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I feel the methods are a bit extreme but most of the logic is sound. One important aspect of parenting is leading by example. It is very important that as a parent you are in complete control of your emotions. If you yell it should be to provoke the desired response to communicate the fact that you are serious not because your are actually angry or frustrated.
I can tell you that I've watched my own son be disobedient as hell towards his mother and grandmothers because they are so soft on him. They've even gotten on my case even for being to hard on him even though I am really the only source of discipline in his life.
I definitely feel justified (even though it's hard as hell) after my son starts to throw a fit or cry because he didn't get his way, and I send him straight to the corner for only 3 minutes. To have him come back mellow, attentive to my words, and then we can resume happy activities.
I do disagree with forcing specific instruments or activities. I want my son to be involved in sports for his health and well being as well as healthy competition. I don't care what sport it is, up to him. Golf, football, tennis, anything that involves competition and requires a complex set of skill to master is great. As far as music, if he does take interest in any instrument I will see that he follows through and makes every reasonable attempt to master it. Not because I want to show him off but because I was raised with a total lack of discipline in my childhood and I really want whats best for him and to be the parent I wish I had and needed badly. I think about how many things I half did half way and wonder what would have come of it if I'd followed through and had someone pushing me towards greatness. I think most parents are too weak to do the right and more difficult thing, which is be in charge. I see kids twice my sons age acting like they are having a psychotic episode in public, screaming, stomping and turning red when they don't get there way. Manipulating their own parents. I feel bad for the kids that they have such poor parenting to benefit from. If my son does that it will be the 1st and last time. I think it's also important to explain to your children the reason you are doing things and try to make them understand your point of view. Simply restricting them from sleeping over is bad. Discipline is best when it's self discipline. When your kids know they are not supposed to do something because it is bad for their own well being. If they are raised right you don't have to lock them up, they will keep themselves out of trouble. Not out of fear of punishment but out of intelligence.
A friend of mine who is a father of 6 once told me some great advice "If you raise your kids right you'll only ever have to hit them once or twice in a decade" I know people are going to be like OMG abuse. But one time I put my son in the corner and he continued throwing a fit and refused to comply. I smacked him once on his butt and made him do his time in the corner. I almost cried myself I felt so bad, but it was the right thing to do. It's not what either of us wants, but it's what is needed. That was over a year ago and I've never had to even threaten him since with any physical discipline. It ends with the corner every time. I very rarely even have to send him to the corner anymore. When he gets older I will probably replace the corner with pushups and mile runs as a form of discipline. I have a brother who is 7 years younger than me. When he got into high school he talked to me about a lot of kids getting into drugs and stuff. I gave him one piece of advice. "Before you put anything in your body, make an informed decision. Let someone else go first and look at them in an hour before you decide" He's come back and thanked me on more than one occasion for that advice. That's what I think good parenting is, not restricting your kids to much. Instead giving them the tools and guidance to make sound decisions on their own.
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On January 09 2011 10:02 MetalMarine wrote:
I am going to fucking give everyone who posts in this thread $5 if her daughters become pornstars. Please quote me on this
At least daddy's little girl will be a star in something \:D/
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On January 09 2011 11:07 Valentine wrote:Show nested quote +On January 09 2011 10:02 MetalMarine wrote:
I am going to fucking give everyone who posts in this thread $5 if her daughters become pornstars. Please quote me on this At least daddy's little girl will be a star in something \:D/
Email a picture of this to the author.
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On January 09 2011 10:10 Judicator wrote:Show nested quote +On January 09 2011 10:08 j0k3r wrote:
Shiet my parents weren't that harsh but I know friends in college now whose parents still treat them that way. Honestly it's degrading being forced into a field of study which you are not interested (medicine, computer engineering etc.) and degrading to be locked in your house as a college student if you did poorly on an exam (i.e. a B). The "Chinese mother" method of parenting is not in the best interest of the kid. I was raised with mixed parenting strategies - I did attend academic enrichment classes by force, but I also was given a high degree of freedom later in high school and encouraged to pursue creative activities such as writing. I did exceptionally well on the SATs and got into a great university without the sort of enslavement many of my friends endured. I could tell they loathed the lifetime of restriction and over-discipline while maintaining some semblance of external normality. But I also know they're not going to grow up as balanced people. I have no idea where you get the idea that you need to be "balanced" to be successful. Go read up on Facebook's founder, he sucks at people skills ironically.
