http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes ... -child-left-behind/

No Rich Child Left Behind

By SEAN F. REARDON
-- Sean F. Reardon is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford.


Here’s a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion.

Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer.

What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially.

One way to see this is to look at the scores of rich and poor students on standardized math and reading tests over the last 50 years. When I did this using information from a dozen large national studies conducted between 1960 and 2010, I found that the rich-poor gap in test scores is about 40 percent larger now than it was 30 years ago.

To make this trend concrete, consider two children, one from a family with income of $165,000 and one from a family with income of $15,000. These incomes are at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the income distribution nationally, meaning that 10 percent of children today grow up in families with incomes below $15,000 and 10 percent grow up in families with incomes above $165,000.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

The same pattern is evident in other, more tangible, measures of educational success, like college completion. In a study similar to mine, Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski, economists at the University of Michigan, found that the proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a bachelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

In a more recent study, my graduate students and I found that 15 percent of high-income students from the high school class of 2004 enrolled in a highly selective college or university, while fewer than 5 percent of middle-income and 2 percent of low-income students did.

These widening disparities are not confined to academic outcomes: new research by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam and his colleagues shows that the rich-poor gaps in student participation in sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer work and church attendance have grown sharply as well.

In San Francisco this week, more than 14,000 educators and education scholars have gathered for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The theme this year is familiar: Can schools provide children a way out of poverty?

We are still talking about this despite decades of clucking about the crisis in American education and wave after wave of school reform.Whatever we’ve been doing in our schools, it hasn’t reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.

Part of knowing what we should do about this is understanding how and why these educational disparities are growing. For the past few years, alongside other scholars, I have been digging into historical data to understand just that. The results of this research don’t always match received wisdom or playground folklore.

The most potent development over the past three decades is that the test scores of children from high-income families have increased very rapidly. Before 1980, affluent students had little advantage over middle-class students in academic performance; most of the socioeconomic disparity in academics was between the middle class and the poor. But the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor. Just as the incomes of the affluent have grown much more rapidly than those of the middle class over the last few decades, so, too, have most of the gains in educational success accrued to the children of the rich.

Before we can figure out what’s happening here, let’s dispel a few myths.


The income gap in academic achievement is not growing because the test scores of poor students are dropping or because our schools are in decline. In fact, average test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card, have been rising — substantially in math and very slowly in reading — since the 1970s. The average 9-year-old today has math skills equal to those her parents had at age 11, a two-year improvement in a single generation. The gains are not as large in reading and they are not as large for older students, but there is no evidence that average test scores have declined over the last three decades for any age or economic group.

The widening income disparity in academic achievement is not a result of widening racial gaps in achievement, either. The achievement gaps between blacks and whites, and Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites have been narrowing slowly over the last two decades, trends that actually keep the yawning gap between higher- and lower-income students from getting even wider. If we look at the test scores of white students only, we find the same growing gap between high- and low-income children as we see in the population as a whole.

It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t important differences in quality between schools serving low- and high-income students — there certainly are — but they appear to do less to reinforce the trends than conventional wisdom would have us believe.

If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

My research suggests that one part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. As you may have heard, the incomes of the rich have grown faster over the last 30 years than the incomes of the middle class and the poor. Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, access to higher-quality child care and preschool and — in places like New York City, where 4-year-old children take tests to determine entry into gifted and talented programs — access to preschool test preparation tutors or the time to serve as tutors themselves.

But rising income inequality explains, at best, half of the increase in the rich-poor academic achievement gap. It’s not just that the rich have more money than they used to, it’s that they are using it differently. This is where things get really interesting.

High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources — their money, time and knowledge of what it takes to be successful in school — on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich.

With a college degree insufficient to ensure a high-income job, or even a job as a barista, parents are now investing more time and money in their children’s cognitive development from the earliest ages. It may seem self-evident that parents with more resources are able to invest more — more of both money and of what Mr. Putnam calls “‘Goodnight Moon’ time” — in their children’s development. But even though middle-class and poor families are also increasing the time and money they invest in their children, they are not doing so as quickly or as deeply as the rich.

