Does tiger parenting backfire?

[yolochka]

<p>mcat2, I think we are very lucky with my kids’ music teachers. Both very good for their needs. The older son had a mild ADHD and she handled it well. Suzuki worked well for him. He is playing his instrument for pleasure in various amateur groups now. The younger one has a better focus and achieved more. He loves his instrument and has a wonderful relationship with his traditional method teacher who is strict, but not to the point of making kids to cry. I think my son would consider becoming a professional musician if he knew he would make a decent living. I don’t know how she does it, but she gets her students to practice without their parents presence. He plans to continue taking lessons in college and participating in the orchestra.</p>

[mcat2]

<p>yolochka, DS’s music teacher grew up in rural contryside. She was an all-state orchestra member in our state when she was a high schooler. Later, I heard she learned from the concert master of the Dallas concert master. She was kind of old trained in a very old school way. It was only when she decided to teach young kids that she received some training in Suzuki method. I think she originally thought it could help her pick up some skills to deal with young kids.</p>

<p>I think DS’s involvement with the music enriches his life and helped him make friends in college. He once told us that listening to and/or playing music is just as important as easting food. I really do not understand this aspect of his life.</p>

[GMTplus7]

<p>interesting snapshots of different parenting styles, from around the world:
[Christine</a> Gross-Loh: Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Have American Parents Got It All Backwards? | HuffPost Life)</p>

<p>

**We need to let 3-year-olds climb trees and 5-year-olds use knives. **
… a Norwegian researcher at Queen Maud University in Norway, has found in her research that the relaxed approach to risk-taking and safety actually keeps our children safer by honing their judgment about what they’re capable of. </p>

<p>Children can go hungry from time-to-time.
In Korea, eating is taught to children as a life skill and as in most cultures, children are taught it is important to wait out their hunger until it is time for the whole family to sit down together and eat… All children eat the same things that adults do, just like they do in most countries in the world with robust food cultures. </p>

<p>Instead of keeping children satisfied, we need to fuel their feelings of frustration.
The French, as well as many others, believe that routinely giving your child a chance to feel frustration gives him a chance to practice the art of waiting and developing self-control. </p>

<p>**Children should spend less time in school. **
The Finnish model of education includes a late start to academics (children do not begin any formal academics until they are 7 years old), frequent breaks for outdoor time, shorter school hours and more variety of classes than in the US… </p>

<p>Thou shalt spoil thy baby.
In Japan, where co-sleeping with babies and kids is common, people are incredulous that there are countries where parents routinely put their newborns to sleep in a separate room. The Japanese respond to their babies immediately and hold them constantly… when babies get their needs met and are loved unconditionally as infants, they more easily become independent and self-assured as they grow.</p>

<p>Children need to feel obligated.
In China, parents do the opposite: the older children get, the more parents remind them of their obligations… the cultural ideal of not letting adolescents go but of reminding them of their responsibility to the family and the expectation that their hard work in school is one way to pay back a little for all they have received, helps their motivation and their achievement.

</p>

[yolochka]

<p>mcat2, no doubt music is very important! We did the right thing by creating this opportunity for our kids. Research shows that early music lessons increase IQ and prolong brain health, not to mention enriching the person. I just wanted to say that a good teacher is very important, more so than the method.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@yalemom15

Where it has made a difference with both my kids is they don’t make basic, stupid math errors when working on complex problems. One son, a chem. eng. major, sometimes has test questions where the answer is two pages worth of equations. One simple math error can throw an entire question into disarray. The other kid (not a science or math major) just aced the hardest econ class at his U. largely because of his level of comfort with equations and math in general.

</p>

<p>Economics can be pretty heavy in math; economics majors considering PhD study in economics are recommended to take advanced math courses like real analysis.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>I find it interesting that our views on parenting are largely immune to any kind of study of outcomes.</p>

<p>Personally, I advocate donkey parenting over tiger parenting. It’s similar in some ways to tiger parenting, but rather than pushing your kid as a tiger parent does, you trail along behind your kid, carring the Boy Scout gear, the soccer stuff, the snacks for the team, the harp, etc.–you go to all the games–you have to, because you’ve agreed to coach, or to wave the linesman flag. You spend a lot of time with your kid, and you get to know their friends–because you’re the one in the back of the room with the video camera, recording a bunch of teen rock bands.</p>

<p>We’ve found this to be an effective technique. Perhaps it’s similar to the “supportive parenting” referred to in the study in the first post.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>Here’s an old thread with more on “donkey” parenting:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1074510-lament-donkey-father.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1074510-lament-donkey-father.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[poetgrl]

<p>I remember that! And, I would for sure say H was a donkey father.</p>

[mcat2]

<p>

because you’re the one in the back of the room with the video camera, recording a bunch of teen rock bands.

This reminds me of an event: At one time, DS was invited to his friend’s house for a “jam” sesson at his house. We were there and very soon a very loud music was made from this “band”. We did not see his friend’s parents at first and I had a little bit concern that it might be too loud. Even though it would not bother the neighbor (whose house is at some distance from his house), it might be “bothering” the parents who were upstairs.</p>

<p>His parents came downstairs later on, and made a comment like “This house is rarely full of such a high energy. It makes me feel young again.”</p>

<p>Something interesting (if not disgusting) here: This friend was once in our house and played music with several of the friends. At one time, he tried to find a nearby quiet spot to come up with same catchy tune. He ended up going into a rest room and staying there for quite a while. When these teenagers were together for this kind of activity (they were high schoolers back then), mostly during weekend or the break, they were often together in the house for 6 or 7 hours on that day! It appears to be a deep fun for them.</p>

<p>I do not know whether (and how often) DS continued doing this in college. But occasionally, we noticed on youtube that some of his friends and he played on the street near the campus and somebody recorded it. At one time, they played in the Spring Fling event (before those invited musicians played.)</p>

<p>When a child has developed some deep interest in something, he or she will be willingly do it all by himself/herself without any push. Actually, you could hardly stop him/her from doing what he/she likes to do.</p>

<p>The hard part is how to jumpstart his interest on anything. Something that could help in this regard is that it is better not to assign a “practical value” or to set up a “goal” for this activity (e.g., Doing this would help me get into an ivy school.) Just enjoys the process itself and see where it will lead you. We also provided many resources for getting into some activities. Many of our efforts are in vain and DS was not interested in it. But once in a while, it was a hit and he started to get involved with this. A good nature of DS is that once he is interested in something, he would spend significant efforts on it over a long time, unlike some other kids.</p>

<p>Regarding “following the child around”, DS and his mother were extremely close as she drove him around town (or out of town) for various activies from, say, 2 years old (story time for toddler in a public library) to almost the end of his high school. For DS’s music lesson (we were lucky to snap a time slot on Saturday), both parents were always there when DS took the lesson, for likely 12 years.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>I don’t know if this is bragging or a confession of insanity, but when our kids got interested in forming rock bands, we bought a drum set for our basement so they could practice at our house (even though our kids didn’t play drums). This was partly selfish, so we wouldn’t have to schlep them to the drummer’s house. But we never regretted it.</p>