The Last of the Tiger Parents
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's absurd to think that no-one who came up with a Tiger Parent philosophy won't be a good researcher or independently creative, but there does seem to be a rapid winnowing of people who were previously overperforming on tests and 'routine intellectual work'.
While this is very true, the "movers and shakers" are the ones who set the standard of a research culture. Frankly, that's why the US has a major research advantage over most (probably all) countries that strongly embrace tiger parenting.
In many ways it, combined with my laziness as a kid made things harder. I sailed though tests and did good enough, but always had academic interests outside of school.
I turned out great, but I do wish I had treated school as something other than a ticket punching experience.
Also, let's not forget that sometimes the reason "there is not a clearly delineated pathway to achievement" could well be because the existence of such a thing would disrupt existing social hierarchies.
It's not exactly Isaac Newton territory.
And why is this their call?
I think Tiger Parenting simply increases the floor. Therefore, many children have artificially inflated marks relative to their true intelligence. When these children are put in an environment in which they are unable to rely on outworking others, they falter. They are not uncreative, they're just not intelligent.
Or you know, child happiness and personal fulfilment.
You'd be really surprised.
People follow their dreams even in the bottom 5% -- including as refugees, in times of war, and in all kinds of bad situations, and in all kinds of cultures, not just "the west".
The "starving artist" (who does or does not make it) is not something out of fiction, and neither is the piss poor bootstrapped entrepreneur.
I had two friends at school and met exactly same situation visiting their families one day. We were given some homework to do...
Jewish family: Misha, you are so smart, why you cannot solve this exercise?
Russian family (same Tiger style): Vladimir, why you cannot solve this exercise, why you are so lazy?
I do remember that the comparison impressed me - parenthood is an art of creating proper motivations really.
I don't remember elementary school that much. I remember getting my homework done quick because I could play the N64 or Xbox when my homework was done. Maybe that instilled in me the notion that academics come first. I also remember taking math quizzes and being pretty good at them in elementary school. It was like a game to see if I could be the first one to finish and still get 100%.
When I was in middle school and high school I was always aiming for As. Part of it was because I was genuinely interested and motivated to learn. More cynically, if I failed (or was even below average) academically it would be big blow to my sense of self-worth. Also because I desired the status and money that going to a good university would bring.
That said, I don't really think my parents ever strictly enforced academic commitment. Sure, I got As, but I also spent a ton of time playing video games, hanging out with friends, etc. I didn't have a bed time - I distinctly remember binging through a whole season of Dexter on a school night once. When my parents found a beer bottle tucked away in a closet (damn friends couldn't clean up for shit) they were more mad that I got caught rather than that my friends and I experimented with alcohol. I'd speculate that if I started getting mostly Bs or Cs they'd probably crack down on recreational time, but this was something that neither I nor my sister ever put to the test.
I don't want this to sound self-congratulatory, but I really think in retrospect my childhood was a great outcome. I had academic success because my parents instilled the principles in me at a young age, and by late childhood or young adulthood I was self motivated academically. Thus, in high school I was free to balance school and social life myself any my parents trusted me to get good grades without much input on their part.
It's also the kind of childhood I'd want to pass on to my kids. I'd want to instill in them the value of academic and professional success, but want them to be self motivated to achieve those goals beyond early childhood years.
I worked to get good grades for myself, not because my parents really pushed me to. They certainly encouraged and helped, but that was it. I was very introverted my first few years of high school (did have online friends through games, and friends in real life, but rarely stayed overnight with them, etc) but my parents pushed me to get out of that even. I didn't do much studying, either (bit me in the ass in college tho because I didn't know how to study well lol), and didn't have a bedtime.
Now, my brother wasn't as motivated to do good as I was, even though he could. And my parents didn't push him either. They let him have his friends over every weekend and get Bs and such. I'm really really glad I had that kind of upbringing when comparing it to the other kid who had to have straight As, had over 1000 volunteer hours a year, did Tae Kwan Do and several other extracurriculars (his parents wanted him and siblings to go to Naval Academy;they all did end up going). There were times his life seemed awful, even tho he hung out with friends a lot and had fun... His siblings both had it worse off, and it showed in how they interacted with people (i.e. Grades decided worth, no real social skills, etc etc)
It's been a few years since I've read the book, but your upbringing sounds extreme dissimilar from what Chua calls tiger parenting. Where you start to diverge is where you have time for video games once academics are taken care of.
