Former Stanford dean explains why helicopter parenting is ruining a generation

I see her complaints as more sinister. She comes from a privileged background, and she's concerned that people from her social class are getting pushed out of her university by kids whose parents made them work hard.

> As kids get older their ability to completely screw up their life goes up exponentially.

If one reconciles those two points one can see that a lot of what parents obsess about is without any real consequences. An example of utterly irrelevant worry is breaking an arm as a kid - it will hurt for a while, but you'll be fine. Nothing one can't recover from. As you note, it's important to let a kid fail and learn from that failure.

And there was a lot more poverty then than we have now. There also wasn't the widespread expectation of having a "good life," and probably a much smaller pre-existing middle class all attempting to hang onto their position. Furthermore, the whole notion of "middle class" and all the expectations that come with it probably weren't as firmly rooted as they are now, so people just... expected less.

>Climate change wasn't the issue back in the 80s - instead it was things like Mutually Assured Destruction. There's always something. We need to stop making excuses like "it's current affairs issue X".

Just saying "there are bad things now and there were bad things then" does not mean that circumstances are always equally good or bad. The economic/social/political climate CAN be better or worse at different times. Life was certainly very hard for the generations living through the great depression or WW2, and the burdens those people carried should not be diminished by people living in more fortuitous times.

Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted.

You can ask the same of NYC. How many supreme court justices are from NYC versus Idaho? Location matters. Location changes you. Peers change you.

relatively small sample size

Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.

I grew up in the generation when no one in my region of the country (the Midwest) had heard of test prep. The students who did best on standardized tests (my friends and I) simply enjoyed reading for fun. Really, it's that simple. Read books and articles that are not assigned by school and that you choose for your own reading pleasure. Students who score high today on standardized tests are still avid readers. Nothing has changed about that at all. This even works for the math section of the tests.

To learn how to score well on a standardized test reading section, the number one piece of advice is READ, READ, READ, and READ. Read about what you like to know more about. Read things that are fun for you. Find books and magazines about interesting topics and read them. Turn off the TV and read. Put away the video game controller and read. Read hard things, and read easy things. Read a lot.

For years, I wondered why it came so readily to mind to write "READ, READ, READ" in all capital letters like that when I give advice on this subject, as I have frequent occasion to do. Recently, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). Yes, that works for Chinese, and it works for English too. By practicing reading, you gain reading comprehension and reading speed, and speedy reading with good comprehension gives you time to complete standardized test sections with time to spare. That reduces the pressure and lets you relax and think while you take the test. Try it. You may like it, and anyway reading is fun.