tiger parenting worked in that one case
These young women have significant advantages beyond their tiger mother.
It's probably your mother's fault if you don't get into Harvard. It's just as easy to have a baby with a Harvard alum as with anybody else. Once you get past the personality thing.
I stopped giving my (meager) annual alumni donation to the law school where the Tiger Mom and her self-absorbed husband teach, and sent an email to the alumni office saying, basically, how can I give money in good faith to the law school when its most prominent public faces are these two quasi-academic fraudster idiots? To my surprise, a very nice and honest guy from the alumni office wrote back and said I know, I know, we hear this a lot and I agree with you, we keep trying to promote the good work we're doing and the press keeps focusing on these unbearable self-promoters.
That sounds like the alumni office has a guy hired to do emotional labor.
I would prefer that my mother not receive credit for my admission, in part because she was vile and abusive before and after and also because no, that's pretty much it.
I thought "tiger" was just a nice way of saying "vile and abusive."
The emotional labor article has a great link of to another article about "bids"-- with a good passage about training kindness into a habit, turning toward partners even when you're tired, etc. The article is from the Atlanic; it's annoyingly called Masters of Love, because it's framed as an interview/discussion with the researchers. Fortunately, it delves into the specifics of bids, how they're made, and why they're important, instead of dragging the research out in purely conversational style.
To my surprise, a very nice and honest guy from the alumni office wrote back and said I know, I know, we hear this a lot and I agree with you, we keep trying to promote the good work we're doing and the press keeps focusing on these unbearable self-promoters.
That is kind of adorable, I confess.
The self promotion gene appears to have been passed on successfully as I skimmed the first few paras of the linked article before I realized it really was a puff piece on a 20 year old.
I want to know how the Tiger Dog is doing.
3, 8: A few months after my daughter was rejected by my undergraduate college, the development office sent around a CD appealing to the alumni "family" and our sense of belonging and how generations call U__ home etc. etc. I wrote to the EVP of development and told him how this more or less added insult to injury and I planned never to give another red cent to my beloved "home." I copied the dean of admissions. To their credit, both responded promptly. They basically said, gee we're sorry, but the school is getting popular and competitive [subtext: unlike in my day]; she could always apply to transfer in and then maybe she could join the "family" and don't you want to keep your 25+ years of donations flowing? I declined to do so, daughter went elsewhere and thrived, and my connection with the college is to keep up with some classmates and root from afar for the sports teams when they play other friends' schools. Win-Win-Win, painfully.
12: Wow. Can you ask for your donations back?
My plan to avoid that situation by never donating to Fucksaw U. and discouraging my kids from attending is so far progressing smoothly.
12: I'm torn between saying that the system of legacy admissions in college is kind of pernicious, so sucks to be you but good for them for not making a legacy a shoo-in... and saying that I can totally understand why that specific line in the promotional materials was hurtful. Even if they were going to use it somewhere - and I'm not sure even that's a good idea - it's just sloppy not to have another pamphlet targeted at people in your position.
14: Same here. I have a lot of fond memories of my college, but for whatever reason, it's just not on my list of either communities to support or charities to give money to.
As for the OP, the "emotional labor" link was interesting. In some ways I'd definitely meet the quota and in some ways I'd fall far short. Of course, how much any given example matters depends a lot on the couple. (And of course, even if I could check off every single one of those examples, a "quota" is probably not the right way to think of it anyway.)
13, 14. I donated over the years because I had liked a couple of my profs in my [still] small and [still] struggling department. And we had discouraged daughter from applying for a number of reasons, but she went ahead with it. So no great loss. But in talking to classmates about their experiences, it's clear that my donations, though steady, were not quite big enough over the years to have an effect on admissions (and there can be an effect).
I understand the discrete points about emotional labor and how it's important to be supportive of someone, but reading through the whole article reminds me of my husband giving me daily reminders about all the ways in which I don't help him enough. So sorry, article author, but maybe you should do some of those things for yourself instead of relying on other people and then whining about it.
Yeah, I have specific memories of ceasing to do some of the emotional labor things for Lee and some of the suggestions, like affirming your partner's good ideas, seem predicated on having a good relationship with a partner who has good ideas. That is of course ideal but if it's not your reality, I don't know that emotional labor will help.