Define success. It's all in the eye of the beholder. Sucking at people skills isn't something to be promoted whatever your definition of success is.
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i'm asian and i find this article incredibly arrogant. funny cause she has happa kids. lol. what a joke of an asian chick. gtfo of here.
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ok, I read the things the kids cannot do and I just stopped reading after that. This bitch is a joke
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Ok so a Chinese mother writes an article about how awsome Chinese mothers are. It's kinda hard to take such an article serious regardless if it is true or not.
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Most of my asian friends at university had horrific work ethics because of this type of upbringing. They put in stupendous hours of solo work, and there was no noticeable improvement in their grades compared to us 'westerners'. They never socialised because they were working all the time, and two I knew were being treated for depression by their doctors but refused to go home or tell their parents because they were terrified of being labelled as a failure. Failure is something that will occur in real life, it's not possible to be perfect at everything you do and so this type of upbringing was crushing these guys' self esteem. Whilst I agree that westerners can sometimes be too lax with their children I heartily disapprove of this draconian parental model the author suggests.
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On January 09 2011 10:25 Sablar wrote:
Are there any psychological issues that so called chinese mothers DON'T give their children? Just wondering.. It would be very nice to see something to back up the statements that this kind of parental style leads to various problems.
Heh, at least I know I am psychologically screwed up and socially inept. Not an exactly impartial viewpoint here though, since while I do really like my parents I really disagree with the method of upbringing they chose.
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On January 09 2011 11:19 Hesmyrr wrote:Show nested quote +On January 09 2011 10:25 Sablar wrote:
Are there any psychological issues that so called chinese mothers DON'T give their children? Just wondering.. It would be very nice to see something to back up the statements that this kind of parental style leads to various problems. Heh, at least I know I am psychologically screwed up and socially inept. Not an exactly impartial viewpoint here though, since while I do really like my parents I really disagree with the method of upbringing they chose.
Next generation of Asian kids will be the biggest drug addicted twinkies in existence.
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This article makes me sick, and the information within is not only wrong, but harmful in the same way that racism and intolerance is harmful.
I am not asian, however a huge percentage of the people I interact with and the girls that I have dated, are. Not only did many of them have incredibly stifled and unhappy childhoods, some of them do not even speak to their overbearing parents in adulthood, and many of them rebelled to the point where they dropped out of college and became ostracized from their families. Suicide is a common story among their friends and relatives. The children who do grow up successfully are so insulated from reality that they don't have the proper social faculties to know right from wrong, or judge whether somebody is lying to them. In extreme cases, they become very cold and loveless people.
Other cultures mess up their kids too, but strict asian parenting is by far the style that I have seen cause the most emotional and mental damage to its children. It's been proven time and again, and reinforced by every parenting expert, that you need to let your child socialize, make their own decisions, and learn from their own mistakes.
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Every paragraph I read of this article just makes me more and more pissed off. Do not think for a second that Asian parents are like this. Only about 1% of them are, and they raise terrible children. Asian parents like these are something that Asians as a whole are very ashamed of. Now this bitch comes out with her head up her ass and tells everyone that she is superior? Who the hell is she trying to impress? All she's doing is creating a bad image for Asians as a whole. I am going to email her and tell her to go kill herself, because I am PISSED OFF.
EDIT: Decided not to email her. Signed her up for gay porn instead.
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Oh.. I thought this was a satirical piece. She's actually serious? I'm Asian and while there are a few good things about "Asian" parenting, most of those parents take it too far and it becomes detrimental once the child doesn't have to listen to the parent.
It's definitely a very fine line. Not at all the way the author describes it.
