The result? "[T]iger moms produced kids who felt more alienated from their parents and experienced higher instances of depressive symptoms. They also had lower GPAs, despite feeling more academic pressure."
As the Korean was reading the article, he could practically hear the cheers and see the tears of joy of the many, many haters of the Tiger Parenting idea. When the Korean wrote the post "Tiger Mothers are Superior", the reaction was swift and angry as hell, especially from Asian American. Many significant Asian American bloggers and writers spilled much digital ink claiming that Tiger Parenting was in fact inferior, and and was responsible for all the bad things that happened in their lives. Wesley Yang found notoriety through his New Yorker article, talking about how he heroically defied the yoke of Asian culture upon himself and told younger Asian Americans to do the same. Kim Wong Keltner, in her book "Tiger Babies Strike Back", kvetched about how she grew up having "no idea how to connect with other people." So, what does the Korean think about this development? Is he ready to change his mind about the benefits of Tiger Parenting?
Hardly. Tiger Mothers are still superior. And here is why.
(More after the jump.)
"Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at "askakorean@gmail.com.
Why is Tiger Parenting superior? To repeat the previous post, Tiger Parenting is superior because it creates superior results. Although Tiger Parenting may be found in any ethnicity, Asian Americans may serve as a natural experiment of sorts because they are a relatively homogeneous group in which Tiger Parenting is the norm. While not every Asian Americans may be successful, Asian Americans, as a group, are spectacularly successful despite facing long odds as racial minority and immigrants. This success is hardly limited to earning a lot of money and holding down a white collar professional job. Successful Asian American artists, athletes, business leaders, thought leaders, etc. are numerous, and their number is disproportionately large compared to the number of Asian Americans in the United States.
None of this changed between Amy Chua's book in 2011 and Su Yeong Kim's study in 2013. Tiger Parenting is still dominant among Asian Americans, and Asian Americans continue to succeed. This leads to a simple conclusion: what changed was the angle of view, not the thing itself. Indeed, Forbes posed this very question to Kim: "why do Asian-American kids so dominate at Stuyvesant, the public school that has the highest bar to admission in the city, while Asian-American students make up only around 14% of the city's total public school population?" Kim was forthcoming with the answer: "I don't have an answer for you. That will have to be the subject of my next study."
This is an important point. Based on experience, it is evident that Asian Americans employ a particular parenting strategy. (To be sure, similar strategy may appear frequently in other ethnicity as well, but not as uniformly as Asian Americans.) It is also evident that Asian Americans enjoy a great deal of success in the United States. So why does Kim's study fail to capture this very real success?
Part of the explanation may be about the sample. As Jeff Yang explains in the Wall Street Journal:
Class and education clearly play a role in the effectiveness of "Tiger"-style parenting - at least as far as academic achievement. My parents were strict, and had high expectations for my achievement, but they also did much more than just encourage and enforce: They spent hours working with me, answering questions, teaching workarounds, patiently (and sometimes impatiently) putting as much effort into my education as I did. Would that be true of parents who don't speak English, or didn't graduate from high school, or who work 80-hour weeks at a restaurant and come home exhausted? You could make a case that for parents whose backgrounds and cultural context don't allow them to roll up their sleeves and help, being Supportive could certainly produce better results than being Harsh or Tiger.Tiger Mom Amy Chua Responds to Tiger Baby [Wall Street Journal]
But I think this is only a part of the explanation. My sense about Kim' study is that this is fundamentally a problem of definition. Kim's definition of Tiger Parenting is in the emphasized portion above: a parenting strategy that is both significantly warm and significantly harsh at the same time. This definition is not off-base; Tiger Parenting is in fact characterized by the parents' willingness to be strict and demanding. The Asian American experience confirms this, and so does Amy Chua's book.
Yet this definition is incomplete. Tiger Parenting is much more than mere mechanics and strategies. An essential part of Tiger Parenting is the underlying assumption about the child's potential, and how to maximize it. This assumption is different from other styles of parenting.