The economists Richard J. Murnane and Greg J. Duncan report that from 1972 to 2006 high-income families increased the amount they spent on enrichment activities for their children by 150 percent, while the spending of low-income families grew by 57 percent over the same time period. Likewise, the amount of time parents spend with their children has grown twice as fast since 1975 among college-educated parents as it has among less-educated parents. The economists Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey of the University of California, San Diego, call this escalation of early childhood investment “the rug rat race,” a phrase that nicely captures the growing perception that early childhood experiences are central to winning a lifelong educational and economic competition.

It’s not clear what we should do about all this. Partly that’s because much of our public conversation about education is focused on the wrong culprits: we blame failing schools and the behavior of the poor for trends that are really the result of deepening income inequality and the behavior of the rich.

We’re also slow to understand what’s happening, I think, because the nature of the problem — a growing educational gap between the rich and the middle class — is unfamiliar. After all, for much of the last 50 years our national conversation about educational inequality has focused almost exclusively on strategies for reducing inequalities between the educational successes of the poor and the middle class, and it has relied on programs aimed at the poor, like Head Start and Title I.

We’ve barely given a thought to what the rich were doing. With the exception of our continuing discussion about whether the rising costs of higher education are pricing the middle class out of college, we don’t have much practice talking about what economists call “upper-tail inequality” in education, much less success at reducing it.

Meanwhile, not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.

We need to start talking about this. Strangely, the rapid growth in the rich-poor educational gap provides a ray of hope: if the relationship between family income and educational success can change this rapidly, then it is not an immutable, inevitable pattern. What changed once can change again. Policy choices matter more than we have recently been taught to think.

So how can we move toward a society in which educational success is not so strongly linked to family background? Maybe we should take a lesson from the rich and invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born. Investments in early-childhood education pay very high societal dividends. That means investing in developing high-quality child care and preschool that is available to poor and middle-class children. It also means recruiting and training a cadre of skilled preschool teachers and child care providers. These are not new ideas, but we have to stop talking about how expensive and difficult they are to implement and just get on with it.

But we need to do much more than expand and improve preschool and child care. There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and “improving teacher quality,” but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children.

This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves. This might include strategies to support working families so that they can read to their children more often.. It also means expanding programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership that have proved to be effective at helping single parents educate their children; but we also need to pay for research to develop new resources for single parents.

It might also mean greater business and government support for maternity and paternity leave and day care so that the middle class and the poor can get some of the educational benefits that the early academic intervention of the rich provides their children. Fundamentally, it means rethinking our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone.

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy..

斯坦福的社会学教授SEAN F. REARDON的文章，我同学推荐的。.

另一篇
Money Cuts Both Ways in Education

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND | REUTERS

Published: May 9, 2013


NEW YORK — If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring. We see it anecdotally in the soaring fees for private schools, private lessons and private tutors, many of them targeted at the pre-school set. And recent academic research has confirmed what many of us overhear at the school gates or read on mommy blogs.

This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality. Whatever your views about income inequality among the parents, inherited privilege is inimical to the promise of equal opportunity, which is central to the social compact in Western democracies.

But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.

First, the data on parental spending on education. There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.

When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.

In “Investing in Children: Changes in Parental Spending on Children, 1972–2007,” a study published this year in the journal Demography, the researchers Sabino Kornrich and Frank F. Furstenberg found that spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”

Dr. Kornrich and Dr. Furstenberg warn that social mobility is in jeopardy. “In the race to the top, higher-income children are at an ever greater advantage because their parents can and do spend more on child care, preschool, and the growing costs of postsecondary education,” they write. “Thus, contemporary increases in inequality may lead to even greater increases in inequality in the future as advantage and disadvantage are passed across the generations through investment.”

They are right to worry. But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.

That is the conclusion of research by Suniya S. Luthar, professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Dr. Luthar stumbled upon the subject of troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”

That accidental discovery set Dr. Luthar on a research path that has prompted her to conclude that the children of privilege are an “at-risk” group. “What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”

Dr. Luthar’s findings are directly connected to the stepped-up spending on children’s education at the top that Dr. Kornrich and Dr. Furstenberg document. The title of the paper she is finishing, due to be published in the autumn, is “I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.

