This came up most obviously in questions of skipping ahead on a subject. When the topic came up, they defaulted to resistance, not because they didn’t believe in the kids, but because they did not trust the parent’s. When it was right for the kid, they were all in.
The school in question does the full run of Pre-K through 12, with 4 schools, each with their own leadership and vibe. When he got to middle school, a little bit of achievement bullshit started showing up, but nothing untoward. So we rolled him into the high school, full of trust.
The thing we didn’t realize, because it was just starting, was that the high school was a real pivot from the rest of the school. I understand this was not always so, but apparently they had looked at the bottom line and decided that a shift toward sports was better for enrollment.
I’m sure it was a good choice for the school, but because the schools are separate, we had no idea this was going on, and the leadership at the HS still *talked* like nothing had changed. So, Freshman year was a ride.
It was not all bad. The teaching staff hadn’t changed much, and the individual teachers were still great. But the level of support they were getting from the administration was obviously thinning, and that shift showed up in other places.
We discussed pulling him at the end of that year, but he was unwilling to give up his friend group, and we respected that. Which unfortunately laid the groundwork for a story that SO MANY G&T kids know: the one about the teacher who crushed my love for math.
It’s a tale as old as time, so I won’t dwell on the specifics, except to say that this kid, who had loved math and had a talent for it ended up hating and fearing math and became convinced he was clearly no good at it. It was heartbreaking, and part of why we pulled him out midyear.
We got him to another school and, while I think my wife might disagree with the term, we focused the rest of the year on decontamination. Because while the math mattered, it wasn’t JUST the math.
At one point, the kid had looked around at his friends rushing on their Ivy League paths and had declared he was uninterested in the rat race, and was looking to do more of a “rat jog”, and I always thought that was super healthy of him.
"Rat Jog" is now firmly embedded in my lexicon. See also: "Rat Treading Water" and "Ratslide".
But what we hadn’t realized, boiling frog style, was that the race was not so easily escaped. High school had been all high stakes and HUGE homework load, and even for a kid without executive function challenges, it was overwhelming.
I developed a lot of sympathy for apparent helicopter parents in that time. There are still the annoying ones who are pushing their own vision on the kid, but a lot of them are just trying to keep up with all the things you MUST do for the child.