Wow, this is so sad. I grew up in Europe in the 90s with parents who pretty much let me do whatever I wanted as long as I was a well-behaved child/teenager and getting reasonable school grades.
At 6 years old I was literally biking by the river or wandering in the woods with my friends after school for hours on end. Every day was an exciting adventure without any adult supervision, just random groups of 2-10 kids who would gather in the afternoon to play together. The rule was "home by dinner or there won't be any dinner for you". I never did any extracurricular activity, ever.
This did not prevent me from going to a great university in my country, get my master in Computer Engineering, graduating in the top 5% of my class, have a curriculum good enough to legally immigrate to the US, and working at several tech companies including FAANG, making high 6 figures now.
I would never give away those wonderful memories and early life experiences for some random extracurricular activity just to "stand out" later on, I do believe such freedom helped form my character to a much greater extent than any scripted activity would have.
I'll shout it from the rooftops: Down with helicopter parenting!
Independence, life skills, and fun stem from the freedom to explore on one's own. If anything parents, should be constantly nudging and encouraging kids to be more independent than is typically expected by:
1. Letting them have some unstructured, unsupervised time, especially out in the neighborhood.
2. Not automatically doing or thinking for them, especially by answering advice questions with questions that encourage reflection and independent decision-making.
3. Expect them to help with chores and needs self-service, pushing back against the expectation that parents are the forever barbers, waiters, and maids while the kids are on permanent vacation.
You're going to have to be somewhat careful or forward thinking to keep those same benefits for your kids going forward, I'm afraid. I made the opposite move and I see kids playing outside far more often here in Finland than I ever did in the States, and I grew up in a quite cozy little suburb.
In my darker moments I fear this may be one of those things where the tradeoffs between a high performance society and a take-it-easy culture just can't be squared. But then I remember that it's more likely downstream of other, more transient issues in American culture - the ever present fear of getting cancelled, the heavily bike-hostile ecosystem, etc. It's worth fighting to get back.
Younger children in Finland do play outside more than younger children in the USA do these days. However, the linked article is about teen mental health, and Finland has a pretty bad track record for that, too. Loads of Finnish teenagers are walled off indoors, with social media their main outlet.
> This did not prevent me from going to a great university in my country, get my master in Computer Engineering, have a curriculum good enough to immigrate to the US, and working at several tech companies including FAANG, making high 6 figures now.
The key question is more, could you do that today and would you sacrifice that to give your kids that childhood? Would your grades and lack of extracurriculars have earned you admission in this year's cohort? Is that path still really available?
I am 9 years out from the university admissions game, so still pretty young, but some time has passed. I would not be a competitive applicant today for many of the same programs I was admitted to back then.
High school was by far the most stressful time of my life and the fun part is, it would have had to have had more pressure to be where I am today.
> I would not be a competitive applicant today for many of the same programs I was admitted to back then.
Disclaimer: I live in the US but didn’t grow up here. I also grew up in the 90s.
In my experience, in higher education the prestige of the school has a smaller impact on learning than most people seem to think. Mostly, it seems to function as networking and a badge on your resume which can open the next door.
But once you have a bit of experience, more doors will open. In a few years, people care more about what you worked with than what school you went to, even if it’s an Ivy for instance.
Plus, working at smaller companies is a much faster way to learn than faang, imo. Sure, you get good at politics, perf reviews, and learn some best practices, but in terms of domain knowledge and practicing decision making, faang is terribly inefficient for “growth”. I wish I had worked more at smaller companies/freelancing, because frankly most of big corp was a waste of time (although money is good).
what is the point of growth if not to make more money?
you could quit your faang job and work as a janitor while hacking projects on the side if so inclined. except one has a pathway to 500k+ and the other does not.
> what is the point of growth if not to make more money?
I’d definitely swap those two, for life in general. (Depending on what you mean by growth, which is why I quoted it, because I don’t really subscribe to the implicitly assumed linear progression model.)
Anyway, I’d be the first to say money is important, because of what it lets you do. Similarly, the potential of earning money in the future (should it be needed) provides financial safety, and having faang on resume helps with that. But money also has an aggressive diminishing returns curve for what most people do with it, including me.
A lot of young people are concerned that they have to be competitive early to not have doors close on them, which is what I’m arguing is less true than they are mostly told. Especially for tech. So I was mainly arguing that sacrificing childhood to be molded in the senseless game of early credentialsm and extracurriculars is a tactically meh choice in most cases, and that’s excluding the emotional abuse itself.
> you could quit your faang job and work as a janitor while hacking projects on the side if so inclined.
This is a really good point that people miss. Sure, the (insert birth year here) childhood seems really nice in retrospect, but many of the realities of life have changed, and someone growing up with that kind of childhood today will not necessarily have the same outcomes as back then.
At 6 years old I was literally biking by the river or wandering in the woods with my friends after school for hours on end. Every day was an exciting adventure without any adult supervision, just random groups of 2-10 kids who would gather in the afternoon to play together. The rule was "home by dinner or there won't be any dinner for you". I never did any extracurricular activity, ever.
This did not prevent me from going to a great university in my country, get my master in Computer Engineering, graduating in the top 5% of my class, have a curriculum good enough to legally immigrate to the US, and working at several tech companies including FAANG, making high 6 figures now.
I would never give away those wonderful memories and early life experiences for some random extracurricular activity just to "stand out" later on, I do believe such freedom helped form my character to a much greater extent than any scripted activity would have.