EPTArticle: "Why Chinese mothers are superior." - Page 25
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koreasilver
9109 Posts
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Peanutsc
United States307 Posts
I am a genius. I am successful. Also, I have good self esteem. My parents never told me I was lazy or fat. I’m pretty sure I was often lazy. So fuck you, Amy Chua, for reinforcing that tired old model minority stereotype. For speaking for an entire group of people and ascribing your abusive parenting to your culture. (I have an in-law who had a horrific childhood with parents who were abusive. By all accounts, he is a loving and gentle man. He also has a Big Important Job and Great Big Impressive Degrees. But I wouldn’t argue that his “success” demands you replicate his parents’ methods. By the way, he’s white.) Not sure where I sit on this. On the one hand, I guess to a certain extent I'm an example of how successful this type of parenting can be, since I've accomplished a lot of the things that Chua would want her children to accomplish. I think that our country and this world would be a lot better in certain ways if people focused a little less on feeling entitled to their specialness. I cannot safely say that I would've been able to achieve all that I have on my own without the double-edged sword of parental micromanagement and constant pushing. However. I will not be raising my children this way, no matter what a Yale law professor says. I think it's possible to inculcate a good work ethic without making your child's practice piano every day for 10 years if he doesn't want to, and it's possible to instill a sense of high standards without freaking out over a 70 on one test in AP math. There must a way to support without smothering, and guide without controlling, and this is an era where you can't afford to err on the side of obedience - leadership is too valuable a trait in the post industrial age. At any rate, this article seems meant to stir up controversy to promote Chua's book more than to add any real substance to the issues surrounding styles of parenting. It's done a tremendous job! My male Chinese-American friend found this gem of a response to the Chua article somewhere: "I hope you realize that this type of parenting has caused many young asian males, while academically successful, to become socially awkward, creativity challenged and low self-esteem, which funny enough, were probably the reasons why you didn't want to date or marry one of them." :-/ | ||
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Raw
United States25 Posts
I am Chinese-American and I grew up accustomed to Western Parenting. From my experience, and through my friend's success, I can honestly say that my Asian friends (stricter parenting) have it better (making more money / seeming to be more successful) than my "Western" friends. That said, I cannot state whether they are actually happier becoming Nurses or Computer Engineers... The strongest message that I got from this article was something along the lines of "People enjoy what they are good at". Being a devoted game player like most I assume on this board, I play a BUNCH of games. Chess, Starcraft, Magic the Gathering, Poker, LoL, Ping Pong, many various board games and random other computer games that have come and gone. This message really stuck out to me because I never really do enjoy the game until I start winning. Its hard learning new games and when people already know how to play, and crush you over and over again (I have competitive friends), it is really difficult to want to keep playing. You have to develop the skills and understanding of the game to finally get it and start winning. It seems like if someone was trained to do well in school from the start and practiced it over and over again and was literally forced to do well, they might enjoy it more than those who just skate by... I am torn when I become a parent on what style to develop for parenting my children... Somewhere in the middle seems best imo | ||
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numLoCK
Canada1416 Posts
One thing that is particularly striking to me is the discussion on allowing children to give up or pushing them to their limits. While the author's beliefs might be too harsh, the point is a good one. Often I see parents who are satisfied with their child's mediocre performance, something that was not present in my home. The idea that I couldn't learn what was taught at a high level was not there. If I did poorly, it was my fault. Not because I lacked capacity, but because I didn't put in the effort. So now, in university, I have an overwhelming confidence in my ability. Classes require more effort as I continue forward, but there aren't classes that I simply cannot do well in. Understandably, though, some students will have a much harder time achieving and I do not believe yelling at them until they get it right will work.However, it is my opinion that most of the time when a student is stuck he or she can be made to progress though better teaching methods or continued effort. So while the harsh methods advocated in the article may not be best, there is some value in pushing children to meet their capacity and emphasizing that they are not limited by a lack of ability. | ||
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stalking.d00m
213 Posts