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On January 09 2011 11:15 emc wrote:
ok, I read the things the kids cannot do and I just stopped reading after that. This bitch is a joke
lol, pretty much, I skimmed through most of it though, and some of it was really really disturbing, I wonder what her kids will think in twenty years.
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Chinese guy here... and some of the things are true and some things are heavily exaggerated. The article makes it sounds like children cannot have motivation or succeed on their own. That's completely ridiculous and stupid. Furthermore, she makes it sounds like parents are the only reason children succeed. Again, ridiculous.
The author is referring to immigrant "Chinese mothers"--who aren't westernized. The issue with this fact is that as these parents are generally unfamiliar with the education system in the United States, they can often do very little except push their children to succeed. I know tons of people who do poorly in school and have parents that fit this stereotype very well. Again, if the children aren't inclined to do well, any amount of abuse is absolutely useless.
The truly successful students, asian or not, create goals for themselves and achieve them. Parents become the support, not the commanders of their lives and academics.
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On January 09 2011 10:48 Blisse wrote:Show nested quote +On January 09 2011 10:19 G0dly wrote:
terrible article
I knew a kid whose chinese parents got pissed at him for not maintaining perfect grades. It's not that he didn't try - his parents forced him to study and he tried his best, but no matter he couldn't meet their standards. His parents called him stupid, they accused him of trying to disappoint them, they punished him by not letting him go to friends houses, go to movies, etc.
Eventually he straight up hung himself in school.
The best way is to have a balanced approach. Yes, you should establish a good work ethic - teach children to do their homework, to study, to get good grades, but also let them have some fun. Yelling at a child for getting an A- is ridiculous. I'd rather have a child who gets A- or B+ and has an active social life and friends as opposed to an A+ tryhard who studies/plays instruments all day and night.
addendum: in high school my parents didn't even check my grades. They give me complete independence and do not force me to study - I studied on my own and completed work on my own. When I was younger they taught me that learning was its own reward, that I should always try my best, and that it's important not to be lazy. I'm no genius, not valedictorian, but did get accepted into Cornell while still having fun in high school and maintaining an active social life.
There are a lot of kids in my school raised in the manner described in that article, and they hate their lives. They walk into class like zombies because they get 3-4 hours of sleep a night. They'll fight with the teacher over 3 points on a test because they got a 95 instead of a 98 (while I might be sitting in class happy with a 92). Their grades are their lives.
I say fuck that, go out and have some fun, you only fucking live once, you're only a kid once. That kid was just bad, sorry, or the parents did it wrong. Any kid who actually studies or focuses hard and well will turn out the same way, provided they don't have a mental disability. Any kid. And if he hung himself, that's just giving up. Why doesn't it work all the time then? Because the kid is not motivated to do it, since he is dreaming about his friends, and what else he could be doing rather than working. That's not called studying. He didn't try as hard as he could, he just didn't try. I have never known a person that sucked so badly that they couldn't grasp a concept if they actually tried. And I just realized you're not Chinese, so obvious you don't have the same approach, and obviously that's why your kids are or will be, on average, not as successful. It was the whole point of the article...? I'm an A+ student. I will annoy and bug my teacher if she gives me a 98 instead of a 99. I've done that on several occasions. And I'm perfectly fine with my life. I have friends. I'm up for valedictorian. I'm on several teams, and hopefully captain of one. My grade is my life, but why am I perfectly fine with it? Because it's fun doing work. It's fun doing work well. I don't understand why or how people can put the wrong answer on a test or whatnot, and be perfectly fine with that. The point is trying your best when it's obviously not your best. I love people who are trying their best, and then go out and party, drink, or otherwise not study, or study at the last second. Sorry, that's not trying your best. Everyone's best is 100%. Tell someone to study like a freak, the second they get home until they eat, and until they sleep and then write a no bull**** test, and I'll be damned if they don't get above 95%. Especially in high school. The difference is simple, some parents enforce that perfection is the child's best. Other parents allow them to settle for an obviously fake try-your-hardest best. Can you match the parent with the ethnicity?
