Parents, you have to read this article about Chinese mothers in the Wall Street Journal.
The piece is by a Chinese woman who, like me, grew up in the USA and has a non-Asian husband. She is raising her kids in the way I was raised. Basically, it boils down to:
- Focus on academics — perfection is the only acceptable result
- Also important to excel at violin/piano
- No sports, theater or nonacademic activities.
- No regard for the child’s self-esteem
- Spending hours a way drilling her kids with practice tests
- No sleepovers, no boyfriends
The article has some really interesting info such as:
almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that “stressing academic success is not good for children” or that “parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.” By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way.
And some true observations such as:
If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child “stupid,” “worthless” or “a disgrace.” Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child’s grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher’s credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it.
This is exactly how my sister and I were raised and I always assumed that it was a result of my parent’s insecure feelings as immigrants in an unfamiliar land. Their fear that we would not be able to support ourselves (and them, when they were no longer able to work), I assumed, drove them to push us harder than they would have if we stayed in Korea.
But this woman clearly doesn’t have those same motivations. So what is it that drives her to raise her kids in the way she was raised? Is she not scarred by the constant haranguing? Did she not have a rebellious period where she hated her parents, suffer from anorexia, or allow herself be bullied because she always felt that she was not good enough?
There are certainly some aspects of my upbringing that I plan to repeat with my kids. I plan to sit down with them daily to work on their homework and drill them as necessary. I will expect really good grades and for them to go to a top college. I know that my mother was able to successfully instill in me a strong work ethic, the ability to focus and the drive to not give up. I do not agree with many westerners who feel that these are traits that you have or do not have. I know that my mother instilled them in me through her strict methods.
But I also know the impact that my upbringing had on my self esteem and happiness as a child. I was not happy. And I want my kids to be happy and to feel good about themselves. I am not going to tell Matilda that she is too fat, too slow, to dumb. I won’t ever say to Mateo that he is a failure and a loser. If they end up achieving less than perfection, so be it.
So please post comments, I am dying to know what you all think about the article? For non-Asians, are you totally horrified? And for Asians, do you plan to do this to your kids?
Read the full article here.
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Update: I checked out this comment thread on Quora. Another statistic, asian-american females have a a high suicide rate in the USA. The story posted by Christine Lu is worth reading too. Her “perfect” sister committed suicide. She wrote the author about it and the author says that in her book, she actually talks a lot about retreating from the Asian parenting model. So in short, the WSJ article is perhaps not very representative. Bet it will sell books though.
More links:
Story on WSJ about how parents in China are embracing Western parenting in order to encourage creativity http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059720804985228.html?mod=WSJ_article_related
Care.com blog http://blog.care.com/sheila/2011/01/are-playdates-keeping-your-child-out-of-harvard.html
My Mom is a Fob: Earnest Advice in Broken English from Your Asian-American Mom (foreword by Margaret Cho) http://amzn.to/hJUoft
. Its about a girl who is overweight and she goes on a diet and becomes fit and athletic. To me, the book is awful because girls have enough problems trying to keep up with the photoshopped models in magazines and advertisements. But others point out that we have a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands and that the book focuses on health and not appearance. 
– Written by a plastic surgeon to explain to kids about their mom’s cosmetic surgery.
Raising a genderless child
Great article on Today.com about a Canadian couple who is keeping the sex of their newborn child a secret. They would like their child to have the freedom to develop his/her own identity and not have to be concerned about whether it is conforming to gender norms.
They have 2 older children (both boys) with gender neutral names and their sons also are free to wear dresses, long hair, nail polish etc..
Why did they take the step to keep the sex of their third child a secret? Because they recognized that people treat children different based on their sex. Not necessarily worse or better, but differently. Small children, like my 2 year old son, do not care if they are boys or girls. But adults and older children do. They have a very strong need for babies girls to be sweet princesses and for little boys to be little ball players/truckers/soldiers. Keeping the sex of their child secret prevents people from pushing their kids to gender identify.
Students of gender studies will recognize this story as X: A Fabulous Child’s Story. In the story by Lois Gould a child is born, called X and the child is allowed to play with whatever X wants and can grow up to be whatever it wants to be. The story ends with the happy ending that X is the most well adjusted child ever. You can read it in full here. It was written in the late 70s — back when we watched Free to be You and Me and when girls were offered an array of choices that were previously not available to females.
Women and girls since then have enjoyed the victories of the feminist movement. We can choose to marry, have kids, wear skirts, go to school, work in “male” jobs. The vast majority of us operate somewhere in the middle, picking and choosing from “feminine” and “masculine” things on a daily basis. We may identify as women or girls, but the truth is that we all do a lot of things that would have been considered to be unacceptably masculine a generation ago.
So why is the idea of a gender neutral kid so shocking? Because I have to admit, I too raised my eyebrows at this story.
I am sure that people are concerned about the child being bullied or not fitting in. But who bullies a baby? The couple clearly is not going to try to prevent their child from figuring out their sex when it is older. At some point, when the kid is around 3 years old, it will figure it out and start asking some questions and making some choices. Won’t it be nice to know that your kid likes princesses and pink because she really likes them, rather than liking them by default?
Freedom is a good thing. I think these people are crazy (what is unschooling?) but the kid will be fine.
More detailed article here.