkeley =/
it's not that you don't have parents period. it's just that they are not present to nag you. the funny thing is, my grades did not begin to improve until my grandfather died. after he passed, i felt like he was all of the sudden able to watch my every move. now that he's gone, i feel like i have to carry on all that he has achieved. and that has *increased* the amount of stress i feel. i guess my point is--whether they are here to explicitly tell us or not--we all know in our hearts what it is our parents want us to achieve. and meeting *that* expectation can be a goal, right?



<!--EDIT|kasia|Sep 13 2002, 07:56 AM-->

[CrX3183]

I never meet my parents expectations. Even whey i go the farthest you can possibly go, they somehow tell me to do more... <_< How can you possibly do better?

Does anyone else get the same treatment that i do?

[mydnyht]

They expect me to do the best that I can... and I do. What really upsets me is when friends of mine get B's or C's, and they're worried about it only because they know that their parents are going to flip... Especially my one friend, because her parents drink.

[unordinary.girl]

my parents have always been there to ask me about school, my grades, and stuff like that......

so yeah, basically always pressuring me to do well...

it usually stresses me out, because they ask me about that stuff everytime i see them and they totally expect me to be the perfect student and the perfect daughter.....

i guess you can say im the "bad seed" of the family, out of me and my 2 younger brothers.....LOL......but ive pretty much just depended on myself to get things done since i was 16 and old enough to work.

[artsfartsyjanet]

I don't know if I would've pushed myself as hard if my parents were democratic in terms of their parental style. In the past, I had the grades, the recognition, the ovation from the student body, the media coverage, the entire rigamarole.... but all that didn't seem to matter (at the time) because my parents always found some measly flaw to negate all of those rewards. Now, I could care less. Dayam it. B)

[angel nympho]

My parents are just happy that I got my life back on track after the whole drug thing.

[Adaon]

Well, my 'rents stress a lot like some of your parents stress. Grades, work, and such......fer me it prolly stemmed from the fact I was the adoring middle kid who watched over his lil brother and wanted to follow in his older sister's foot steps of getting into San Fran's best HS then go on to Berkeley.....then I grew a spine and "decided" what I wanted to do with my life, which was bike, drink, smoke up, hang with friends and just live......or so it was at the time.....til I became a Christian which makes matters worse in an atheist family, so being a black sheep who recovered from "slipping up" is worse than being a black sheep because I can just as easily fall back INTO old habits than I can to fight them.......some parents have that bad habit to see the worst in their kids, or at least to see only the worst case scenario so as not to be surprised in reality......what a load of bullocks.....

[nonamerasian]

My parents never pressured me about grades. Nevertheless, they were crazy about certain subjects, particularly when I was very young. The older I got, the less stress they put.

This is true about my dad to an extent, but this is especially true about my mom.

My mom would teach me multiplication and division even before preschool because she had high expectations in regards to math. My grades in the subject didn’t matter, but she didn’t understand why kids were “wasting years” (as she’d say) and weren’t learning the tables in the first years of school.

In third grade she’d make me practice dictation because she didn’t think it was stressed enough in American schools, but math with the subject that she liked to stress.

My dad would try to pressure me in regards to history, but he didn’t go all out like my mom, who could be torturous. He’d just plop these huge books in my arms and say read.

I don’t think I could ever reach my mom’s expectations in math unless I became a math major. It didn’t help that I failed a reasonably simple math Regents in high school.

Expectations were high, but not too high in my opinion. The only problem is that they weren’t good teachers.

If you can meet expectations, the attitude is that that’s what you are supposed to do. No praise or anything.

If you can’t meet it, you’re a dunce, pretty much.

My mom has refined her ways. She saw that one of her grands only had addition and subtraction for homework and decided to teach her multiplication and division, which she did in one day over a year ago and the child has retained everything.

Yesterday I heard her trying to coach the same child in algebra, lol.

They never used incentives.