The article of NYTimes.com talks about most parents are in effort to pay for their children’s activities which can not guarantee their later success according to many experts. They pay for their children to take music lessons, gymnastics, horseback riding, tutoring, and summer-long residential camps, etc. In fact, they believe these experiences are not just for good grades, or are the key to the right college, but also are for the opportunities they give children. Somehow, not offering children every possible opportunity makes parents feel that they are in bad parenting. They believe that every child has a “hidden talent”, and they will fail their kids if they do not do everything possible to bring it to light. So a lot of parents are exhausted by their own overparenting which takes up much of their money, time, and emotional energy. However, there is no evidence that supports that sore of parental choices can be correlated at all with academic success according to Professor Levitt, a co-author of the New York Times blog Freakonomics. Professor Levitt also says that being rushed from one event to the other is just not the way most kids want to live their lives. Moreover, Professor Doherty suggests that parents have to move away from the idea that if they do not start children early, they will not reach their full potential.
I think this article is interesting because it describes a very common parenting issue in our society. Actually, I have known that a lot of my friends and relatives just like most parents think good parenting is to give their children everything possible. They believe that a myriad of skills are very important to their kids’ future success. One of their kids starts her drawing class when she is only 3 years old. As a parent, I think that there is no single answer for the question of how we should do so we can help our kids get a better future.