On the other hand, Lee and I just assembled a tricycle together, which was some pretty amazing teamwork given that she can't assemble a damn thing and it's really annoying to have to say "Pass me the screwdriver. No, the SCREWDRIVER!" and I was able to fix all the things she messed up when she started without complaining and we got it all done and ready for Selah's birthday party Sunday. While it's both labor and emotional labor, I already disassembled the couch and bed she's taking so she can get them out of here easily this afternoon and make it all not my problem. I'm good with that.
On the other hand, Lee and I just assembled a tricycle together, which was some pretty amazing teamwork given that she can't assemble a damn thing and it's really annoying to have to say "Pass me the screwdriver. No, the SCREWDRIVER!"
This sounds like my wife and I back when we were young and foolish and tried to assemble stuff together. As you probably all have figured out, I was Lee in this situation.
That is awesome! It's certainly true in my relationship that you can gauge the health of our relationship based on how much of a fight results from assembling or moving something. We seem to be really solid right now given that we moved a queen-sized bed from the basement to the first floor that the movers had crushed to fit under the rafters in the basement.
Our best assembling something story was getting 2/3rds of the way through an Ikea shoe cabinet and then realising that it needed to be bolted to the wall. With a drill. Which we didn't have. And, because it only had two feet, it wasn't like we could do anything with it until we figured that out. DIY is really not either of our strengths, unfortunately.
Bill, do you think you would still be donating if your school made its final round of admissions decisions on a lottery basis? (That is, was it just the *fact* of her not getting in, or more the insult and subsequent tactlessness?) I think legacy admissions are overall a horrible pernicious thing and yet I'm pretty sure I'd react just the way you did, so I find this an interesting problem.
Ah, and now I'm being called on to reassemble the furniture, of course! Oh well, fine. It will give the girls a chance to see the whole apartment and then the four of us can go home!!
Since the subject is hopeless people relocating, I'll use this to vent uncharitably about my MIL. Prefacing that she has anxiety and depression and OCD and I should really be more sympathetic:
She's an unrepentant* hoarder whose landlord found out last winter (when a pipe in the heated house inexplicably broke) that his property was a shambles. He's been varying degrees of asshole to her, and she actually got off her ass and found an apartment in just a few months (from when she started looking, not from when he made clear he wanted her out; first came months of denial that she'd have to go).
For varying reasons, only some her fault, she only just got the lease signed last Friday. She's been paying her rent and keeping her landlord informed, and was intending to spend this month relocating. This morning a constable shows up to kick her out, because her eviction had apparently kicked in Monday at midnight. Jaw-dropped emoticon here. AB & I are currently dreading her inevitable moping around our house for the next X days.
Honestly, it's hard for me to get too mad at the landlord, because, aside from the utter squalor of his property (which we always knew she wouldn't address), it's obvious that she has not, in the 7 days that she's had a lease, done one single thing towards moving. But now she's upset that she's going to have to leave stuff behind. AB is thoroughly out of patience with her, and meanwhile we've got a lot of (normal) shit to deal with and really can't handhold MIL through this process. But without handholding, she will literally do nothing but sleep on our couch 20 hours a day.
It's bad to take a drink at 11:20 am, right?
*MIL has no credit rating, because no credit cards, so her new, professional landlord required us to cosign her lease. AB told her that this puts us on the hook for her hoarding, and that we can't have a repeat, and that she'd like MIL to go through this hoarder program run by the Health Dept. And MIL replied that she'd "think about it", and got really indignant.
Does she have money for professional movers, or are you on the hook for packing and schlepping for her?
ARGH that would make me feel like I was drowning. I'm sorry.
If it makes you feel better, I'm spending most of today being inconvenienced by a German. I'm getting paid, but still.
That there's a hoarder program is very promising. I have an aunt in a similar situation and she's done better with a caseworker and recovering hoarder support group, I know. That sounds totally frustrating and awful on your side.
I don't know why, but this town seems to be hoarder central. When I go for a walk, I see so many houses that are obviously inhabited by somebody who is at least tending toward hoarding. I blame de-industrialization, the resulting break-up of inter-generational family structures when all the kids moved south for jobs, and too many Russians.
25: I don't think a mover would deal with a hoarder. The new place is 1/4 mile away, so the move itself is NBD (which is part of why I'm so annoyed that she spent the last week doing nothing).
