Overbearing Parents

[aeastet]

One thing I hope the OP gets from all of this is that you need to listen and be a better parent than your parents are. I tell my sons all of the time that if you take what I taught you and you make it better for your kids then we are both better for it. Be a better parent than I was to you and your kids will thank you.

Your parents job is to try and help you be a better person based on what they were taught by their parents. You also need to understand that your parents are not out to get you (in most cases). They love you and want you to be successful. Your parents will judge themselves by how you turn out. If you are happy. and if you are successful in your life. Parents that were raised by very strict parents may have a closed mind on flexibility. Open communication is the only way to change that but it may not help. There is a lot of information on the FIRST web site. Print some of it off and leave it around your house. If they will not go to the mountain bring it to them. Do what you can do but ultimately you can not make your parents change their minds.

I will tell you as a professional engineer that I have hired interns for many years now and they have all come from the FIRST environment. I get to see smart, motivated students and get to "test drive" them for many years.

Freedom only comes when you can take care of yourself. When you get there you will look back and see the lessons that your parents taught you and you will understand why they did what they did even if you still do not agree with it.

Keep your head up and keep having fun. This is the most amazing program I have ever had the privilege to be a part of and I wish I would have had the chance to be part of it when I was in school (it didn't exist back then).

[ScottM]

I'm going to take a swag (guess) and say that your parents will listen to someone in a position of authority. Find out if there will be college recruiters at one of your competitions. Invite (beg?) your parents to come to the competition and talk to the recruiters.

Then remind them that people such as;

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google, and W. James McNerney, Jr., Chairman, President and CEO, The Boeing Company, have been elected to the Board of Directors of FIRST

Good luck and persevere.

[Rangel]

It sounds like you've been a part of your team for a while now and if your parents don't understand the importance of it now, they probably never will. My advice is to keep doing what you can do be as involved with your team as much as possible. For example if your parents don't want to give you rides, find other modes such as friends or the bus. I'm a little on the side of Nathan in terms of radicalness being in a similar situation not too long ago. I don't suggest to go as far as forging permission slips but maybe stay later in robotics than your supposed to some days and stuff like that. Do what you can to make your parents happy though. Keep up with grades and schoolwork, tell them what they want to hear if you get into one sided arguments about robotics again, and give your coach contact information anyways and just say your coach got it from school system. You probably won't convince them that robotics is the best use of your time but you have a good chance of remaining active since they've allowed you to stay on this long.

[Qbot2640]

I have had several of my past team members come back and tell me that during their college interviews, when FIRST Robotics was brought up it dominated the remainder of the interview...so the nervous student undergoing this high-stakes interview suddenly gets to speak much more comfortably about a topic that they know intimately. They have told me that it made a major difference in the success of the interview. (And each one who told me this, was successfully admitted to their first choice of universities.)