Sometimes I really hate parents. A lot. Not my parents – my parents are great, but some of my friends’ parents. They’re crazy and demanding and impatient. It’s awful and it turns my friends into neurotic, nervous messes.

In high school I had a friend whose parents were ridiculous. They pushed her so hard. Nothing was ever good enough. She wasn’t as good as her sisters. She didn’t do enough after school, she didn’t do well enough on standardized and AP exams, she wasn’t skinny enough. It was awful. I’m not saying my friend wouldn’t have had issues if her parents weren’t so horrible to her, but their treatment of her certainly didn’t make anything better.

Now I feel like it’s high school all over again. I have another friend whose parents seem a little, shall we say, intense? I don’t know this situation as well, so I can’t really comment, but I can see it on her face when she mentions something about her parents. They’re visiting today and between what I’ve overheard and what I can see on her face, it makes me think it’s at least a somewhat similar situation.

My parents expect me to do well. That’s not the issue here. They expect me to do well, but they also help me do well. They’re supportive and understanding. I never thought I had the “cool parents” until I got to college. Looking back I realize that I had it pretty good. I was allowed to dye my hair multiple times (many times my parents actually paid for the dye), I never got grounded (of course I never really did anything to get grounded for, but that might be beside the point), and my mom took me to get my nose pierced because I wasn’t going to be 18 for another 3 months. So yea, my parents are cool. If I fail a class, I’ll still have some ‘splainin to do, but I’m a decently good kid and I think my parents realize that.

I sometimes feel like a failure or a slacker compared to these friends and yet they’re so harsh on themselves because their parents are so hard on them. It depresses me greatly and I just want to yell at these people and make them realize what they’re doing.

I’m not in a whole lot of contact with my friend from high school. The end of junior year and then senior year she sort of withdrew from all of us. I’m not really sure what she did during lunch and the other times during the school day that we all used to spend together, but we didn’t see her. We would still invite her to movie nights or other things, but she always said no. Eventually we just stopped asking. Sometimes I regret that, but I don’t really know what else we could have done.