28 is nice to hear, and 29 sounds right. You saw that Chr/s Br/em table about how Pittsburgh has, by far, the longest tenancy* of any city in the country? Clearly related.
In good news, she's actually up and about; I hear her emptying the dishwasher, and she came into my office to get a book to read, and was about as close to her normal self as one could hope. Maybe this won't be that awful.
*that is, people living at the same address year after year; nothing to do with renter vs. owner
29: My aunt is in Milwaukee, which fits at least the non-Russian description pretty well.
I assume the old people with the most shit were raised in Communist Russia and took an overly materialistic view of freedom.
Ugh, that sounds terrible, sorry JRoth.
My FIL is a hoarder too, although it sounds like he's somewhat more functional than your MIL. I love him and my MIL, but they drive me bananas. Their houses* are actually very clean, just piled to the rafters with neatly-stacked boxes of stuff. They live in a huge McMansion in Arizona, but many of the rooms are so filled as to be nonfunctional. For example, they have like six washing machines, which can't be discarded because they each have just one thing wrong with them and he plans to fix them when he has the time or finds this belt that is no longer in production but he he'll buy when he can get a good price on eBay, etc. etc.
*They also own a home in the Bay Area, which they left when they moved to Arizona. At the time, they planned on coming back in a month or so, cleaning it out, and putting it on the market. This was TEN YEARS AGO. The place is still filled to the gills with stuff. In the intervening years it has become one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, which means that they are effectively paying like a million dollars for a storage unit. AUGGHhh. Actually, just a few months ago, my FIL went back there to finally clean out the place so they could sell it or rent it out. My BIL went to go see him, and he was basically sitting in the living room surrounded by piles of decades-old electronic equipment, tinkering with a twenty-year-old speaker. He told my BIL that there's no need to rent a dumpster to clean out the place, because he plans to sell most of the contents of the house. Like a velour sectional set that they got from Sears in 1982, and a cubic acre of broken stereo components. He's still up there. AUGGGGGGHHHHH.
Is the velour clean? You can't buy that stuff new these days.
My boyfriend is wonderful in almost all ways, but moving or assembling things with him is awful for me. His intuitions about the angle to turn or the edge to life are not like mine. I'd rather do that kind of thing with my sister or Anand a thousand times.
Yeah, I've been very helpful about assembling the furniture myself rather than doing it together, because the one is sometimes physically tough but not going to make me want to explode in a million pieces.
I slept in my own assembled bed in my own house last night and it was fantastic. Today I change the crib into a toddler bed and put some shelves together and move some furniture around, but I think the bulk of the assembly work is behind me now. And the girls got to hang out at Lee's while I put her furniture together for her and they had a great time and I was able to fee genuinely friendly toward Lee, which hasn't happened in a long time. This seems promising, and I'm getting bonus points for putting in extra work. She's going to have the girls for an overnight tonight to let me rearrange their rooms because I'm trying to sort of physically mark that our lives are different in hopes that will help them process it or something and also because I've long wanted all of them sleeping in the same room. So far so good, and I'm completely relieved and now have a whole life ahead of me!
You made your bed and the laid in it.
33: MIL's elder sister and mother both had hoarding tendencies; it's like it got worse the farther down you went: MIL's mom had that Depression-survivor thing of saving every length of thread, but it was all neatly organized and not overflowing. Then the sister was similar to your FIL, a clean, visitable house, but with too many boxes and defunct objects. And then MIL. She just buys things, brings them home in plastic bags, and never touches them again. It's breathtaking.
35: AB & I have good furniture-moving synergy. I don't remember when we first discovered that, but it was one of those nice realizations of compatibility.
27 was wrong. My troubles were mostly caused by a Swedish guy. My bad.
Occasionally I'm mildly annoyed by how much stuff my parents and in-laws have, and it gets more than mild when they threaten to send it to us (we have little storage space), but this is helpful perspective - they're nowhere near that bad.
I think they might be a lot worse if not for the fact that both my dad and my father-in-law took care of cleaning up after elderly relatives when they died or had to be put in nursing homes. Those relatives weren't hoarders themselves, but still, it probably helped the dads keep things in perspective. JRoth and jms, is there anyone with incipient dementia in your families that you can subtlely nudge the hoarders to help out with? I realize it's not practical in JRoth's case, but just a thought.
Is the velour clean? You can't buy that stuff new these days. :3
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