On January 11 2011 16:28 numLoCK wrote: I think it is important to overlook the racial aspect of the article and focus more on the different parenting styles. While we may be upset with the way the author presents her argument we must not allow this to influence our assessment of it. One thing that is particularly striking to me is the discussion on allowing children to give up or pushing them to their limits. While the author's beliefs might be too harsh, the point is a good one. Often I see parents who are satisfied with their child's mediocre performance, something that was not present in my home. The idea that I couldn't learn what was taught at a high level was not there. If I did poorly, it was my fault. Not because I lacked capacity, but because I didn't put in the effort. So now, in university, I have an overwhelming confidence in my ability. Classes require more effort as I continue forward, but there aren't classes that I simply cannot do well in. Understandably, though, some students will have a much harder time achieving and I do not believe yelling at them until they get it right will work.However, it is my opinion that most of the time when a student is stuck he or she can be made to progress though better teaching methods or continued effort. So while the harsh methods advocated in the article may not be best, there is some value in pushing children to meet their capacity and emphasizing that they are not limited by a lack of ability. If you overlook racial aspect of the article .... you have nothing left at all. The whole thing is full of stereotypical remarks from someone who has no evidence or scientific study to prove any of the things he has written. Seriously, I am an asian and yeah, competition is tough but we have same strengths and weakness like anyone else. Some parents make their children focus hard on study while some just let them do what they want in their life. Some are geniuses, some are cool while some others are pure assholes. Obviously the author did his 'research' by watching prime time programs (or shall we say "poisonous propaganda of the free market economies"! I am not making that up, just read the name of 'books' he has written! ). The author forgot one simple thing- All parents love their children and want them to succeed no matter where they from. Its a big world and we all have different cultures so, yeah, there are bound to be some differences. | ||
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TimmyMac
Canada499 Posts
On January 11 2011 11:29 Orome wrote: Every test's goal is to maximize its variance in order to distinguish between participants' results as well as possible. No, the goal of norm-referenced tests is to distinguish between results. Which is pretty stupid, unless you're using those results for university admissions or something similar. Many tests are criterion-referenced, and separating participants is secondary to identifying mastery (or not) of material. On January 11 2011 11:29 Orome wrote: By adding a 50% guessing variable into the mix, you not only reduce the average variance of a university test from 0-100% to 50-100%, you also skew the results in favour of the bad and lucky. The less you know, the more you will guess, giving you higher chances of getting answers correct out of sheer luck. I can give you a simple enough example. Student a knows 0% of the questions, student b knows 50%, student C knows 100%. The test has 100 questions. Now, in a test with no randomness factor, student a should get 0 points correct, student b 50 and student c 100. In our actual university test with a 50% guessing chance for each question, student a will on average get 50 (!) questions right, student b will get 75 and student c will get 100. Someone didn't take stats. Increase the number of elements in the test and the problem goes away. The curve shifts up, yes, but the ability to separate students (which apparently is the goal) doesn't change. If you're norm-referencing, the raw scores don't matter anyway. If you're criteria-referencing, raw scores do matter and you just have to pick a score that's satisfactory and which demonstrates sufficient mastery for your purposes. | ||
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Orome
Switzerland11984 Posts
On January 11 2011 17:51 TimmyMac wrote: No, the goal of norm-referenced tests is to distinguish between results. Which is pretty stupid, unless you're using those results for university admissions or something similar. Many tests are criterion-referenced, and separating participants is secondary to identifying mastery (or not) of material. Someone didn't take stats. Increase the number of elements in the test and the problem goes away. The curve shifts up, yes, but the ability to separate students (which apparently is the goal) doesn't change. If you're norm-referencing, the raw scores don't matter anyway. If you're criteria-referencing, raw scores do matter and you just have to pick a score that's satisfactory and which demonstrates sufficient mastery for your purposes. I'm not talking about norm-referenced tests obviously. Raw scores do matter in this case and the number of elements isn't high enough to get a satifactory confidence interval. I'm talking about a very specific test given at my university for a specific subject, not dichotomic tests in general. Secondly, the curve shifting up (if I'm understanding what you mean by curve shifting up correctly, methodology is harder in your non-native language) does matter because you're not only trying to separate between pass and fail but also between different pass and fail grades. Because the randomness factor in these tests isn't accounted for, the range of results is only between just a fail (I'd assume that's a D+ in US terms) and 100%. So in the end you have both a randomness factor that is unacceptable for any serious test, leading to huge confidence intervals and a grading range that doesn't even cover the bottom half of possible grades. edit: and no matter how many items you add, a test format like this will always be biased towards people who know less (ie. guess more) unless you account for the randomness factor, which this test doesn't do. what adding items does is decrease the variance between participants with the same amount of knowledge, but it doesn't change the average result differential between participants with a different amount of knowledge. | ||