i am chinese though
lololololololol
edit
difference is like this. A kid i know (he's asian) was forced to take all ap classes because his parents want him to get into an ivy league school. He takes all ap classes. Ap chem, ap english, ap us history, ap calc, ap spanish etc. However, he hated english, spanish, and history. He didn't want to take them. He likes science. His parents don't give a shit. "the more ap's you have, the better chance you will get into yale/harvard/princeton/brown/dartmouth etc." they tell him. Whole year he bitches about how little sleep he gets, how little free time he has, how he isn't even interested in the class etc.
Like him, I enjoy science as well. Unlike him, my parents didn't pressure me to take all ap's, so I ap calc and ap physics, challenging myself on subjects I liked and taking the "regular" courses in other subjects. the AP classes were interesting, I enjoyed them, learned a lot, did well on exams, and I still had time left over for fun.
guess what? the both of us are in ivy league institutions. In the end all that time he spent on subjects he hated didn't fucking matter.
so ye i can match the ethnicity, I am the ethnicity, but I'm not like you - don't assume all chinese people are like you. I took classes that I was interested in and challenged myself in those classes not because my parents told me to, not because of some desire to please my parents or to become "perfect asian" but because I genuinely like those subjects. Yeah it's true I could have done better. It's true that I was in the 95th percentile in my class as opposed to 99% (since ap courses are weighted higher, people who take more ap's will have higher rank) but I honestly didn't give a shit. While other kids were studying on saturday afternoons, I was hanging out with friends, and I wouldn't trade those saturdays with friends for 4% ranking even if I could
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giving support in academics by pushing your children to study more than they would by themselves - perfectly acceptable.
giving them no choice in life - stupid.
No sleepovers, no extracurricular choice, no nothing? Choose their instruments and entire lives for them?
God damn what a crazy bitch
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I think her article is pretty accurate for Chinese mothers living in China due to the overpopulation issues. If you're not successful, (e.g. get into a good university), you're pretty much fucked for life unless your parents are already loaded and can send you off to some foreign school to get a degree. If she thinks this is good parenting advice for anyone living in the Western world, she's batshit crazy.
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On January 09 2011 11:41 teamsolid wrote:
I think her article is pretty accurate for Chinese mothers living in China due to the overpopulation issues. If you're not successful, (e.g. get into a good university), you're pretty much fucked for life unless your parents are already loaded and can send you off to some foreign school to get a degree. If she thinks this is good parenting advice for anyone living in the Western world, she's batshit crazy.
She's a professor at Yale comparing "western" parents to "chinese parents"-- it's about parents in the U.S. You're right that her point is batshit crazy though--and is ironically out of touch with most actual
Chinese parents.
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sent to that punk:
Dear Professor Chua:
Hello! I am a 2nd year physics student attending Dartmouth College and a proud son of Chinese parents. However, I believe your article describing the merits of the strict "Chinese mother" style lacks perspective of the negative effects of such parenting. I attended high school at The Harker School of San Jose, CA, a school at which the demographics are split roughly 1/3rd Chinese, 1/3rd Indian, 1/3rd White (with a few token black and hispanic kids). The school, being a highly competitive preparatory school, understandably attracts many 'involved' parents from the upper-middle class, parents with the fervent hope that their children will "succeed." However, I argue that the "Chinese" definition of success is less beneficial to a child's actual success in the American workforce than either the "White" and "Indian" definitions of success, as reflected by the pressures exerted by the respective parent groups.
From how I understand it, the Chinese parenting style is this: make sure your child gets perfect grades, make sure your child masters at least one sport (often tennis or badminton) one instrument (piano or violin, of course), and encourage a high-security well-paying job to minimize risk of "failure". From this perspective, law, medicine, engineering, and similar career tracks are optimal: solid, stable six-figure salaries (at this point, if you disagree, you may be considering your own style. However, be wary that what I describe is the average style, not yours. Individual anecdotes are much less important than the average). The 'carrot' often emphasized is security: one cannot afford nice things without a six figure salary, and all ambition, especially unprofitable artistic or altruistic ambition, should be put on the back-burner until one is secure and comfortable.