“It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”

It can be tempting, particularly if you don’t happen to be raising children in one of the hothouse communities Dr. Luthar studies, to dismiss this hyper-education as a frivolous, albeit painful, form of conspicuous consumption, like cosmetic surgery or flashy cars. But the truth is that these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.

“These are kids whose parents value upward mobility,” Dr. Luthar said. “When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”

It turns out that our children are feeling the same paradoxical strains of the 21st century we all are. Increasingly, we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.

Dr. Luthar says the children she studies fear the price of losing would be psychic as well as economic — “What happens to me if I fall behind? I’ll be worth nothing.” In an age when more and more of the middle class is falling behind, no wonder they — and their parents — are at risk.

[ 本帖最后由 pp_dream 于 2013-5-17 03:08 编辑 ].

第一篇文章，其实不用斯坦福教授研究，他讲述的问题是显而易见的。教育与家庭收入的相关性很大，这个不分种族地区国家，哪儿都一样。

第二篇文章更接近实际，即中产/中高产家庭孩子及父母的巨大压力和焦虑，其中孩子承受的压力比父母还大。
对于普通米国家庭是这样，对于我这类的移民家庭压力和焦虑就更大了。.

在米国居住时间越长越发体会到其社会的分化，教育/职业/收入的差距基本上造就了社会分化，还有就是种族。在我看来社会分化还是由经济实力的差异而产生的。观念上的差异还不是分化的主要因素，而经济实力是主要因素。

从我身边接触过的人群看，中/中高产阶层对孩子的教育投入是很用心也是家庭支出比较大的一部分。在对孩子教育和引导上与我们老中类似，希望孩子努力并通过努力获得好的教育好的职业，继而好的收入好的家庭。可能老米家庭没像我们那么重视分数，但也不马虎。而且在体育/艺术上的投入（时间/金钱/精力）很大，绝对比国内同等家庭的投入大。

而中低产（一般中低产孩子比较多），因为经济实力相对较弱，无法投入太多于孩子教育，另外家长本身观念上也不太在意孩子教育，这样家庭的孩子慢慢地就落后于中高产家庭的孩子了。

这样的分化一代代延续，造就了越来越大的社会分化。这与我们国内的情况很相似。.

Allison Singh.
Author, Lawyer

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al ... ?utm_hp_ref=college

The Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley. Maybe Duke, if all else fails... maybe.

That's the "List" -- the typical college list for parents of high-achieving Asian-American students. With over four thousand colleges to choose from, why do so few make the cut?

As one guidance counselor lamented to me, Asian-American parents just don't show up for information sessions featuring lesser known or liberal arts colleges, regardless of the quality of the school. Yet when it comes to the big name schools, you can't find a seat. He asked me for advice. While not all Asian-Americans limit their college choices to the List, for those that do (and other parents as well), here is what I have to offer.

We all fall prey to the lure of brands from time to time, and education is no exception. It seems that for many Asian-American parents, only the luxury brands of higher education will do. It would serve us well to stop and think about the purpose of brands, the calculated effort to promote group think and distort reality (as a trademark attorney by training, I have seen this up close). These two goals are out of place, but persist, in the education world.

Take the Ivy brand, for example. Originally just the convenient name for a regional athletic division, "Ivy" effectively blurs the distinctions between its eight members. The reality is that each Ivy varies greatly in course offerings, class size, access to professors, research opportunities and quality of life. Yet for many, especially Asian-American parents, the individual Ivies are interchangeable simply because they share the same brand.

A similar lack of critical analysis appears in the reliance by Asian-American parents on U.S. News & World Report rankings. If status is the goal, then U.S. News is the scorecard. One private educational consultant with an Asian-American client base admitted that U.S. News is a "Bible" for many parents. It doesn't matter that colleges have been caught fudging their numbers and the list has lost credibility. For parents that value competition, winning and being at the top, U.S. News still dominates.

