I'd bet it's because the parents are feeling a lot of stress. Especially without a robust community support network/string external role models, children tend to inherit their parents' emotional states.

As a parent I also thought “I won’t repeat these patterns” but reality is, that is so hard. Often parents want the best for their children and use any possible technique to make sure they are successful.

I am not giving an excuse but rather want to point to our society and our behaviour. When an expat at work asked me yesterday where to move to make sure that his 5 year old will have the best schools of the country… with such an elitist behaviour, I can only facepalm and see this is going to be much worse in the next 5-10years.

Problem is, the world is an economic slugfest today unlike it was at least when I grew up. When my High School class graduated a long time ago, most of us were competing for jobs with people in our own small town. At most, we were competing with the surrounding counties. There was university for A students, community college and/or middle class office work for B students, normal working class jobs for C students, and tougher lower-paying jobs for D students. As for university, we were competing for entrance with mostly other people in our state.

Today's kids are competing with the entire world, and the middle class is disappearing. So it's much higher stakes. And it's bimodal: You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.

> Problem is, the world is an economic slugfest today unlike it was at least when I grew up

It only did not feel like a slugfest for a select few in developed countries like the US/Canada/UK/Aus and maybe some other European countries.

For the vast majority, hustling has always been a thing, including immigrating across oceans and leaving all of your friends and family behind.

It just so happens that people in the US who used to or whose parents used to have security of shelter/healthcare/food no longer have that security.

> You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.

This seems a little hyperbolic. The requirements you describe are probably true enough for top 20 universities, but they aren't true for top 100, and there still seem to be plenty of random white collar office jobs that hire people from merely medium-ranked universities.

And AI, should it work out, is threatening to wipe out even the “good” side of that equation.

Problem is, with growing inequality, the 80th-percentile school and the 20th-percentile school is vastly different, whether that is in school resources or the life trajectories of graduates.

An interesting perspective on this: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-new-urban-order-send-...