In the tiger parent model there are no video games or playtime with friends when academics are done. That is when you do additional academics or learn foreign languages or practice classical music.
Getting good grades is not an accomplishment to be rewarded and straight A's don't get you any latitude. These accomplishments are the bare minimum of expected behavior for your child.
A gifted child can become a high achiever with a casual approach to academics. With a rigorous approach the idea is that average children become high achievers and gifted children become world class.
I do believe in the value of an educated populace not just for jobs, but for democratic and civic strength.
There is some nature to consider, not just nuture, I guess.
Less wasteful, less disappointment at not being happy all the time.
I graduated in the top 50% of my high school class and had a 3.2/4 GPA at a state EE program. I hear about high school kids studying 3 hours a day, I don't think I ever studied much more than 3 hours a week. Definitely not stellar academic credentials.
I ended up entering an md phd program where I washed out after 5 years. Fast forward a few years (20...) and I have my own company and will make about $800k-$1M this year.
Yet at no time was I unhappy, even when I was digging for change out of the couch to have enough money to buy food. I remember savoring the ridiculousness of the situation and reveling in it. Yet I'm no happier now than I was at that moment.
Part of life is figuring out what truly makes you happy. For most of us it ends up being bringing happiness to others in some way, not achievement and material possessions.
One thing that became abundantly clear from watching my kid go through the college process was that "better" is highly student-dependent. I had a really really great time at university but was happy that my kid didn't even apply there as I think he wouldn't have enjoyed the experience and would not have flourished; in fact he did end up going to a school I could not have handled.
Assuming you enjoy your job at the "big 5", is anything wrong?
(Not to say that it's always useful to reflect on the path not taken once in a while in case it provides insights for the future! But tiger parenting -- as a recipient of it, though my parents tried to tone it down -- is predicated on there being a "way", which ultimately there isn't, at least in the USA).
I wonder if that does your kids or anyone else a favor. As someone in position similar to the author, I've chosen to Tiger parent my kids. As my Asian immigrant parents understood: money is really important. It matters so much that financial stress is a leading cause of divorce and people die because they don't have the money for proper healthcare. I don't want my kids to suffer for lack of money. Nor do I want them to feel like they can have their cake and eat it too because they can depend on their parents' money.
There's also a question of whether it helps anyone else. Our world is facing immense challenges. Many of the things cans we've been kicking down the road for these past decades are going to pile up on the generation to come. Their generation needs people slaving away in labs or in front of computers. That need might be existential. Your kids shouldn't get a pass on that just because they are privileged and their parents were well-off enough that they could be comfortable without necessarily striving.
That way when your daughter is grown she is more likely to have a balanced set of experiences.
Also, at worst you'd become known as "that quirky parent who flips coins to choose between things." Whereas if you keep insisting on activities that sound like they'll increase her later earning potential, you will at worst create a nice size resentment in your daughter as she figures out what you're doing.
Which is the cause and which is the effect? Financial stress may be a leading cause of divorce because money’s importance is so heavily emphasized.
IMHO that's overfitting, what worked for our parent might or might not work for us. I believe cultivating the right mindset, having the children think for themselves instead of forcing them to follow our footsteps, is the best way to prepare them for the uncertainty of the future.
Disclaimer: I'm Asian, but not in America.
Further education is in no way a guaranteed path to success: I have two BS degrees Physics and Geology with math and CS minors, and yet I am a stock boy at Target.
Nothing is a path to anything. We of course hear from the successful children of "tiger moms" but how many stories in the last 50 years do you remember with the headline "my mother demanded everything and I am a fork lift operator at an industrial door warehouse" and yet https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58ff7f40e4b0c46f0782a5b6 Asian Americans are statistically poorer than most...
Before you can rebel academically, a decade of conformism is required. So few nonconformists survive that such traits are immediately valuable - but do not mistake that for neutrality, modern education is conformist above all else.
> Further education is in no way a guaranteed path to success.