I disagree.
For this country's numerous problems to be solved, we need innovative entrepreneurs and self-sacrificing politicians, not more cogs in the medical and legal machines. Being a law professor, I'm sure you'd object to the latter phrase, since there are clearly many altruistic and forward-looking practitioners of law. However, again, Chinese parents tend to emphasize security. That means cushy corporate jobs, patent law, and wholly selfish pursuits. While in your head you may be thinking you are encouraging perfectionist parents who will produce the next generation's leaders and heroes, you are not. You are encouraging perfectionist parents who will produce soulless six-figure generating machines. As for the ambitious, less-profitable pursuits that Chinese parents often tell their children to relegate to the distant future, I will remind you that luxury breeds an appetite for more luxury, and such ambitions are often forgotten - if you worked in the corporate sector rather than academia, I'm sure you'd agree.
Furthermore, Chinese parents, as your article so enthusiastically reflects, strongly prioritize grades (and of course, standardized test scores). This implies complicity with the current education system of the United States, which I believe to be more flawed than you may realize. Standardization of curriculum through No Child Left Behind and AP courses, a chinese-mom favorite, emphasizes a rigid, unquestioning style of thought that is better suited for answering multiple choice questions than answering queries of "why is this important?" or "how do we fix this?" or "am I being taught the complete picture?" To the latter-most question, the answer is definitely "no" for AP US History, a course I'm sure your two daughters have taken (or maybe IB?). In fact, due to my experiences with the American education system, I am strongly tempted to home-school my future children, with the only deterrent being my fear of improper development of social skills.
Speaking of social skills, children of Chinese parents tend to have the worst on average. Ask any student from high school, "which kids are most awkward, the Asians, the Indians, or the Whites?" I guarantee you the answer will be Asians. Why is that? Because their time is monopolized by their parents and they lack the time to find out how the rest of society works. Why do white parents allow frequent sleepovers, socializing, and (gasp) partying? Because it allows their children to bond with other children in style most natural to American kids. You may disapprove of the partygoers and pleasure-seekers, but if your kids can't get along with them in college, then they will lack a huge part of the picture of America. And those partygoers and pleasure-seekers will constitute an undeniable chunk of the future workforce. You don't think that the frat kids all became homeless, do you?
Finally, motivation: Chinese children's motivation is rarely internal. After all, who can internalize a desire to succeed when your mother is already screaming at you to do so? The Catholic schoolgirl effect, a colloquial term for the sudden outburst of sexual activity after 18 years of sexual repression among, well, Catholic schoolgirls, manifests analogously in the Chinese population: if a Chinese parent suddenly decides "well my child achieved a 4.0 (unweighted of course), outstanding extracurriculars, and is pretty much perfect, I bet he/she will do fine in college without my help," I can guarantee you that that parent's child will not get a 4.0 in college. Nor a 3.5. Perhaps not even a 3.0. It is said that a mother's voice will always stay with a child: however, in the case of Chinese children, most resent that voice and will ignore it unless the mother is actually present (or over the phone continuing to scream). Again, if you disagree, citing personal evidence, I remind you that anecdotal evidence is worthless. What you are advocating is not a replica of your successful experience with your daughters, but a general culture of strictness and high expectations.
As for my personal experience: my Chinese parents are not Chinese parents in the way you have described. They allowed me to quit piano in 3rd grade, they were patently hands-off for my entire high school experience, and they have trusted my judgment for (most) every choice I have made (of course dispensing useful advice along the way). They know that I've partied and imbibed alcohol in college, and they're fine with it, because they trust me to be responsible. And I am glad for it, my ambitions are all my own, and I am proudly on a track to not a six figure salary, but continuing happiness.
Sincerely, and with the approval of my Chinese parents,
TUNAAAAAAAA
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EPT