This is not surprising, at least for Chinese-Americans, because nowhere is educational status more evident than in mainland China, where the Ivy-bound can rise to the level of reality stardom (the thinking man's Kardashians, perhaps). The 2000 Chinese bestseller Harvard Girl, written by parents of successful applicant Yiting Liu, sold over two million copies and created a cottage industry of books, seminars and consulting practices selling the secrets of getting in.

Status is not the whole answer, though. If you look closer, as I was prompted by an educational consultant of Asian background, you see striations within the Asian-American community. For immigrant families still waiting to realize the American dream, college is evaluated in terms of "return on investment." Students from these families are expected to bring in big returns, and attending an Ivy League school is an indispensable part of the plan. After financial security has been achieved, there may be less pressure on children to follow a preordained path. The choice of college is not bound to the family's aspirations, giving rise to a longer, more diverse college list.

In many Asian countries, where you go to college determines the course of your professional life. It makes sense that Asian-American parents would think the same holds true in the U.S., and it used to, but not anymore. Research shows that today's employers care more about what an applicant can do than the name on a diploma. When The Wall Street Journal asked recruiting executives at 500 leading companies to name the top 25 colleges that "best prepare students to land jobs that are satisfying, well-paid and have growth potential," only one Ivy made the list, Cornell, in the 14th spot. Berkeley came in at fifteen and MIT at twenty-three. Jennifer Merritt, "Penn State Tops Recruiter Rankings," The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2010. According to The Wall Street Journal study, "recruiters made clear that they preferred big state schools over elite liberal arts schools, such as the Ivies." I bet many high-achieving Asian-American applicants would be welcomed with open arms, and scholarships, at these schools, and apparently graduate with better prospects for employment as well. Too bad they wouldn't make the List.

Another misplaced assumption is that graduating from an elite undergraduate school eases the way for admission to graduate school. It is not the case that elite undergrads are feeder schools for elite graduate schools. Depth of coursework, scores on graduate school entrance exams, internships, student research, work experience, recommendations and demonstrated interest in the subject area count much more than school status or any of the other non-academic factors that come into play in undergraduate admissions (geography, legacy, athletics). One educational consultant refers parents to Harvard Business School to prove this point -- the undergraduate schools represented are as diverse as the students themselves.

If employers and graduate schools are not placing brand name schools above the rest, we shouldn't, either. I am not saying school status doesn't matter at all -- it just doesn't matter as much as parents assume it does, and it is certainly not worth the cost.

By "cost" I am not talking about tuition, but the cost endured by students. This is very real to me. I married into an Indian-American family, which I love dearly. Our family is loud and quiet at the same time. Loud music and laughter mask the silence of a generation afraid to speak about secret failures, relationships and struggles. As confided to me, the attitude among many young Asian-Americans is: do what you have to do to get your parents off your back. Getting into an acceptable college helps -- the better the school, the bigger the accomplishment, the more leverage gained to push parents away.

This does not strike me as a sustainable relationship. I have seen young people drift away from family as the secrets take over. Rejection from a college on the List is not a failure to be hidden from parents out of shame, especially when discrimination in admissions against Asian-Americans is widely accepted as fact. I have seen that education, like marriage, is a family affair in Asian-American households. The publisher of Harvard Girl, Yang Kui, agreed, stating, "Going to Harvard means that the way they raised their child was successful." Tracy Jan, "Chinese Aim for the Ivy League," The New York Times, January 4, 2009. This raises the stakes beyond mere acceptance. However, I doubt that parents, regardless of ethnicity, who make an intelligent, independent and realistic assessment of Harvard's admission tactics would ever judge themselves (or their children) based on its results.

So what should be the new goalpost, if not acceptance into one of the schools on the List? Think about what it takes to excel in the global economy. Sure academic achievement is necessary, but to really stand out it takes creativity, confidence and critical thinking. Why are successful entrepreneurs unafraid to fail? They have the confidence to think for themselves, adapt to change and take the road untaken. Confidence does not come from a college name -- it comes from believing in your abilities despite what an anonymous admissions officer might decide.