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Eluadyl
Turkey364 Posts
I'm a masters student in materials engineering. gonna submit my thesis in two weeks and already applied for phd studies. I'm good at what I do, and I love it. The problem is I hate being tested of having to prove how good I am. I simply wanna do something useful. Not to get high grades or get a diploma. Just to do experiments for experimenting alone. I'm still judged by my GPA. I got 110 over 120 from TOEFL and people around me who can barely make 60 stand in awe. People who have seen me speak or write english multiple times and even asked for help on several occasions stand in awe NOW that I got a piece of paper that says I kick ass by their standards. I absolutely hate being standardized, graded, ranked. I don't hate being criticized, mind you, just being treated as a number. Success can't be judged by standardized methods. People are generally obsessed with incentives and ranks, therefore methods to grade what is essentially not gradable are invented. I therefore, hate people for what they are. For their fucked up nature. For their unwavering obsession on personal status relative to others. Most people I know wouldn't study a minute if not for grades. Wouldn't read a single page if they weren't gonna be tested. Wouldn't have played a single match of SC if not for ladder points. Wouldn't treat people nice if not for religion (or fear of being beaten). This is what asian upbringing (not even half as harsh as the OP article) made me into. I'm just another freak who criticizes the system for his own mistakes, blames grades and ranks for his laziness. So all the people out there who are happy to be judged by the weight of your wallet, GPA or ladder points, I hope wails of yet another unsuccessful loser will entertain you. You deserve it. | ||
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Mayfly
145 Posts
On January 11 2011 13:23 Orome wrote: Genetics account for 50-60% of IQ. Genetics are very important (more so than for many other traits), but so are environmental factors. edit: I'm not pulling this number out of my ass btw, it's from my uni textbook for developmental psychology. :p It's still a relatively rough estimate though. How much of IQ is inherited and not is poorly understood. I know a review of 111 studies on identical twins reached the number 86% heritable, i.e. identical twins raised apart are 86% similar in regard to IQ. Adopted unrelated siblings raised together are 0% similar in regard to IQ. Heritability of IQ also rises from childhood into adulthood, which is rather counter-intuitive. If we look at brain mass, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobe, and the shape of the frontal lobe itself, all of which carry what we call the general intelligence level and IQ, they are all highly heritable, and in the case of the shape of the frontal lobe as heritable as fingerprints. All in all, 50% is a LOW estimate of IQ inheritability. And what the non-heritable stuff is we don't know either. Breastfeeding seems to be great, though. Nutrition in general, probably. | ||
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Hemula
Russian Federation1849 Posts
On January 11 2011 15:53 Raw wrote: Somewhere in the middle seems best imo Quote this. Also, shitty parents are shitty parents. They exist anywhere you'd go, and that makes me sad. I would like to know percentage of suicides between chinese kids and teenagers, I assume it is very high. Though I dont think that western-like system is all right. Everybody have to seek for his own happines, it is never a thing that can be obtained easily... These are my thoughts. P.S. Eluadyl, +1 | ||
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zenith8
55 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + sad but true for many with asian folks I'd say having the strict asian upbringing has screwed me up socially and emotionally. Although I did get pretty good grades in Uni and highschool yet I don't exactly have a well paying job  | ||
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Orome
Switzerland11984 Posts
On January 12 2011 06:57 Mayfly wrote: How much of IQ is inherited and not is poorly understood. I know a review of 111 studies on identical twins reached the number 86% heritable, i.e. identical twins raised apart are 86% similar in regard to IQ. Adopted unrelated siblings raised together are 0% similar in regard to IQ. Heritability of IQ also rises from childhood into adulthood, which is rather counter-intuitive. If we look at brain mass, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobe, and the shape of the frontal lobe itself, all of which carry what we call the general intelligence level and IQ, they are all highly heritable, and in the case of the shape of the frontal lobe as heritable as fingerprints. All in all, 50% is a LOW estimate of IQ inheritability. And what the non-heritable stuff is we don't know either. Breastfeeding seems to be great, though. Nutrition in general, probably. Hm, your numbers are strange. The 0.86 number is from a well-known study, but that study also gives the correlation for adopted siblings raised together as 0.25, not 0. | ||
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Mayfly
145 Posts