What is the essence of Tiger Parenting? None other than First Lady Michelle Obama captured it succinctly, as she was discussing the way she was raising Sasha and Malia Obama. Michelle Obama made her daughters take up two sports: one of their choosing, and the other chosen by their mother. Why? "I WANT THEM TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO DO SOMETHING YOU DON'T LIKE AND TO IMPROVE."
That quote is the essence of Tiger Parenting. The goal of Tiger Parenting is teach the children how to overcome adversity. This is an absolutely essential skill for life, because even in the best possible circumstances, life is full of adversity. Take it from a guy who is married to a woman with her dream job: not even your dream job is dream-like at every moment. And of course, getting to the point where you achieve your dreams require a long, seemingly interminable, stretch of hard work and sacrifice. Without such hard work and sacrifice, nothing gets done. There is no situation in life in which sloth is awarded over activity.
The goal of Tiger Parenting entails an underlying assumption: the child does have the innate ability to overcome those adversities. With proper level of goal-setting, and with proper level of back-pushing, the Tiger Cub "will" learn to overcome the difficulties that she will undoubtedly face in her life. Indeed, this is what causes the tough methodology of Tiger Parenting. How will Tiger Parents make the Tiger Cubs keep doing what they do not like? Encouragement and cajoling alone will never work. The parents will have to become tough, at times verging on harsh. And the parents may become quite tough, because the child will be able to overcome the challenge and become even stronger.
We discussed much of this in the context of Asian Americans, but this basic lesson actually is not lost upon other Americans as well. If Michelle Obama was not enough, how about Coach Leta Andrews? Andrews, the coach for girls' basketball in Granbury High School in Texas, is the winningest high school basketball coach ever. Here is how Andrews and her former player (who was a four-time Olympian) described Andrews's coaching philosophy:
Former players stay in touch. In 1996, Andrews traveled to Atlanta to cheer on Amy Acuff, who had played for her championship team in Corpus Christi and was now competing in the Olympic high jump. Three years ago, shortly after having stents implanted in a blocked artery, Andrews drove eight hours to attend the funeral of Cerny's mother.
Acuff, a four-time Olympian, said: "I THINK PEOPLE OFTEN ARE AFRAID TO DISCIPLINE KIDS; THEY FEEL IT IS TOO HARSH OR THAT THE KID WON'T LOVE YOU. BUT I THINK THE ROOT OF RESPECT AND LOVE IS A PERSON EXPECTING AND DEMANDING THAT YOU BE AS GOOD AS YOU CAN BE EVERY SINGLE MOMENT."
Andrews longs for more diversity on her team and more gym rats, players who want to win as badly as she does. "Don't run around like a chicken with your head cut off," she scolded her offense Monday. But she is not ready to retire. The only win that is important, she said, is the next one.
"I'm not ready to turn this over to these younger coaches," Andrews told her husband recently. "THEY JUST DON'T DEMAND ENOUGH."Texas Coach Demands Best, Has Record to Prove It [New York Times] (emphasis added)
Demand enough, push hard, and the children will deliver results. This is but another incarnation of Tiger Parenting.
It is very important to keep in mind the priorities of concepts involved. Tiger Parents are not tough because they are sadistic monsters. Learning to overcome adversity is the goal; toughness is just a mechanics of getting there. Virtually all the errors surrounding Tiger Parenting are some version of confusing the mechanics of Tiger Parenting with its goal. This is the central error of Kim' study: the study measures the parents' actions, but not the motivation underlying the actions. This is also a common error for those who stridently decried Amy Chua's book when it came out: they were so distracted by the "no sleepovers" rule (which is just mechanics) that they completely lost sight of why such a rule is necessary.
Confusing the priority of these concepts also lead to failed Tiger Parenting--which, like all parenting failures, may come with devastating results. I have seen many cases of Asian parents, who never quite grasped the priority of these concepts, simply punished their children for bad grades without stopping to think about what the punishments are supposed to achieve. This is not Tiger Parenting; this is nothing more than the hollow simulacrum of Tiger Parenting that opponents mistake true Tiger Parenting to be.
"Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at" askakorean@gmail.com.
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