Sure, and I made no such claim, the article author is concerned about educational achievement in and of itself.
Not only is that untrue, it's the exact opposite of the truth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the...
Poor Asian immigrants are just more likely to settle in NYC.
They move there because of the existing immigrant communities already in place.
3/4 of Asian Americans in NYC are immigrants.
I am claiming that if one of the most populous cities in the country/world sees a high degree of poverty in a demographic it might be because that demographic has a high degree of poverty.
>I am claiming that if one of the most populous cities in the country/world sees a high degree of poverty in a demographic it might be because that demographic has a high degree of poverty.
You could actually look at the overall numbers though instead of extrapolating from a non-random sample.
You'd find that Asian Americans are less likely to live in poverty than than any other minority group, and even less likely than the general population.
Clearly NYC is an anomaly. That anomaly is caused by disproportionately large number of poor Asian immigrants.
The only thing this demonstrates is that people from Asian countries poorer than the US disproportionately move to NYC. It isn't in any way useful in a discussion on Asian parenting methods or the benefits of education.
also why is "Asian countries poorer than the US" so easily dismiss-able for purposes of parenting when almost all "Asian Countries" are poorer than the US?
If you don't understand why that is the case, there really isn't much point in continuing this.
In Asian culture, obedience, order, and hierarchy are the values that shape society. Western cultures value individualism, but in Asian cultures, you are part of a unit or group, be it family, department or otherwise. This unit has a clear head/leader (parents or boss) who makes decisions for the entire unit with everyone else expected to obediently follow, and this obedience and hierarchy that makes the unit successful is seen as the highest moral standard in Confucian philosophy. However, the head must also be responsible to the subordinates, sacrificing for the subordinates what the subordinates do for the head. If the head acts in this way, he is morally right and the subordinates' obedience is a reciprocation or agreement of a mutually moral relationship.
See http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Reading_Revolutions/Confucius.html for a quick summary.
If you're a poor Asian immigrant strategizing how to get your family ahead, you will think about it from the perspective of the family unit, ignoring the individual. The generalized strategy would be for the parents to sacrifice themselves to push the kids as much as possible. In Confucian philosophy, the head is 'moral' in beating the kids into studying because they fulfill their responsibility to the kids in providing opportunities for a better life, and the subordinates, (kids) to reciprocate morality, should obediently follow.
Unfortunately, the kids grow up westernized. Confucian philosophy works because the moral obedience and obligation to the unit gets so deeply ingrained, it defines your satisfaction and value system on a deeper, instinctual level. You can get pushed to do things you wouldn't want to do as an individual because you get value out of it elsewhere in a moral or social context. However, if there is no carrot because instead of Confucian values of the unit, western values of individualism is instilled, then there is a problem - from the kid's point of view, it's all suffering. Even worse, it's a direct affront to what society is teaching should be valued (independence and autonomy), and it creates deep feelings of your parents 'being wrong' in asian american kids, enough to be a widespread phenomenon.
2nd generation Asian American adults often feel slighted by their parents very deeply beyond rationalism, and it's a moral wrong, a slight to the fundamental rights of human beings - the right to be an individual. But the result is a successful upper-middle class lifestyle, jumping multiple generations of wealth accumulation in just one. This duality makes a lot of Asian American adults at odds with themselves and their culture.
A lot of 2nd gen try to push while respecting individual feelings, but there's too little fuel to go full tiger parent - you don't need to jump wealth gaps, you value individualism too much, and most importantly, you just don't want your kids to suffer as much as you did.
In this sense, the 2nd generation is similar to the 1st. The major motivation for Asian immigrants was to have a better life, and for their family to not suffer so much. Compared to starving, or being hunted down by communists, or living in old open air houses with no ac or sanitation, what's a bit of forced studying?
Contrary to the view of the article, I don't see modern Asian Americans as regressing. I think we have the background and tools to combine the best parts of both cultures - a little pushing to go beyond themselves, with the empowerment that comes from western individual thought - to create a very strong next generation in the future.
His parents didn't have that luxury, and most of us do not either. So it might not have been pretty, but it did exactly the job that his parents wanted to do. This is how families pull themselves out of the cycle of poverty, through unapologetic adherence to top education and work ethic.
