THE GREAT PUSHY PARENT DIVIDE
The Children’s Tsar says relaxed Northern mums should be pushy like Southern parents. So is she right? Here two mothers battle it out — YOU be the judge ...
ANEW North-South divide has emerged — between parents who push and those who don’t. Earlier this week, Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England (and Leeds-based mother-of-one) warned that parents in the North need to get pushier, like those in the South East, if their offspring are to keep up.
For while Northern children did as well academically at primary school as their counterparts in the south, once they got to secondary school a gap in attainment opened up — and by the age of 16, northern children are lagging behind southern students.
But do Southerners really have the edge when it comes to child-raising? Two mothers, one a laissez-faire Yorkshirewoman and another self- confessed ‘pushy’ Londoner, go head-to-head . . . Helen Carroll, 48, is originally from Bradford and now lives in london with her husband Dillon, a university lecturer and their children Daniel 15, Isobel, 12 and Christian, eight. She says: AS A Yorkshirewoman living and raising her family in North London, i’m not in the least bit surprised by the distinction between these two very different approaches to getting children through their formative years.
one of my nephews, for instance, got into a grammar school in halifax, West Yorkshire, without so much as sitting a past paper.
meanwhile, in our neck of the woods, in an affluent area of North London, my husband and i are among a tiny minority of parents who haven’t paid for private tuition for our three children, or entered them for selective school tests.
And it’s not through lack of interest in academic success.
my husband, Dillon, has a doctorate, plus countless other letters after his name, and is a university department head.
i studied at journalism college, post A- level, rather than doing a degree, because i’d always had a clear idea of what i wanted to do.
But the difference between us and many of our Southern neighbours, it seems, is that we have faith in our children, their teachers and their comprehensive schools, to work out what it is they want, and need, to do and to carve a path towards it.
That’s not to say the children won’t fail along the way — of course they will.
Dillon and i have both experienced more than our fair share of failures, and both agree that we learnt far more from them than we would have done during a week with a super-tutor.
our children, as we were, are more able in some subjects than others and, rather than fretting about this, we see it as a helpful insight into the career paths they will be most suited to, and ultimately follow.
however, strengths and weaknesses seem to be anathema to middle- class parents in our capital city: if a child is falling behind classmates in a subject, the answer is to hire a specialist tutor.
School days may begin as a fun- filled whirl of playdates and ballpool parties but, as many parent raising children in the South-East of England will attest, a child’s last two years in primary can be an altogether less harmonious affair.
This is the period when sharp-elbowed tiger mums and dads avoid eye contact ‘ with the competition’ at pick-up and drop off, while doing everything in their power to get their precious children into the most prestigious local schools.
Whether it’s paying the equivalent of a second mortgage on tuition fees to prepare them for entrance exams at selective and grammar schools, or carting around clarinets and violins in the vain hope of securing a scholarship at a local independent, nothing is too much trouble.
Selective schools were established to serve the most academically able, who might otherwise not be sufficiently stretched in a mixed ability comprehensive. But only those whose parents can afford to pay for professional help to get them through the rigorous entrance exams — including tests in off- curricular verbal and non-verbal reasoning — get a look in these days.
This certainly goes some way to ensuring a string of A*s at the end of year 11, but it may make it harder for adolescents to work out their true strengths and, ultimately, become exceptional in their chosen field.
Even those all-rounders who secure a coveted place at one of the handful of entrance exam schools in our area can wilt under the pressure once they’re in, especially if their success was more about cramming than natural aptitude.
Anecdotally, i’ve heard from one mother, whose daughter suffered an eating disorder, that a significant number of girls on her daughter’s hospital ward were pupils at selective schools.
Still, i’ve felt inadequate in the face of parents who have been so heavily involved in their offspring’s homework and revision that they genuinely worry about how their children will manage without that input once at university.
our youngest, Christian, is still at primary school, so, of course, he often needs an adult sitting beside him to ensure he does his homework. But the older two, Daniel and isobel, manage their own workload with very occasional input from us, and only when requested by them.
Perhaps their homework would be to a higher standard if it was a joint effort, but, ultimately, self-reliance, selfmotivation, resourcefulness and confidence in their own ability and judgment are life skills that will prove more useful than good qualifications.
in the spirit of transparency, i must add that our youngest attends a primary school rated good by ofsted, and our older two are at an outstanding secondary school, recently listed in the top 250 state schools in the country, based on GCSE and A-level results.
To what extent this is down to great leadership and teaching, and what part pushy parents play in this exam success, is difficult to quantify. But there is no denying that intake is a significant factor, with houses in the immediate vicinity selling for £1-million-plus. The catchment keeps shrinking and, without a sibling in the school, living more than half a mile away as we do, our younger children would not have got places.
As its reputation grows, rumours abound of parents moving out of their family homes and temporarily renting flats close to the school to get their children in.
Never mind the private sessions in maths and English, these parents are passing on their most valuable lesson of all: how to survive as a member of the sharp-elbowed Southern middle class.
