A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
. . . 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. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Chinese Parenting
Amy Chua is kind of scary:
You have to give her credit for a certain amount of bravery for putting this out in public. But there are some obvious questions:
ReplyDelete1) I wonder how much Chinese parents in China follow this model. It sounds like a fairly typical first- or second-generation immigrant model to me.
2) Even among immigrants, I wonder. Amy Chua is a Yale professor; but I wonder how many Chinese restaurant owners raise their kids this way?
3) There is something to the austere master-student, wax-on wax-off business, nicely demonstrated in the original column by the story about teaching her daughter to play piano; hours of browbeating and conflict suddenly metamorphose into beautiful playing. Arguably American education could do with more of it. But it is a self-consciously elite approach, designed to produce special groups of experts. If it has ancient roots, it seems to me to go back to the training for the old Confucian civil service examinations. Miss one brushstroke, and you'll end up in the vast floating underworld of failed students, alcoholic poets, and gangsters. But it's worth remembering that many did end up in that underworld.
My point in that last comment is not that Chua's system is "elitist" and hence bad, but simply that it is designed on the deepest level for specialist rather than mass application. It's like Germany's system for producing engineers or Russia's for producing chess masters; they're second to none in their fields, but most Germans aren't engineers, and most Russians aren't chess masters.
ReplyDeleteGiven that, I do wonder what would be the point of producing literally millions of expert piano and violin players. One could of course ask the same thing about high school sports.
Beyond that, I'm still bothered by the idea that this is somehow the "Chinese" way. SOMEBODY must be watching all those Chinese-language movies in my local video store.
Clearly, though, her piece has got me thinking. Thanks for posting it.
I was less curious about whose way it is than about what kind of people think that "success" is worth that kind of sacrifice. Not only the sacrifice of a pleasant childhood, but also the time and effort it takes as a parent to browbeat kids that way. Maybe she had easy kids (I'm told that some people have kids who are interested in success); but what about kids who refuse to get good grades? Do you beat them into submission?
ReplyDeleteMy point was just that, that the system she's proposing could never work for a whole society. It's a system that can only work if the answer to questions like yours--what about kids who refuse to get good grades--can be answered with "they will not be included, since the rewards of this system are only open to a small minority anyway." That's my point in saying this can't be the "Chinese" system: it's a system that no society could practice for all its children. There must be other Chinese systems as well.
ReplyDeleteAnother thinkie thought: anyone taking bets that one of those girls will publish a "Mommie Dearest" book thirty years from now?
ReplyDeleteAny time a parent whose children are not, say, over the age of 35 starts talking about how great their parenting techniques are, I mentally roll my eyes.
ReplyDeleteObviously, the parent has a nice sense of confidence and self-worth. That doesn't necessarily reflect what's going on in the kids' heads.
& my last thought: the list of things that the author's kids are not allowed to do seems more than a little arbitrary.
This set me thinking, too. I strove to succeed academically with very little pressure from my parents, and I sort of imagined that my children would do the same. Mostly, they haven't. I wonder now if it would have made a difference if I had pushed them harder to succeed when they were little, before they developed the steel spines they now have. I doubt it, because I have a strong sense that my sons were born the way they are. But I doubt that sentiment, because I am afraid I am making excuses for myself. I could never have been Amy Chua, but I do wonder if other parenting decisions would have had different outcomes.
ReplyDeleteTwo other thoughts: first, is it possible to sustain an advanced scientific civilization without parents like this? Without ambitious immigrant parents, would enough children choose the hard road of study that leads to MIT or Harvard Medical School? "Enough for what" is the obvious rejoinder, but I just wonder if our rapid scientific progress depends on forcing some subset of our children into this mold.
Second, does anybody know if people raised this way are less happy? One is prone to think that they must be, but honestly teenagers find so many ways to be miserable that I wonder if to be pushed this hard to succeed really hurts.
Those are two questions I wondered about myself. I suspect a more or less objective assessment would show a range of types, both in (for example) an MIT graduating class and among children raised the Chua way. Presumably some Chua kids flourish, and some probably commit suicide.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Chua has also cleverly set up a sort of self-reinforcing argument whereby, if you disagree with her, you're just rationalizing your own weakness. (Freud and Marx did the same thing; if you don't like what they're saying, why, they can explain that, too.)