The first is that tiger parenting requires a large investment of a parent's time to be successful. For those that are absolutely poor and barely surviving they have little time nor energy to actively participate in their kid's schooling.
The second is the factor of luck which I firmly believe is far more important. My parents were the exact opposite of the parenting style in the OP because they couldn't be. The only reason why I managed to escape the cycle of poverty was due (un)lucky circumstances that allowed me to scrape by and survive through college. Families don't pull themselves out of poverty through adherence to education or work ethic. Not in America at least.
And finally there's also survivorship bias in play. We can say that tiger parenting is successful because of successful people being raised in that environment but we ignore the many people that committed suicide, burned out or otherwise didn't make it as a result of such intense stress. On average those exposed to this style tend to do worse.
But I don't think your refutations hold up. This will be a bit of a tome, sorry.
> For those [parents] that are absolutely poor and barely surviving they have little time nor energy to actively participate in their kid's schooling.
That's true for a lot of people. Structural disadvantages are huge. But at the same time, it's not true for large classes of deeply impoverished people. As the author of TFA pointed out, [east] Asian immigrants are, by some metrics, the poorest group of people in the New York area--and definitely severely economically disadvantaged no matter what measurement you use. And yet the academic performance of those groups--even in that area--continues to surpass many others. Given how endemic poverty is among those demographics, I don't think "it's not the poor kids doing super well in school" holds up; the intersection must be large, and something must be materially different about the practices of those folks in order to combat what, elsewhere in the country/world, would be the multiple-generation-damning sentence of poverty.
> Families don't pull themselves out of poverty through adherence to education or work ethic.
That's anecdotal. In general, this is a dangerously politicized area. To argue that families do not, as a rule, pull themselves out of poverty flies in the face of many areas in which they do so in very significant numbers (like the one discussed in the article). However, to argue that therefore all impoverished families can and/or should do this is to echo the most callous and ignorant positions of modern American conservatism.
I think that escaping poverty is possible--not just among outlier families out in the statistical noise--and that figuring out how/when this occurs is important to improving a lot of people's quality of life. I also think it's super important not to let those investigations ever take on the tone of "...and anyone who doesn't bootstrap themselves out of poverty has nobody to blame but themselves". Study in this area must not come at a tradeoff with acting compassionately--compassionately at macro (e.g. political/voting and economic policies/investments), medium (e.g. donating to causes and activism), and micro (e.g. offering what help you can to people you see suffering on the way to work each day) levels--towards those struggling with poverty.
> there's also survivorship bias in play.
I can relate to this personally, having lost people (suicide, overdose, other) due to circumstances correlated with both insanely strict parenting and severe poverty. But I don't think these answers to the question of "how/why/when do families escape poverty with minimal outside assistance?" is an instance of survivorship bias. The hypothesis being tested is "X allowed these specific groups to escape extreme poverty". Nobody's arguing that many (most) others in that situation don't escape, and nobody's arguing that poverty doesn't exist because some people escaped it--that would be survivorship bias. As you point out, there may be long-term costs that are being overlooked, but that's not the same thing.
When you say "On average those exposed to this style tend to do worse", do you mean worse compared to remaining in poverty? If so, citation needed. Or do you mean that "tiger" parenting has worse outcomes compared to other strategies? I don't think most people would disagree with you there. The important question, though, is why this strategy is practiced so effectively among severely impoverished people, and why it has positive results compared to the "control" majority--which, as you point out, is a vicious cycle of poverty feeding back into lack of energy feeding back into lower parent participating feeding back into stunted academic development.
This could be explained through quite a few different avenues. For example, Asian-Americans tend to be lumped together despite how many different cultures actually make up that group. There's also the greater paradox you bring up in that they both compose a group grappling with deep poverty and a group that has seen academic success. It's hard to say therefore that the two are necessarily correlated because we should see academic success tied with decreasing rates of poverty. While it has dropped slightly over the past few years they still remain deep in poverty and have been for decades.