Perhaps there are areas in the North where this is also common practice, but i haven’t heard talk of it among my relatives and friends up there.
of course, like all good parents, we want the best for our children academically, but we have faith that they, with the support of their teachers will figure out what that is for themselves. We will always be behind them but, i’m sorry to disappoint you ms Longfield, we won’t be pushing. Writer and broadcaster anna May Mangan, 58, lives in london with her husband, Joe, 59, who’s a teacher. they have four children, who are all in their mid-20s — one is a mathemetician, two are doctors and the fourth a lawyer. For those parents living in the south, life is a one big bunfight to get the best for them. Sheer force of numbers means the competition for everything is
intense — just this year one third of parents in London did not get their first choice of secondary school — and if you can’t afford to buy your way out of sub- standard educational trouble, there are only two options left to you.
You can accept your lot and hope for the best, or you can push your way out of it. With all your might.
Why push? That’s simple — because these days no young person stumbles into a top university, work placement or career without beating off hordes of other applicants. They have to fight all the way, and before they can fight their own battles, they need you — their parent (and let’s face it, it’s normally down to the mother) to fight it for them. Yet, for some reason in the UK admitting to being ‘pushy’ is like admitting you’re doing something wrong.
This, to me, is utter madness. Any parent who makes the decision to actively not push their child is doing him or her a huge disservice.
It doesn’t matter where in the country you hail from, refusing to push your child is downright idiotic.
Yet, the word ‘pushy’ has somehow translated into vulgar and desperate, among the ‘ laissez faire’ classes.
Worse still are the politicians and luminaries who dictate about what’s best for everyone else’s children while dropping off their own to exclusive independent schools. Diane Abbott and Shami Chakrabarti are prime examples of this shocking hypocrisy.
Before Andy Murray became a tennis champion his hard-working tennis coach mother, Judy, was often seen cheering him on from the side- lines, and suffered a fair amount of criticism for pushing her son to succeed.
Yes, I’ve no doubt there were mornings when young Andy didn’t want to get out of bed, and wanted to hang out with his friends rather than train, yet she drove him on.
And now Andy is a winner. The best tennis player in the world, no less. To me, Judy is the ultimate super-Mum, she’s an inspiration to us all. I too, using a variety of means, helped my four children get top grades, excellent university places and do stand-out extra-curricular activities which has led to them all now having the careers of their dreams. They all own their own properties, too, which I see as a huge achievement.
Yet when I first shared my tips on driving children to success in a newspaper article, I was pilloried.
When I listed the extra-curricular classes my children were involved in (sports, drama, debating, chess club, science club and conversational French) I had a flood of nasty replies around the theme of how I was wrecking their childhood.
Many made the same plea: ‘Leave them alone, just let them be kids,’ and ‘No way would I do that. I just want my children to be happy.’
That’s such a cop out. Of course I want my children to be healthy, happy and loved — but I also want them to be fulfilled, solvent and smart. And getting a brilliant education is the only way to start.
By dashing around after school and at weekend doing extra-curricular classes I wasn’t beating my four children with a stick — I was giving them opportunities.
They mostly enjoyed their afterschool hours. And when they didn’t I would bribe them to enjoy them. So shoot me.
As a rebellious teen, one of my daughters kicked off about me sending her to a young playwrights’ course at a London theatre. We had almighty rows about her intention to abandon it halfway through. It took the promise of a mobile phone upgrade to persuade her to finish, and she has since admitted that the course is a standout on her CV.
If you just leave a child to their own devices, what happens if they choose to stay in their pyjamas, eat pizza and watch TV all day?
I didn’t want my four to graduate from the University of YouTube. So, when they chose their career paths we struck a deal that they’d revise and I’d research.
I couldn’t pass exams for them, or get a Duke of Edinburgh Award, or sit in front of a scary Oxbridge admission interview panel.
BUT I could get them ready for all the other things they will have to face when competing for opportunities. I trawled through prospectuses checking and double checking entry requirements. I visited universities and approached freshers in the street to find angles and loopholes in the admissions system.
I phoned Admissions Officers to try to discover what made a great application. On Sunday afternoons my husband, sister and I did mock interview training with them.
Some of the time they hated it and there were plenty of tears and flouncing. But later they grudgingly admitted it was good preparation.
They didn’t get into Oxford and Cambridge, but they all got into top universities.
Don’t ever assume because the school says your child is doing well that it means they are doing well enough. A pushy parent does their day job and then does the job of the school, too. Check homework, grades and never let a teacher write a reference without supplying them with a full list of your son or daughter’s achievements. Teenagers are often reticent. It’s a pushy parent’s job not to be.
So many parents will dismiss being pushy as completely unnecessary because, they claim, their wonderful son or daughter cracked GCSEs, A-Levels, university degree and glittering career, all on their own, without any help from anyone.
Well, if that’s the case (and there’s quite a lot of lying goes on around this field, in my experience), then I’d say that’s even more of a reason for parents of less-brilliant students to push harder, to compete with such stellar competition.
Yet of course, there are boundaries. The golden rule of pushy parenting is NEVER make a choice about their future for your children.
They must do that themselves, and then you fall in behind. Otherwise you will be forever herding cats. My son and three daughters are now all where they want to be and I am pushy and proud.
Northern Mums should catch on and catch up.