Now that school’s back in session, high school seniors are scrambling to pull together college applications. It’s an anxious time for parents like me. Some parents may be sweating more than others. Take my over-achieving Microsoft senior executive next door neighbors, David and Judy Wong (recent immigrants from Shanghai). They’re frantically hoping their little first violinist, chess champion daughter Vivian gets into Harvard or Yale.
Even with her staggering 6.8 GPA (I have no idea how either), in this competitive environment, Vivian might have to settle for her safety school, Oxford. In our family’s case, we’re just hoping we don’t have to fall back on our daughter’s safety school, the Louisiana Truck Driving Academy for Asian Drivers.
Here at VFTB, our expert staff of college planning advisors and part-time Wal-Mart greeters has assembled a strategy guaranteed to get your child into the Ivy* League college campus of their choice (* we’re talking of course about Ivy Tech Community College with 30 campuses throughout Indiana).
As I look back upon my life thus far, I realize just how blessed I am. Two wonderful daughters, a talented portrait artist wife, living in a gorgeous city (Seattle). But you know, it wasn’t always this way. My life story has been fraught with challenging and perilous obstacles at almost every turn.
Much like Jesus, I had a very humble origin. Like baby Jesus, I too was born in a little town called Bethlehem (just outside of Albany, NY). My childhood home, while not quite a manger, was rustic in its own way. While we did not have sheep like baby Jesus, we did have a sheepdog, at our 3,700 sq. ft. suburban split level five-bedroom house. I missed out on the simple joys of attending a public school. Instead I had to be bussed 20 minutes away to an all boys’ prep school for grades 1 through 12. I rarely got a window seat on the bus. But it made me stronger.
I was forbidden to wear colorful shorts, fun t-shirts or high top sneakers to school. Every day I had to wear the same dull grey uniform with a black tie. It was a military college prep school. Every year, I had to march in the Veteran’s Day Parade while the public school kids all had the day off so they could come to the parade to mock me. But I never complained about the injustice of it all. I reminded myself about all the kids in Africa, Bangladesh and New Jersey who had even less than I had.
About 18 years ago, my wife and I committed a horrible lapse of financial judgment. We are still paying for this reckless mistake these many years later: We became parents. At first it seemed like a great idea – staring into the innocent, helpless eyes of our two adorably sweet, tiny angel babies we adopted from China.
If only someone could have intervened – stopped me from boarding that plane for Hong Kong – and pointed out that over the next 17 years, these little angels would morph into retirement-savings-draining, eye-rolling, “take me to the mall now” moody, fashion-obsessed teenage drama queens who would eventually become legally permitted to drive my car and whose primary function on this planet appears to be texting their friends about how lame their parents were for not letting them go to a party simply because we don’t know the boy or his family… if only somebody had intervened back then and told me what we would be in for, I would have undoubtedly made … the same reckless decision. But that’s beside the point.
My point is this: Raising kids is expensive. The return on your college investment is highly speculative at best, particularly when you learn your son has decided to major in Medieval French Gender Studies. For many parents a far less risky investment would be to put down their entire life savings on the trifecta in the second race at Belmont Park.
[Author’s note: the following is a painfully true, 100% accurate story and it’s the reason I knew at an early age that I would NEVER become a scientist.]
When I was in tenth grade, I had a science experiment to do and I was running very short on time. It was due in a couple days and I had only barely started on my experiment. I decided to do an experiment involving “rust” and the rusting process, and how some elements can accelerate the rusting process while others tend to inhibit or decelerate it.
Anyway, I had one final experiment to do — to test the rust-inhibiting or accelerating effect on metal of boiled linseed oil. I had never heard of linseed oil (I was just reading from a book of high school science projects and one of them was about rust). So I made sure to precisely follow the experiment’s procedures as set forth in the book. One of the elements it suggested using to test the rusting process was “boiled linseed oil.” So I went to whatever store sells linseed oil and came home and began the experiment at about 4:30pm. I should note at this point that my father, for reasons still unknown to me, chose this day of all days to come home at 5pm rather than his usual 6:30pm. The relevance of this point will become clear in a couple paragraphs, so be patient.
Last week, I talked about the breakthrough best-selling parenting book by Amy Chua called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. If you missed it, you can get caught up here. That’s her on the left coaching her daughter Lulu with her violin practice. They are going on day four without sleep, practicing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Suite for Lulu’s recital at Carnegie Hall.
Amy Chua is a Chinese American and a Yale Law School professor who decided to raise her two daughters the traditional Chinese way. To describe her strict parenting approach as “spare the rod, spoil the child” is like saying jumping off a 1,000 foot cliff headfirst could result in an owie. She re-defines the meaning of the phrase “tough love.”
Since reading her book, I have wholeheartedly embraced Chua’s breakthrough parenting philosophy and am here to share with you my Six Simple Steps to becoming a Tiger Mom (or Dad). Follow these six steps to the letter, and before you know it, you will be amazed at the change in your child’s performance at school. Get started today, and you can pretty much mail your child’s acceptance letter to Harvard in a couple months – unless, of course, she had her heart set on Oxford.
Now that school’s back in session, high school seniors are scrambling to pull together college applications. It’s an anxious time for parents like me. Some parents may be sweating more than others. Take my over-achieving Microsoft senior executive next door neighbors, David and Judy Wong (recent immigrants from Shanghai). They’re frantically hoping their little first violinist, chess champion daughter Vivian gets into Harvard or Yale.
