If you have got kids, here is a nasty truth: they are probably not very special, that is, they are average, ordinary, and unremarkable. Consider the numbers of those applications your daughter is sending to Ivy League schools, for instance. There are more than a quarter of a million other kids aiming for the same eight colleges at the same time, and less than 9% of them will make the cut. And those hours you spend coaching Little League because you just know your son's sweet swing will take him to the professionals. There are 2.4 million other Little Leaguers out there, and there are exactly 750 openings for major league ballplayers at the beginning of each season. That gives him a 0.0313% chance of reaching the big clubs. The odds are just as long for the other dreams you've had for your kids: your child the billionaire, the Broadway star, the Rhodes scholar. Most of those things are never going to happen.The kids are paying the price for parents' delusions. In public schools, some students are bringing home 17.5 hours of homework per week or 3.5 per school night and it's hard to see how they have time to do it. From 2004 to 2014, the number of children participating in up to three hours of aider-school activities on any given day rose from 6.5 million to 10.2 million. And all the while, the kids are being fed a promise--that they can be tutored and coached, pushed and tested, hot- housed and advance placed until success is assured. At last, a growing chorus of educators and psychologists is saying, "Enough!" Somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos there has to be a place where kids can breathe, where they can have the freedom to do what they love and where parents accustomed to pushing their children to excel can shake off the newly defined shame of having raised an ordinary child.

If the system is going to be fixed, it has to start, no surprise, with the parents. For them, the

• A.They should be their kids' companions on their journey to academic excellence
• B.They should realize the fact that most children would remain mediocre despite their wills
• C.They should feel relieved if they don't have to pay for their kid's off-school art lessons
• D.They should be their kids' career director rather than help them find a right path to walk on