>That's anecdotal. In general, this is a dangerously politicized area. To argue that families do not, as a rule, pull themselves out of poverty flies in the face of many areas in which they do so in very significant numbers (like the one discussed in the article). However, to argue that therefore all impoverished families can and/or should do this is to echo the most callous and ignorant positions of modern American conservatism.
Saying it's politicized would be objectively and statistically incorrect. Socioeconomic mobility in America is incredibly low. People do not, on average, pull themselves out of poverty at any significant rate in America [1]. I believe it would be fair to state as a rule if you are born in poverty, the chances of you rising up the rungs are not very high.
People escape out of poverty due to a lucky alignment of circumstances that give them the opportunities that other people are more easily afforded access to. The way to therefore improve people's QoL is to ensure that people have these opportunities by improving healthcare, reducing burdens on poor families and ensuring that people have equal opportunity regardless of race or gender.
>When you say "On average those exposed to this style tend to do worse", do you mean worse compared to remaining in poverty? If so, citation needed.
Please read the article before you request citations. The author directly cites a study which states that tiger parenting has the opposite result on average [2].
For the rest of your points, these specific groups tend to have successful people that are propped up as a result of the model minority stereotype. That would be almost exactly survivorship bias because we only see the successful people, not those that tried and failed or are still part of the huge group still living in deep poverty.
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2006/04...
> It's hard to say therefore that the two are necessarily correlated because we should see academic success tied with decreasing rates of poverty. [..but we don't]
No factual disagreement here. I think that the cases in which it does trade off are important--but not because I think we (the US, if you're a citizen) as a society should double down on education as the sole/primary solution to poverty, but simply because these dynamics are important to understand. As you imply, there are many other things also needed to address poverty as a social concern.
> Saying it's politicized would be objectively and statistically incorrect.
That's not what I meant. I didn't mean to suggest your claim was suspect because it's a politicized area, just that discussions about the implications of claims here need to be undertaken carefully given the chargedness of the subject. You are not an exemplar of that polemic.
> If you are born in poverty, the chances of you rising up the rungs are not very high.
In general, I agree.
> People escape out of poverty due to a lucky alignment of circumstances
"Lucky" does not explain the trends described in TFA. Explanation follows.
> The author directly cites a study which states that tiger parenting has the opposite result on average.
Correct. The cited study does not find a conclusive advantage in the "tiger" parenting style (and finds several potential disadvantages). However, my original claim was narrow: that this parenting style appears, given the other claims of the article to be practicable and effective in the face of extreme poverty. My question was not about the choice between "tiger" parenting and other styles in general; rather, it was about why it (according to TFA) is (practiced|able to be practiced|effectively practiced) by people in impoverished situations that, as you say, are usually correlated with "poverty as multigenerational sentence, caveat luck".
I have no speculations on why that difference exists, though it's fascinating--and, I suspect, important to some aspects of social progress. If there is research suggesting that there is not such a correlation, I'd be interested in that as well. Let's just be clear: this is about parenting/upbringing strategies that, in contrast to the norm, counteract or appear to counteract the effects of severe socioeconomic disadvantage, not such strategies on balance in other situations.
If you're a working programmer/job-in-tech a newspaper subscriptions is almost nothing money wise, but contributes lots back.
This is especially true if the article is about a controversial or contentious topic, because then people will often cite other articles in support of or opposition to the points of the article and those are often not behind paywalls.
If it is a current events news article, there will also usually be other sources covering the same events you can turn to if the discussion is such that you really do need to read an article in order to follow along.
If you want to filter them out, you could probably write a simple bookmarklet to do so. Here's something that almost works with HN's current page structure:
(function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes'))
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = 'hidden';})()
If you really want to get rid of that other line, this will do:
(function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes')) {
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = 'hidden';
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.nextSibling.hidden = 'hidden';
}
})()
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.nextSibling.nextSibling.hidden = 'hidden'
Here's something you can put in a bookmarklet to un-hide all the hidden stories:
(function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = '';})()
(function () {
var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes')) {
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = '';
stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.nextSibling.hidden = '';
}
})()
To use, create a bookmark and set the URL to "javascript: <code from above>". You can paste in the "<code from above>" part. You don't have to do any encoding or putting it on one line. Both Firefox and Chrome will automatically do that for you.