Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlazingFrog | Hacker News Reader

Probably the wrong crowd considering HN's readership is probably too young to worry about raising kids... But, as a father of 2 little ones, this "tiger mom" concept is very intriguing to me.

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.

View on HN

Maybe we can turn this discussion around to be a bit more relevant to HNers.

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.

This model seems to be concerned with one only thing: competing. You must be better than everyone else. So you will be happy only in the interval between when (if) you find you're beating someone else and when you realize (inevitably) there's still someone better than you.

A self-worth determined entirely on comparing yourself to others is a recipe for stress and unhappiness, and it is sheer foolishness.

So the underlying question is: how important is it that your children are capable of the types of success which require enormous determination and tenacity.

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.

> I don't it's fair to say that opting for the Tiger Mom approach necessarily implies that all self worth comes from winning.

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."

The model gave examples of competition between man and nature and man and himself only. The piano practice was against the goal of learning a new task and giving up, of believing in self-limitation or overcoming it. It wasn't against comparison to others.

"I don't think there's any doubt these kids will be successful in whatever they choose to do."

Based on what? Academic performance through high school? The ability to play the piano? Are these really good predictors of success?

Besides outliers and exceptions, yes, those are probably fairly good predictors of success.

Of course I don't know that for sure, but I don't think there's any argument that practicing piano for an extended period of time throughout your childhood greatly increases your chance to become a successful pianist. The same goes with academics and pretty much anything.

No, the ability to pour absurd amounts of time and effort into things that you despise, because it's good for you in the long run.

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.

David Brooks wrote a column which addressed some of the social issues you mentioned:

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.

"Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls." Love it. Finally something he and I agree on...

I'm very interested to hear how to spend my income fixing my upbringing (genuinely).

I would rather fund a musician than a non-musician. I wonder if PG keeps such statistics.

Can you elaborate on that?

A musician: -has persevered to learn a difficult skill -has developed both sides of her brain -can focus in private and perform publicly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com