On January 12 2011 12:44 Orome wrote: Hm, your numbers are strange. The 0.86 number is from a well-known study, but that study also gives the correlation for adopted siblings raised together as 0.25, not 0. Yeah, for children. Bouchard quotes a correlation of essentially 0 for young adults. One study showed a correlation of 0.19 but the rest hovered slightly above and below the 0 figure. As I said, the heritability rises with age counter-intuitively. Some quotes: From Bouchard: + Show Spoiler + The adult data, however, show an entirely different picture (Loehlin et al. 1997; Scarr and Weinberg 1978; Scarr et al. 1993; Teasdale and Owen 1984). They suggest an estimate of essentially 0 (0.04). There are fewer adult studies, and one study does provide an estimate of 0.19 (Scarr et al. 1993). Two studies in this group report longitudinal data: Scarr and Weinberg (1978) and Scarr et al. (1993). Scarr and Weinberg (1978), with a sample of 108, found that the drop from childhood to adulthood was from 0.31 to 0.19. In the Texas Adoption Study both the adopted versus adopted and the adopted versus biological groups declined, from 0.20 to - 0.03 and from 0.11 to - 0.02, respectively (Horn et al. 1979; Loehlin et al. 1997). From the book "Intelligence" by Nathan Brody: + Show Spoiler + There are four modern studies that provide data on the IQ correlation of biologically unrelated children who are reared in the same family. Teasdale & Owen (1984) reported a correlation of .02 for a sample of Danish adoptive male siblings reared in the same home on selective service IQ tests. Kent (1985) compared 52 pairs of adoptive siblings reared together with 54 pairs of nonadoptive siblings between 9 and 15 years of age. An IQ index derived from a phone interview correlated .38 in the sample of nonadoptive siblings reared together. The comparable correlation for the biologically unrelated siblings reared in the same home was -.16. Scarr & Weinberg (1983) obtained a corerlation of -0.03 for their sample of biologically unrelated siblings reared in the same family in the Minnesota study of older adopted children. Similar results were obtained in the Texas Adoption Study. [...] The comparable correlations in IQ for these biologically unrelated children reared together decreased [from .11 and .20] to -0.09 and .05, respectively. | ||
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Orome
Switzerland11984 Posts
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hmsrenown
Canada1263 Posts
I had personally been denied of pursuing various interests when I was younger, this including sports and esports because they "aren't useful in life". And to add insult to injury, I was forced into learning piano for about a decade, I was damn good but I never was interested, and hardly ever will be. These personal experiences, though not to be easily generalized, are downfalls of this style of parenting. I hold myself back from judging these practices in general because I still love my parents, but one thing I DO know is my kids are going to be free to pursue whatever they wish, as long as they can find happiness in whatever they're doing. | ||
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thefreed
United States222 Posts
I heard countless times from famous asian people that... it was because their mothers raised them that way that they've been able to get that far. It's hard to understand I know... but it's a different culture anyway, what do u expect? | ||
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BestFriends
Canada133 Posts
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Orome
Switzerland11984 Posts
On January 12 2011 14:40 thefreed wrote: ummm these things CAN seem cruel to foreigners who haven't experienced it first hand... but in my experience some good does come out of it. I heard countless times from famous asian people that... it was because their mothers raised them that way that they've been able to get that far. It's hard to understand I know... but it's a different culture anyway, what do u expect? There are a lot of shades of gray in this. Pushing your kids to realize their potential definitely isn't necessarily bad, in fact I'd say it's very good in moderation, however what this woman's doing is ridiculously over the top. Continually forcing things on kids that they have no intrinsic motivation (this doesn't mean that you don't have to force them to do stuff they're too lazy for sometimes) for isn't doing them a favour, especially when parental love and support given isn't unconditional, but dependant on a kids' result. Telling a kid they're worthless because they got a bad mark at school isn't good parenting. | ||
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khy
United States475 Posts
On January 12 2011 14:40 thefreed wrote: ummm these things CAN seem cruel to foreigners who haven't experienced it first hand... but in my experience some good does come out of it. I heard countless times from famous asian people that... it was because their mothers raised them that way that they've been able to get that far. It's hard to understand I know... but it's a different culture anyway, what do u expect? The Asian American blogosphere has reacted generally negatively. In response to your point, one in particular raised a pretty good point: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2011/01/why-chinese-mothers-are-superior-well-see Rejoinder number one: It's a high-stakes gamble. Sometimes this gamble pays off in the long run. And when it does, as another blogger's response has pointed out, it makes you rich. Neurosurgeons, corporate attorneys, and investment bankers have plenty-rich parents, you betcha. And let's be honest here, Asian America does have a disproportionately high number of MDs, JDs, and MBAs. Like I said, school's not that hard if [you have nothing else to do]. The link also has a bunch of links from some pretty good and popular Asian American bloggers (including Resist Racism, mentioned before), all generally having the same negative tone towards Amy Chua's..."parenting style." Being a 1st generation Korean American who's coming along without her "chinese" parenting, I'd personally love the opportunity to tell her to fuck off in person. I get the feeling I'm not alone. | ||
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CCGaunt
United States417 Posts
no. My chinese mother's help won't help me succeed, or fail miserably. Its just goddamn terrible. | ||
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