Falling in line with group think during the admissions process sets an example that, if followed, does not prepare students to be stars on campus or in the global economy. Most Asian-American parents have instilled in their children the values of hard work and determination. Now is the time to teach the importance of critical thinking and confidence.

The first step is adding a few more schools to the List..

这篇文章和昨天新民晚报上那篇类似.

PP,针对刚刚移民的家庭，像我家丫头这样过来上7年级的孩子，应该如何按步就班的规划呢？虽然知道计划有时赶不上变化，但有规划就有努力的方向，再根据实际情况适当调整总是没错的，谁让我们只有一个小孩，费了这么半天劲折腾过来，总希望孩子能越来越好，不是？
我们对米国初中了解甚微，能给些参考性的建议吗？先谢过！.

谁给翻译下啊？.

其实在哪儿都有个社会定位的问题，国内的中产移民到了美国，要继续维持同样的阶层很多情况下还是蛮困难的。
要不讨论下一代，他们以后选专业的问题，适合又有发展前景的职业方向有哪些？
7、8年级，家长可以给他们这一方面的引导了。
一定要选个越老越吃香的行当。.

不难的，多看看就会了.

引用:

原帖由 pp_dream 于 2013-5-17 08:06 发表
Most Asian-American parents have instilled in their children the values of hard work and determination. Now is the time to teach the importance of critical thinking and confidence.  

这篇文章是专门写给老中看的，呵呵。

我是传统老中，昨天还在因为孩子的问题在给她灌输我的观念，正好是文章里提到的“the values of hard work and determination”，我认为先有此做基础，才能有“critical thinking and confidence”。否则，哪里来confidence？


我们常在家里说我家丫头，说她也就是上Penn State的料。虽然不够鼓励孩子，但也是蛮现实的

不过一说 “Penn State Tops Recruiter Rankings," 这下好多人要去抢Penn State了

[ 本帖最后由 pp_dream 于 2013-5-17 23:19 编辑 ].

我没有想出什么建议 我只能说说可能的状况。

我猜想你女儿过渡比较难的是文科，英文/历史/二外之类的学科。总要一年左右才能完全适应的，急不来。
好像你去的是弯曲，那里的老中老印多，民工码农多，都是高智商的群体，孩子也是高智商的扎堆，竞争比我这里的激烈多了，可能比较多的孩子上课外补习。你们去了就能感受到了。

我这里6年级孩子学业的压力不大，7年级开始honor课程，压力就要增加了。弯曲那里可能比较早就有honor课程了，7年级有点晚，但总好过高中才去。

随着孩子的长大，我现在开始体会到在米国的竞争其实是蛮激烈的，因为不光是单纯学业上的竞争，而是多方面多角度的，比如体育，艺术，leadership，social skill，科研/探索/实验/实践等。当然孩子不可能样样都能，但至少要有几项“能”。

天分高的孩子能轻松应对竞争和挑战，但像我家女儿天分不够，我做家长压力也大的，不光投入时间/精力/经费，还要有持久的耐心/信心/恒心，真不容易。她才6年级，我就开始在跟自己说，不抛弃不放弃了.

米国对中产的定义比我们一般想象的要低，比如第一篇文章中说到 incomes above $165,000被作为中产(rich)举例。年收入按这个收入标准，我的同事和同学们全入围了

比较能持久的职业，医生/律师/教师/兽医/药剂师？

[ 本帖最后由 pp_dream 于 2013-5-19 19:42 编辑 ].

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Twaeq1qljQ
我同学侄子，17岁的参赛作品。喜欢的帮忙like .

懒.

pp前辈，一直跟着你帖子，想问下你觉得和孩子之间有没有什么文化价值上的分歧？对亲子关系影响程度如何？另外就是男女生之间相处的问题，不知道你有没有开始碰到，这些都是我比较担心的。
还有sleepover，我们去年暑假才过去没几天，也就是晚上在公园里一起玩认识的，有个女孩就邀请sleepover，比我们还小，大约5、6岁光景，她是姐姐带去玩的，爹妈我都从来没见过。我吓了一跳，当然第一反应就是拒绝。我看你写好像这个还蛮普遍的，不过我还是很难接受，就算是同学，我起码也要了解人家家庭背景和家庭成员吧……现在孩子还能听我的，再大点恐怕就会有摩擦，觉得我管太多，但是美国这里我还真不敢放手，不会是我想太多了吧.

