My son says he feels like there is too much pressure on him sometimes but thanked us for pushing his so hard. How do you know when to back off vs when to add pressure?

My son is 12 and in the 7th grade. My husband and I strongly believe in being involved parents. He is a middle school teacher and a high school coach. He sees what happens when parents aren't involved and don't push their kids to reach their highest potential.We do push our kids to achieve a lot. Some would probably call it "tiger parenting" and I am okay with that even though I don't agree with that label. I wouldn't say that anything lower than an A on a report card is an F, but anything lower than an A on a report card is addressed. If it is an issue of understanding then we have no problem with hiring a tutor. We also expect involvement in other activities so the 12 year old plays football in the fall, soccer in the winter, and baseball in the spring and summer. We believe that kids who are involved in other things and have little down time are less at risk to run around and get in trouble. He does still have down time. I want to make that clear. He also plays the violin in his school orchestra. Music education is important to us. My husband says his best students are musicians and almost every single valedictorian at the high school for the last 10 years has been involved in either band or orchestra. We want the best for our kids and push them to be their best. We were discussing New Years resolutions last night and decided to make some up for each other. My son said that he wanted us to stop pushing him so hard and to trust him more. He thanked us for pushing him hard up until this point but says we instilled strong values in him and he wants more say in making decisions. The decisions are things like not making him study or practice his instrument. The instrument is important because he will be trying out for the audition orchestra in 8th grade. He also doesn't want my husband coaching his summer baseball team this year and says he wants to work with a new coach. My husband will coach him at the high school level for football and baseball so son said he wants a little break. The problem with that is that this was my husband's first year of not coaching our son in football because he moved up from youth league to the middle school team. We could see that he was putting less effort into football this year than previous years and his performance suffered. This will be his first spring of middle school baseball so my husband won't be coaching that either. He previously coached spring and summer baseball. He was hoping to have summer to correct anything that went wrong during spring ball but our son said he would really prefer if my husband didn't coach summer ball this year.This is one of the few times I have felt stuck as a parent. I value our relationship with him over anything and am glad he felt comfortable coming to us but I am trying to balance wanting him to succeed with wanting him to make his own decisions. If he wants to screw off in baseball or football for the next couple years, maybe the only way for him to learn is to spend an extra year or two on JV because he isn't good enough for varsity. Maybe the only way for him to regret not putting his all into grades or music is to be rejected from his top choice school as a senior. Maybe we need to let him make more decisions and deal with the consequences with a small "I tried to tell you."Thoughts? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/36hEhL1