The race to the Ivy League starts early.
Well-to-do parents are increasingly hiring private tutors not just for high school, middle school and elementary kids — but also for their tiny toddlers.
Their little ones might be on-track developmentally, but moms and dads want junior to get a jump on the competition when it comes to learning their ABCs and 123s.
“It’s an investment,” said Gabrielle Gambrell, 36, a mother-of-two and a public relations professor at New York University who lives in White Plains. “Education is very important to me. I absolutely desire for my children to excel academically — especially at their young ages.“
She and her husband shell out a little over $2,000 a month on a private teacher for their 3-year-old son, Jeffrey, and 16-month-old daughter, Galia.
During each 45-minute, $85 session — which Jeffrey has attended three times weekly since April 2021 — the tutor guides the children through lesson plans that focus on learning Spanish, though neither Gambrell, an Iona University grad, nor her husband, Jeffrey senior, are native speakers, and identifying colors, shapes and animals.
Gambrell said all the hard work is paying off for Jeffrey, who attends a public preschool in Westchester County five days a week.
“My son is able to answer his teacher’s questions in both English and Spanish,” said Gambrell, who barely remembers the basics of the foreign language, which she studied in high school. “He literally does a happy dance when it’s time to go to tutoring because it’s given him an incredible love of learning.”
Educators and tutoring companies are eagerly meeting the needs of parents looking to give their kids every academic advantage.
Beck Goodman, a Teach for America alumna with a Masters degree in education, started offering private tutoring for Manhattan’s preschool set during Covid lockdown and has seen demand soar so much that she has turned it into a business.
“A number of families began receiving services over the pandemic, saw the benefits and shared their positive experiences with their friends and relatives — who wanted the same educational leg up for their young kids,” she said. “[Our clients] want to give their kids an academic head start,” said Goodman.
She now has a thriving early childhood enrichment company, Growing With Beck, and three full time employees.
She accepts students as young as age 2 for her weekly 45-minute, in-home sessions, which range in cost from $100 to $700 per session, depending on each family’s needs. Goodman tells The Post she typically charges her clients around $300 for each appointment.
“[Hiring a tutor] is, in some ways, a luxury for people who have the means,” she said, adding that parents who don’t have the excess funds for tutoring can utilize free educational tools on YouTube and Pinterest.
Her typical tot session begins with “a conversation about their day, then we review a specific subject we’ve been focusing on — so if we’re learning letters, I’ll hide letter cut-outs around the room and have them find each one.
“We might play a board game or card game, or we’ll do an educational craft [centered around] numbers, colors and measurements with scissors and glue.”
The trend isn’t limited to type-A New Yorkers. The nationwide tutoring franchise Kumon, which has nine locations in the five boroughs, offers its services to children as young as age 3.
On TikTok, proud parents showcase what their tots have been able to achieve thanks to extra academic coaching under the #ToddlerTutor, which has over 1.5 million views,
Mollie Coniglio, 33, a married mother of two based in Denver, Col., engaged a tutor for her 3-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son in April.
She explained why she did so on TikTok, saying “I know all parents think their kids are gifted and geniuses, but our son is testing out of all of the grades, so we’ve got to figure out something.”
Coniglio told The Post that her son had begun expressing boredom at preschool because he wasn’t being challenged enough on subjects like letter and word recognition, reading and writing.
However, she says since hiring their private tutor, Lauren, from Care.com, her brood has reached surprising scholastic heights.
“Our 3-year-old can engage in a full hour of lessons without getting distracted, which is quite impressive at her age,” boasted the mom, who chose to withhold her children’s names for privacy reasons.
“Our 4-year-old has mastered letter recognition and sounds, can write his name and basic words, and is beginning to combine letter sounds to recognize words.”
But, experts warn that while providing young kids with enrichment and learning opportunities can be highly beneficial, it has to be for the right reasons.
“If moms and dads are only getting a tutor to make their kid more competitive in the classroom for bragging rights about how smart their child is, it can lead to anxiety-related issues around perfectionism, as well as a fear of failure and disdain for school,” NYU Langone Health child psychologist Yamalis Diaz told The Post.
“If you’re doing it for the wrong reasons, you’re actually killing their love of learning.”