我女儿12岁，还没经历teenage的事情。从我同学里高中的孩子看，恋爱发生的几率50%有的，有的同学是支持孩子恋爱的，有的不支持。我本人是不支持的，前几天还跟女儿谈了这事，表明我的态度，目前她认为这类事是：disgusting, gross!

文化价值的分歧在12岁孩子身上还没体现太具体，我这里本地白人是主流群体，即便都是白人，我还是看出家庭教育的差异。基本上，家教类似的孩子会自然而然地在一起做朋友，这也是我的发现 忽的发现孩子会自然形成自己的圈子。然后看我女儿圈子里孩子的家庭就可以发现，我们这些家庭（8个家庭）很类似，父母多从事某专业行业，父母爱孩子很上心教育上很投入（我指精力/时间/经费）。孩子也上进，学习/体育/艺术上都花力气，我们家的还不是最用功的，有其他孩子家庭各方面投入更多，且各方面都很用功。

对于sleepover，我只允许她去这几个朋友家，同时我发现这几个朋友的父母也是谨慎的。因为我们去年刚搬到这里，第一次邀请同学到家里来玩，不sleepover。同学的家长们会在第一次来时“考察”我们家的情况，比如住什么区域，我们的职业，家里条件等等，他们都会在随便聊天时获得他们想要捕捉的信息并作出判断。第二次邀请同学来是来sleepover，基本都来我家sleepover了。我心里也就明白了，他们的家长接受了我们, 我猜想他们认为家庭matched。后来再来时，家长都不一定来的，有时孩子就跟着校车来我家。慢慢的，我们几家的家长也熟悉了。

我这么详细的说，你一定明白了这个过程是什么样的。在对待sleepover上，家家都是谨慎的，尤其我们是女孩子，年龄小的，更要谨慎了。

在美国是不能随便放手的，米国情况比较复杂。.

PP_dream 的观点和我非常一致 ，而且我非常赞同PP的这些观点，估计我们都是上海人的原因 ，不论在美国还是上海其实对孩子的教育是一致的。我认为这个是一个负责的家长教育孩子的方法。.

好像澳村这里sleepover是很常见的，家长也不是那么谨慎。
我们是去年10月份来的，已经有两家邀请过女儿去sleepover，一个是白人家庭，一个是香港来的老移民，那个香港的妈妈还专门给我打了电话。这两个小姑娘平时和我女儿关系挺好的，但和他们家长我们都没有接触过，所以我委婉地说女儿晚上会想家，能不能改成白天一起玩。结果对方就没有进一步消息了。
我还在想是不是我不了解本地文化。不过，我还是坚持女孩子要去sleepover的话一定要知根知底，不能为了面子而冒这种风险。.

在加拿大时，我女儿是第二年开始sleepover的。加拿大社会比米国安定简单，我们在渥太华住的社区更是。她去sleepover的几个同学家是她最要好的朋友，其中BFF Elsa家她去了不知多少次，这是一家法国人家，我帖子里还写过她家领养安徽残疾儿童的事。

米国社会比加拿大复杂。我同学听说我们sleepover大叫不可以，让我查registered sex offenders in my areas 我立马查了，我这一带安全的

不过，总是谨慎些好。.

谢谢，看来我谨慎些还是对的。男女生关系上原来我的立场没有那么坚定，现在看起来也不能太含糊。其实现在国内很多小学里就有苗头的，家长不一定知道，但是同学之间已经不是什么秘密，孩子们比我们想像得要早熟。这些事放在国内还是很容易控制的，但到了米国我没有一点把握。.

扭腰市长说啦，成绩马马虎虎的中学生别上大学啦，当水管工好了！不用担心工作外包，不用担心被计算机代替。也就是不用担心失业。有道理！

可是，水管工也不是想当就当滴，常常是家传生意呢。.

水管工热门行业 高薪的干活.