Daughter of Tiger Mom responds to controversy
nypost.com
nypost.com
I don't think there's any doubt these kids will be successful in whatever they choose to do. My question (and probably for many westerners too): is this education the best way to raise happy individuals? There seems to be a big divide between most well-off Asian families and most educated Western families when it comes to what is the most important thing in life. No doubt there is a correlation between being happy and successful but one hardly guarantees the other.
Based on what? Academic performance through high school? The ability to play the piano? Are these really good predictors of success?
That's how I felt as a Chinese kid growing up anyways - there are a fuckton of things that your parents will force upon you that seem arbitrary, boring, or downright aggravating, but you have to power through it anyways and still give 100%. Or else. This has proven to be useful in the long run for me.
It's not entirely without negative consequences, though. What is traditionally deemed "useful" in a Chinese family can be extremely limiting. I spent the better part of college learning social cues and human interaction that I honestly should've picked up by age 12, and my folks weren't nearly quite as restrictive as Tiger Mom herself!
Even now I'm just starting to explore the arts and my own creativity - something that has basically been trained out of me since birth. It's tough going.
IMHO the stereotypical Chinese family optimizes its success metric in a very limiting way: money. If you follow Tiger Mom's formula, you are probably going to end up with a stable, high-income job, but are going to end up emotionally pretty miserable. As a Chinese immigrant it's something I've seen again and again far too often in my own community.
I can't speak for all Chinese, but having been raised in a Tiger-Mom-esque way, and enjoyed the fruits of its success, I find that I'm spending a large portion of my income these days fixing what my upbringing broke.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opinion/18brooks.html
I found it pretty interesting, and it's contributed to my growing respect for Brooks.
I'm a third generation overseas Chinese, and I've many cousins who don't grow up in a Tiger mom environment but end up doing very well in life.
You see, there are two types of families.
One, where the parents are well educated, and see to it their children excel academically.
Then there are those whose parents are involved in business. Those cousins don't have the same pressure from parents to excel academically. While they don't do well at school, they end up doing very well at business.
Amy Chua's style is very much waterfall. The goal is known, and far away, and it takes about two decades of work to get there. As long as the world doesn't change too quickly, the method is a slog but assured.
Meanwhile, the other parents approach life in a more exploratory manner. One cousin was good at drawing, and he helped out his fathers furniture shop helping customers visualise what a finished kitchen may look like. Eventually he branched into contract renovations hiring about 20 people, and now he's moved on to a more lucrative business of building houses in Singapore.
A self-worth determined entirely on comparing yourself to others is a recipe for stress and unhappiness, and it is sheer foolishness.
I don't it's fair to say that opting for the Tiger Mom approach necessarily implies that all self worth comes from winning.
The really tough questions is: How much of your child's self esteem should come from enduring extended periods of hard work to achieve a goal. It's tough because the extent to which a child tries hard may be directly affected by the extent to which their self esteem requires that success.
Quoting Tiger Mother: "The only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal, and that medal must be gold."
You are commenting on something you have no experience with, nor intimate knowledge of, and your only exposure to it a sensationalized book (or worse, even more sensationalized and hyperbolic stories about said book).
The Tiger Mom thing is not immune from criticism - far from it, but to insinuate that children that grew up in such families are abused and suffering from Stockholm Syndrome is incredibly insulting. You've essentially dismissed all of the complexities of the issue by hand-waving and saying that their opinions are invalid, they don't know what they're talking about, and they're all just suffering from a psychological disorder.
I'm trying really hard to stay civil here. But please, get a fucking clue before dropping statements like these and tossing around claims of child abuse.
And thank you for the ad hominem, it's really what I've come to expect from a place like HN.
What's upsetting to me is this used to be a place where you could have really civil disagreements. Now when people disagree, they get nasty, or they throw around links to psychological disorders of whoever they disagree with. It's screwed up.
Having been around the world and immersed in many cultures, I think the traditional Chinese way is pretty good.
Actually, I think it'd be really excellent to take traditional Chinese parenting but also emphasize exploratory creative fail-forwards type work, and then mixed in some Italian-style entertaining, hosting people, socializing and being friendly.
I do think Americans sometimes under-emphasize practical success these days, and that can actually wind up really hurting people... you see someone with a masters degrees in fine arts who work at Starbucks has and is staring at crushing student loan debt for their entire life... that's not good.
Nowhere's perfect, but I think the traditional Chinese way is a very good starting block. Patch the underemphasis on socializing and abstract-fail-forwards stuff, and I think you're looking at a very successful parenting model.
Two telling quotes from his article:
Professor Chua's article was a bracing rebuttal to the sappy-clappy "we're all special" sentimentality that is too prevalent in American child-raising. Her methods worked, too, at least in meeting her own goals: Her daughters are straight-A students, and one has played piano at Carnegie Hall. Probably we American parents should practice more tough love with our kids and fuss less about their self-esteem. Few of us would disagree with observations like: "Nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work." And assuming "strength, not fragility" concurs with current scientific understanding of the child's psyche. They are indeed tough little critters.
And later:
Children need some nagging and supervision, but they also need freedom to explore, to discover their own interests and aptitudes. We may, in our current child-raising practices, have over-emphasized self-esteem and self-discovery, but that does not make these notions nugatory. Children are entitled to a childhood, with frequent spells of play, idleness, and freedom from hovering adults.
I read part of the book and was completely disgusted by it. This person should be arrested for child abuse and thrown in a Russian gulag and see how it feels when the shoe is on the other foot!
Also, your association between Tiger Mom styles of raising children and suicide rate is pretty specious, and if you'd pardon me for saying so, looks like an outsider with no context making wild accusations. For one thing, Tiger Mom is Chinese, and yet the suicide epidemic is largely limited to Japan.
If Tiger Mom styles of raising children existed in both China and Japan, yet the suicide problem largely contained to Japan, it would seem to suggest that it is not to blame for the high suicide rate.
Also, the "work like a dog, doctor making millions" vs. "great childhood, $15/hr waitress" is really a false dichotomy. Most Chinese people who grow up under a Tiger Mom environment don't end up making millions, and similarly most children who had a more liberal/free childhood don't end up busing tables.
I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed in Amy Chua for being so overly sensationalistic in her book and promotion thereof. I'm not sure if her mother approves of the extreme, polarizing way in which she is being presented to the world. The typical Chinese childhood is characterized by extremely high expectations, but in and of itself it does not entail abuse or even really misery.